CHAPTER XI.
THE SINKING OF THE FLEET.
July-August, 1519.
Diego Velazquez once More—His Supporters in the Camp of Cortés—They Attempt Escape—Are Discovered—The Leaders are Seized and Executed—Cortés’ Ride to Cempoala, and what Came of it—He Determines on the Destruction of the Fleet—Preliminary Stratagems—Several of the Ships Pronounced Unseaworthy—The Matter before the Soldiers—The Fleet Sunk—Indignation of the Velazquez Faction—One Vessel Remaining—It is Offered to any Wishing to Desert—It is finally Sunk—Francisco de Garay’s Pretensions—Seizure of Some of his Men.
To the top of a fir-tree, which he curbed and then let spring, Theseus fastened the robber Sinis, who had been accustomed himself to kill travellers in that way. In a hollow brazen bull, which he had made for the Sicilian tyrant to roast his victims in, Perillus the inventor was roasted. A famous detective was hanged at last for house-breaking. Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder, who about the middle of the seventeenth century travelled the country over to discover and bring witches to punishment, was finally, with pronounced effect, subjected to one of his own tests. Witches, he had said, would not sink in water. This was a safe proposition for the prosecution; for if they sank they were drowned, and if they did not sink they were burned. Being at length himself charged with witchcraft, the people seized and threw him into a river; and as he floated, by his own law he was declared a witch, and put to death accordingly. In more ways than one, he who invents a guillotine is often the first to suffer by it. It is not wise to sow dragons’ teeth, and expect therefrom a happy harvest.
Now Diego Velazquez had all his life been sowing dragons’ teeth, and hunting witches, and building guillotines, and brazen bulls. Starting from Spain in the guise of a noble old soldier, as he advertised himself, though some said of him that his sword was bloodless and his bravery bravado, he served the usual apprenticeship in the New World, chasing, and mutilating, and murdering, and enslaving natives, working to death on his plantations those saved for this most cruel fate. For this and similar service Diego Colon, then ruling the Indies at Española, sent him to Cuba to play governor there over those inoffensive and thrice unlucky savages. Fraud being native to his character, no sooner was he fairly seated than he repudiated his late master and benefactor, and reported directly to the king, even as his own captain of the Mexican expedition was now doing. Another of his guillotines was the vile treatment of Grijalva for not disobeying orders, on which score he could not complain against Grijalva’s successor. Yet, as head and heart frosted with time the Cuban governor was not happy: misdeeds never bring true or lasting happiness. His bitterness, however, was but in the bloom; the full fruit of his folly would come only after the consummation of events upon the continent, grand as yet beyond conception. Ordinarily it is much easier to kill a man than to create one; in this instance it was extremely difficult to kill the man that he had made.
If among the New World cavaliers such a thing as poltroon or coward could be, Diego Velazquez was that thing, notwithstanding he had participated in so much fighting. Yet I do not call him coward, for my pen refuses to couple such a term with that of sixteenth-century Spaniard. Certain it is, however, that few men in those days preferred conquering new lands by deputy to winning glory in person, and if this soldier and governor was not a coward, there was little of the manly or chivalrous in his bravery. He was cautious, yet frequently his cupidity overcame his caution; and when he adventured his gold—for he seldom risked his life, either for fame which he dearly loved, or for gold which he loved still dearer—it was under restrictions ruinous to almost any enterprise. In his ordinary mood he played fairly enough the statesman and hero, but in truth his statesmanship was superficial, and his heroism theatrical. Las Casas calls him a terrible fellow for those who served him, and Gomara says he had little stomach for expenditures. This much allowance, however, should be made in any statements of historians respecting the governor of Cuba: in their drama of the conquest Diego Velazquez plays the part of chief villain to the hero Hernan Cortés, when as a matter of fact Cortés was the greater villain of the two, principally because he was the stronger.
Even the priests praise Cortés, though many of his acts were treacherous; and timidity in a leader was accounted the most heinous of crimes. On the whole, I agree with Torquemada that the governor should have gone against Montezuma in person, if it was necessary he should go on such dastardly work at all; but we may be sure that Velazquez would not himself venture upon this sea of high exploit, though Æolus with a silver cord had tied up the winds in an ox-hide, as he did for Ulysses. And now from this time forth, and indeed from the moment the unrestrainable Estremaduran embarked defying him, the sulphurous fire of hatred and revenge burned constant in the old man’s breast.
Never was villainy so great that if united with high station or ability it could not find supporters; for most men are rascals at heart in one direction or another. The pretty pair, Velazquez the governor, and Cortés the adventurer—so well pitted that the difference between them consists chiefly in setting off the position of one against the native strength of the other, the manners and pusillanimity of the one against the fate-defying chivalry of the other—had each his active workers not only in Spain, but in America, those of Velazquez being some of them in the very camp of Cortés. Since the royal grant of superior powers to Velazquez, this faction has lifted its head. And now its brain works.
The messengers for Spain had scarcely left the port before these malcontents form a plot, this time not with the sole desire to return to a more comfortable and secure life, but with a view to advise Velazquez of the treasure ship so close at hand. Amongst them are to be found the priest Juan Diaz; Juan Escudero, the alguacil of Baracoa, who beguiled and surrendered Cortés into the hands of the authorities; Diego Cermeño and Gonzalo de Umbría, pilots; Bernardino de Coria, and Alonso Peñate, beside several leading men who merely countenanced the plot.[252] They have already secured a small vessel with the necessary supplies, and the night of embarkment is at hand, when Coria repents and betrays his companions.
Cortés is profoundly moved. It is not so much the hot indignation that stirs his breast against the traitors as the light from afar that seems to float in upon his mind like an inspiration, showing him more vividly than he had ever seen it before, his situation. So lately a lax and frivolous youth, apparently of inept nature, wrought to stiffer consistency by some years of New World kneading, by a stroke of the rarest fortune he suddenly finds himself a commander of men, in a virgin field of enterprise fascinating beyond expression, and offering to the soldier possibilities excelled by nothing within the century. As the mind enlarges to take in these possibilities, the whole being seems to enlarge with it, the unstable adventurer is a thing of the past, and behold a mighty rock fills the place. Against it heads shall beat unprofitably. The momentous question of to be or not to be is forever determined; it is an affair simply of life now. Life and the power of which he finds himself possessed shall rise or fall together; and if his life, then the lives of others. No life shall be more precious to him than his own; no life shall be accounted precious at all that stands in the way of his plans. To a lady who complained of the burning of the Palatinate by Turenne, Napoleon answered: “And why not, madame, if it was necessary to his designs?” The Palatinate! ay, and a hundred million souls flung into the same fire, ere the one omnipotent soul shall suffer the least abridgment. It was a small matter, and he would do it; all the islands of the Western Inde he would uproot and fling into the face of the Cuban governor before he would yield one jot of his stolen advantage. Each for himself were Velazquez, Columbus, and Charles, and the rest of this world’s great and little ones, and Cortés would be for himself. Henceforth, like Themistocles, though he would die for his country he would not trust her. Return to Cuba he well knew for him was death, or ignominy worse than death. His only way was toward Mexico. As well first as last. All the past life of Cortés, all his purposes for the future, concentred in these resolves to make them the pivot of his destiny. Cortés, master of kings, arbiter of men’s lives! As for these traitors, they shall die; and if other impediments appear, as presently we shall see them appear, be they in the form of eye or right hand, they shall be removed. Tyrant, he might be branded; ay, as well that as another name, for so are great ends often brought to pass by small means. Unpleasant as it may be, the survivors may as well bear in mind that it will be less difficult another time.
So the conspirators are promptly seized and sentenced, Escudero and Cermeño to be hanged, Umbría to lose his feet, and others to receive each two hundred lashes.[253] Under cover of his cloth Padre Diaz, the ringleader and most guilty of them all, escapes with a reprimand. As for the rest, though among them were some equally guilty, they were treated with such dissembling courtesy and prudence as either to render them harmless or to convert them into friends. “Happy the man who cannot write, if it save him from such business as this!” exclaimed the commander, as he affixed his name to the death-warrants. For notwithstanding his inexorable resolve he was troubled, and would not see his comrades die though they would have sacrificed him. On the morning of the day of execution he set off at breakneck speed for Cempoala, after ordering two hundred soldiers to follow with the horses and join a similar force which had left three days before under Alvarado.[254]