The Spanish artists have furnished the savage war-chieftain, or their Emperor Montezuma, with very spacious and beautiful palaces, one of which they raised on pillars of fine jasper; and another wrought with exquisite skill out of marble, jasper, and other valuable stones, with veins glistening like rubies,—they have finished the roof with equal skill, composed of carved and painted cypress, cedar, and pine-trees, without any kind of nails. They should have furnished some of the chambers with suitable pavilions {210} and beds of state; but the bedding and furniture in our northern Indian huts, is the same with what they were pleased to describe, in the wonderful Mexican palaces. In this they have not done justice to the grand red monarch, whom they raised up, (with his 1000 women, or 3000 according to some,) only to magnify the Spanish power by overthrowing him.
Montezuma in an oration to his people, at the arrival of the Spaniards, is said by Malvendar, to have persuaded his people to yield to the power of his Catholic Majesty’s arms, for their own fore-fathers were strangers in that land, and brought there long before that period in a fleet. The emperor, who they pretend bore such universal arbitrary sway, is raised by their pens, from the usual rank of a war chieftain, to his imperial greatness: But despotic power is death to their ears, as it is destructive of their darling liberty, and reputed theocratic government; they have no name for a subject, but say, “the people.” In order to carry on the self-flattering war-romance, they began the epocha of that great fictitious empire, in the time of the ambitious and formidable Montezuma, that their handful of heaven-favoured popish saints might have the more honour in destroying it: had they described it of a long continuance, they foresaw that the world would detect the fallacy, as soon as they learned the language of the pretended empire; correspondent to which, our own great Emperor Powhatan of Virginia, was soon dethroned. We are sufficiently informed by the rambling Missisippi Indians, that Motehshuma is a common high war-name of the South-American leaders; and which the fate he is said to receive, strongly corroborates. Our Indians urge with a great deal of vehemence, that as every one is promoted only by public virtue, and has his equals in civil and martial affairs, those Spanish books that have mentioned red emperors, and great empires in America, ought to be burnt in some of the remaining old years accursed fire. And this Indian fixed opinion seems to be sufficiently confirmed by the situation of Mexico, as it is only about 315 miles from south to north; and narrower than 200 miles along the northern coast—and lies between Tlascala and Mechoacan, to the west of the former, and east of the latter, whence the Mexicans were continually harassed by those lurking swift-footed savages, who could secure their retreat home, in the space of two or three days. When we consider the vicinity of those two inimical states to the pretended puissant empire of Mexico, which might have easily crushed them to pieces, with her formidable {211} armies, in order to secure the lives of the subjects, and credit of the state, we may safely venture to affirm, from the long train of circumstances already exhibited, that the Spanish Peruvian and Mexican empires are without the least foundation in nature; and that the Spaniards defeated the tribe of Mexico (properly called Mechiko) &c. chiefly, by the help of their red allies.
In their descriptions of South-America and its native inhabitants, they treat largely of heaven, hell, and purgatory; lions, salamanders, maids of honour, maids of penance, and their abbesses; men whipping themselves with cords; idols, mattins, monastic vows, cloisters of young men, with a prodigious group of other popish inventions: and we must not forget to do justice to those industrious and sagacious observers, who discovered two golgothas, or towers made of human skulls, plaistered with lime. Acosta tells us, that Andrew de Topia assured him, he and Gonsola de Vimbria reckoned one hundred and thirty-six thousand human skulls in them. The temple dedicated to the air, is likewise worthy of being mentioned, as they assert in the strongest manner, that five thousand priests served constantly in it, and obliged every one who entered, to bring some human sacrifice; that the walls of it were an inch thick, and the floor a foot deep, with black, dry, clotted blood. If connected herewith, we reflect, that beside this blood-thirsty god of the air, the Spaniards have represented them as worshipping a multitude of idol gods and goddesses, (no less than two thousand according to Lopez de Gomara) and sacrificing to them chiefly human victims; and that the friars are reported by a Spanish bishop of Mexico, in his letters of the year 1532, to have broken down twenty thousand idols, and desolated five hundred idol temples, where the natives sacrificed every year more than twenty thousand hearts of boys and girls; and that if the noblemen were burnt to ashes, they killed their cooks, butlers, chaplains, and dwarfs[[LII]]—and had a plenty of targets, maces, and ensigns hurled into their funeral piles: this terrible slaughter, points out to us clearly from their own accounts, that these authors either gave the world a continued chain of falsehoods, or those sacrifices, and human massacres {212} they boastingly tell us of, would have, long before they came, utterly depopulated Peru and Mexico.
[LII]. With regard to Indian dwarfs, I never heard of, or saw any in the northern nations, but one in Ishtatoe, a northern town of the middle part of the Cheerake country,—and he was a great beloved man.
I shall now quote a little of their less romantic description, to confirm the account I have given concerning the genuine rites, and customs, of our North-American Indians.
The ornaments of the Indians of South and North America, were formerly, and still are alike, without the least difference, except in value. Those superficial writers agree, that the men and women of Peru and Mexico wore golden ear-rings, and bracelets around their necks and wrists; that the men wore rings of the same metal in their nose, marked their bodies with various figures, painted their faces red, and the women their cheeks, which seems to have been a very early and general custom. They tell us, that the coronation of the Indian kings, and installment of their nobles, was solemnized with comedies, banquets, lights, &c. and that no plebeians were allowed to serve before their kings; they must be knights, or noblemen. All those sounding high titles are only a confused picture of the general method of the Indians in crowning their warriors, performing their war-dances, and esteeming those fellows as old women, who never attended the reputed holy ark with success for the beloved brethren.
Don Antonio de Ulloa[[96]] informs us, that some of the South-American natives cut the lobes of their ears, and for a considerable time, fastened small weights to them, in order to lengthen them; that others cut holes in their upper and under lips; through the cartilege of the nose, their chins, and jaws, and either hung or thrust through them, such things as they most fancied, which also agrees with the ancient customs of our Northern Indians.
Emanuel de Moraes and Acosta affirm, that the Brasilians marry in their own family, or tribe. And Jo. de Laet. says, they call their uncles and aunts, “fathers and mothers,” which is a custom of the Hebrews, and of all our North-American Indians: and he assures us they mourn very much for their dead; and that their clothes are like those of the early Jews. {213}
Ulloa assures us, that the South American Indians have no other method of weaving carpets, quilts, and other stuffs, but to count the threads one by one, when they are passing the woof;—that they spin cotton and linnen, as their chief manufacture, and paint their cloth with the images of men, beasts, birds, fishes, trees, flowers, &c. and that each of those webs was adapted to one certain use, without being cut, and that their patience was equal to so arduous a task. According to this description, there is not the least disparity between the ancient North-American method of manufacturing, and that of the South Americans.
Acosta writes, that the clothes of the South-American Indians are shaped like those of the ancient Jews, being a square little cloak, and a little coat: and the Rev. Mr. Thorowgood,[[97]] anno 1650, observes, that this is a proof of some weight in shewing their original descent; especially to such who pay a deference to Seneca’s parallel arguments of the Spaniards having settled Italy; for the old mode of dress is universally alike, among the Indian Americans.