Introduction 
9 
and all the other provinces between the Cape of Honduras and the Cape 
of Florida on both the South Sea and the coasts of the north were placed 
under the jurisdiction of the Audiencia of New Spain, which was com¬ 
posed of a president— Ñuño de Guzmán —and four oidores (judges). On 
January i, 1529, this audiencia began to function in Mexico City, both 
as an administrative and as a judicial body. 
The audiencia that was thus installed soon proved its unworthiness in 
more ways than one, and in 1530 another administrative experiment was 
decided upon by the king. In place of an audiencia which should exercise 
both administrative and judicial duties, it was decided on the administra¬ 
tive side to establish a viceroyalty in New Spain, and on the judicial side, 
to name a new audiencia to take the place of the unworthy first one. The 
new audiencia began to function in Mexico City in January, 1531; pending 
the arrival of the first viceroy, Don Antonio de Mendoza in 1535, it 
functioned, as had the first audiencia, in both administrative and judicial 
matters. 
One important result of the determination of the king to suppress the 
first audiencia was the spectacular advance of the frontier of settlement in 
the west from Colima over 400 miles northward to San Miguel de Culia- 
cán. Aware of the reports sent to Spain of the misrule of the first audi¬ 
encia, the president, Ñuño de Guzmán, desirous of reviving his waning 
prestige and of regaining the favor of the king, advanced into unexplored 
territory in the spring of 1530 and in October, 1531, founded the villa 
of San Miguel de Culiacán, which was some 450 miles south of the 
present international boundary of the United States and Mexico, and 
which, for a number of years, was to be the northernmost Spanish outpost 
in the west. An effort on the part of Guzmán to establish an independent 
jurisdiction under the name of Mayor España met with royal disfavor; 
a cédula of 1531 renamed it Nueva Galicia de la Nueva España. 
In the meantime Cortés, who had been stripped of all power in New 
Spain by his rivals, returned to Spain to plead his own case. Unable to 
secure reinstatement as governor of New Spain, he was, however, named 
Marqués del Valle de Oaxaca, a title carrying with it the vassalage of 
23,000 natives. He was also reinstated as captain-general of New Spain, 
and was promised the governorship of any islands that he might discover 
in the South Sea that were not included in grants to other jurisdictions, 
and of any part of the mainland not previously discovered or included in 
grants to other jurisdictions. 
In 1530 Cortés returned to New Spain, where he resolutely set to work 
to carry out his long delayed plans for exploration in the South Sea. 
An expedition sent out under Diego Hurtado de Mendoza in 1532 dis¬ 
covered the Tres Marias Islands and explored for the first time the coast 
region lying between the Sinaloa River (the northern limit of Guzmán’s 
explorations) and the Río Fuerte. Another expedition sent out in 1533 
under Grijalva and Jiménez discovered the Revilla Gigedo group of 
islands and the southern end of the peninsula of Lower California, which 
was taken to be an island. By his agreement with the crown, Cortés’s 
claims to these newly discovered lands were unquestioned. To establish 
these claims definitely, Cortés in 1535 led a colonizing expedition to the 
