The Conquistadors (44 page)

The importance of this trade, and its rapid growth, can be gauged from the record of sailings – seventy-nine ships outward, forty-seven homeward, by 1540. By the middle of the sixteenth century European wars were making big inroads into the traffic. This led to the adoption, in 1564, of the convoy system. Even so, at
the end of the century the whole economy of Spain, and her standing in the European power complex of nations, was dependent upon bullion from the New World. By then the rigidity of the colonial system was such that the colonies were virtually sealed off, not only from foreign countries, but also from each other. A mass of laws denied them the right to trade, to grow certain crops, even to manufacture for themselves. Raw materials had to be dispatched to Spain in Spanish bottoms. It was only the Spanish colonists' intense loyalty to the crown that enabled such bare-faced exploitation to continue for three centuries.

A saying presently current in Mexico has the ring of truth: the Indians made the conquest, the Spaniards made the revolution. In 1810 Hidalgo raised the cry
Viva, viva
in Mexico; in 1811 Bolívar became an active revolutionary in Caracas and began his attack on the Spanish garrisons in South America. In little more than ten years colonial independence had been established, sometimes with the help of ‘mercenaries' released from European service by the defeat of Napoleon. But, as in Africa today, the colonists found they had no experience of self-government and little machinery of administration. The result was anarchy again, a situation that was exploited by the most powerful Spanish colonial families. The rich Creoles became richer; the Indians were reduced to the level of serfs on the big estates, and those of mixed blood were little better off. The degree of integration in Mexico, where conditions were particularly bad, produced an explosive situation. This led inevitably to the blood-bath of the 1910 – 17 revolution and to the obsessive nationalism of today. In Peru, as in other South American colonies, liberation from Spain was followed by military dictatorship. There was not the same intermingling of blood, and centuries of forced labour imposed by Inca and Spaniard had reduced the Indians to a state of passive acceptance of authority and exploitation. Independence took a different form, and it was war that bedevilled the new republics.

The traveller in Central and South America today, who looks beyond the great monuments of the Indian past, will be conscious that the history of the last four and a half centuries has left much more than a legacy of grandiose churches and elaborate mansions. In Mexico the mixture of Spanish and Indian blood is almost total, resulting in a new and volatile race of considerable energy. As a result of this, and the proximity of the United States of America, she is the first Latin-American republic to achieve the breakthrough to a financially sound economy. Peru may well be the next, but the Andes make communications costly and hinder the development of her mineral wealth, and her large Indian population, many of them outside a money economy, presents a problem that only time will solve. Like Panama, which is only viable because the American-owned Canal has replaced the Spanish mule trains, the condition of each of these countries has its roots in geography and the past.

Symbolic, and most significant, is the divergence of their attitudes to their Spanish founders. In Mexico, Cuauhtemoc, the Aztec leader executed by Cortés
on his march into Honduras, is a national hero, Cortés himself execrated. By the standards of the day he was a liberal and just man, yet almost every trace of him has been expunged, his statues broken up, the streets renamed, his palaces at Tlaxcala and Cuernavaca filled with Mexican versions of the conquest, his personal image made grotesque by the murals of Diego Rivera.

Yet, in Peru, no stigma seems to attach to the much more brutal conqueror who founded Lima – Pizarro, mounted on his charger and looking very like the statue in his native Trujillo, still faces the Plaza de Armas; and the chapel to his memory, in the great cathedral opposite, is unmolested and full of visitors, Peruvian as well as foreign. Moreover, in Peru, Spanish colonial architecture, though pretentious and even more grotesquely ornate than in Mexico, has not been overlaid by any pseudo-Indian revival. This reflects the different political set-up; Peru is still largely governed by, and for, the white minority, many of them descended, without mixed blood, from the Spanish colonists.

The contrast in Mexico is startling, modern sculpture and architecture having reverted to the Aztec in an almost paranoic attempt to recreate a pre-Spanish mood and obliterate four and a half centuries of history. The Mexican attitude oddly echoes the Spanish conquest, and down the centuries one seems to hear faintly the words of Cortés at the end of his last Letter – ‘
for it is impossible but that in time your Majesty will come to recognize my services; and even though this time never comes, yet I am satisfied in doing my duty and in the knowledge that I hold myself in debt to no man
…' From this city of Tenochtitlan, the 3rd of September, 1526.

Picture-writing could not, of course, define the spelling of Aztec names, and Cortés in his dispatches, and the Spaniards who wrote about the Conquest afterwards, had to reproduce the strange Indian sounds as best they could. It was not, in any case, a period in which spelling was notable for its uniformity. However, place names at least have now become reasonably established, and wherever possible I have adopted the local spelling. This applies also to the leading Indian figures. It would obviously be wrong to continue to use the form Montezuma, which Prescott established as general usage a century ago, when throughout Mexico he is now referred to as Moctezuma and this spelling is everywhere displayed in lights as the brand name of a popular beer! When in doubt I have tried to combine simplicity of spelling with uniformity. The result is not always satisfactory. For instance, Moctezuma was succeeded by Cuitlahuac, and when he died of smallpox it was Cuauhtemoc who defied the Spaniards. This is not as simple as Guatemoc – though better than the alternatives: Quauhtemoc, Guatemozin, Quatemucin, Guatemuza, Guatemuz – but it is at least consistent. For those who like to be able to pronounce the names they read, with reasonable accuracy, the rules are simple: X = sh; Qu = k; Hu and Gu = w. Once these rules are applied, the alarmingly strange juxtaposition of consonants and proliferation of vowels is reduced to a more sensible pattern since all the rest is phonetic. This applies also to Peruvian Indian words.

A great deal has now been written about Cortés and his conquest of Mexico, and the archives at Madrid and Seville have yielded a mass of documents. Scholars have found these last a fruitful field for research, but the resulting information is more germane to a study of the Indian civilization and the after-effects of the Conquest than to the Conquest itself. For this, the main sources will always remain the same – Cortés himself. Gómara, and Bernal Díaz. All three suffer from some degree of bias, and include, as a result, errors of statement, even of fact. But though facts are twisted to suit their purposes, misrepresentation is much less blatant than in the work of later chroniclers. Oviedo, who went to the Indies as royal inspector of gold smelting, had completed his vast
Historia General de las Indias
by 1535, and Sahagún, who was in Mexico by 1529, primarily concerned with the conversion of the Indians, and who lived amongst the people of Texcoco for some years, actually wrote his manuscripts in the Náhuatl language. There
were several Indian writers: Tezozomoc within forty years of the Conquest, and the best known, Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, had completed his
Horribles Crueldades de los Conquistadores de Mexico
before the end of the sixteenth century. Only Fray Bartolomé de las Casas had actually been on the spot at the time of the Conquest. He went out to the New World with Ovando in 1502 and was there when Cortés arrived two years later. He was in a better position than any other to write a true history, but he was a Velázquez man and inimical to the upstart conqueror. His
Historia General de las Indias
fails as a proper source, partly on this account, but chiefly because he belonged to what might be termed today an extreme left-wing group of ecclesiastics who became more Indian than the Indians. His hostility to Cortés, and his terrible indictment of his own people for their treatment of the Indians, made his work attractive to Spanish writers of a later age who wished to throw the blame for the decline of empire on those who had originated it. Though his attitude is partly justified by the events that followed the Conquest, reference to Cortés' brief defence of the
encomienda
and
repartimiento
systems given at the end of his third dispatch to the Emperor reveals his own repugnance and clearly indicates that his promotion of them was due to the demands made upon him, both by his own army and by the army of officials that descended on him from Spain.

Cortés wrote five letters to the Emperor Charles. They were a strange blend of military dispatches, plunder accountancy and political pleading. The second and third, which cover the Conquest from the time the Spaniards left the coast until the fall of Mexico, were published in Seville in 1522 and 1523, in each case about two years after they were written. The fourth, dealing with events immediately after the destruction of Mexico and dated October 15, 1524, was published in Toledo and Saragossa in 1525. For three centuries the first and fifth letters were missing. The eighteenth-century Scottish historian, Dr Robertson, finally sleuthed them out in the Imperial Library in Vienna, a not unreasonable place to find them since Charles was ruler of the Habsburg empire (the only feather head-dress attributable to ancient Mexico is in the Vòlkerkunde museum in Vienna). The first letter, however, is not the one Cortés wrote from Vera Cruz, which has never been found, but the very similar one sent to the Emperor by the Council of the newly-formed settlement. Thus, the whole history of events in New Spain, from the beginning of 1519 until 1527, is on record, and, in the main, written by the man chiefly involved.

The second letter (the first of the four that are by Cortés himself) opens:
Very Great and Powerful and Very Catholic Prince, Most Invincible Emperor, Our Lord – and ends: From Your Sacred Majesty's very humble servant and vassal, who kisses the royal hands and feet of Your Highness – Hernán Cortés.
All his letters are punctuated with the fulsome adjectives expected by the omnipotent feudal rulers of the period –
Caesarean Majesty, Sacred Majesty, I kiss your feet a thousand times
– and this, together with the necessity of justifying actions taken without legal sanctions of the crown, gives the Letters a certain coldness, almost an artificiality. Nevertheless, they are a day-to-day record of the Conquest written at the time and on the spot. We have become accustomed now to generals' dispatches and diaries, but few such meticulous records exist of campaigns more than four centuries ago, and certainly not by generals as physically involved in the fighting as Cortés. I have, therefore, regarded this as the prime source of facts, dates and numbers of men involved. On the nature and description of the fighting and in matters of detail, the letters are less explicit – they are, after all, war dispatches and politically orientated.

The
Historia de las Indias
by Francisco López de Gómara, together with the second part, entitled the
Historia de la Conquista de Mexico,
was published in Saragossa in 1552. A year later it was suppressed. Gémara met Cortés in the disastrous Algerian expedition of 1541, when Cortés was wrecked and lost his five priceless ‘emeralds'. He became his secretary and personal chaplain and, since he could refer to Cortés for details and amplification, his work must be regarded as a sort of extension of the Letters. In 1541 Cortés, though Marqués del Valle, was no longer the absolute ruler of New Spain. The ecclesiastics and bureaucrats had taken over, his health was beginning to suffer, his fame to tarnish. By the time the book was published he was dead, worn out by the hardships he had suffered in winning an empire for an ungrateful monarch. Gómara was the first writer to publish an account of the Mexican Conquest in a separate volume. Inevitably, its value as a source is marred by its obvious bias. Everything is attributed to his master – Cortés is everywhere on the battlefield, a master of strategy, and when things go wrong he is never to blame. Not having been there, Gómara's writing often lacks clarity, and his facts, particularly in the numbers of men involved, are sometimes at variance with the figures given by Cortés at the time of his dispatches. If, as has been suggested, Cortés virtually dictated the history to his secretary as a sort of justification at secondhand of his claims for the recognition of his services by the crown, then one can only assume that he possessed no copy of his dispatches and that his memory was occasionally at fault. The suggestion cannot be taken very seriously, since Gómara's style is very different from that of Cortés. Nevertheless, he had constant access over a period of six years to the one man who had the whole picture of the Conquest in his mind, and, therefore, Prescott's assessment of his work as one of the two pillars upon which the story of the Conquest mainly rests, must be accepted.

The other pillar is the
Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España
by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. This is without question one of the most remarkable documents to come out of any war.

I, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, citizen and town councillor of the most loyal city of Santiago de Guatemala, one of the first discoverers and conquerors of New Spain and its provinces, and of the Cape of Honduras and Higueras, native of the most noble and famous city of Medina del Campo, and son of its former town councillor Francisco Díaz del Castillo, known as the Courteous – and his legal wife María Diez Rejón – may their souls rest in glory! – tell you the story of myself and my comrades: all true conquerors, who served His Majesty in the discovery, conquest, pacification, and settlement of the provinces of New Spain; one of the finest regions of the New World yet discovered, this expedition being undertaken by our own efforts, and without His Majesty's knowledge.