Chapter XI.
The Expedition to Honduras.
The natives reduced to slavery.
The great object of the Spanish adventurers was to extort gold from the natives. The proud cavaliers would not work, and the natives were not willing to surrender the fruits of their toil to support their haughty conquerors in splendor. Cortez consequently, though reluctantly, doomed them to slavery. They were driven by the lash to unpaid toil. It was an outrage defended only by the despotic assumptions of avarice. The Tlascalans, however, in acknowledgment of their services as allies of the Spaniards, were exempt from this degradation. In all other parts the wretched natives toiled under their task-masters, in the fields and in the mines, urged by the sole stimulus of the lash. The country thus became impoverished and beggared, and masters and slaves sank together.
Laws and institutions.
Cortez had now reduced, in subjection to the crown of Spain, an extent of country reaching along the Atlantic coast twelve hundred miles, and extending fifteen hundred miles on the Pacific shore. With energetic genius which has rarely been surpassed, the conqueror established laws and institutions, many of them eminently wise, for this vast realm.
Colony at Honduras.
Cortez had sent one of his captains, Christoval de Olid, to Honduras, to found a Spanish colony there. This intrepid man, giddy with the possession of vast power, and encouraged by the success with which Cortez had thrown off his dependence upon Velasquez, determined to imitate his example, and assert independence of all authority save that of the Spanish crown. But Cortez was the last man to allow his authority to be thus trifled with. He immediately sent an expedition under Francisco Las Casas, with five ships and a hundred veteran Spanish soldiers, to arrest the disobedient officer. With pennants flying, Las Casas sailed from Vera Cruz, and was rapidly borne by prosperous gales around the immense promontory of Yucatan, a voyage of nearly two thousand miles, to the bay in Honduras named the Triumph of the Cross, where Olid had established his post. Olid opposed his landing, but, as many of his soldiers chanced to be absent in the interior he could present no effectual resistance.
Olid wrecked and taken prisoner.