Our Cat/10/ic Heritage in Texas
February 15 1 1527, he was living in Seville. This post, the most impor- tant, since upon him devolved the duty of collecting and accounting for all revenues and the payment of all salaries, indicated the high esteem in which he must have been held at the time. Only a person who had established a sterling reputation for probity and integrity would have been entrusted with this position of paramount importance to the interests of the king. His chief duties were those of a collector of revenue. He was prepared to exercise great diligence in gathering the king's fifth of all gold and silver obtained by barter or otherwise. It became his task to collect the impost on the production of salt; the seven and a half per cent import tax, when it should become effective upon the expiration of the special " ' .. . dispensation granted to the first settlers; and to account for all revenues from the royal fields and livestock. He was obliged to pay the officers their salaries and cooperate with them in every way for the settlement and pacification of the country. "You will take great care of, and be diligent to look after everything that may tend to our sen 1 ice and which should be done in that country .. . for their peopling and pacification," declared the king, "informing us extensively and particularly of every matter especially of how our commands are obeyed and executed in those lands and provinces, of how the natives are treated, our instructions observed, and other things respecting their liberties that we have com- manded; especially the matters touching the service of our Lord and divine worship, the teaching of the Indians in the Holy Faith, and in many other details of our service, as well as all your observations, of which I should be kept informed." Thus the treasurer was destined to be in effect the king's ears and the kings eyes, exercising a vigilant steward- ship over all the affairs entrusted to him by the royal decree. As a pre- caution for the more satisfactory fulfillment of his many duties, the instructions end by requiring that Cabeza de Vaca deposit two thousand ducats with the Seville treasury, as a bond of proper conduct in office. 1 ' "His subsequent career shows him to have been possessed of great adapta- bility, a ready wit, courage, honesty, and a kindly disposition, not unattended by the unquestioning faith of the age, although in his nar- rative there is a remarkable absence of the marvelous stories of giants, pigmies, troglodytes, cynocephali, and other monsters, the common stock of all travellers' tales," declares Lowery. "Even when relating the mirac-
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14 Buckingham Smith, Re/a/ion, Appendix IV, ::nS-223.
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