The Conquest of Mexico

The Conquest of Mexico by Roger Pocock

Roger Pocock's The Conquest of Mexico opens with a characterisation of Hernando Cortes as a man who spent an idle and unprofitable youth, a fact the narrator presents as encouraging rather than shameful, since it placed Cortes among ordinary men rather than exceptional ones. Cortes grew up in an age electrified by the discoveries of Columbus, when boys dreamed of fountains of youth and trails to Eldorado. As a colonist in Cuba he proved a constant irritation to the governor, slipping free of irons, defying authority, and finally departing as a declared outlaw in command of his own expedition. His men were already alarmed when he landed them in newly discovered Mexico, and were horrified when he sank the ships behind them to remove any thought of return. They stood in the tropical lowlands beneath the great snow-crowned volcano Orizaba and marched upward through extreme changes of climate, through hunger and pain, to reach a high plateau of fertile land, dense population, and wealthy cities. They learned that the realm was governed by the Emperor Montezuma, a ruler capable of fielding a million warriors, whose temples consumed twenty thousand sacrificial victims each year and whose nobility feasted on human flesh. Four hundred Spanish soldiers began to feel the weight of their situation. Yet Cortes, who had so unsettled the governor of Cuba and his own men, had a still more powerful effect on Montezuma. Ancient Mexican tradition held that a bearded stranger from the eastern sea, a figure called Bird-Serpent, had once taught the people the arts of civilised life and then departed into the ocean, promising to return. The arrival of bearded white men in armoured ships, carrying weapons that flashed like lightning and riding animals unknown to the Aztecs, seemed to Montezuma the fulfillment of that prophecy. He responded as a man might respond to an invasion of winged beings riding dragons, sending embassy after embassy laden with treasure and begging the visitors not to approach his capital. Cortes pressed on regardless. Passing through the independent republic of Tlascala, which existed inside Montezuma's empire in a state of perpetual war with the Aztecs, he defeated a force of a hundred thousand warriors in three engagements and then enlisted the Tlascalans as allies. Moving onward with this combined force he entered Cholula, an ancient Aztec city famous for its great mound temple, four times the base size of the Great Pyramid. There the Cholulans, acting on Montezuma's orders, welcomed the Spaniards and then attacked them inside the city. Cortes answered with a massacre of three thousand men in the precincts of the temple itself, and then continued his march toward the Aztec capital. The City of Mexico stood in those days on a salt lake since drained, built on piles and threaded with canals in the fashion of a barbaric Venice, possibly larger and grander than Venice itself. Three causeways crossed the lake to meet at the central square, the site of which is now occupied by one of the world's great cathedrals. The city possessed zoological gardens, an aviary, floating market gardens on the lake, streets cleaned by a thousand sweepers, and a metropolitan police force of ten thousand, all of it far in advance of any European city of the time. Cortes seized Montezuma and held him prisoner, eventually placing him in irons. For six months the emperor reigned under Spanish orders, overwhelmed with shame yet attached to his captors as gallant gentlemen. He gave them his royal treasure of gems, gold, and feather robes. A dispute among the Spaniards over this plunder, worth a million and a half pounds sterling in gold alone, persuaded Montezuma that they were not entirely divine, but he continued to regard them as friends, even supplying weapons from his arsenal to be burned as fuel in the punishment of his own nobles. At this point the governor of Cuba sent Narvaes with seventeen ships and a substantial force to arrest Cortes for rebellion. Facing odds of only three to one, Cortes descended to the coast, defeated Narvaes, captured him, and incorporated his men as reinforcements, returning to the capital with eleven hundred troops. During his absence his lieutenant Alvarado, a fair-complexioned man the natives called Child of the Sun, had massacred six hundred unarmed nobles and violated the great temple, igniting a war of vengeance across the entire Aztec nation. Cortes re-entered the city to find himself besieged. Montezuma addressed the attacking Aztecs from the palace ramparts in his robes of state and was shot by them. The Aztecs seized the great temple overlooking the palace, which the Spaniards then stormed at severe cost. Starving and desperate, the Spaniards cleared a road through the city and on the night of Montezuma's death attempted to retreat along one of the causeways. Three canals interrupted the route and the drawbridges had been removed. A portable bridge was brought for the first gap, but the weight of the crossing jammed it and it could not be retrieved. The second and third gaps were filled with debris, artillery, chests of gold, horses, and the dead. The army dissolved into a fleeing mass fighting through rain and darkness against thousands of attackers in canoes. At least fifty men were drowned by the weight of gold they refused to abandon, and many others were captured to be sacrificed on Aztec altars. Montezuma's children drowned among hundreds of others while Cortes and his cavaliers swam their horses back and forth to escort the column. The rearguard under Alvarado held the causeway until last, then leaped a chasm with the aid of a grounded spear in a feat of daring that gave the spot its permanent name, Alvarado's Leap. Beyond the causeway on the mainland, as dawn broke, Cortes sat on the ground and wept. He had lost four hundred and fifty Spaniards, thousands of Tlascalan allies, his records, artillery, muskets, stores, and treasure in what became known as the battle of the Dreadful Night. A week later, his starved and wounded force was attacked by two hundred thousand Aztecs. Armed with swords alone, the Spaniards fought for hours until Cortes himself killed the Aztec general, turning the battle into a victory by his own hand. Rested and reinforced, the Spaniards then returned to invest, besiege, storm, and burn the famine-stricken and pestilence-ridden capital, a city heaped with the unburied dead of a most valiant nation. In the aftermath, under successive Spanish viceroys, Mexico was extended northward to the edge of Alaska and became a Christian and civilised state distinguished by great engineering works, splendid architecture, and institutions such as a national pawn-shop designed to assist the poor. So complete was the transformation that one of the so-called native slaves of the mines wrote to the king of Spain offering to pave the two hundred and fifty miles from Vera Cruz to the capital with ingots of pure silver as a royal road and a gift to Spain.

By Roger Pocock · First published 1926 · Genre: Historical Fiction, Adventure, Military History · 1,878 words

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A. D. 1519

"Hernando Cortes spent an idle and unprofitable youth."

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Mexican history · Spanish conquest · 16th century · Aztec Empire · Colonial history · military history · exploration · indigenous peoples · Hernán Cortés · cultural conflict · imperialism · adventure

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