by Hugh Thomas
But Cortés was favored still by fortune, as Narváez had predicted would be the case, for some time yet. That was September 1523. That month Rodrigo de Paz and Francisco de las Casas, his cousins, at last reached New Spain with the news that the Emperor had named him captain-general and governor, the letter of appointment being accompanied by an instruction to Garay not to settle in Pánuco, but if he wanted to stay in New Spain, to go down to Espíritu Santo or, better, beyond it. Cortés immediately sent to inform Garay of these orders and dispatched Diego de Ocampo and Pedro de Alvarado with a notary from Tordesillas, Francisco de Orduña, to enforce the decree.24
Garay’s men were still melting away through desertion and he, at that time still in his Vitoria Garayana, was ailing. His ships were seized by Vallejo, his artillery by Alvarado. In these circumstances, Garay had no alternative but to accept to go up to Mexico-Tenochtitlan, Coyoacán, as Cortés’s guest. It was a humiliating conclusion to his great adventure. Cortés and Garay embraced and exchanged reminiscences of old days together fifteen or more years before in Santo Domingo. But to no avail: After dining with Cortés on Christmas Day 1523 in the house of Alonso de Villanueva, a friend of Garay as of Cortés, Garay died of a stomach complaint. Going into Garay’s room, Alfonso Lucas, one of Garay’s friends, and probably a Sevillano, heard the governor of Jamaica at midnight shouting, “Without doubt I am mortal.” He was.25
Within a few months, however, Cortés had himself to repair to Pánuco, for the Huastecs were priding themselves on what they believed to be their skill in expelling Garay and wreaking vengeance on his followers. The Huastecs, who were Maya-speaking, were enemies of the Mexica, but their way of life was luxurious, since, in their tropical land, they had plenty of food and there was a cult of pulque, which made them strong drinkers. They had also created much three-dimensional sculpture and were serious players of the famous ball game of the region. They were highly licentious.
Cortés swiftly established Spanish control in Pánuco and then, to his and his companions’ shocked horror, found the faces displayed in the town of several who had in 1523 come to the region with Francisco Garay. These had been flayed and cured as if their skins had been glove leather. This unpleasing discovery concentrated the minds of all the conquistadors.26
Thereafter, Cortés established Vallejo as his commander in the region in the new settlement of San Esteban del Puerto, which soon had over a hundred settlers of whom twenty-seven were horsemen and thirty-six were musketeers or crossbowmen. Juan de Burgos, a merchant of that city, who would become an enemy of Cortés, maliciously suggested that Cortés had ordered the Huastecs to kill as many as possible of Garay’s men, but the accusation contains no truth.
Afterwards the Crown sent a letter of complaint to the audiencia in Santo Domingo because of their permission to Garay to embark upon an expedition in an area already conquered by Cortés.27
At much the same time, Cortés sent his most turbulent lieutenant, Cristóbal de Olid, to Honduras to found a settlement there. He had returned from both Michoacán and Zacatula and was pestering Cortés for a new employment. Cortés believed that there was much wealth in the region concerned; and he told the emperor Charles that “many pilots believe that there is a strait between that bay and the other sea [the South Sea] and this is the thing which I most desire to discover because of the great service which I am certain Your Caesarian majesty will receive thereby.”28 Cortés had also heard that the nets used for fishing in those parts were a mixture of gold and copper, so he assumed that they were rich. A new settlement under Cortés’s direction would also presumably be a way of restructuring the territory of Pedrarias in Central America.
So Olid set off from Tenochtitlan on January 11, 1524, with six ships, with good guns and five hundred men, of whom a hundred were crossbowmen. Cortés assumed that Olid and Alvarado would meet if no strait divided them, for the latter had already begun a land journey to Guatemala.29 Two clerics accompanied Olid. They were to root out sodomy and human sacrifice “in a friendly manner.” All houses where Indians were being fattened for human sacrifice were to be broken open and the prisoners freed. Crosses were to be established everywhere.
Cortés sent Olid to Honduras via Havana. There, Cortés hoped, he would pick up Alonso de Contreras, from Ordaz, Toledo. He was one of those who had accompanied Cortés to New Spain in 1519, with horses, pigs, cassava (roots), and bacon. But Olid called on his old master, Diego Velázquez, who was then on his deathbed. Despite his condition, Velázquez encouraged Olid’s rebellious instincts.
Some other Spaniards from Cuba accompanied Olid to Central America. There Olid immediately set himself up in opposition to Cortés. His settlement of May 3, 1524, was at Naco on the river Chamelecón, in Higueras, thirty miles south of Puerto de Caballos on the Bay of Honduras.30
When he heard of this unilateral declaration, Cortés’s first reaction was fury: Peter Martyr—in old, not New, Spain—said that “his neck swelled” at such bad news.31 Díaz del Castillo, who was with Cortés at the time, however, wrote that he became very thoughtful, but since he was at bottom high-spirited, he did not permit such matters to get the better of him.32 Cortés dispatched a loyal force, under his cousin Francisco de las Casas, against Olid, with five ships and one hundred soldiers.33 They reached Honduras in good time and sought to land. Olid tried to prevent that. There was a short sea battle between Las Casas and Olid. The latter must have felt surrounded by enemies, since he had some days before sent two companies of men down the Río Pechin to try to stop, or even seize, Gil González Dávila, an eternal adventurer who was the elder brother of Cortés’s Alonso de Ávila and who was making his way northward from Panama.34
So Olid offered a truce to Cortés’s cousin Las Casas, who agreed to stay for a time aboard his ship. But alas for hopes of a peaceful solution! A storm pushed Las Casas onto the shore, in which torment he lost thirty men and all his arms. He was now a refugee with Olid, and he soon found himself joined in his confinement by Gil González Dávila and Juan Núñez de Mercado, an ex-page of Cortés, who were seized as they struggled northward.
Olid was delighted by these unexpected events and wrote, very pleased, to Diego Velázquez in Cuba to say how he had outmaneuvered everyone (Velázquez died before he could read the letter). He also sent one of his captains, Pedro de Briones, to establish his supremacy in some nearby settlements. But Briones was not to be trusted, for he planned to rejoin Cortés in Mexico. At that point, Las Casas and González Dávila decided to kill Olid, which was easy enough because, though more prisoners than refugees, they had not been chained. They found some scriveners’ knives, and then, while González Dávila was talking to Olid, Las Casas seized the latter by the beard and cut his throat. González Dávila added some thrusts of his own. But Olid was strong, and broke away to hide in a thicket. Las Casas proclaimed: “To me, those for the king and Cortés against the tyrant Olid!” No one supported the latter, who was soon betrayed.
A charge of rebellion was swiftly and almost formally brought against Olid in an arbitrary trial. Las Casas demanded a sentence of death for rebellion, and Olid, one of the great men of the conquest of Mexico, was accordingly beheaded forthwith in the square of Naco. The victors soon founded a city there, which they named Trujillo, for Las Casas was from that city in Extremadura. Both he and González Dávila then began to prepare to return to Mexico.
These events, so advantageous for Cortés, occurred in September 1524. But, not knowing of them, Cortés decided on an expedition of his own. His aim was to punish Olid. This was a controversial decision and one which he must have later bitterly regretted. Why he thought it necessary is a mystery. Why at least did he not wait till he had heard the result of Las Casas’s expedition? He was advised against leaving Mexico-Tenochtitlan by all his friends there. He did not listen. Perhaps he was bored by problems of administration and coveted a return to campaigning.
In any event, and for whatever psychological reason, the great conqueror of Mexico set off for
Honduras-Higueras by land on October 12, 1524, a month after Olid had been done to death. He left Alonso de Estrada and Rodrigo de Albornoz, the royal treasurer and the accountant, as lieutenant-governors to act in his stead while he was away. The chief magistrate would be Alonso de Zuazo, an experienced lawyer who had just completed the juicio de residencia of Diego Velázquez in Cuba. Two other royal officials—Gonzalo de Salazar and Pedro Almíndez Chirino—accompanied Cortés, as did the unfortunate Cuauhtémoc, last of the Mexican rulers, and his colleagues Tetepanquetzal and Cohuanacoch, the leaders, or ex-monarchs, respectively, of Tacuba and Texcoco. Others in his train were the resilient interpreter Marina, the reliable Sandoval, the complex Alonso de Grado, the fortunate Juan Jaramillo, the Genoese Luis Marín, Pedro de Ircio, and Bernal Díaz, all of whom had accompanied him in 1519.
Cortés took with him also a large personal staff, which included a majordomo, two maîtres d’hôtel, a steward, a shoemaker, a butler, a doctor, a waiter, two pages, eight footmen, and five musicians. His followers included, so he himself reported, nearly a hundred horse and thirty foot, with perhaps three thousand Indian followers.35 Cortés’s cousin Rodrigo de Paz would remain behind as majordomo of his property in Mexico, Cuernavaca, and on Coyoacán.
Soon after he had abandoned the heartland of old Mexico, Salazar and Pedro Almíndez Chirino left the expedition to return to Mexico. The bad relations between Estrada and Albornoz had been reported to Cortés, who assumed that the return of these two other officials, whom he believed loyal, would make everything easier in the great city whose rebuilding he had begun so well.
After Espíritu Santo and Coatzacoalcos, Cortés found himself in new country. The expedition passed through the center of the Yucatán Peninsula; bypassed Copilco, where there was much cacao and good fishing; and stopped briefly at Anaxuxuca, Chilapao, Tepetitán, Zagoatan, Istapan (“a very large town on the banks of a beautiful river, a suitable place for Spaniards to settle”), and Teuticacar (“a most beautiful town with two very fine temples,” in one of which pretty virgins were regularly sacrificed). Cortés had many bridges built of brushwood, sometimes of timber. Occasionally they had to cross marshes by bridges, including one built by Indians from Tenochtitlan; they experienced “much distress through hunger,” many curious conversations with Indians in canoes, while sermons were given by Cortés via Marina on the virtues of Christianity. Indian chiefs, such as Apasolan, became Christians and burned their idols. Sometimes Mass was celebrated accompanied by the music of sackbuts and flageolets. Cortés received many gifts of gold and girls, honey and beads, fallow deer and iguana. There were jungles, which the expedition had to cross on their knees, and there were flat pasture lands. They encountered high inland seas over one hundred miles in diameter, and met nights of torrential rain amid plagues of mosquitoes. There were “fearful northern gales”; there were days when the expedition was carried onward only by powerful currents in vast rivers; and there was the unmasking of an alleged plot of Cuauhtémoc, Cohuanacoch of Texcoco, and Tetepanquetzal of Tacuba, and their subsequent execution by hanging at Izancanac on Ash Wednesday, February 28, 1525. (Two senior Mexica—Cihuacoatl, or “Juan Velázquez,” and Moyelchuitzin, or “Tapia”—seem to have betrayed their colleagues’ conversations about possible rebellion.)36 Guanacalin, Prince of Texcoco, and Tacitetle, his equivalent in Tacuba, were left frightened but uncharged.
Cortés met merchants of the Mexican commercial centers of Xicalango and Los Terminos selling cacao, cotton materials, dyes, torches, beads made from shells, sometimes gold mixed with copper. The expeditionaries ate dried maize, cacao, beans, pepper, salt, and many hens and pheasant, as well as dogs bred for food. Sometimes they traveled by raft, each one of which carried about seventy bushels of dried maize and quantities of beans, peppers, and cacao, as well as ten men.
Eventually, after many privations, the expedition reached Nito, at the corner of Yucatán and Honduras, and there they encountered some eighty Spaniards, including twenty women who, unarmed and without horses, seemed to be dying of hunger. They had been left behind by Gil González Dávila, who had returned to Panama. Cortés’s own expedition was short of food, and perhaps all might have starved to death had it not been for the unexpected arrival of a ship from Santo Domingo with thirteen horses, seventy pigs, twelve casks of salted meat, and some thirty loaves of bread “of the kind used in the islands”—that is, presumably cassava bread. Cortés began to build a caravel and a brigantine that would reestablish his relations with those outposts. Of course, he found out about the fighting between Olid, Las Casas, and González Dávila, as well as the death of the first of these. He complained fiercely about the trade in Indian slaves, which continued on a large, ever-growing scale in the bay islands off Honduras in those days, and he explained how he had freed those slaves previously seized by Rodrigo de Merlo of Cuba.37 Cortés was now presenting himself as the friend of the Indians.
In the meantime, many strange, disturbing, quite unexpected things were going on in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. At first, Cortés’s absence seemed not to matter. Thus on January 1, 1525, a meeting of the town council of the city was held in the house of Licenciado Alonso de Zuazo, Cortés’s friend. There were present Gonzalo de Salazar, the majordomo, and Pedro Almíndez Chirino, the inspector, sent back to Mexico to maintain order while Cortés, the governor-general and adelantado, was on his journey. Also present were Gonzalo de Ocampo, Garay’s majordomo who had become mayor in Mexico; Cortés’s cousin Rodrigo de Paz, the chief magistrate, who had brought the good news of his governor-generalship; and Bernardino Vázquez de Tapia, the well-born conquistador from Talavera de la Reina, who had been with Cortés throughout the campaign of the conquest and who had not yet revealed himself the bitter critic of the great conquistador that he would soon become. These Spanish conquerors then elected for the following year two mayors, four town councillors, and a public spokesman.
There was thus nothing untoward in the names of the new members.38 They seemed much as they had been in the past, and they duly distributed 211 solares in 1525, of which 114 were urban but 97 were orchards. Several shares were granted for the establishment of mills, and one was given to a woman, Isabel Rodríguez, wife of Miguel Rodríguez de Guadalupe, who had cured the wounds of “los enfermos de la conquista.”39 But more was afoot.
During the course of 1525, the temporary rulers of New Spain, especially Pedro Almíndez Chirino and Gonzalo de Salazar, convinced themselves that since they had had no news from or of Cortés, he must be dead. On August 22, the town council formally decided to that effect. On December 15, Rodrigo de Albornoz wrote to the Council of the Indies a hostile letter about Cortés, whom he accused of being “consumed by avarice” and “a tyrant.”40 When Rodrigo de Paz, Cortés’s cousin, protested against the new self-assumed authority—Salazar and Pedro Almíndez—he was peremptorily imprisoned in the new fortress of the Atarazanas. He was asked the whereabouts of Cortés’s treasure. He denied that it existed. He was tortured and soon killed. It was an extraordinary development, heightened by the seizure by Salazar and Pedro Almíndez of much of Cortés’s property. Something like a reign of terror was instigated. Juana de Mansilla, wife of a conquistador who was with Cortés in Honduras, sustained the view that Cortés and her husband were still alive. She also refused to remarry. She was condemned to ride through the city on a donkey with a rope round her neck and to be whipped. Others of Cortés’s friends took refuge in the monastery of San Francisco. Judge Zuazo escaped to Cuba. The legitimacy of the new empire seemed to be on the verge of collapse.
Then on January 28, 1526, Martín de Dorantes, one of Cortés’s grooms, who came from Béjar, reached Mexico with his master’s order displacing Chirino and Salazar. He talked in the monastery of San Francisco to Jorge de Alvarado and Andrés de Tapia. After a struggle, Cortés’s party regained control. Then in a few months, the city council received a letter from Cortés himself in which he explained that he had arrived at San Juan Chalchicuyecan, Veracruz. The council read t
his on May 31, the day of Corpus Christi, with the council preparing to leave the new makeshift cathedral in procession. This missive led the council to revoke the grants of solares in the city and huertas outside it that had been made by Salazar and Pedro Almíndez Chirino.41
Cortés returned on June 19 to the city he had conquered and had then rebuilt. He had been away for more than a year and a half. In a letter to the emperor Charles he described how the population welcomed him as if he “had been their father.”42 Presumably he meant the Indians as well as the Spaniards in the place. The treasurer Estrada and the inspector Rodrigo de Albornoz rode out in fine array to meet him, though Albornoz had written so critically of Cortés the previous year; the majordomo Salazar and the inspector Pedro Almíndez Chirino, hid in their houses. Cortés went first to the monastery of San Francisco, where he was effusively greeted by all his friends who had taken refuge there. There he was told by old associates, such as Francisco de Ávila, his friend since Cuba, of what had happened in his absence. Almost his first move was to rescind his grant of the encomienda of Tacuba to Pedro Almíndez Chirino and to give it formally to Isabel Montezuma on the occasion of her new marriage, to Alonso de Grado.43 His next action was to arrest Salazar and Chirino and hold them both in a wooden cage.
