"If, at Mr. Wilson's summons, we reject as improbable a series of events supported by far stronger evidence than can be adduced for the conquests of Alexander, the Crusades, or the Norman conquest of England, what is it, we may ask, that he calls upon us to believe? His scepticism, as so often happens, affords the measure of his credulity. He contends that Cortés, the greatest Spaniard of the sixteenth century, a man little acquainted with books, but endowed with a gigantic genius and with all the qualities requisite for success in warlike enterprises and an adventurous career, had his brain so filled with the romances of chivalry, and so preoccupied with reminiscences of the Spanish contests with the Moslems, that he saw in the New World nothing but duplicates of those contests,—that his heated imagination turned wigwams into palaces, Indian villages into cities like Granada, swamps into lakes, a tribe of savages into an empire of civilised men,—that, in the midst of embarrassments and dangers which, even on Mr. Wilson's showing, must have taxed all his faculties to the utmost, he employed himself chiefly in coining lies with which to deceive his imperial master and all the inhabitants of Christendom,—that, although he had a host of powerful enemies among his countrymen, enemies who were in a position to discover the truth, his statements passed unchallenged and uncontradicted by them,—that the numerous adventurers and explorers who followed in his track, instead of exposing the falsity of his relations and descriptions, found their interest in embellishing the narrative."

Of course Wilson's book was unscientific to a degree, with its Phœnician theories, its estimate of Spanish sources of information, and its assorted ignorance of many things. Its author, had, however, stumbled upon a bit of truth which no ridicule could shake, and which proved fruitful in suggestion to a very different kind of investigator. This was Mr. Lewis Henry Morgan, an important name in the history of American ethnological study. As a young man Morgan had felt an interest in the American Indian, which developed into a very unusual enthusiasm. It led him ultimately to spend a long time among the Iroquois, studying their tribal organisation and social phenomena. He embodied the knowledge so obtained in a book entitled The League of the Iroquois,[43] a truly epoch-making work, though the author himself was at the time wholly unaware of its far-reaching importance. This book described the forms of government, the social organisation, the manners and the customs of the Iroquois, with great accuracy and thoroughness. Seven years later, Morgan happened to fall in with a camp of Ojibway Indians, and found to his astonishment that their tribal customs were practically identical with those of the Iroquois. While this coincidence was fresh in his mind, Morgan read Wilson's iconoclastic book on Mexico. The suggestion made by Wilson that the Aztec civilisation was essentially the same as that of the northern tribes of Red Indians did much to crystallise the hypothesis which has now been definitely established as a fact.

Those who do not care to read a long series of monographs and several large volumes in order to arrive at a knowledge of what recent ethnologists hold as true of Ancient Mexico may find the essence of accepted doctrine somewhat divertingly set forth in a paper written by Mr. Morgan in criticism of H. H. Bancroft's Native Races of the Pacific States. Mr. Morgan's paper is entitled "Montezuma's Dinner."[44] In it the statement is briefly made that the Aztecs were simply one branch of the same Red Race which extended all over the American Continent; that their forms of government, their usages, and their occupations were not in kind different from those of the Iroquois, the Ojibways, or any other of the North American Indian tribes. These institutions and customs found no analogues among civilised nations, and could not, in their day, be explained in terms intelligible to contemporary Europeans. Hence, when the Spaniards under Cortés discovered in Mexico a definite and fully developed form of civilisation, instead of studying it on the assumption that it might be different from their own, they described it, as Mr. A. F. Bandelier has well said, "in terms of comparison selected from types accessible to the limited knowledge of the times."[45] Thus, they beheld in Montezuma an "emperor" surrounded by "kings," "princes," "nobles," and "generals." His residence was to them an imperial palace. His mode of life showed the magnificent and stately etiquette of a European monarch, with lords-in-waiting, court jesters, pages, secretaries, and household guards. In narrating all these things, the first Spanish observers were wholly honest, although in their enthusiasm they added many a touch of literary colour. Their records are paralleled by those of the English explorers who, in New England, thought they had found "kings" among the Pequods and Narragansetts, and who, in Virginia, viewed Powhatan as an "emperor" and Pocahontas as a "princess." That the Spaniards, like the English, wrote in ignorant good faith, rather than with a desire to deceive, is shown by the fact that they actually did record circumstances which even then, if critically studied, would have shown the falsity of their general belief. Thus, as Mr. Bandelier points out, the Spaniards tell of the Aztecs that they had great wealth, reared great palaces, and acquired both scientific knowledge and skill in art, while in mechanical appliances they remained on the level of the savage, using stone and flint for tools and weapons, making pottery without the potter's wheel, and weaving intricate patterns with the hand-loom only. Equally inconsistent are the statements that the Aztecs were mild, gentle, virtuous, and kind, and yet that they sacrificed their prisoners with the most savage rites, made war that they might secure more sacrificial victims, viewed marriage as a barter, and regarded chastity as a restraint.[46] Still further inconsistencies are to be found in the Spanish accounts of the Aztec government. Montezuma, for instance, is picturesquely held to have been an absolute ruler, one whose very name aroused awe and veneration throughout the whole extent of his vast dominions; and yet it is recorded that while still alive he was superseded by Guatemozin; and even Acosta notes that there was a council without whose consent nothing of importance could be done. In fact, under the solvent of Mr. Morgan's criticism, the gorgeous Aztec empire of Cortés and Prescott shrinks to very modest proportions. Montezuma is transformed from an hereditary monarch into an elective war-chief. His dominions become a territory of about the size of the state of Rhode Island. His capital appears as a stronghold built amid marshes and surrounded by flat-roofed houses of adobe; while his "palace" is a huge communal-house, built of stone and lime, and inhabited by his gentile kindred, united in one household. The magnificent feast which the Spaniards describe so lusciously,—the throned king served by beautiful women and by stewards who knelt before him without daring to lift their eyes, the dishes of gold and silver, the red and black Cholulan jars filled with foaming chocolate, the "ancient lords" attending at a distance, the orchestra of flutes, reeds, horns, and kettle-drums, and the three thousand guards without—all this is converted by Morgan into a sort of barbaric buffet-luncheon, with Montezuma squatting on the floor, surrounded by his relatives in breech-clouts, and eating a meal prepared in a common cook-house, divided at a common kettle, and eaten out of an earthen bowl.

One need not, however, lend himself to so complete a disillusionment as Mr. Morgan in this paper seeks to thrust upon us. Still more recent investigations, such as those of Brinton, McGee, and Bandelier, have restored some of the prestige which Cortés and his followers attached to the early Mexicans. While the Aztecs were very far from possessing a monarchical form of government, and while their society was constituted far differently from that of any European community, and while they are to be studied simply as one division of the Red Indian race, they were scarcely so primitive as Mr. Morgan would have us think. They differed from their more northern kindred not, to be sure, in kind, but very greatly in degree. Though we have to substitute the communal-house for the palace, the war-chief for the king, and the tribal organisation for the feudal system, there still remains a great and interesting people, fully organised, rich, warlike, and highly skilled in their own arts. In architecture, weaving, gold and silver work, and pottery, they achieved artistic wonders. Their instinct for the decorative produced results which justified the admiration of their conquerors. Their capital, though it was not the immense city which the Spaniards saw, teeming with a vast population, was, nevertheless, an imposing collection of mansions, great and small, whose snowy whiteness, standing out against the greenery and diversified by glimpses of water, might well impress the imagination of European strangers. If the communal-houses lacked the "golden cupolas" of Disraeli's Oriental fancy, neither were they the "mud huts" which Wilson tells of. If Montezuma was not precisely an occidental Charles the Fifth, neither is he to be regarded as an earlier Sitting Bull.

So far, then, as we have to modify Prescott's chapters which describe the Mexico of Cortés, this modification consists largely in a mere change of terminology. Following the Spanish records, he has accurately reproduced just what the Spaniards saw, or thought they saw, in old Tenochtitlan. He has looked at all things through their eyes; and such errors as he made were the same errors which they had made while they were standing in the great pueblo which was to them the scene of so much suffering and of so great a final triumph. When Prescott wrote, there lived no man who could have gainsaid him. His story represents the most accurate information which was then attainable. As Mr. Thorpe has well expressed it: "No historian is responsible for not using undiscovered evidence. Prescott wrote from the archives of Europe ... from the European side. If one cares to know how the Old World first understood the New, he will read Prescott." Even Morgan, who goes further in his destructive criticism than any other authoritative writer, admits that Prescott and his sources "may be trusted in whatever relates to the acts of the Spaniards, and to the acts and personal characteristics of the Indians; in whatever relates to their weapons, implements and utensils, fabrics, food and raiment, and things of a similar character." Only in what relates to their government, social relations, and plan of life does the narrative need to be in part rewritten. It is but fair to note that Prescott himself, in his preliminary chapters on the Aztecs, is far from dogmatising. His statements are made with a distinct reserve, and he acknowledges alike the difficulty of the subject and his doubts as to the finality of what he tells. Even in his descriptive passages, he is solicitous lest the warm imagination of the Spanish chroniclers may have led them to throw too high a light on what they saw. Thus, after ending his account of Montezuma's household and the Aztec "court," drawn from the pages of Bernal Diaz, Toribio, and Oviedo, he qualifies its gorgeousness in the following sentence:[47]

"Such is the picture of Montezuma's domestic establishment and way of living as delineated by the Conquerors and their immediate followers, who had the best means of information; too highly coloured, it may be, by the proneness to exaggerate which was natural to those who first witnessed a spectacle so striking to the imagination, so new and unexpected."

And in a foot-note on the same page he expressly warns the student of history against the fanciful chapters of the Spaniards who wrote a generation later, comparing their accounts with the stories in the Arabian Nights.

Putting aside, then, the single topic of Aztec ethnology and tribal organisation, it remains to see how far the rest of Prescott's history of the Conquest has stood the test of recent criticism. Here one finds himself on firmer ground, and it may be asserted with entire confidence that Prescott's accuracy cannot be impeached in aught that is essential to the truth of history. His careful use of his authorities, and his excellent judgment in checking the evidence of one by the evidence of another, remain unquestioned. In one respect alone has fault been found with him. His desire to avail himself of every possible aid caused him to procure, often with great difficulty and at great expense, documents, or copies of documents, which had hitherto been inaccessible to the investigator. So far he was acting in the spirit of the truly scientific scholar. But sometimes the very rarity of these new sources led him to attach an undue value to them. Here and there he has followed them as against the more accessible authorities, even when the latter were altogether trustworthy. In this we find something of the passion of the collector; and now and then in minor matters it has led him into error.[48] Thus, in certain passages relating to the voyage of Cortés from Havana, Prescott has misstated the course followed by the pilot, as again with regard to the expedition from Santiago de Cuba[49]; and he errs because he has followed a manuscript copy of Juan Diaz, overlooking the obviously correct and consistent accounts of Bernal Diaz and other standard chroniclers. There are similar though equally unimportant slips elsewhere in his narrative, arising from the same cause. None of them, however, affects the essential accuracy of his text. His masterpiece stands to-day still fundamentally unshaken, a faithful and brilliant panorama of a wonderful episode in history. Those who are inclined to question its veracity do so, not because they can give substantial reasons for their doubt, but because, perhaps, of the romantic colouring which Prescott has infused into his whole narrative, because it is as entertaining as a novel, and because he had the art to transmute the acquisitions of laborious research into an enduring monument of pure literature.

CHAPTER IX
"THE CONQUEST OF PERU"—"PHILIP II."

THE Conquest of Peru was, for the most part, written more rapidly than any other of Prescott's histories. Much of the material necessary for it had been acquired during his earlier studies, and with this material he had been long familiar when he began to write. The book was, indeed, as he himself described it, a pendant to the Conquest of Mexico. Had the latter work not been written, it is likely that the Conquest of Peru would be now accepted as the most popular of Prescott's works. Unfortunately, it is always subjected to a comparison with the other and greater book, and therefore, relatively, it suffers. In the first place, when so compared, it resembles an imperfect replica of the Mexico rather than an independent history. The theme is, in its nature, the same, and so it lacks the charm of novelty. The exploits of Pizarro do not merely recall to the modern reader the adventurous achievements of Cortés, but, as a matter of fact, they were actually inspired by them. Thus, Pizarro's march from the coast over the Andes closely resembles the march of Cortés over the Cordilleras. His seizure of the Inca, Atahualpa, was undoubtedly suggested to him by the seizure of Montezuma. The massacre of the Peruvians in Caxamarca reads like a reminiscence of the massacre of the Aztecs by Alvarado in Mexico. The fighting, if fighting it may be called, presents the same features as are found in the battles of Cortés. So far as there is any difference in the two narratives, this difference is not in favour of the later book. If Pizarro bears a likeness to Cortés, the likeness is but superficial. His soul is the soul of Cortés habitans in sicco. There is none of the frankness of the conqueror of Mexico, none of his chivalry, little of his bluff good comradeship. Pizarro rather impresses one as mean-spirited, avaricious, and cruel, so that we hold lightly his undoubted courage, his persistency, and his endurance. Moreover, the Peruvians are too feeble as antagonists to make the record of their resistance an exciting one. They lack the ferocity of the Aztec character, and when they are slaughtered by the white men, the tale is far more pitiful than stirring. Even Prescott's art cannot make us feel that there is anything romantic in the conquest and butchery of a flock of sheep. The outrages perpetrated upon an effeminate people by their Spanish masters form a long and dreary record of robbery and rape and it is inevitably monotonous.