Bernal Diaz del Castillo
The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Vol 2 (of 2)
From this place Cortes marched, with half of his troops, to the river Chila, which lay at about twenty miles from the sea shore, and requested the tribes inhabiting the country on the opposite side to send him messengers of peace. But as their bellies were still full of the flesh of the many Spaniards they had killed belonging to the several expeditions which had been sent thither during the two last years by Garay, to form settlements, they imagined they would be able to overthrow Cortes with the same ease. They likewise placed great dependence in the inaccessibility of the places they inhabited, which lay between large lakes, rivers, and morasses; they therefore not only refused to return an answer, but murdered the ambassadors whom Cortes had sent to them. He, however, still remained quiet for a few days, to see whether they would not alter their minds; but, finding they persisted in their hostile feeling towards him, he ordered all the canoes which lay in the river to be seized; and with these, and some boats he ordered to be constructed from the wrecks of the old vessels belonging to Garay's expedition, he crossed the river with one hundred and fifty men, among which there were fifty horse, the rest being, for the greater part, crossbow-men and musketeers. The enemy, who had posted strong detachments at different points along the banks of the river, allowed our troops to cross unmolested, but were ready to receive them on the opposite side.
If these Guastecs had come with great numbers into the field on previous occasions, they came this time with more, and fell upon our men like so many furious lions. In this encounter they killed two soldiers and wounded above thirty others; three horses were likewise killed and fifteen wounded. Our Mexican auxiliaries also suffered a considerable loss; but Cortes gave the enemy so rough a reception that they soon took to flight, leaving behind them great numbers of killed and wounded.
Cortes quartered his troops for the night in a township which was quite deserted by its inhabitants, but where he found abundance of provisions. The following morning, as his men were looking about the place, they came to a temple, inside of which they found suspended various articles of Spanish dress, the scalps and the tanned skins of the faces of several Spaniards, with the beards attached to them. These were the remains of the soldiers of Garay's expedition to the river Panuco. In many of these skins our men recognized former acquaintances, and some even their intimate friends. It was indeed a melancholy sight to them, and they took down those miserable remains to give them Christian burial.
From this place Cortes marched to another township, and observed every military precaution, the men being each moment prepared for an attack, as he well knew that the tribes of this province were very warlike. His spies soon came in with the intelligence that large bodies of the enemy lay in ambush to fall suddenly on our men while they should be dispersed among the houses.
Our troops being thus apprized of the enemy's intentions, the latter were unable to do them much injury; yet they bravely attacked our troops, and fought with great intrepidity for about half an hour, when our cavalry and musketeers succeeded in putting them to flight. In this engagement Cortes had two horses killed, besides seven others wounded, and fifteen of the men so severely that three died shortly after. These Indians have the peculiar custom, when they are compelled to retreat, to face about three several times to renew the attack, a mode of warfare which has seldom been found among these tribes. After this battle, the enemy retreated to a river which was of considerable depth, and very rapid. Our cavalry and light-armed foot pursued them most vigorously, and wounded great numbers.
The day following, Cortes marched further up the country, and passed through several townships, but every one was deserted by its inhabitants. In these towns they found, in subterranean vaults, a great number of large earthen jars filled with the wine of the country.32 Our general, after marching in this way for another five days, and nowhere meeting with any of the inhabitants, returned to the river Chila.
Cortes now again invited the inhabitants on the opposite side of the river to send ambassadors to conclude peace with him, and this time he was more successful; for, as they had lost a great number of men, and feared another incursion into their country, they sent word that they would despatch messengers of peace to us after the lapse of four days, which time they required to collect some gold for a present. Cortes therefore patiently awaited the time specified; but, as no one came, he then determined to attack a large township which lay on the banks of a lake, surrounded by rivers and morasses. This place he was resolved to attack from the lake side, to do which he had to cross the latter; and this he accomplished by means of canoes fastened two and two together. On these a part of our troops, with a great number of Mexicans, embarked in a dark rainy night, passed unobserved across the lake, and fell into the town before the inhabitants were in the least aware of it. The town was completely destroyed, and most of the inhabitants killed, our Mexican auxiliaries carrying off a rich booty.
As soon as the inhabitants of the surrounding neighbourhood received information of this, they no longer hesitated as to what they should do; and, in the space of five days, messengers of peace came pouring in from all sides; the most distant mountain tribes, whose territory our troops had not yet visited, alone refusing to send any ambassadors.
Cortes then laid the foundation of a town, about four miles from the river Chila, and left there one hundred and fifty Spaniards, among whom were twenty-seven horse, thirty-six musketeers and crossbow-men. The whole of the townships which had sued for peace he divided among these troops as commendaries. Of this town, which received the name of Santisteban del Puerto, he appointed Pedro Vallejo commandant.
Cortes was just on the point of leaving this new town, and of marching back to Mexico, when he received certain information that three townships, which had previously stood at the head of the rebellion in this province, had again conspired to revolt. The inhabitants of these three townships had put a great number of Spaniards to death after they had sued for peace and had declared themselves vassals of our emperor, and now were using every means to persuade the population of the surrounding neighbourhood to join them in an attack upon our new settlement, and kill every Spaniard left behind when Cortes should have departed with the remaining troops for Mexico. Cortes having convinced himself of the truth of this report, burnt the three towns to the ground, but they were subsequently rebuilt by these same tribes.
About this time the following misfortune happened. Cortes, previous to leaving Mexico, had sent orders to Vera Cruz for a quantity of wine, preserved fruits, and biscuits, besides a number of horse shoes, all of which was to be forwarded to the province of Panuco. A vessel without delay was despatched with these things from Vera Cruz, which arrived safe off the coast of Panuco, where, unfortunately, it was overtaken by a terrific storm from the south, and went to the bottom of the sea: only three of the crew were saved, who clung to some loose pieces of wood and were driven to a small island about sixteen miles from the mainland, which was covered in places with white sand.
Every night great numbers of seals came on shore to sleep on the sand, and these were the means of keeping the three men alive, who killed them and roasted their flesh at a fire which they kindled after the Indian manner, by rubbing two pieces of wood vehemently together. By digging a well towards the middle of the island they procured themselves fresh water, and at last even found a species of fig, so that they could not at least die of hunger; and in this way they continued to live for the space of two months, when they were rescued in the following manner.
Cortes having waited a length of time in vain at Santisteban del Puerto for this vessel, wrote to his major-domo at Mexico to know the reason why the things he sent for had not arrived. When his major-domo received this letter he soon guessed that some accident must have happened to the vessel, and instantly sent out another in search of her. It pleased God in his great mercy that the vessel should approach the small island where the three Spaniards had been cast on shore, who had had the good sense to keep a large fire burning night and day.
The reader can easily picture to himself the great joy of these men when this vessel arrived off the island: they immediately embarked in her, and sailed for Vera Cruz. One of these men, whose name was Celiano, subsequently lived in Mexico.
Cortes was on his way to Mexico when he received information that several tribes which inhabited the wildest part of the mountains had risen up in arms, and were committing every kind of depredation against those of their neighbours who had entered into an alliance with us. He therefore determined to put an end to these hostilities before he returned to the metropolis; but these ferocious tribes being apprized of his approach, lay wait for him in a dangerous mountain pass, attacked his baggage, killed many of the Indian porters, and plundered them of all they carried. Our cavalry, which now came up to the assistance of those who had charge of the baggage, lost two horses from the rugged state of the road. These Indians, however, had to pay dearly for all this when our troops reached their towns, for the Mexican warriors showed very little mercy, and killed and took numbers of them prisoners. The cazique and his chief officer were hung, and the baggage of which they had plundered our troops was retaken.
After the execution of these men, Cortes commanded the Mexicans to stay hostilities, and he summoned the chiefs and papas of the province to send him ambassadors, who now arrived without delay, and acknowledged themselves subjects of our emperor. Cortes then appointed the brother of him who had been executed, cazique of the place; and, after thus restoring peace to the province, he continued his march to Mexico.
I must here observe that there is not a more wicked, a more uncivilized, or a more filthy people in the whole of New Spain than the inhabitants of the province of Panuco; and in no part were human sacrifices found to be so frequent or so barbarous. The inhabitants were excessive drunkards, and guilty of every kind of abomination: however, they met with due punishment; for, after our troops had visited their country a few times with fire and sword, they received, in the person of Nuño de Guzman, who became governor there, a much severer scourge. He sold almost the whole of them for slaves to the different islands, as we shall see in the proper place.
CHAPTER CLIX
How Cortes and the officers of the crown forward to Spain the wardrobe of Motecusuma, and the emperor's share of the booty; and what further happened.
After this campaign in the province of Panuco, Cortes was busily occupied with the rebuilding of the city of Mexico.
Alonso de Avila, who had been despatched to the island of St. Domingo to communicate there in Cortes' name with the royal court of audience and the Hieronymite brotherhood, had by this time returned to Mexico, and had obtained for Cortes the necessary powers from the above courts to subdue the whole of New Spain, turn the inhabitants into slaves, mark them with a red-hot iron, and distribute the Indians into commendaries in the same manner as was customary at Hispaniola, Cuba, and Jamaica. This power granted to Cortes was to remain in force until the emperor's pleasure was known on this head. The Hieronymite brotherhood duly apprized his majesty of all this, and despatched a vessel for that purpose to Spain; and though the young emperor was at that time still in Flanders, their despatches arrived safely in his hands. As the Hieronymite brotherhood were well aware of the bad feeling which the bishop of Burgos always had evinced towards us, they purposely omitted to acquaint him with the nature of these despatches; and, upon the whole, they never communicated with him excepting on matters of trifling import.
Alonso de Avila, as I have before remarked, was a man who feared no one, and had formerly held some office immediately under the bishop of Burgos, so that it was fortunate he happened to be absent upon the mission just mentioned, in St. Domingo, when Christobal de Tapia arrived at Vera Cruz with the appointment of governor of New Spain, as the latter had brought letters from the bishop to him, and on such an occasion the determined character of Avila might have greatly injured our general's cause.
Cortes, who was thoroughly acquainted with this man's disposition, always strove to keep him at a distance from his person; and now again, upon the advice of father Olmedo, he presented him with the lucrative township of Quauhtitlan, which would give him constant occupation; and Cortes added to this a considerable sum of money, by which he gained him so completely over to his side, that he soon after intrusted him with a most important mission, by despatching him and Quiñones, the captain of the guards, to Spain, as his own procuradores, and those of New Spain in general; and provided them with two vessels which were to carry over to the emperor 88,000 pesos, in gold bars, and the wardrobe of Motecusuma, which had hitherto been in the possession of Quauhtemoctzin. The latter was a valuable present, and well worthy of our great emperor's acceptance, as it contained jewels of the most precious kind, pearls of the size of hazel nuts, and various other precious stones, which I should not like to enumerate singly, even if my memory would allow me. At the same time were sent the bones of the giants which we found in the temple of Cojohuacan, similar to those bones which were previously given to us by the Tlascallans, and which we had sent to Spain on a former occasion.
Three tigers, and several other curiosities, which I have now forgotten by name, were likewise shipped on board these two vessels.
The chief magistrates of Mexico, on this occasion, wrote a letter to the emperor, and we, the conquistadores, with father Olmedo and the royal treasurer, drew up an humble address to our monarch, in which we first of all mentioned with praise the many important and faithful services which Cortes and all of us had rendered to his imperial majesty; we gave him a full account of the siege of the city of Mexico and the discovery of the southern ocean, and added we were convinced these countries would prove a source of great wealth to Spain. We then requested his majesty to send to New Spain a bishop and monks of different religious orders, but all to be pious and well-informed men, that they might assist us in extending the holy catholic faith in these countries. We likewise humbly petitioned his majesty to appoint Cortes viceroy of New Spain, as he had proved himself so meritorious and faithful an officer to the Spanish crown. In the same way we begged the favour for ourselves, that all appointments made by the crown in this country might exclusively be given to us the conquistadores or to our sons. Further, we requested his majesty not to send any lawyers into the country, as those persons, with all their learning, would merely breed lawsuits, discord, and confusion throughout the whole country. We then mentioned how Christobal de Tapia had been sent as viceroy to New Spain by the appointment of the bishop of Burgos, assuring his majesty that Tapia was not fit to fill such an important situation, and that if he had been allowed to enter upon the viceroyalty of New Spain, that country would undoubtedly have been lost again to the Spanish crown. We were compelled to clear up all these circumstances to his majesty, as we feared the bishop of Burgos had not only omitted to lay before his majesty our previous despatches, but had also misrepresented things to him, in order to favour his friends Velasquez and Tapia, to the latter of whom he had promised the hand of his niece Doña Petronella de Fonseca. Tapia had certainly produced papers relative to his appointment, of the genuineness of which there could really be no doubt, and we had indeed perused them with deep veneration, and we would immediately have obeyed the instructions they contained if we had considered Tapia a proper person to fill the important office of governor; but as he was neither a soldier nor a man of sufficient mind and determination of character, nor possessed of talents requisite for a viceroy, we found ourselves necessitated to inform his majesty of the whole state of affairs, which was the real object of this present humble address of his majesty's faithful and obedient servants. We then prayed his majesty to decide in these matters, and particularly requested that he would not allow the bishop of Burgos in any way to interfere in matters which concerned Cortes and ourselves, as otherwise all further conquests we contemplated in New Spain would be interrupted; nor should we even be able to maintain peace in the provinces that were subdued. As a proof of the bishop's enmity towards us, we mentioned that he had forbidden the two harbour masters of Seville, Pedro de Isasaga and Juan Lopez de Recalte, to allow any arms or soldiers which were destined for Cortes or our army in general, to leave that place. We then gave his majesty an account of the recent campaign of Panuco, how the inhabitants had been obliged to sue for peace, and had declared themselves vassals of his majesty; what terrible battles they had fought with Cortes, and how they had killed all the officers and soldiers which Garay had sent thither from time to time. This campaign, we went on to say, cost Cortes above 60,000 pesos, which he had paid out of his own private purse, the reimbursement of which he had in vain solicited from the royal treasurers; that Garay was fitting out a new armament in Jamaica destined for the province of Panuco, but it was advisable that his majesty should issue orders for him to postpone that expedition until we should have completely subdued the country, that he might not again sacrifice the lives of his men to no purpose, and create an insurrection in the country, which would be sure to ensue if he arrived there beforehand, as the Indians, and particularly the Mexicans, would immediately conclude that there was no unanimity in the operations of the Spanish generals; conspiracies would be formed, and the whole country would rise up into open rebellion.
These and many other things we wrote to his majesty, nor was Cortes' pen idle on this occasion, for he also sent the emperor an account of every circumstance in a private despatch, which contained twenty pages, and I know their contents pretty well, as I read them all through with great attention. Among other things, he solicited his majesty's permission to proceed to Cuba in order to take the viceroy Diego Velasquez prisoner, and send him to Spain, there to stand his trial for having sent persons to murder him, Cortes, and for having upon the whole endeavoured to confuse the affairs of New Spain.
With these despatches, the money, and other valuable matters, Quiñones and Avila set sail from Vera Cruz on the 20th of December, 1522, and safely passed through the straits of Bahama. On their voyage two of the three tigers broke lose and made their escape, after wounding several of the crew; it was then determined that the third should be killed, which was in fact the most ferocious of the three. Without any further accident they arrived off the island of Tercera, where they dropped anchor. During their stay on this island, Quiñones, who had a vast idea of his courage and was of a very amorous disposition, got into a quarrel about some female, and received such a terrible blow on the head that he died a few days after of the consequences, so that Avila had to transact all our business himself.
The two vessels then continued their voyage, but had not advanced far beyond the island of Tercera when they fell in with the redoubted French corsair Jean Florin, who attacked and took both vessels, carrying Avila with the crews to France.
About this same time Jean Florin captured another vessel, bound from St. Domingo, having on board above 20,000 pesos, besides a quantity of pearls, sugar, and a great number of cow hides. With these valuable prizes the corsair returned to France a wealthy man, and made the king and the lord high admiral of France splendid presents out of the things he had captured; and the whole of France was amazed at the treasures we thus forwarded to our emperor. This very circumstance even created a great desire in the mind of the French king to take possession of part of the Caribbee islands; and it was upon this occasion he exclaimed that our emperor could carry on the war with him solely with the riches he drew from the West Indies! And yet at that time the Spaniards had not subdued or even discovered Peru. The king of France on this occasion also sent word to our great emperor, that as he and the king of Portugal had divided the world between themselves, without offering him any part of it, he should like them to show him our father Adam's will, that he might convince himself whether he had really constituted them the sole heirs to these countries. As long as they refused to comply with this, he would consider himself justified to possess himself of everything he could on the high seas: and indeed it was not long before he again sent out Jean Florin with a small fleet, who took considerable prizes at sea, between Spain and the Canaries; but as he was returning home with them to France he fell in with three or four Biscay men of war, who attacked him with such determination, that after a severe engagement he was obliged to surrender, with the whole of his vessels, and he, with his captains, was brought in a prisoner to Seville. These prisoners were then immediately sent to the emperor, who, however, on the first intelligence of their capture, ordered them to be tried, when they were found guilty, and the whole of them were hung in the harbour of Pico.
Such was the miserable end of Jean Florin, who carried off to France all the gold we had intended for our emperor! As for Avila, he was detained a close prisoner in one of the French fortresses, as the king of France expected a large ransom for a man who had been commissioned to convey so vast a treasure from the new world to Spain; but Avila by some means or other succeeded in bribing the commandant of the fortress, and secretly sent intelligence to Spain of the object of his mission; he even managed to forward Cortes' despatches, with all his papers and our letters, either into the hands of the licentiate Nuñez, who was a cousin of Cortes, and reporter of the royal council of Madrid, or into those of Cortes' father or of Diego de Ordas. These papers were instantly despatched to his majesty in Flanders, without their being at all noticed to the bishop of Burgos, who had not been able to hide his pleasure when he heard that all the gold, with our despatches, had fallen into the hands of the French corsair.
From this moment we had nothing further to fear from the bishop, for his majesty now received full particulars of all the circumstances; and though he felt grieved at the loss of so much gold, yet he was in one sense pleased it had fallen into the hands of the French king, for it would convince that monarch we should never let our emperor want for money to wage war with him. He also sent peremptory orders to the bishop of Burgos to aid Cortes in every way with regard to the affairs of New Spain; adding, that he was shortly coming to Spain himself, in order to investigate the dispute between Cortes and the governor of Cuba. When news of the capture of Avila, with the loss of the whole treasure we sent by him, reached New Spain, we all felt exceedingly grieved; but Cortes immediately collected all the gold and silver he could, which had recently been brought in from the province of Mechoacan, and of this he ordered a cannon to be cast, which he intended as a present to the emperor, and gave to it the name of phœnix.
The government of the township of Quauhtitlan was also carried on in the name of Avila until the arrival, three years after, of his brother Gil Gonsalez in New Spain, who was deputed by Avila to take the sole government of his Indian property, as he himself was determined never again to cross the sea, though he had obtained the appointment of treasurer of Yucatan.
But all this is rather foreign to my narrative, and I will rather relate what happened to Sandoval and the other officers whom Cortes sent out to form settlements in the provinces. But so many circumstances happened in the meantime, that I was obliged to break the thread of my history, and they were certainly too important to withhold from the curious reader. There was the arrival of Christobal de Tapia in Vera Cruz, which obliged Cortes to recall Sandoval and Alvarado from their expeditions into the provinces, in order that they might assist him with their excellent support and counsel in a matter of so much importance. Then there was the insurrection in the province of Panuco, and the mission to our emperor; and so it happened that my narrative became rather confused.
