From 1826 to 1837 he was engaged on his Ferdinand and Isabella, and this naturally led him to the study of his Mexican and Peruvian themes; and Irving, who had embarked on them as a literary field, generously abandoned his pursuit to the new and rising historian.[1223] The Conquest of Mexico appeared in 1843,[1224] and has long remained a charming book, as fruitful in authority as the material then accessible could make it.
In the Preface to his Mexico Mr. Prescott tells of his success in getting unpublished material, showing how a more courteous indulgence was shown to him than Robertson had enjoyed. By favor of the Academy of History in Madrid he got many copies of the manuscripts of Muñoz and of Vargas y Ponçe, and he enjoyed the kind offices of Navarrete in gathering this material. He mentions that, touching the kindred themes of Mexico and Peru, he thus obtained the bulk of eight thousand folio pages. From Mexico itself he gathered other appliances, and these largely through the care of Alaman, the minister of foreign affairs, and of Calderon de la Barca, the minister to Mexico from Spain. He also acknowledges the courtesy of the descendants of Cortés in opening their family archives; that of Sir Thomas Phillipps, whose manuscript stores have become so famous, and the kindness of Ternaux-Compans.
To Mr. John Foster Kirk, who had been Prescott’s secretary, the preparation of new editions of Prescott’s works was intrusted, and in this series the Mexico was republished in 1874. Kirk was enabled, as Prescott himself had been in preparing for it, to make use of the notes which Ramirez had added to the Spanish translation by Joaquin Navarro, published in Mexico in 1844, and of those of Lúcas Alaman, attached to another version, published also in Mexico.[1225]
Almost coincident with the death of Prescott, was published by a chance Mr. Robert Anderson Wilson’s New History of the Conquest of Mexico.[1226] Its views were not unexpected, and indeed Prescott had been in correspondence[1227] with the author. His book was rather an extravagant argument than a history, and was aimed to prove the utter untrustworthiness of the ordinary chroniclers of the Conquest, charging the conquerors with exaggerating and even creating the fabric of the Aztec civilization, to enhance the effect which the overthrow of so much splendor would have in Europe. To this end he pushes Cortés aside as engrafting fable on truth for such a purpose, dismisses rather wildly Bernal Diaz as a myth, and declares the picture-writings to be Spanish fabrications. This view was not new, except in its excess of zeal. Albert Gallatin had held a similar belief.[1228] Lewis Cass had already seriously questioned, in the North American Review, October, 1840, the consistency of the Spanish historians. A previous work by Mr. Wilson had already, indeed, announced his views, though less emphatically. This book had appeared in three successive editions,—as Mexico and its Religion (New York, 1855); then as Mexico, its Peasants and its Priests (1856); and finally as Mexico, Central America, and California.
It was easy to accuse Wilson of ignorance and want of candor,—for he had laid himself open too clearly to this charge,—and Mr. Prescott’s friend, Mr. George Ticknor, arraigned him in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., April, 1859.[1229] He reminded Wilson that he ought to have known that Don Enrique de Vedia, who had published an edition of Bernal Diaz in 1853, had cited Fuentes y Guzman, whose manuscript history of Guatemala was before that editor, as referring in it to the manuscript of Bernal Diaz (his great-grandfather), which was then in existence,—a verity and no myth. Further than this, Brasseur de Bourbourg, who chanced then to be in Boston, bore testimony that he had seen and used the autograph manuscript of Bernal Diaz in the archives of Guatemala.
In regard to the credibility of the accounts which Prescott depends upon, his editor,[1230] Mr. Kirk, has not neglected to cite the language of Mr. E. B. Tylor, in his Anahuac,[1231] where he says, respecting his own researches on the spot, that what he saw of Mexico tended generally to confirm Prescott’s History, and but seldom to make his statements appear improbable. The impeachment of the authorities, which Wilson attacks, is to be successful, if at all, by other processes than those he employs.
Meanwhile Arthur Helps,[1232] in tracing the rise of negro slavery and the founding of colonial government in Spanish America, had published his Conquerors of the New World and their Bondsmen (London, 1848-1852),—a somewhat speculative essay, which, with enlargement of purpose and more detail, resulted in 1855-1861 in the publication of his Spanish Conquest in America, reprinted in New York in 1867. He gives a glowing account of the Aztec civilization, and, excerpting the chapters on the Conquest, he added some new details of the private life of Cortés, and published it separately in 1871 as an account of that leader, which is attractive as a biography, if not comprehensive as a history of the Conquest. “Every page affords evidence of historic lore,” says Field, “and almost every sentence glows with the warmth of his philanthropy.”[1233] Helps has himself told the object and method of his book, and it is a different sort of historical treatment from all the others which we are passing in review. “To bring before the reader, not conquest only, but the results of conquest; the mode of colonial government which ultimately prevailed; the extirpation of native races, the introduction of other races, the growth of slavery, and the settlement of the encomiendas on which all Indian society depended,—has been the object of this history.”[1234]
Among the later works not in English we need not be detained long. The two most noteworthy in French are the Histoire des nations civilisées du Mexique of Brasseur de Bourbourg, more especially mentioned on another page, and Michel Chevalier’s Mexique avant et pendant la Conquête, published at Paris in 1845.[1235] In German, Theodor Arnim’s Das Alte Mexico und die eroberung Neu Spaniens durch Cortes, Leipsic, 1865, is a reputable book.[1236] In Spanish, beside the Vida de Cortés given by Icazbalceta in his Coleccion, vol. i. p. 309, there is the important work of Lúcas Alaman, the Disertaciones sobre la Historia de la República Mejicana, published at Mexico in three volumes in 1844-1849, which is a sort of introduction to his Historia de Méjico, in five volumes, published in 1849-1852.[1237] He added not a little in his appendixes from the archives of Simancas, and the latter book is considered the best of the histories in Spanish. In 1862 Francisco Carbajal Espinosa’s Historia de México, bringing the story down from the earliest times, was begun in Mexico. Bancroft calls it pretentious, and mostly borrowed from Clavigero.[1238]
Returning to the English tongue, in which the story of Mexico has been so signally told more than once from the time of Robertson, we find still the amplest contribution in the History of Mexico, a part of the extended series of the History of the Pacific States, published under the superintendence of Hubert H. Bancroft. Of Bancroft and these books mention is made in another place. The Mexico partakes equally of the merits and demerits attaching to his books and their method. It places the student under more obligations than any of the histories of the Conquest which have gone before, though one tires of the strained and purely extraneous classical allusions,—which seem to have been affected by his staff, or by some one on it, during the progress of this particular book of the series.
G. Yucatan.—With the subsequent subjugation of Yucatan Cortés had nothing to do. Francisco de Montejo had been with Grijalva when he landed at Cozumel on the Yucatan coast, and with Cortés when he touched at the same island on his way to Mexico. After the fall of the Aztecs, Montejo was the envoy whom Cortés sent to Spain, and while there the Emperor commissioned him (Nov. 17, 1526) to conduct a force for the settlement of the peninsula. Early in 1527 Montejo left Spain with Alonso de Avila as second in command. For twenty years and more the conquest went on, with varying success. At one time not a Spaniard was left in the country. No revolts of the natives occurred after 1547, when the conquest may be considered as complete. The story is told with sufficient fulness in Bancroft’s Mexico.[1239] The main sources of our information are the narrative of Bernal Diaz, embodying the reports of eye-witnesses, and the histories of Oviedo and Herrera. Bancroft[1240] gives various incidental references. The more special authorities, however, are the Historia de Yucathan of Diego Lopez Cogolludo, published at Madrid in 1688,[1241] who knew how to use miracles for his reader’s sake, and who had the opportunity of consulting most that had been written, and all that had been printed up to his time. He closes his narrative in 1665.[1242] The Bishop of Yucatan, Diego de Landa, in his Relation des choses de Yucatan, as the French translation terms it, has left us the only contemporary Spanish document of the period of the Conquest. The book is of more interest in respect to the Maya civilization than as to the progress of the Spanish domination. It was not printed till it was edited by Brasseur de Bourbourg, with an introduction, and published in Paris in 1864.[1243]