by Hugh Thomas
The expedition made for the Isla Mujeres, off what is now Cancún. Afterwards they sailed along the Mexican coast to the west, stopping at what became known as Cape Catoche. Many friendly contacts occurred between Spaniards and Indians, who told them that the name of the land where they had arrived was Yucatan.5 Hernández de Córdoba declared before a notary, Miguel de Morales, that he was taking possession of it in the name of Queen Juana and King Charles, her son.6
But he soon had to abandon his endeavors after a battle with the Maya near what is now Champotón. Twenty-five Spaniards were killed, a survivor, Pedro Prieto, later recalled. Hernández himself left for home mortally wounded, although his small force of arquebusiers made some impression on the indigenous enemies, who now smelled gunpowder for the first time. Hernández de Córdoba took back to Cuba some well-worked little gold objects, some small disks of silver, and some clay figurines. “Better lands have never been discovered,” wrote a member of his expedition, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier who, like Cristóbal de Morante, came from Medina del Campo.7 On reaching Cuba, Hernández de Córdoba said that he would like to return to Castile to tell the King and Queen what he had found, but he died before that could happen.8
In 1518, there was a second expedition to New Spain. This was led by Juan de Grijalva, a nephew of Governor Velázquez, who took a larger force with him than Hernández de Córdoba had, in four ships. He also took some artillery capable of firing twenty-pound cannonballs about four hundred yards.9 With him too were arquebusiers, crossbowmen, and a few fighting dogs, probably mastiffs, but no horses. His instructions were apparently to sail along the coast of, and trade slaves in, Yucatan, rather than settle there. He did not have permission for any of those purposes from the Jeronymite priors of Santo Domingo, which probably he should have had.10 But he did have with him the master pilot Antonio de Alaminos, who by now knew the waters of the Gulf of Mexico well. The four ships were captained by himself, Pedro de Alvarado of Badajoz, Francisco de Montejo, of Salamanca, and Alonso de Ávila, of Ciudad Real. Because of their roles later in Cortés’s expedition to Mexico, they have gone down in history as if they had been immortal gods. Each of these captains invested in the expedition, as did Diego Velázquez.11 Unlike Hernández de Córdoba, Grijalva had a priest with him, Father Juan Díaz of Seville, who wrote a brief diary of what he observed. Altogether, the expedition numbered three hundred people.12
Grijalva seems to have first gone out to Santo Domingo in 1508. He took part in the disgraceful quest for slaves in Trinidad of Juan Bono de Quejo’s in 1516, but that apart, he had a reputation for honest dealing and honorable conduct.
His expedition set off in January 1518 and landed, as had Hernández de Córdoba’s, at Cozumel, which they called Santa Cruz. There they found to their astonishment sumptuous houses, with stone doorposts (they reported them to be of marble), roofs of slate, tall temples, noble staircases, statues, and terra-cotta animals. A certain scent of incense hung over the island as if it had been Corsica in the old days. Then Grijalva, following in the wake of Hernández de Córdoba, turned north and west, and reached a spot near the present-day Campeche. There, a Mayan cacique, whom the Spaniards called “Lázaro,” requested them to leave: “We don’t want you as guests” was the comprehensible message. Perhaps he was the same cacique who had challenged Hernández de Córdoba. A skirmish followed, and the Indians fled at the sound of cannon. Grijalva, who lost two teeth in the fighting, did not pursue them. Instead, he continued to sail up the coast of what is now Mexico. Perhaps this was where Díaz de Solís and Pinzón were in 1508.
Grijalva was, however, soon sailing where no European had been before. He passed the port now known as El Deseado, and on the river that bears his name, he came upon a canoe from which the fishermen seemed to be using hooks of gold. The Spaniards captured a man, and the local chief offered him the weight of that man in gold; but Grijalva, “despite his companions,” rejected the idea. A little later another cacique on the coast gave Grijalva a great number of ornaments, including golden shoes, gaiters and cuirasses of gold, and some golden armor.
The expedition then arrived at the Isle of Sacrifices, where Grijalva and his friends discovered what seemed to be signs of recent human sacrifices. They must have seen such things in Yucatan, too, but here the number of the victims was greater, and there were also decapitated heads and clear evidence of cannibalism. A local cacique, probably a Totnac, gave Grijalva a golden jar, some bracelets and golden balls, and other jewels. Yet another cacique, whom the Spaniards nicknamed “Ovando,” gave them more beautiful objects of gold, such as a small statue of a man, a fan, and a mask, all carefully worked and with precious stones encrusted in the borders. They dined with the cacique, who also presented Grijalva with a beautiful, very well-dressed slave girl. Here they were close to the site of what would become Vera Cruz and eventually that of Tuxpan. Grijalva and his companions heard for the first time talk of a great empire, that of Moctezuma and the Mexica in the mountains.
Some members of the expedition, such as Martín Millán de Gamboa, wanted to remain where they were and establish a colony, but Grijalva quite correctly forbade it: his instructions from his uncle were different. Instead, he sent back Pedro de Alvarado to Cuba in his caravel to tell Velázquez what he had discovered. He took with him some of the gold that Grijalva had been given, including a breastplate and a mask. It was an astonishing story. The gold and the report of the empire of Moctezuma made a great impression on all who heard it in Cuba. This empire might not be that of China, but it did not sound so very different.
Grijalva sailed back down the coast as far as Cape Catoche, returning to Cuba on June 28. When he reached Santiago de Cuba, Velázquez criticized him on the ground that he should have stayed behind to settle the new territory that he had discovered, but Grijalva did not have the authority for such a thing, as Velázquez knew perfectly well.13
The noise of Grijalva’s artillery had had a great effect on the Indians, and so did its effectiveness in destroying objects at a distance; its inaccuracy at close range seemed less important.
All the Spaniards, meanwhile, had been much impressed by the level of craftsmanship they encountered. It was on a different scale to what had prevailed in the Caribbean. They may have taken back, too, a sense that the tributary Indians, such as the Totonacs, who lived near what would become Vera Cruz, were so hostile to the imperial power of the Mexica that they might become allies of Spain. The detailed evidence of human sacrifice that they encountered on the island of Ulua, off what is now Vera Cruz, admittedly distressed everyone. Still, the positive side of what they had seen, expressed in so many interesting artifacts, could not be gainsaid.
Already by July 1518, only a month after Grijalva was back in Cuba, Peter Martyr could write enthusiastically in a letter to his ex-pupils, the Marquises of los Vélez and de Mondéjar:
From the Indies much news has come in. The Spaniards leaving the island of Cuba—which is called by them “Fernandina”—toward the west but more toward noonday have encountered cities in which the subjects live according to law, there is commerce, and people go around dressed. They have books in whose pages they intersperse, between the lines of writing, figures of kings and idols, such as we see made by historians with prints or codices, with fabulous representations done in order to make them saleable. They have, too, streets as in any other city, houses built of stone and treated by lime, magnificent palaces and splendid temples where they offer sacrifices to their gods, similar to nocturnal phantasms. Annually they sacrifice an uncountable number of children, girls, and even slaves bought in the market.14
A real New World seemed thus to be opening before the Spaniards of the Caribbean: rich, because of the gold; savage, because of the human sacrifices; and cultivated, because of the illuminated books, the sculpture, and other works of art. The whole represented a temptation to all Spaniards in Cuba: the desire for glory, the desire for gold, and the desire to bring pagans to the true God.
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“O our lord, thou has suffered”
O our lord, thou has suffered fatigue, thou has endured weariness, thou hast come to arrive on earth.
Moctezuma to Cortés on the causeway leading to Tenochtitlan, November 15181
The third Spanish expedition to what is now Mexico was that of Hernán, or Hernando, Cortés, to give him the name by which he was always known at the time. Then in his late thirties, having been born about 1480, he came from the town of Medellín, in Extremadura, and had first gone to the Indies in 1506. He derived from an illegitimate and impoverished branch of the wild Extremeño family of Monroy and was remotely connected by blood with Ovando, the Governor of La Española. Another distant relation was the councillor of the realm, Lorenzo Galíndez de Carvajal. Cortés had many cousins but neither brothers nor sisters. Both his father and his maternal grandfather were on the side of La Beltraneja in the civil war of the 1470s, his grandfather Diego Alfon Altamirano having been a majordomo of one of the leaders of the defeated party, the Countess of Medellín, a daughter of a famous favorite of King Enrique IV, Juan Pacheco. The castle of Medellín had been besieged by royal forces in 1476, and probably Cortés’s grandfather was in it at that time.2 Thus the conqueror of Mexico emerged from a world of rebellion, war, and conspiracy second to none.
Medellín, a town owned by the count of that name, is eight miles west of Villanueva de la Serena, at the head of the lovely valley of the Serena, where the archive of the Mesta was kept and where several hundred partners in that sheep collective would meet once a year.3 So Medellín was accustomed to contact with the outside world. Cortés had been at the University of Salamanca and had mastered Latin there.4 He may have been related to the dean of the cathedral of Salamanca, Álvaro de Paz.5 He then lived for a time in Seville, acting as a notary. His life at Medellín had brought him into contact with cultures other than Castilian, since in his childhood there were both Jewish quarters and Muslim ones in the town. His grandfather’s successor as majordomo in the castle had been Jewish, too, and had converted to Christianity in 1492 when Cortés was about twelve years old and when the Church of Santa Cecilia began to be built on the site of the synagogue.
As we have seen, Cortés had served his kinsman Ovando as notary in the new town of Azúa, on the southern coast of La Española, between his arrival there in the autumn of 1506 until 1510 or 1511. Then he had acted as secretary to Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar, who took him to Cuba and favored him. Cortés must have been present when Velázquez founded major cities in Cuba. Between 1516 and 1518 he had also been one of the magistrates of Santiago, by then the Spanish capital on the island; and he had made money from the pursuit of gold.6
Cortés was cautious and serene. He never troubled much about material comforts. He had a skillful way with his pen, as his artful letters to Charles V suggest: these are the only documents still worth reading of the large body of literature created by the conquests. At the same time, he was a voluptuary: the list of his women, many of them indigenous Mexicans, in the course of his war with the Mexica is long. The best portrait of him was a medallion by the Strasburger Christoph Weiditz.7
Cortés’s expedition was a much more formidable undertaking than those of his two predecessors, for he took with him twenty ships and nearly six hundred men, including sailors. Like Hernández de Córdoba, he had arquebusiers. Like Grijalva, he had artillery. But unlike both of them, he also had horses. He had with him not just one priest, Father Juan Díaz, from Seville, who had also accompanied Grijalva, but also an agile Mercedarian friar, Bartolomé de Olmedo, from near Valladolid, in Castile, who must have helped him in gauging the reaction of the court in Castile to what he was doing. About twenty women also seem to have been with Cortés, as much fighters as nurses or mistresses (the role of “conquistadora” should be a subject for study). He had with him many young men fresh from Spain, such as Gonzalo de Sandoval and Antonio de Tapia, both from his own hometown of Medellín, as well as a free black warrior, Juan Garrido, who had been in many battles before in the Caribbean, in Puerto Rico, Guadeloupe, and Florida with Ponce de León, and in Cuba with Velázquez.
The majority of the expedition were men who had passed a few years in Cuba, but there were some who came especially from Santo Domingo, such as Juan de Cáceres, who became Cortés’s majordomo. There also came some, like Ginés Martín Benito de Béjar (who played the tambourine so well) and Pedro Prieto, as well as the three chief lieutenants at the beginning (Alvarado, Ávila, and Montejo), who had been to Yucatan before, with either Hernández de Córdoba or Grijalva, or indeed both. Some, such as Francisco de Montejo and Bernal Díaz del Castillo, had gone first to the Indies with Pedrarias but had made for Cuba when they found Darien an intolerable challenge to their health and patience.
Cortés was named to command this expedition as soon as Pedro de Alvarado returned from his journey with Grijalva. His instructions from Velázquez included the command to settle the lands discovered by Grijalva, to preach Christianity, to map the coastline from Yucatan to the north (and, by implication, to discover whether there was a strait there to the Pacific, then still known as the Southern Sea), and, wherever he landed, to take possession of territory in the name of the Spanish monarchs. There were also fantastic obligations: to find out about “the people with large, broad ears and others with faces like dogs and also where and in what direction are the Amazons who are nearby, according to the Indians whom you are taking with you.”8
Cortés’s men came from nearly every part of Castile, but the largest number came from Andalusia, say 36 percent, particularly from the city of Seville. Perhaps 16 percent came from Extremadura, and slightly fewer than that from Old Castile. The leaders, however, were mostly from the first of these last territories, including men whom Cortés had known all his life and who would back him unquestionably in moments of difficulty. Loyalty to the local leader was frequent among all the first generation of conquistadors. A few of Cortés’s men came from Aragón and Cataluña, one or two from Valencia, almost none from Granada.9 Cortés also brought with him a number of Cuban Indians as servants or slaves: Velázquez had given his approval.10
The leaders of his army, when it took shape as such, were Pedro de Alvarado, from Badajoz, nephew of that Diego de Alvarado who was one of the oldest Spanish inhabitants of La Española; Diego de Ordaz, from Castroverde del Campo, in Castile; Alonso de Ávila, from Ciudad Real; Andrés de Tapia, probably from a family of Medellín; and, later in the campaign, Gonzalo de Sandoval, who was also born in Medellín and who became in effect the second in command. None of these men had much previous experience of war, though some had participated in the fighting that had led to the Spanish control of Cuba. Diego de Ordaz had fought at the disastrous battle of Turbaco in 1509, in Hojeda’s expedition, when Juan de la Cosa had been killed. Cortés himself had fought in Cuba and probably in La Española. Still, most of them came from families where the cult of arms dominated all conversations, and several, like Cortés himself, had fathers who had fought against Granada.
No doubt Alvarado had told Cortés of his impressions of this new world discovered by Hernández de Córdoba and Grijalva, and Cortés listened carefully.
Cortés and his expedition went first to Yucatan. There they recovered a lay brother from Écija, Jerónimo de Aguilar, who, wrecked in 1509 when on Nicuesa’s expedition, had been for several years obliged to live with the Maya Indians.11 One of Cortés’s men, Angel Tintorero, described how on an island off Yucatan while looking for wild boar (so he recalled), he came across Aguilar in Indian clothes, clasping a worn Book of Hours.12 Aguilar, who at first seemed so close to the Indians that no one recognized him as a Spaniard, spoke Maya. When Cortés was later presented with a Mexican slave, Mallinalli, or Marina, as the Spaniards named her, who spoke Maya as well as Nahuatl (the language of the Mexica), he was able to communicate with his supposed opponents through this double, clumsy, but effective system of interpretation.13
After several skirmishes in different pla
ces on the Mexican coast, Cortés set up a base near Vera Cruz, in defiance of the wishes of Diego Velázquez. There he fended off a rebellion mounted by some of the supporters of that Governor who were on the expedition and who seem to have wanted to go home. He established a good understanding with the people of the coast, the Totanacs, who had been tributaries of the Mexica. Already, he and his friends, like Grijalva before them, had seen signs of human sacrifice: “a sort of altar covered with clotted blood” was one of their disagreeable observations in Yucatan.
Cortés was approached by the Emperor of the Mexica, Moctezuma, who gave him presents but also tried to find out as much as he could of these surprising newcomers with long hair, sharp swords, and great physical strength. His magicians, who were, as we may suppose, his spies, reported that the leading Spaniards talked all night and at dawn were back on their horses. Now it was that Moctezuma presented Cortés with the two finely wrought, heavy gold and silver wheels almost certainly depicting the Mexican calendars (they were repoussé work). They had apparently been prepared for Grijalva, but he had sailed away before they were finished.14 They seemed the great prizes of this stage of the conquest.
Cortés had the immense good fortune to land in the territory dominated by the Mexica in a year dedicated by the priests to the memory of the humane god Quetzalcoatl. He and his conquistadors came out of the same sea where legend had it that that deity had vanished long ago on a raft of serpents. Cortés played on these memories. There was a story, too, that Quetzalcoatl was always expected to return one day, though no evidence for the legend seems to exist that predates the conquest. The Mexica seem to have confused Cortés with the lost god. For that reason, Cortés was formally given clothing intended to resemble that of the god Quetzalcoatl.
