The Conquistadors (5 page)

He was prevented, however, by what his secretary describes as an abscess
behind the right knee. Others called it the buboes, a swelling of the lymphatic gland in the region of the groin caused by syphillis. His extraordinary energies had already found an outlet, and now that he was in a colony where there were few women of his own race it was almost inevitable that he should contract venereal disease, since, it was said, Indian women infected their lovers more readily than Spanish women. His recovery was probably due to a native remedy,
guayacán,
but the ultimate effects of the disease hardly explain the mystery of the remains exhumed at the Jesús Hospital Church, Mexico City, in 1947, described as those of a hunchbacked dwarf with an unnaturally narrow head, a small aquiline nose and a functional limitation of the right arm. Since this description coincides with the monster in Diego Rivera's murals, the most probable explanation is a political one, modern Mexico having done everything possible to discredit Cortés. Both the body and the murals certainly compare very strangely with the description of him given by Bernal Díaz: ‘He was of good height and body and well proportioned and of strong limbs … had his face been longer he would have been handsomer and his eyes had a somewhat loving glance yet grave withal …' The only blemish was apparently a knife scar on the lower lip, got in one of his amorous brawls. This was covered by his beard, which was dark and sparse. He is also described as being lean, with a high chest, his back of good shape, but slightly bow-legged, due no doubt to constant riding.

In 1509 Don Diego Columbus arrived in Santo Domingo as Governor of the Indies, having finally established his hereditary title as son and heir of the man who had discovered the New World. Two years later, after settling the island of Puerto Rico, he sent Diego Velázquez with three hundred men to conquer Cuba, which had at last been proved an island, but was still virtually unexplored. For Cértes, who accompanied the expedition, this was the gateway to Mexico. He was twenty-six, still in a civil capacity as clerk to the treasurer, which entailed keeping account of the king's fifth. The annexation of Cuba did not take long. Velázquez was appointed lieutenant-governor and the ‘able and diligent' Cortés given a
repartimiento
of Indians which he shared with Juan Juárez. Juárez owed his preferential treatment to the fact that Velázquez was in love with one of his sisters. The Juárez girls had come over from Spain with Don Diego Columbus in 1509, shopping for rich husbands, and another of them, Catalina, had thrown herself at Cortés.

In the warm tropical atmosphere of the islands passions flared and the situation that developed would have been one of pure farce if there had been no political undercurrents. Cortés was now a very eligible bachelor: he had mines, large numbers of cattle, sheep and mares, and the first house in the new town of Santiago de Baracoa. His susceptibility to women, however, was not accompanied by any desire to marry them. Moreover, his ambitions, and his position in the new colony of Cuba, made him a natural focus for the intrigues of those who were dissatisfied at the rewards of conquest. Cortés may have been ‘cunning and cautious', but he was now open to attack, and, as a result of various accusations, Velazquez had him arrested and thrown into prison.

Faced with the prospect of trial by men whom Gómara calls ‘false witnesses', Cortés broke the padlock, seized the guard's sword and shield, escaped out of a window and sought sanctuary in a church. The account given by Las Casas is somewhat different. In this Cortés is chosen by a group of conspirators to plead their case before Spanish judges known to have arrived recently in Hispaniola to examine grievances, is arrested as he embarks in a canoe, and comes near to being hanged.

As he was confined to the sanctuary of a small church, a trap was laid for him, and it is even suggested that Catalina herself was used as a decoy. At any rate, he was seized, put in irons again, and this time imprisoned on board a ship. Again he managed to free himself, and having exchanged clothes with a servant boy, let himself down over the side into the ship's boat. It was night and only one other vessel was in the harbour. He cut loose its boat and rowed up-river. But, unable to make headway against the current, and fearing that his boat would be sighted if he attempted to land from it, he slipped over the side and swam ashore with apparently all the documents relating to the grievances against the governor carefully tied in a bundle on his head.

He went straight to the house of Juan Juárez, having, it seems, come to the conclusion that, despite his large following and the position he had hoped to establish for himself by arguing the case of the dissident element in the colony, it was now essential to re-establish himself with Velázquez. Since he finally married Catalina Juárez, it is obvious that he went to her brother's house to tell him he was prepared to make an honest woman of her. Velázquez was then on a punitive expedition against some rebellious natives. Juárez gave Cortés arms, and whilst he sought sanctuary in a church again, interceded for him with Velázquez. The final reconciliation took place in the governor's camp. ‘They shook hands and after a long talk lay down together in the same bed where they were found next morning by Diego de Orellana who had come to tell the governor that Cortées had escaped.'

These little episodes illustrate the rough and tumble of politics in the New World, and from them Cortées appears to have realised that real power was only to be achieved through independent command and the successful conquest of
unsettled lands. He was content to bide his time. He was twice elected mayor or alcalde of Santiago, and not until the latter part of 1518 did he make any move towards independent power.

By then much had happened in Spain, all of which had its repercussions overseas. The little kingdom of Navarre had fallen to Ferdinand in 1513. In January 1516 Ferdinand himself had died. He was succeeded by his sixteen-year-old grandson, Charles, who was already heir to Luxembourg, the Low Countries and the area of Burgundy then known as the Franche Comté, through his father, and through his grandfather to the Habsburg empire of Austria, and was also shortly to be elected emperor of Germany. His mother was Ferdinand's daughter Joanna, and on her father's death she became Queen of Aragon and Naples, and the great Cardinal Ximenes, Archbishop of Toledo, was appointed regent of Spain, including her possessions in Italy, Africa, France and the New World. In the two years of his regency Ximenes did a remarkable job of consolidation for the young King Charles. By encouraging the militia of the towns, he forestalled any danger provoked by the nobility smarting under the prospect of a monarch dependent on Flemish advisers; he held Navarre against the French, establishing Spain's power by the demolition of the strongest castles; and in the south, he strengthened the country's defence and held the Barbary corsairs at bay with a strong fleet. He overhauled the country's finances, neglected in the last years of Ferdinand's reign, particularly the funds of the military orders, cut out all waste in the administration, and even reduced the pensions granted by Ferdinand and Isabella. He also found time in that brief period to send a commission to Hispaniola to investigate the position of the natives, and he made a serious attempt to stop the flow of negro slaves to the new colonies. On September 17, 1517, Charles landed in Spain. Ximenes retired to his diocese and in less than two months he was dead. It was the end of an era in which Spain had become one kingdom. It was the dawn of a new era, this time beyond the seas.

PART TWO
Cortés

Cortés sailed for what was later to be called New Spain on February 10, 1519. He was then thirty-three and had been fifteen years, nearly half his life, in the Indies. He had served as a notary, as Velázquez' secretary-treasurer, as a civic dignitary and man of affairs in a colonial capital that was growing fast, and up to that time seems to have been content to stand on the touchline of discovery. Into Santo Domingo, the capital of Hispaniola, came news of all that was happening in the New World. The Pinzón-Solís expedition of 1508-9, which took them south by way of Yucatán and Honduras to the Brazilian coast in search of a passage to Asia, was followed, between 1509 and 1511, by the disastrous attempt of Hojeda and Nicuesa to establish themselves on the mainland coast between Venezuela and Honduras. This finally led to Balboa and Pizarro founding a colony in Darién. By then Jamaica had been subjugated and Diego Velázquez, with Cortés one of his officials, had settled Cuba. In 1513 Ponce de Leon, broken in health after his two-year campaign in Puerto Rico, discovered Florida, by accident and after much hardship, having lost his way in a futile quest for some incredible fountain of youth. Most exciting of all, in September of the same year Balboa discovered the Pacific.

In 1514 Pedrarias came out from Spain as governor of Darién, now the province of Tierra Firme. With him was Bernal Díaz whose extraordinary book,
Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España,
will give us an eye-witness account of Cortés' march on Mexico. He was distantly related to Diego Velázquez and joined him in Cuba. But after ‘three fruitless years' in Tierra Firme and Cuba, he was ready to try his luck again when in 1517 Hernández de Córdoba mounted the first real attempt to penetrate and settle the mainland coast of the Caribbean north of Tierra Firme.

The Córdoba expedition, with three ships and 110 men, sailed on February 8, 1517, bound for Yucatán, which is just across the sea from Cape San Antón at the western end of Cuba. But first, it would seem, they sailed northwards across the Great Bahama Bank to Andros and other islands of the Bahama group. Velázquez had ordered them to get him Indians as payment for a vessel he had let them have on
credit. In view of the Spanish attitude to Caribs, the suggestion that they refused on the grounds that they were not slavers would seem open to doubt. The fact that they did not return to Cuba, but made along the north coast to San Antón, indicates that their real purpose in venturing into such dangerous and uncharted waters was pearls.

Like most expeditions sailing in search of gold and pearls and new lands, Córdoba's vessels were victualled largely with cassava bread and pigs, and carried oil and beads and cloth for barter. Bernal Díaz has given us a detailed account of their difficulties. After rounding Cape San Antón they headed west into the open sea. They were ‘without any knowledge of the depths or currents, or the winds', so that they were ‘in great hazard of their lives' when a storm struck. It lasted forty-eight hours and nearly wrecked them. Finally they made land at Cape Catoche, where they could see a settlement about six miles inland that was larger than any in Cuba. It had great stone pyramid-shaped structures, and because of this, they named it Great Cairo. The cacique (the Carib word for a local leader) made friendly overtures, but then led them into an ambush. Having driven off the Indians, they went up into the ‘pyramids'. They were temples to the gods the Indians worshipped, and in the idol-rooms they found rudely-made gold and copper ornaments and ‘many idols of baked clay, some with demons' faces, some with women's, and others equally ugly would seem to represent Indians committing sodomy with one another'. These teocallis – Bernal Díaz refers to them as
cúes
– were to dominate every city, town and village the Spaniards conquered.

Having looted what they could, they embarked and sailed on for another fifteen days to Campeche. They still thought they were exploring an island; instead, it was the organized forces of the mainland Indians that patrolled the shores. Córdoba's men were now short of water – water was always short in these small, over-crowded vessels sailing so slowly through tropical waters. They landed at several places, were driven off at one point by large numbers of Indians, dragged their anchors, and very nearly lost their ships in a northerly gale that lasted four days. By now the water casks had dried out and were leaking. They landed again, this time at Champotón, managed to collect some water, and were then attacked by a force of Indians that outnumbered them two hundred to one. They lost fifty men; Córdoba himself was hit by ten arrows; and they only just managed to escape back to their ships. Again shortage of water and a north-easterly gale with anchors dragging. Finally they sailed for Cuba by way of Florida, a round trip of somewhere between a thousand and two thousand miles with only the most elementary charts. Córdoba died of his wounds, but the expedition was important, for the gold and idols they brought back, and their accounts of large, stone-built Indian towns, turned all eyes on Yucatán.

No doubt their accounts gained in the telling, but anyone who has been to Yucatán and seen the remains of those great teocallis will appreciate the impact the country and the temples made upon Córdoba's men. Accustomed to the simple
dwellings and primitive existence of the island Caribs, they had found a race of Indians who not only built in stone on a grand scale, but were highly skilled in all sorts of crafts, particularly gold and feather work. Moreover, they were well armed and highly organized, their warriors trained to fight under the lead of their caciques with drums sounding and banners and plumes of feathers flying. And though they were idol-worshippers and sacrificed human beings as well as birds, the ritual of their religion was very complex and their priests burned incense ‘of a sort of resin which they call copal'. But however tall the stories might seem to the colonists in Cuba, accustomed to easy conquest of the island Indians, the spoils were not in doubt. Cordoba and his men had brought back enough to prove that in Yucatán lay the wealth they had dreamed of since the days of Columbus, and which they had so far failed to find.

Velázquez immediately started fitting out a new expedition with two ships of his own and two that had sailed with Córdoba. He appointed a relative of his, Juan de Grijalva, as captain-general, and the other three vessels were commanded by Alonso de Ávila, Francisco de Montejo and Pedro de Alvarado, all of whom held
encomiendas
– a grant of Indian labour given under licence by the Council of the Indies in Seville – and were thus men of substance in the colony. The expedition sailed from San Antón on May 1, 1518, and three days out discovered the island of Cozumel on the eastern side of the Yucatán peninsula. They then went north round
Cape Catoche and after eight days arrived at Champotón in the Gulf of Campeche, the place where so many men had been lost on the previous expedition.