Conquistador: Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs

by Buddy Levy

  The islanders brought food to the Spaniards, including loads of fresh fish, bundles of colorful and sweet tropical fruits, and hives of island honey, a delicacy that the island people nurtured and managed. The Spaniards traded beads, cutlery, bells, and other trinkets for food and low-grade gold ornaments. Relations seemed convivial, and Cortés decided to hold a muster on the beach to assess the force he had amassed in Cuba.

  The ships included his one-hundred-ton flagship plus three smaller vessels displacing seventy or eighty tons. The remaining boats had open or partially covered decks with makeshift canvas roofs to provide shade from the scorching sun or shelter from the rain squalls. The bigger ships transported smaller vessels that could be lowered at ports or some distance offshore, then rowed or sailed to a landing.4 The ships were packed belowdecks with ample supplies of island fare: maize, yucca, chiles, and robust quantities of salt pork which had a long shelf life, plus fodder for the stock.

  The crew of mercenaries comprised chivalrous men bred on war and adventure. Over five hundred strong, these travel-hardened pikemen and swordsmen and lancers had either paid their way onto the voyage or come spurred by the promise of fortune. Cortés strode the beach and surveyed the sharpshooters, thirty accurate crossbowmen and twelve well-trained harquebusiers bearing handheld matchlocks fired from the shoulder or chest. Ten small cannons would be fired by experienced artillerymen, who also carried light, transportable brass cannons called falconets. The detail-oriented, highly prepared Cortés had the foresight to bring along a few blacksmiths who could repair damaged weaponry and, most important, keep the prized Spanish horses well shod. Extensive stocks of ammunition and gunpowder were packaged carefully in dry containers and guarded at all times. For land transport, Cortés brought two hundred islanders from Cuba, mostly men for heavy portaging, but also a handful of women to prepare food and repair and fabricate the wool, flax, and linen doublets, jerkins, and brigandines the men wore.

  Cortés ordered the horses lowered from the ship’s decks by means of strong leather harnesses, ropes, and pulleys, then had them led ashore to exercise and graze on the island’s dense foliage. Curious islanders came forward. They had been observing the general muster, and now they were absolutely entranced by the horses—some islanders running away in fear at the sight of them—the first such creatures they had ever witnessed. Intrigued by the horses’ impression on the locals, Cortés had his best cavalrymen mount the glistening and snorting animals and gallop them along the beach. Artillerymen tested cannons, firing them into the hillsides; the explosions were thunderous, flame and smoke belching from the muzzles. Archers shouldered crossbows and sent arrows whistling through the air at makeshift targets.5

  When the smoke from the military display had cleared and the horses were put away, islanders approached the Spaniards more closely, and tugged at their beards and stroked the white skin of their forearms. A few of the chiefs became animated and gesticulated aggressively using sign language and pointing beyond the easternmost tip of the island. Cortés had Melchior brought forward, and after some discussion he reported some extraordinary news: the older chiefs claimed that years earlier other bearded white men had come and that two of them were still alive, held as slaves by Indians on mainland Yucatán, just a short distance, about a day’s paddle, across the channel waters.

  Cortés mused, deeply intrigued by the prospect of Spanish-speaking countrymen who had been living among mainland Indians. This was an unexpected and potentially profitable windfall. He appealed to one of the main caciques, asking him for a few of his able men whom he could send over as scouts to see what they might learn of these Spaniards and to bring them back if they could. The chief conferred with others, but they balked, explaining that they feared sending any of their own people as guides because they would quite likely be killed and sacrificed or even eaten by the mainlanders. Alarming as this fear seemed, Cortés pressed, offering more of the green glass beads that the islanders appeared to covet, and the chiefs acquiesced. Cortés dispatched several men, along with his captain and friend Juan de Escalante, in a brigantine. Hidden beneath the braided hair of one of the messengers was a letter stating that Cortés had arrived on Cozumel with more than five hundred Spanish soldiers on a mission to “explore and colonize these lands.” Flanking them in support were two ships and fifty armed soldiers.6

  While he awaited news from this reconnaissance, Cortés scouted his hosts’ island. He noted well-built houses, orderly and neat, and other evidence of a complex civilization, including their “books,” elaborate series of drawings on stretched bark. What interested him most was a large pyramidal structure, a temple constructed of limestone masonry, with an open plaza or sanctuary at its top, overlooking the sea. Cortés climbed the pyramid steps and, upon reaching the temple, saw that the pavilion was spattered with the blood of decapitated quail and domesticated dogs, small foxlike canines that the people also ate. Bones were piled as offerings. Cortés and his men found these idols monstrous, even frightening. One was especially curious: it was hollow, made of baked clay and set against a limestone wall with a secret entrance at its rear, where a priest could enter and respond to worshippers’ prayers, like an oracle. Around the idol, braziers burned resins, like incense. The caciques told Cortés that here they prayed for rain, and frequently their prayers were answered. Sometimes human beings were offered as sacrifice.7

  Inflamed by the specter of human sacrifice, Cortés called for Melchior and through him pitched his first sermon and attempt at religious conversion. Speaking to the assembled Indians, Cortés railed that there was only one God, one creator—the one true God that the Spaniards worshipped. Bernal Díaz listened carefully, reporting that Cortés said “that if they wished to be our brothers they must throw their idols out of this temple, for they were evil and would lead them astray.”8 These evil abominations would send their souls to hell, Cortés said, but if they exchanged their idols for his cross, their souls would be saved and their harvests would prosper.

  Melchior’s Spanish was hardly sufficient to convincingly or accurately convey Cortés’s message verbatim, especially the complex notion of the Christian soul (for which, at any rate, no Mayan terminology existed). But that did not stop Cortés from using an even more aggressive, highly symbolic tactic. The chiefs had responded that they disagreed—their own idols and gods were good, and their ancestors had worshipped them since time began. Cortés then brazenly ordered his men to smash the idols and roll them down the pyramid steps, where they crumbled at the feet of the mystified and terrified onlookers. The islanders, even the chiefs, remained too frightened by the previous military and cavalry demonstrations to do anything other than shake their heads in terror and confusion. Cortés then supervised a cleansing, a whitewashing of the blood from the prayer pavilion. The men scrubbed away the blood smears and animal entrails with lime, and carpenters erected a wooden cross, as well as a figure of the Virgin Mary. These were the new idols the people of Cozumel were to worship.

  Cortés then ordered the priest Juan Díaz to hold mass. On leaving the newly altered shrine, Cortés sternly instructed the caciques of the village that they must keep the altar clean and decorate it frequently with fresh flowers. As a parting gift, Cortés had his men teach the islanders how to make candles from their beeswax, so that they could keep candles always burning before the figure of the Virgin.9 In exchange, the islanders presented Cortés with gifts of “four fowls and two jars of honey.”10

  A week later Escalante and Ordaz returned from their foray to the Yucatán. They had delivered Cortés’s letter to a village chieftain, they claimed, but nothing had come of it. Cortés was disappointed, but it was time to press on, so he summoned his captains, loaded the ships, packed some Cozumel honey and wax for his king, and, as the weather looked promising, sailed away from the island paradise that they had already renamed Santa Cruz. They set their bearings for the small island called Isla Mujeres, which Francisco de Córdoba had discovered and named on his unsuccessful voy
age two years earlier, in 1517. Almost immediately distress shouts came from Juan de Escalante’s brigantine; the vessel hove to and then ignited its cannon, signaling that it was imperiled. It was leaking badly, and the pilot feared it would not make the crossing. Escalante’s ship carried the bulk of the expedition’s important stores of cassava bread, which had been packed in Cuba, so Cortés decided to turn around and sail back to Cozumel, where they might repair the ship in friendly environs.

  For several days, with the help of the islanders, Cortés’s carpenters caulked the leaks. Meticulous, Cortés had his “gunners” clean and maintain all the weaponry, then pack and repack all the ammunition and powder. His “bowmen” ascertained that all the crossbows were in order and had “two or three spare nuts and cords and forecords.”11 Cortés took the opportunity to see if the Virgin Mary and cross were still affixed at the temple, which to his pleasure they were. The repairs complete, the stores of provisions dried and reloaded, the weaponry properly maintained, the fleet prepared to set sail once more.

  It was March 12, a Sunday. Cortés requested that mass be held before they depart. That done, the expeditionary force readied to board—but just then they spotted the outline of a canoe heading toward them from the mainland, paddling furiously. The boat made land down the beach. Cortés dispatched his trusted captain Andrés de Tapia to investigate; Tapia and a few officers strode down the beach, swords brandished. There they met the arrivals, a half-dozen men “naked except that their private parts were covered. Their hair was tied as women’s hair is tied, and they carried bows and arrows.”12 Seeing the Spaniards carrying drawn swords, the oarsmen in the canoe set to push off again and flee, but a tall man standing in the prow spoke to them quietly, telling them to wait. Then he stepped forward and called out to Tapia in broken Spanish, “Brothers, are you Christians?”

  Tapia nodded and sent immediately for Cortés, then embraced the man as he knelt and wept. He was a priest named Jerónimo de Aguilar, and his story was miraculous.

  Back in 1511 the ship Aguilar was on had struck low shoals off the coast of Jamaica, and he and about twenty other survivors had escaped in a rowboat with what little they could gather. Bereft of food and water, and trading shifts on their only set of oars, they caught a westerly current and washed up on the shores of the Yucatán, half their number dead and the rest nearly so.

  Mayan tribesmen welcomed them by taking them prisoner, immediately sacrificing their leader, the conquistador Valdivia, and four other men, then eating these Spaniards during a festival feast. Aguilar and his remaining friends, including a man named Gonzalo Guerrero, were crammed into cages and could only watch in horror at the sacrificial ceremonies, as drums rumbled into the lowland jungle and celebrants blew mournful songs on conch shells. The Spaniards were being fattened for sacrifice. Realizing their potential fate, they worked together and broke the cage slats, sneaking away into the night.

  Aguilar and Guerrero, along with a few others, found refuge in another village and were quickly enslaved. Aguilar became known as “the white slave.” Through hard work, acquiescence, luck, and his faith, he had survived eight years among his Mayan captors and had earned his freedom.13 He had received Cortés’s letter from the messengers, and then visited his countryman Guerrero, who was now living in a nearby village. Guerrero had won his own freedom through impressive feats of manual labor and was now an accepted member of his tribe, a warrior and a military leader. He had taken a wife, a chief’s daughter, and she had borne him a daughter and two sons. His heavily muscled body was covered with tattoos, his ears were pierced, and he wore a hunk of jade in his lower lip. He had gone native and told Aguilar he had no desire to return.

  For his part, Aguilar had always held out the remote hope that he might someday be rescued, and from the day of his arrival on mainland Yucatán, he had kept his mind sharp and strong by counting the days. One of the first questions he asked Cortés and his men was what day of the week it was. He learned it was Sunday and realized he was off by a few days, but by now it hardly mattered. Tucked beneath his tattered cloak was a torn old prayer book, which he kept with him at all times. In his eight years marooned, he had learned to speak Chontal Mayan fluently, and he had retained much of his native Spanish, though it was rusty and came with difficulty.

  Cortés was elated by this stroke of providence. Through Aguilar he could learn something of the mainlanders’ customs, their beliefs and lifeways. But more important, he could now communicate with them, something he understood to be crucial to his success. He immediately made Aguilar his translator and interpreter and kept him nearby at all times.14

  The weather was favorable, and the leaky ship had been repaired. All the weapons, horses, and provisions were in proper order. Leaving Cozumel once more, the fleet struck out for the mainland, come what might.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Battle with the Tabascans and the Acquisition of La Malinche

  AS THE FLEET CUT ACROSS THE OCEAN, Cortés plied Aguilar for information about the Mayan people, trying to determine whether they would be hostile. The mainland Mayans had successfully repelled Captain Francisco de Córdoba in 1517 at Champoton, killing twenty of his force and leaving over half of his expedition—including its leader—mortally wounded. Córdoba had made it back to Cuba, only to die shortly after. But he had managed to bring back gold, inflaming continued interest in the region. As Cortés paused on Isla de Mujeres to take on water and secure stores of salt, he mused on what his own reception might be like.

  Fair winds pushed the fleet some four hundred miles around the nose of the Yucatán and into the southern reaches of the Gulf of Mexico, passing by the site of the Córdoba disaster. Cortés, patriot that he was and certainly game for revenge, brashly considered landing there and paying the inhabitants a visit, but his pilot Alaminos, noting unfavorable winds and also remembering the shallow reefs and shoals in the area, advised against it. They pressed on. Cortés sent Captain Alonso de Escobar, whose ship was “very fast and of shallow draught,”1 ahead to do some scouting and reconnaissance. After being temporarily blown off course, Escobar made it safely to a harbor called Puerto Deseado, where to his amazement a greyhound, abandoned two years earlier during the Grijalva expedition, came yelping and barking from the woods, her tail wagging. The dog was sleek and fattened from the abundant game in the area. When they took her hunting, she led Escobar and his men to ample supplies of rabbits and deer.2

  Reunited, the armada moved together under full sail before favorable winds and by March 22 anchored near a sandbar at the wide and tranquil mouth of the Tabasco River (renamed by the Spaniards the Rio de Grijalva), near the native settlement of Pontonchan. Because the water was too shallow for the bigger ships, Cortés assembled a force of two hundred soldiers and headed into the mouth of the river in brigantines and smaller vessels, the oar boats towed by the caravels. The boats slipped slowly upriver and into dank and briny mangrove swamps; the thick canopy overhead screamed and keened with shrill bird cries. The men found the place putrid-smelling. Cortés raised his hand to his pilot when he spied dugout canoes paddling furiously toward them from upriver. Along the banks of the river, interspersed among the trees, stood hordes of Tabascan warriors armed with bows and spears, their bodies painted ochre and red, plumed in feathers.

  Cortés directed the bulk of his boats to a headland a safe distance away and had cannons and falconets unloaded while crossbowmen and harquebusiers stood ready. He hoped not to have to fight, but he would be ready nonetheless, and he entreated his men to remain at attention at all times.

  With Aguilar at his side, Cortés moved upriver and neared Pontonchan, a thriving commercial center, and met the first of the Tabascan warriors in their dugouts. Through Aguilar, he called out that he came in peace and wished only to trade goods for food and obtain water. (That was a bit disingenuous, as he had plenty of both—he was in fact nosing around for gold.) The Tabascans responded violently, shouting back at Cortés that the Spaniards should not attempt to l
and. The Tabascans warned that all would be killed if they advanced beyond a line of palm trees the Spaniards named Punta de los Palmares (Point of Palm Trees).3

  Cortés pondered his next move as he scanned the scene, estimating the town to possess some twenty-five thousand inhabitants. The Spaniards were dramatically outnumbered. Cortés continued to negotiate, reiterating his desire for food and underscoring that he was perfectly happy to pay a fair price for whatever they might provide. As darkness fell, both sides stood at an impasse, though the Tabascans said that they would report to their chiefs in town and determine whether they wished to trade. They told the Spaniards to meet them in the town square in the morning.

  That night, sleepless on the sandy beach and anticipating battle, Cortés sent a force of one hundred men to the outskirts of the village with orders to support him in a surprise attack from the flanks if a skirmish ensued. While the rest of the Spaniards lay swatting bugs and sweating in their heavy armor, the Tabascans evacuated the town of all women and children and hid them deep in the river delta forests. To thwart the Spaniards’ approach, Tabascan builders erected barricades and obstructions from tree trunks and branches around the town and along the river.

  In the morning, the Tabascan representatives reiterated that they were unwilling to trade. Cortés and his men boarded their shallow-draft warships and proceeded upriver toward the town. A throng of war-painted Tabascans lined the river, chanting, shrieking, beating drums, and blowing weird siren-songs through conch shells. Standing at the prow of his boat with Aguilar interpreting and Diego de Godoy, the king’s notary, as witness, Cortés addressed the Tabascan chiefs with Spain’s legally required forewarning or requerimiento. This ironic, devious, and self-justifying speech called on the Indians to accept Christ in lieu of their own gods and the Spanish king as their sovereign. They must acquiesce to become vassals of Spain and agree to Christian preaching and education, for which they would receive untold rewards, including peace, prosperity, and everlasting life.4