The Conquistadors (10 page)

Cortés now had the whole district, which amounted to some twenty towns, with him to a man. To consolidate his position he started work immediately on the construction of his settlement. The site he chose was on the flat land beside the river about a mile and a half from Quiahuitztlan. He worked at carrying earth and stone and the digging of the foundations himself; and, following his example, his captains worked alongside the soldiers. Vera Cruz was planned with a church, a plaza, arsenals, watch towers, barbicans – it was, in fact, a typical Spanish fortress town, and with the aid of the Indians the major part of it was completed in a very short time.

It was whilst they were still building Vera Cruz that an embassy arrived from Mexico with presents of gold and cloth. It was an important embassy, including two nephews of Moctezuma, and to Cortés it was the first indication that his policy of driving a wedge between the Mexicans and the people they had conquered was having the desired effect. To the accusation that the Spaniards had fostered rebellion, Cortés loftily replied that the Totonacs were now vassals of the Emperor Charles and could not be expected to serve two masters. He added that he and his captains were now on their way to visit Moctezuma and place themselves at his service. As evidence of good faith he then produced the three tax-gatherers, well dressed and well fed, and after Alvarado had given a display of Spanish horsemanship, the ambassadors left for Mexico with the released prisoners and a gift of coloured beads.

Though Cortés had said he was on his way to visit Moctezuma, he was still far from ready for such a dangerous expedition. He needed allies. He needed also the support and authority of his king for what he was doing. In addition, there was the persistent problem of dissension in his own ranks; seven soldiers had already tried to desert in a stolen boat.

When he heard that the Culhúans were attacking the town of Cingapacinga twenty-five miles away, Cortés marched at once with his entire force, supported by two thousand Totonac warriors. But the Zempoalans had lied. There was a feud between Zempoala and Cingapacinga, and they were simply using the Spaniards as a front for looting. Cortés was furious. He made them hand back all they had stolen, and having thus ingratiated himself with the Cingapacingans, he lectured them on the true faith and had them swear allegiance to the Spanish crown.

On the way back one of his own soldiers was caught looting. He had him strung up as a lesson to the others, for if his men looted he knew he would lose the support of the Indians, and that would mean ultimate disaster. But he could ill afford even the loss of a single Spanish soldier and he was probably relieved when Alvarado, of his own accord, cut the fool down just before he choked to death.

Cortés' anger at the behaviour of the Zempoalans seems to have seriously alarmed them, for on his return to the city he was presented with eight girls, each with a golden collar round her neck and gold ear-rings. They were the daughters of chiefs, and they were offered in the usual Indian fashion to cement the alliance by bearing his captains children. The time had come for Cortés to destroy their last link with Mexico. He said that if they accepted the girls they would become the Indians' blood-brothers, and this they could not do unless the girls became Christians and the Indians ceased sacrificing human beings and gave up sodomy. At that time they were regularly sacrificing anything up to five humans a day, offering up their hearts to the idols and eating the arms and legs. They also had boy prostitutes dressed as girls.

The Indians at once became extremely menacing, prepared to defend their idols and their beliefs. But when Cortés threatened to abandon them to the wrath of Moctezuma, official opposition suddenly collapsed and most of the people stood apathetically by whilst some fifty Spanish soldiers threw the idols down the steps of the temples. But at the sight of this desecration some of the warriors would have attacked if Cortés had not seized the cacique and half a dozen of the priests, threatening them with death if a single arrow was loosed. Finally, on the instructions of the cacique, the priests in charge of the temples took the broken idols away and burned them. The description of these priests is quite horrific: ‘They wore black cloaks like those of canons, and other smaller hoods like Dominicans. They wore their hair very long, down to their waists, and some even down to their feet, and it was all so clotted and matted with blood that it could not be pulled apart. Their ears were cut to pieces as a sacrifice and they smelt of sulphur. But they also
smelt of something worse – of decaying flesh.' These priests were unmarried, but practised sodomy.

Next day, when the whole place had been cleaned and the walls white-washed, an altar was set up and four of the priests, their hair washed and cut and with clean white robes, were put in charge of it. They were shown how to make candles from a local wax and ordered to keep them burning before the image of the Virgin and the Holy Cross. It was religious showmanship, but its effect was powerful, particularly when mass was said and the Indian girls were baptized. Moctezuma, two hundred miles away and getting accounts of it by spies, perhaps at second or third hand, must have found it very confusing. These
teules
with their cannon, their horses and their ships, armed for battle and demanding gold, yet kneeling humbly in the dust before a piece of wood and a picture of a woman with a child … it cannot have made much sense to a man whose gods devoured human hearts by the thousand.

On their departure for Vera Cruz the Spaniards took the eight girls with them. The most beautiful had been christened Francisca, and once again Cortés had given her to his friend Puertocarrero. He himself had been presented with the fat cacique's niece, who was extremely ugly; and possibly as a rude joke she had been baptized Catalina. For a man who had been a notorious womaniser Cortés showed himself singularly uninterested in Indian girls. Certainly at this moment he had other things on his mind. A ship had come in from Cuba with Francisco de Saucedo and ten soldiers. More important, they had a horse and a mare on board. They also brought news that Velázquez had been confirmed as
adelantado
of Cuba and had been empowered to trade and found settlements.

Cortés and his men had now been more than three months on the coast. It was time to move inland. But first a ship must be sent to Spain with a glowing account of the country and all they had achieved, and enough gold to support their own claims. Then all the rest of the fleet must be destroyed, so that thereafter every man would be committed, with no prospect of saving his skin unless they succeeded. Only by this drastic and irrevocable action could the threat of desertion, even mutiny, be finally extinguished.

As usual Cortés had prepared the ground so carefully that he appeared to be yielding to popular pressure, rather than giving orders. The soldiers themselves prepared a letter to the Emperor Charles summarising all their achievements. This was to be accompanied by all the gold they had so far gained, every man finally agreeing to forego his share so that the total might be as impressive as possible. They also sent four Indians they had rescued from the cages at Zempoala, where they were being fattened for sacrifice. Puertocarrero and Montejo were chosen as envoys. The best ship in the fleet was got ready, fifteen sailors were picked and two pilots allocated, including Alaminos, who knew the Bahamas and so could steer direct for Spain. The soldiers' letter attacked Velázquez, accused the president of the Council of the Indies, Bishop Fonesca, of having been bribed, and it petitioned that Cortés be confirmed in his office as captain-general in New Spain. Cortés sent his own letter, the first of the five long dispatches he wrote to his king, and the envoys sailed on July 26, 1519, with orders to avoid Cuba.

The need to destroy his ships before marching into Mexico was impressed on Cortés by yet another attempt to seize a vessel and escape in her to Cuba. This time he sentenced the two leaders to be hanged, the pilot to have his feet amputated, and the men, who all seem to have been from Gibraltar since they are referred to as Men of the Rock, to two hundred lashes. He then left immediately for Zempoala to finalize plans with his Indian allies, and in his absence it is probable that the executions were not carried out. At Zempoala the soldiers themselves seem to have pressed for the destruction of the ships, chiefly on the grounds that by releasing sailors it would reinforce their numbers by almost a hundred. At any rate, the order was finally given and Juan de Escalante, who had been appointed chief constable, was sent to Vera Cruz to see it carried out.

The plan was to get all the stores and gear ashore, bore holes in the ships' bottoms and then beach them. It was to be done on the grounds that their hulls were rotten, a fairly reasonable excuse since everyone knew that teredo worm was active in the warm waters of the Gulf. However, sailors are not the most willing collaborators in this sort of work. The job was botched, only five ships being beached as arranged, and Cortés was forced to abandon his subterfuge and order the remaining vessels to be sunk. By then, of course, there was considerable opposition. But once it was done the outcry quickly subsided, for nobody thereafter had any alternative but to support their leader and the will of the majority.

Cortés took the opportunity to make one of his periodic speeches. He was very good at haranguing his troops, and by the end of it they were with him almost to a man, and those that were not now had no means of escaping their destiny, which was to fight and go on fighting until they either died or conquered.

With the destruction of the ships, Vera Cruz assumed greater military importance as the base on which they could fall back if necessary, and also as a port through which they might ultimately receive reinforcements from Spain. A question that must have occupied Cortés' mind as he pressed on with his plans for the advance into the interior was the proportion of his force needed to secure his base. It would have the support of the surrounding country, a total of fifty towns and villages capable of putting something like fifty thousand warriors in the field, and it is probable that his first intention was to leave only a token force. But before he began his march from Zempoala, Juan de Escalante, whom he had left in command at Vera Cruz, sent word that a ship had been sighted off the coast.

Leaving Pedro de Alvarado in command of his army, Cortés took Sandoval and three other horsemen and galloped the fifteen miles back to Vera Cruz. One of his greatest qualities as a leader was his ability to meet trouble head-on, and in person. His haste, and the fact that he ordered fifty of his soldiers to follow him as fast as they could, indicates his concern that Diego Velázquez might be attempting a landing from Cuba. In fact, the ship turned out to be one of a fleet of three sent out by Francisco de Garay, Diego Columbus's governor of Jamaica. This they learned from three Spaniards they captured on the foreshore. Garay had obtained a commission from Fonseca giving him the governorship of any lands he might discover north of the San Pablo river, and his captain, Alonso Álvarez de Pinedo, with a force of two hundred and seventy men, was already establishing a settlement two hundred miles to the north on the Pánuco river. Cortés made an unsuccessful attempt to seize the vessel, but all he got was two of her sailors who had jumped ashore from a boat.

Cortés must have been very conscious now of the pressure of events building up behind him. It was not only Velázquez he had to fear, but Garay as well. To secure his base would require a larger force than he had originally intended. All told, including sick and wounded and the older soldiers, he left about a hundred and fifty men for the defence of Vera Cruz. The cream of his army he took with him, a total of about four hundred men, and on August 16, 1519, he marched out of Zempoala. He was accompanied by between forty and a hundred fighting chiefs of the Totonacs, and two hundred
tamemes,
who carried the artillery and stores, each Indian capable of fifteen miles a day with a fifty-pound pack on his back. He had fifteen horses and six guns. His soldiers wore cotton armour and hemp shoes and they carried shields. A few had arquebuses, muskets or crossbows, but in the main they were armed with lances and swords. Only the captains and horsemen wore steel armour. By the route they took it was almost two hundred and fifty miles to Moctezuma's capital. There were three great mountain ranges in their path, the first two overshadowed by volcanic peaks of more than 14,000 feet, the third by Popocatépetl and Iztaccihuatl, both over 17,000 feet high, and it was all unknown territory, much of it probably hostile. Few men before them had ever embarked upon such a hazardous march with the odds so heavily weighted against success. Whatever their motives, whatever their behaviour, they were brave men; and Cortés himself, a man who never faltered, never despaired even when the outlook was utterly hopeless, must rank as one of the greatest military leaders in history.

For the first three days of Cortés' march on Mexico-Tenochtitlan his army was advancing through friendly territory, but they still had scouts out ahead and a picked company marched in advance of the main army. The going was easy, generally flat, with the plain tilted from the coast towards the mountains fifty miles inland. Food was plentiful, for wherever there was water, crops grew without regard to season, and at that time, both on the plains and in the mountains, there were a great number of deer. It was mid-summer and the
tierra caliente
of the coastal belt was hot and very humid. Directly ahead of them they could see the rounded bulk of Cofre de Perote topped by a bare rock mass, square like a fortress, and though the mountains, blurred with haze, represented the first great barrier on their line of march, at least they offered the prospect of some relief from the burning heat. The country was fairly thickly populated, the villages oases of cultivation in the dry plain. But as they approached the foothills, where the cooler atmosphere of increasing altitude draws rain from the moisture-laden north wind, the savannah country gradually merged into a thick jungle growth full of tropical flowers, bright-plumaged birds and large butterflies.