VIA. D. 1519THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO
“Hernando Cortesspent an idle and unprofitable youth.”
So did I. And every other duffer is with me in being pleased with Cortes for setting an example. We, not the good boys, need a little encouragement.
He was seven years old when Columbus found the Indies. That was a time when boys hurried to get grown up and join the search for the Fountain of Youth, the trail to Eldorado. All who had time to sleep dreamed tremendous dreams.
Cortes became a colonist in Cuba, a sore puzzle to the rascal in command. When he clapped Cortes in irons the youngster slipped free and defied him. When he gave Cortes command of an expedition the fellow cheeked him. When he tried to arrest him the bird had flown, and was declared an outlaw.
The soldiers and seamen of the expedition were horrified by this adventurer who landed them in newly discovered Mexico, then sank the ships lest they should wish to go home. They stood in the deadly mists of the tropic plains, and far above them glowed the Star of the Sea, white Orizaba crowned with polar snows. They marched up a hill a mile and a half in sheerheight through many zones of climate, and every circumstance of pain and famine to the edge of a plateau crowned by immense volcanoes, a land of plenty, densely peopled, full of opulent cities. They found that this realm was ruled by an emperor, famous for his victorious wars, able, it seemed, to place a million warriors in the field, and hungry for captives to be first sacrificed to the gods, and afterward eaten at the banquets of the nobility and gentry. The temples were actually fed with twenty thousand victims a year. The Spanish invading force of four hundred men began to feel uncomfortable.
Yet if this Cortes puzzled the governor of Cuba, and horrified his men, he paralyzed the Emperor Montezuma. Hundreds of years ago a stranger had come to Mexico from the eastern sea, a bearded man who taught the people the arts of civilized life. Then birds first sang and flowers blossomed, the fields were fruitful and the sun shone in glory upon that plateau of eternal spring. The hero, Bird-Serpent, was remembered, loved and worshiped as a god. It was known to all men that as he had gone down into the eastern sea so he would return again in later ages. Now the prophecy was fulfilled. He had come with his followers, all bearded white men out of the eastern sea in mysterious winged vessels. Bird-Serpent and his people were dressed in gleaming armor, had weapons that flashed lightning, were mounted on terrible beasts—where steel and guns and horses were unknown; and Montezuma felt as we should do if our land were invaded by winged men riding dragons. To the supernatural visitors the emperor sent embassyafter embassy, loaded with treasure, begging the hero not to approach his capital.
Set in the midst of Montezuma’s empire was the poor valiant republic of Tlascala, at everlasting war with the Aztec nation. Invading this republic Cortes was met by a horde of a hundred thousand warriors, whom he thrashed in three engagements, and when they were humbled, accepted as allies against the Aztecs. Attended by an Tlascalan force he entered the ancient Aztec capital, Cholula, famed for its temple. This is a stone-faced mound of rubble, four times the size and half the height of the Great Pyramid, a forty-acre building larger by four acres than any structure yet attempted by white men.
By the emperor’s orders the Cholulans welcomed the Spaniards, trapped them within their city, and attacked them. In reply, Cortes used their temple as the scene of a public massacre, slaughtered three thousand men, and having thus explained things, marched on the City of Mexico.
In those days a salt lake, since drained, filled the central hollow of the vale of Mexico, and in the midst of it stood the city built on piles, and threaded with canals, a barbaric Venice, larger, perhaps even grander than Venice with its vast palace and gardens, and numberless mound temples whose flaming altars lighted the town at night. Three causeways crossed the lake and met just as they do to-day at the central square. Here, on the site of the mound temple, stands one of the greatest of the world’s cathedrals, and across the square are public buildings marking the site of Montezuma’s palace, and that in which he entertainedthe Spaniards. The white men were astonished at the zoological gardens, the aviary, the floating market gardens on the lake, the cleanliness of the streets, kept by a thousand sweepers, and a metropolitan police which numbered ten thousand men, arrangements far in advance of any city of Europe. Then, as now, the place was a great and brilliant capital.
Yet from the Spanish point of view these Aztecs were only barbarians to be conquered, and heathen cannibals doomed to hell unless they accepted the faith. To them the Cholula massacre was only a military precaution. They thought it right to seize their generous host the emperor, to hold him as a prisoner under guard, and one day even to put him in irons. For six months Montezuma reigned under Spanish orders, overwhelmed with shame. He loved his captors because they were gallant gentlemen, he freely gave them his royal treasure of gems, and gold, and brilliant feather robes. Over the plunder—a million and a half sterling in gold alone—they squabbled; clear proof to Montezuma that they were not all divine. Yet still they were friends, so he gave them all the spears and bows from his arsenal as fuel to burn some of his nobles who had affronted them.
It was at this time that the hostile governor of Cuba sent Narvaes with seventeen ships and a strong force to arrest the conqueror for rebellion. The odds were only three to one, instead of the usual hundred to one against him, so Cortes went down to the coast, gave Narvaes a thrashing, captured him, enrolled his men by way of reinforcements, and returned with a force of eleven hundred troops.
He had left his friend, Alvarado, with a hundred men to hold the capital and guard the emperor. This Alvarado, so fair that the natives called him Child of the Sun, was such a fool that he massacred six hundred unarmed nobles and gentlefolk for being pagans, violated the great temple, and so aroused the whole power of the fiercest nation on earth to a war of vengeance. Barely in time to save Alvarado, Cortes reentered the city to be besieged. Again and again the Aztecs attempted to storm the palace. The emperor in his robes of state addressed them from the ramparts, and they shot him. They seized the great temple which overlooked the palace, and this the Spaniards stormed. In face of awful losses day by day the Spaniards, starving and desperate, cleared a road through the city, and on the night of Montezuma’s death they attempted to retreat by one of the causeways leading to the mainland. Three canals cut this road, and the drawbridges had been taken away, but Cortes brought a portable bridge to span them. They crossed the first as the gigantic sobbing gong upon the heights of the temple aroused the entire city.
Heavily beset from the rear, and by thousands of men in canoes, they found that the weight of their transport had jammed the bridge which could not be removed. They filled the second gap with rocks, with their artillery and transport, with chests of gold, horses, and dead men. So they came to the third gap, no longer an army but as a flying mob of Spaniards and Tlascalan warriors bewildered in the rain and the darkness by the headlong desperation of the attacking host. They were compelled to swim, and at least fifty of the recruits were drowned by the weight of gold they refusedto leave, while many were captured to be sacrificed upon the Aztec altars. Montezuma’s children were drowned, and hundreds more, while Cortes and his cavaliers, swimming their horses back and forth convoyed the column, and Alvarado with his rear guard held the causeway.
Last in the retreat, grounding his spear butt, he leaped the chasm, a feat of daring which has given a name forever to this place as Alvarado’s Leap. And just beyond, upon the mainland there is an ancient tree beneath which Cortes, as the dawn broke out, sat on the ground and cried. He had lost four hundred fifty Spaniards, and thousands of Tlascalans, his records, artillery, muskets, stores and treasure in that lost battle of the Dreadful Night.
A week later the starved and wounded force was beset by an army of two hundred thousand Aztecs. They had only their swords now, but, after long hours of fighting, Cortes himself killed the Aztec general, so by his matchless valor and leadership gaining a victory.
The rest is a tale of horror beyond telling, for, rested and reinforced, the Spaniards went back. They invested, besieged, stormed and burned the famine-stricken, pestilence-ridden capital, a city choked and heaped with the unburied dead of a most valiant nation.
Afterward, under the Spanish viceroys, Mexico was extended and enlarged to the edge of Alaska, a Christian civilized state renowned for mighty works of engineering, the splendor of her architecture, and for such inventions as the national pawn-shop, as a bank to help the poor. One of the so-called native“slaves” of the mines once wrote to the king of Spain, begging his majesty to visit Mexico and offering to make a royal road for him, paving the two hundred fifty miles from Vera Cruz to the capital with ingots of pure silver as a gift to Spain.