[162] Blank in the original MS.
[163] That is, his mother Juana's grandson, his Majesty's own son.
[164] Attorney General.
[165] Santo Domingo, Mexico, Guatemala with Nicaragua and Peru.
[166] Naboria—domestic service: tapia—task work.
[167] Juan Infante. No notice seems to be preserved of this encomendero.
Diego de Ordás. Was a native of Campos de Valverde or Castro Verde. He was chief Mayor-domo to Diego de Velásquez, governor of Cuba, and was sent by him to arrest Cortés at Trinidad, in the Island of Cuba, when he had already started on the expedition to Mexico. Instead of arresting Cortés, D. de Ordás joined his company and was made Captain of one of the ships of the expedition, and became one of the principal leaders. He was the first Spaniard to ascend Popocatepetl. After the fall of Mexico he was sent by Cortés on a mission to Spain, when he was made a Comendador of the order of Santiago, had the grant of Indians which had been made to him in Mexico confirmed by the Emperor, and was given a smoking mountain (Popocatepetl) as his coat of arms. He then went back to Mexico, and two or three years later returned to Castile, and petitioned for leave to conquer the Marañón region, where he lost his life. He was about forty years old when he left Cuba for Mexico.
Maestro Roa. When describing the festivities in Mexico to celebrate the peace made by Francis I and the Emperor at Aguas Muertas, Bernal Díaz says (ch. cci): "After this, on the following morning, half this same Plaza had been turned into the City of Rhodes with its towers ... and of the hundred knights commanders ... the Marquis Cortés was their commander and the Grand Master of Rhodes....
"I want to add an amusing story concerning a settler in Mexico called the Master of Rhodes (Maestro de Roda), already an old man, who had a great wen on his neck. He had the name of Master of Rhodes because they called him purposely Master of Rhodes, and it was he for whom the Marquis had sent to Castile to heal his right arm, which he had broken in a fall from a horse after his return from Honduras, and he paid him very well for coming to cure his arm, and gave him some pueblos of Indians.
"When the festivals which I have mentioned were over, as this Master of Rhodes was one of the chroniclers [of the festivities], and was a good talker, he went to Castile at that time, and became so well acquainted with the Señora Doña Maria de Mendoza, the wife of the Comendador Mayor, one Francisco de los Cobos, that he bewitched her, and promised to give her drugs so that she should bear a child, and he said this in such a way that she believed him, and the Señora Doña Maria promised him that if she bore a child she would give him two thousand ducats, and would support him before the Royal Council of the Indies in obtaining further pueblos of Indians. This same Master of Rhodes also promised Cardinal de Cigüenza, who was President of the Council of the Indies, that he would cure him of the gout, and the President believed him, and they allotted him, on the order of the Cardinal and through the support of the Señora Doña Maria de Mendoza, very good Indians, better than those he owned. What he did in the matter of cures was to heal neither the Marquis's arm (if anything he left him more crippled, although he paid him very well and gave him the Indians I have mentioned), nor did the Señora Doña Maria de Mendoza ever bear a child, for all the hot sweetmeats of sarsaparilla which he ordered her to take, nor did he cure the Cardinal of the gout; but he kept the bars of gold which Cortés gave him, and the Indians which the Royal Council of the Indies bestowed upon him in New Spain.