VI
A. D. 1519 THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO
“Hernando Cortes spent an idle and unprofitable youth.”
So did I. And every other duffer is with me in being pleased with Cortes for setting an example. We, not the good boys, need a little encouragement.
He was seven years old when Columbus found the Indies. That was a time when boys hurried to get grown up and join the search for the Fountain of Youth, the trail to Eldorado. All who had time to sleep dreamed tremendous dreams.
Cortes became a colonist in Cuba, a sore puzzle to the rascal in command. When he clapped Cortes in irons the youngster slipped free and defied him. When he gave Cortes command of an expedition the fellow cheeked him. When he tried to arrest him the bird had flown, and was declared an outlaw.
The soldiers and seamen of the expedition were horrified by this adventurer who landed them in newly discovered Mexico, then sank the ships lest they should wish to go home. They stood in the deadly mists of the tropic plains, and far above them glowed the Star of the Sea, white Orizaba crowned with polar snows. They marched up a hill a mile and a half in sheer height through many zones of climate, and every circumstance of pain and famine to the edge of a plateau crowned by immense volcanoes, a land of plenty, densely peopled, full of opulent cities. They found that this realm was ruled by an emperor, famous for his victorious wars, able, it seemed, to place a million warriors in the field, and hungry for captives to be first sacrificed to the gods, and afterward eaten at the banquets of the nobility and gentry. The temples were actually fed with twenty thousand victims a year. The Spanish invading force of four hundred men began to feel uncomfortable.
Yet if this Cortes puzzled the governor of Cuba, and horrified his men, he paralyzed the Emperor Montezuma. Hundreds of years ago a stranger had come to Mexico from the eastern sea, a bearded man who taught the people the arts of civilized life. Then birds first sang and flowers blossomed, the fields were fruitful and the sun shone in glory upon that plateau of eternal spring. The hero, Bird-Serpent, was remembered, loved and worshiped as a god. It was known to all men that as he had gone down into the eastern sea so he would return again in later ages. Now the prophecy was fulfilled. He had come with his followers, all bearded white men out of the eastern sea in mysterious winged vessels. Bird-Serpent and his people were dressed in gleaming armor, had weapons that flashed lightning, were mounted on terrible beasts—where steel and guns and horses were unknown; and Montezuma felt as we should do if our land were invaded by winged men riding dragons. To the supernatural visitors the emperor sent embassy after embassy, loaded with treasure, begging the hero not to approach his capital.
Set in the midst of Montezuma’s empire was the poor valiant republic of Tlascala, at everlasting war with the Aztec nation. Invading this republic Cortes was met by a horde of a hundred thousand warriors, whom he thrashed in three engagements, and when they were humbled, accepted as allies against the Aztecs. Attended by an Tlascalan force he entered the ancient Aztec capital, Cholula, famed for its temple. This is a stone-faced mound of rubble, four times the size and half the height of the Great Pyramid, a forty-acre building larger by four acres than any structure yet attempted by white men.
By the emperor’s orders the Cholulans welcomed the Spaniards, trapped them within their city, and attacked them. In reply, Cortes used their temple as the scene of a public massacre, slaughtered three thousand men, and having thus explained things, marched on the City of Mexico.
In those days a salt lake, since drained, filled the central hollow of the vale of Mexico, and in the midst of it stood the city built on piles, and threaded with canals, a barbaric Venice, larger, perhaps even grander than Venice with its vast palace and gardens, and numberless mound temples whose flaming altars lighted the town at night. Three causeways crossed the lake and met just as they do to-day at the central square. Here, on the site of the mound temple, stands one of the greatest of the world’s cathedrals, and across the square are public buildings marking the site of Montezuma’s palace, and that in which he entertained the Spaniards. The white men were astonished at the zoological gardens, the aviary, the floating market gardens on the lake, the cleanliness of the streets, kept by a thousand sweepers, and a metropolitan police which numbered ten thousand men, arrangements far in advance of any city of Europe. Then, as now, the place was a great and brilliant capital.