The Conquistadors (24 page)

The Mexican chiefs were indeed offering peace. The details were arranged by a high priest the Spaniards had captured, and he went with them, at their request, to see that the truce was carried out. As when Moctezuma requested the release of Cuitlahuac, Cortés does not seem to have understood the Indian mind, and Doña Marina failed to advise him of their real intention. Religious ceremony was the basis of their society, and the presence of this high priest was necessary for the installation of Cuitlahuac as king.

Cortés had just sat down to a much-needed meal when news arrived that, far from ceasing their attacks, the Mexicans had re-taken all the bridges on the Tacuba causeway. According to his own version, he recaptured the lot in one swift assault at the head of a small group of cavalry, reached the mainland, and found himself cut off. The Mexicans had closed in behind him, pulling the rubble from the gaps, swarming over the causeway, and had massed in canoes on the lake. Cortés fought his way back, jumping the six-foot gap where the last bridge had been, only his armour saving him and his horse from being killed. By the time he had fought his way back to the quarters it was being rumoured that he was dead.

Four bridges were now held by the Mexicans, four by the Spaniards. It was time to get out of the city, regardless of loss of face or loss of men, for even if the Mexicans sued for peace again, he dared not trust them.

Now begins what the Spaniards have named the Noche Triste. A mobile bridging unit was constructed and Cortés detailed a hundred and fifty soldiers with four hundred Tlaxcalans to carry it, place it in position and guard it whilst the army crossed. The artillery was to be carried by two hundred Tlaxcalans, supported by fifty soldiers. Sandoval and Ordaz were to lead the army, whilst two companies of fifty men each, under Saucedo and Lugo, were to spearhead counterattacks wherever the march was opposed. Alvarado and Juan Velázquez were to bring up the rear, and three hundred Tlaxcalans, with thirty soldiers, were to guard the prisoners. The evacuation would be made that night, when there was a chance that the Mexicans would be taken by surprise and offer little opposition.

It was a sensible plan. What was not so sensible was that, instead of travelling light, they marched out encumbered with gold. Not unnaturally, Cortés was determined that the king's fifth at least should be saved; and no doubt he wanted his own treasure saved as well, for he knew he would have need of it if he were to return to complete the conquest of Mexico. There was by now the colossal total of 700,000 pesos' worth of the stuff (at present values around £3,000,000) weighing anything up to eight tons. Alonso de Ávila and Gonzalo Mejía, the two Treasury officials, took charge of the royal share, and to transport it Cortés gave them seven wounded horses, a mare of his own, and over eighty Tlaxcalans. But once the treasure hall was open, there was no stopping the soldiery. It was every man for himself. Those whose eyes were bigger than their experience – the Narváez men, in particular – loaded themselves down with gold. Old campaigners, like Bernal Díaz, were content to pocket a few of the
chalchihuites,
taking the beautifully-cut pieces of jade from the small boxes in which they had been packed.

Thus encumbered, they marched out of their quarters shortly before midnight on June 30, 1520,
²
having been camped in the palace of Axayacatl almost eight months. It was a dark night with a mist hanging over Texcoco lake and a light drizzle falling. Sandoval and Ordaz reached the start of the Tacuba causeway
without opposition, and the prefabricated bridge was placed in position over the first of the eight gaps. Cortés states that it was the sentries posted at the causeway-end who gave the alarm. More likely they simply gave the signal for the attack to begin, for before the Spaniards had reached the second bridge-gap they were set upon by an ‘infinite multitude'. The movement of such a large body of troops and horses, with bridging equipment, cannon, baggage and treasure, could not possibly have been concealed. Clearly, the Mexicans were waiting for them at the point where Cuitlahuac thought they would be most vulnerable. The lake on either side of the causeway was thick with canoes and the Indians stood in the water and in the gaps stabbing with their long spears.

Cortés crossed the second bridge and, with five horsemen and five hundred soldiers, forced a passage down the causeway, swimming the gaps, until he reached the mainland. He then went back for the rest, acting as a rearguard, with three or four horse and about twenty foot, until all the survivors had reached the mainland.

Like any general in his dispatches Cortés makes it all sound very orderly, even though he admits that many men and horses were lost and all the artillery, treasure and baggage. In fact, he had been neatly ambushed and the whole retreat turned into a shambles. The musketeers and crossbowmen had abandoned their weapons at the second bridge. It was hack, hack, hack, with steel cutting flesh and bone, as the soldiers fought their way through band after band of Mexicans, the water on one side, the flat roofs on the other and the lake full of canoes. Horsemen were pulled from their mounts, men trampled underfoot, dragged down into the water, drowned in the gaps. The rear of the column bore the brunt of it. Juan Velázquez was killed. Alvarado was wounded in the foot, his famous sorrel mare killed under him, but he still fought on, lance in hand. Eighty of his men were dead. The wooden bridge unit had been destroyed and the approaches to the gap were littered with dead men, dead horses and boxes from the baggage train. Alvarado had finally crossed by leaping the gap, pole-vaulting it with his lance; this is the bridge that was afterwards called Alvarado's Leap, and a section of the Tacuba route out of Mexico City is still called Puente Alvarado. He finally broke through to Cortés with four soldiers and eight Tlaxcalans, ‘all of them pouring blood from many wounds'. A massive old ahuehuete tree on the Calzada Mexico-Tacuba is
supposed to mark the spot where Cortés stood in tears at the wreckage of his hopes – but whether they were tears of rage or sadness is not recorded.

When at last they reached Tacuba they re-grouped on the high ground over–looking the lake, at a teocalli where the church of Los Remédios now stands – throughout Mexico almost every temple site is marked by a church. But even here the Indians continued to harry them. Early next morning they took stock and found they had lost more than six hundred of their men, mainly the Narváez contingent, who had died at Alvarado's Leap, weighed down by gold and drowned. But it was the Tlaxcalans who had suffered the heaviest losses – over two thousand killed, by Cortés' reckoning. This does not necessarily indicate that they had borne the brunt of the fighting; simply that they met the Mexicans on equal terms, which the Spaniards did not. The cavalry were certainly in the thick of it, for, armoured though they were, no less than forty-five horses were killed, only twenty-three surviving.

None of the prisoners survived, not even the son and daughters of Moctezuma, whom the king is supposed to have committed to Cortés' care on his deathbed. They died at Alvarado's Leap, as did Cacama, according to Bernal Díaz. But that determined and indomitable Indian Princess, Doña Marina, came through it all alive, together with María de Estrada, the only Spanish woman in Mexico, and Doña Luisa, Xicotencatl's daughter. They had been saved by a group of Tlaxcalan warriors. All the other women had been abandoned to their fate.

Cortés and the remnants of his army were besieged in the temple all that day, and at midnight they left, heading north towards Cuauhtitlan and the north end of Texcoco lake. Watchmen, hearing them go, raised all the neighbouring towns, and they had a bitter day of it in bad country. They spent the night in another hill-top temple, hardly a man unwounded, and with very little food. They were on the march again an hour after daybreak, in thickly populated country and under constant attack as they skirted north round Zumpango and two other lakes. A small town they captured gave them a twenty-four-hour break, and then on again, still short of food, and constantly losing the track that was supposed to lead to Tlaxcala. That night they camped in some hovels on the edge of a plain. When they started out in the morning there were Indians posted on a hill to the right of their march. Cortés took five horsemen and a dozen soldiers and reconnoitred
round the base of it. On the other side he found the great city of Otumba. Indians swarmed out of it and he was himself wounded in the head by two sling-stones. The Spaniards made little progress that day and camped the night in the open, supplementing their meagre diet of maize and herbs with the flesh of a horse killed in the day's fighting.

The Mexicans now made a tactical blunder that was to deprive them of their advantage and indeed pave the way for the final subjugation of their country. Instead of persisting with their harrying tactics they decided on a pitched battle. For this final blow Cuitlahuac had massed a great army of his warriors in the open maize fields outside Otumba. He had never seen Spanish cavalry in action on level ground; nor had any of his war chiefs. Accounts that had filtered through from the coast, and from Tlaxcala and Cholula, had almost certainly been regarded as exaggeration, since they were quite contrary to their experience of horsemen in the city confines of Mexico. They had no idea of the thundering weight and deadly thrust of armoured horses at full gallop.

Cortés, realizing that he now faced the final test, ordered the badly wounded, who had been carried on horseback, to march as best they could. The horses – all twenty-two of them – were prepared for battle. They were to charge and return, charge and return, their riders aiming always at the enemies' faces. The foot soldiers were to drive their swords always into the Mexicans' bellies.

The battle of Otumba was fought on July 7, 1520. ‘It was a destructive battle and a fearful sight to behold', says Bernal Díaz, who, like Cortés, gives God the credit for victory. ‘We seemed all to be given double strength.' The cavalry broke the massed ranks of the Mexicans. ‘And then, commending ourselves most heartily to God and the Blessed Mary, and calling on the name of our patron St James, we charged them, altogether. … We moved through the midst of them at the closest quarters, slashing and thrusting at them with our swords, and the dogs fought back furiously, dealing us wounds and death with their lances and their two-handed swords. And, the field being level, our horsemen speared them at pleasure, charging and retiring and charging again.'

No estimate is given of the Mexican strength, but it is significant that the battle raged throughout most of the day. Bernal Díaz claims that there had never been seen throughout the Indies so many warriors assembled for battle. ‘All the flower of Mexico, of Texcoco, of all the towns around the lake, and of many others in the neighbourhood, was present.' The size of the Mexican force is confirmed by Cortés himself – ‘so great a multitude of Indians came out to encounter me, that all about us we could not see the ground, so completely was it covered by them. They attacked us on all sides so violently that we could not distinguish each other, for being so pressed and entangled with them. Certainly we believed that to be our last day. …' And he adds, ‘They were so many that they hindered one another, and were unable to fight or fly.' There is no doubt about the courage and ferocity of the Mexican warriors, but autocracy was their weakness in battle, as it was
in politics. Their war chiefs wore feathered head-dresses, great golden plumes that waved in the sunlight above the struggling mass of their fighting men. On Cortés' orders the Spanish cavalry made a dead set at them, and as one by one their leaders fell, the warriors lost heart and their ranks began to break. ‘Then', Bernal Díaz says, ‘all our horsemen followed them, and we felt neither hunger nor thirst. It was as if we had suffered no disaster and undergone no hardships; we followed up our victory, dealing death and wounds, and our allies the Tlaxcalans became like very lions.'

The Spanish force was now reduced once again to little more than four hundred men. But though the Mexicans followed in the wake of their march, they no longer attempted to attack them, and next day, when they reached the Tlaxcalan border, which was marked by ancient defence works, the Mexicans vanished. The Spaniards were among friends again, with the caciques of Tlaxcala coming out to meet them, commiserating over their misfortunes, offering them food and shelter.

One of the most extraordinary things about this whole campaign is the loyalty of the Tlaxcalans. They have their counterpart in all mountain country – the Scots, the Montenegrans, the Berbers. Fiercely independent, they saw in the Spaniards
their only hope of survival, and despite their frightful losses, they were still prepared to support them. It was, in fact, the Tlaxcalan alliance that enabled Cortés to fight back and recover all the ground he had lost.

Cortés himself never seems to have wavered in his intentions. He sent at once to Vera Cruz for powder, crossbows and the crews of two of Narváez's ships that had gone aground, harangued his men, told them bluntly that the war would be prosecuted until the whole country was subject to Spanish rule, and with the backing of his old guard, shamed the remnants of Narváez's men, who wanted nothing but to get back to Cuba, into staying with him. He had, of course, no field hospital of any sort, but Tlaxcala's proximity to the high mountains made it a healthy place. Wounds healed. Many of his men, however, were maimed for life – he himself had lost two fingers of his left hand – and all the reinforcements he got from Vera Cruz were seven sickly sailors. Nevertheless, after three weeks' rest, he ordered his men to march against the Mexican-garrisoned town of Tepeaca, to the south and slightly east of the old volcano called La Malinche. Primarily it was a punitive expedition. Sixteen Spanish soldiers had been killed there. But it was also a training march, designed to instil some discipline into the Narváez men and to test the loyalty of his Tlaxcalan allies. They provided two thousand warriors, and when they joined him, it must have put new heart into his own men, for they were a brave sight, marching into the camp in ranks twenty abreast, all dressed in white and in perfect order, drums beating, trumpets blowing, bright plumes nodding and the banners of their republic gleaming in the sunlight. This colourful scene was completed by the ritual sacrifice of some Mexican spies and the induction of a chief's son to full warriorhood by blooding him five times across the face with a still-palpitating heart.