Later Life and Death
Alvarado developed a plan to outfit an armada that would sail from the western coast of Mexico to China and the Spice Islands. At great cost, he assembled and equipped 13 ships and approximately 550 soldiers for the expedition. The fleet was about to set sail in 1541 when Alvarado received a letter from Cristóbal de Oñate, pleading for help against hostile Indians who were besieging him at Nochistlán. The siege was part of a major revolt by the Mixtón natives of the Nueva Galicia region of Mexico. Alvarado gathered his troops and went to help Oñate. In a freak accident, he was crushed by a horse that was spooked and ran amok. He died a few days later, on July 4, 1541, and was buried in the church at Tiripetío, a village between Patzcuaro and Morelia (in present-day Michoacán).
Four decades after Alvarado's death, his daughter Leonor de Alvarado Xicoténcatl paid to transport his remains to Guatemala for reburial in the cathedral of the city of Santiago, now Antigua Guatemala.
Read more about this topic: Pedro De Alvarado
Famous quotes containing the words life and/or death:
“The new man is born too old to tolerate the new world. The present conditions of life have not yet erased the traces of the past. We run too fast, but we still do not move enough.... He looks but he does not contemplate, he sees but he does not think. He runs away from time, which is made of thought, and yet all he can feel is his own time, the present.”
—Eugenio Montale (1896–1981)
“O Lord, methought what pain it was to drown,
What dreadful noise of waters in my ears!
What sights of ugly death within my eyes!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)