The Conquistadors (8 page)

Five Indians were captured, including two of their war chiefs. These Cortés released and sent back into the town with gifts to explain to their caciques that he came in peace. He knew by now that the mainland Indians were far too numerous to be conquered by force. Each Spaniard who died, each horse that fell, was an absolute and total loss that he could not replace. Diplomacy – the mailed fist in the velvet glove – was the only key to conquest; he was the first commander of an expedition in the Indies to appreciate this, and his nature and training were such that he was able to carry it through. Guile was something the Indians understood; it was a part of their nature, also. They sent some slaves in ragged cloaks and blackened faces and a small gift of food, but Aguilar already understood the way his leader's mind worked, and he sent them back with a demand that the caciques themselves come with a proper gift. They came the following morning with fowls, fish, fruit and maize-cakes, and the request that they be allowed to bury their dead before the hot sun made them smell or the jaguars ate them. They had lost some eight hundred killed. Cortés took the opportunity to stage a demonstration.

There were thirty caciques in all, and he received them at midday outside his tent. It was very still and hot, the air heavy with the smell of the copal the Indians
had burned when incensing the assembled Spaniards. A mare that had just foaled was hidden away behind the place where the caciques stood, and after Cortés had upbraided them with a great show of anger and informed them they were vassals of the mighty Emperor Charles, he gave the signal and the largest cannon was fired close beside them. The randiest stallion in the fleet was brought up and, catching the scent of the mare, stood pawing the ground and neighing, his eyes rolling wildly as he stared straight at the Indians.

It was all very childish, very theatrical; but it was nevertheless a most effective demonstration of power, with his men all about him, rank on rank and armed, and the ships riding off the land. The caciques were terrified. The result was peace and a plentiful supply of food. But Cortés was not thinking of the local gain. He knew they had a system of picture-writing and that all he did and said on the coast was being reported by this means; in pictures the scene he had set would be most effective. Cold war propaganda, in fact, and in the circumstances then ruling – about which he had no inkling at the time – it was to prove quite deadly.

It was typical of Cortés' colonizing methods that his first order to the caciques was to bring all the people back into the town as a sign of peace. This gesture, and the atmosphere of normality it produced, was essential to his purpose. He ordered them also to abandon their idols. This again was policy as much as proselytizing, since the destruction of these symbols of their inherited faith struck at the roots of their confidence. He showed them a picture of the Virgin and Child, and in absolute submission they asked for it to be given them to keep. As always, he stage-managed the business so that the request came from them, and he then had an altar erected and a great cross set up. Examining them and learning the reasons for their hostility, that they had been pushed into battle by the cacique of the Champotóns, he demanded that the man be brought before him. Their reply was startling: he had already been sacrificed for giving them such bad advice! Next day the town was renamed Santa María de la Victoria, the cross set up and Fray Bartolomé de Olmedo, the expedition's chaplain, said mass before all the important people of the town and then baptized them.

Cortés had not neglected the financial side of the expedition. But each time he demanded a gift of gold and jewels he was answered by the words ‘Culhúa' and ‘México'. They meant nothing to him then. He was, however, given a present of twenty women, and bearing in mind the instructions about his men not cohabiting with heathens, he had them all baptized and distributed them among his captains. He did not realize it at the time, but this gift of women was of far greater value to him than gold, for it included one who was ‘a great lady and a cacique over towns and vassals since her childhood'. She was christened Marina, and because of her high birth, she is always referred to as Doña Marina. Since she was good-looking and a princess, Cortes gave her to his friend Alonso Hernandez Puerto-carrero. Throughout the campaign Cortés strictly adhered to the letter of his instructions regarding cohabitation with native women. They must first be
baptized and they then acquired the status of
barragana,
a peculiarly Spanish institution that amounted to legal concubinage. Thus Doña Marina became Puertocarrero's wife in the eyes of all but the Church. This energetic and intelligent woman, who quickly learned Spanish, was to have a remarkable influence on the Conquest, for she spoke Náhuatl, which was the language of the Aztecs of both Culhúa and Mexico. Aguilar only spoke Tabascan, so that as the expedition marched inland, she soon replaced him as the ‘tongue' of Cortés.

The fleet sailed on the Monday before Easter, and four days later it arrived at San Juan de Ulúa, where Alaminos anchored the ships close under the island safe from northerly gales. Two pirogues put out from the shore and made straight for the flagship. To the Indians the scene must have been utterly fantastic: the great high-sterned carracks riding in the quiet waters that, except for Grijalva's visit, had remained empty down the centuries, and, in the centre, Cortées' ship with the royal standard and pennants streaming in the sunlight.

From these Indians Cortés heard for the first time the dread name of Moctezuma. Their lord, they said, was a servant of this great king and he had sent them to discover the purpose of their visit and to supply whatever they needed. Unlike the Tabascans they came in peace, which augured well, though Cortés must have been aware that this embassy was concerned less with establishing friendly relations than with probing the strength of the invading force.

By Good Friday the Spaniards were all ashore with their horses and guns. Having set up an altar, mass was said in the blistering heat of the sand dunes, and after that they set to work cutting wood and establishing a hutted camp. On the Saturday, they had the assistance of large numbers of Indians, who came into the camp with a gift of provisions – fowls, maize-cakes, plums which were then in season – and also some gold jewels. They had been sent by Cuitlalpitoc, who governed the province for Moctezuma and was the same man who had visited Grijalva the year before. He and Teudilli, another of Moctezuma's officials, came into the camp on Easter Sunday with more gifts of food, including this time vegetables. In those days scurvy was regarded as an infectious disease, rather like the plague or leprosy. Thousands of sailors were to die in agony during the next
two hundred and fifty years because of a vitamin C deficiency in their diet, but in Mexico fruit and vegetables were always available, so this was one hazard with which Cortés and his men did not have to contend.

Since it was Easter Sunday, Fray Bartolomé, assisted by the padre, Juan Díaz, chanted mass whilst the Indians looked on in amazement. Afterwards Cuitlalpitoc and Teudilli dined with Cortés and his captains. Since they were Mexicans, and Aguilar did not then understand the Náhuatl language, Doña Marina was brought in to act as interpreter. It was a clumsy arrangement, Aguilar interpreting into Tabascan and Doña Marina from Tabascan to Náhuatl. But by the end of the meal Cortés had learned that Moctezuma was not only lord of the great city of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, but also supreme overlord of Culhúa, a confederacy of city-states that lay several days' march beyond the mountains, and that his power stretched right down the coast, his warriors having within recent years conquered the area of San Juan de Ulúa.

This information, almost certainly supported by some indication of the enormous number of warriors that could be mobilized against him, confirmed Cortés' earlier estimate of the situation – that he could only dominate the interior with the co-operation of Moctezuma. In other words, he would have to rely on a cold-war battle of wits rather than force of arms. He started to work on the minds of the two Mexicans immediately, trying to explain Christianity and talking to them of the greatness of the emperor he served. His object was to impress upon them the desirability of an early meeting between himself and Moctezuma. The reply was evasive, but as evidence of goodwill Teudilli produced a chest full of golden objects and also ten bales of cloth worked with brilliant feathers. These were gifts from Moctezuma himself. Large quantities of food were also produced – fowls, fruit and baked fish. It meant peace, for the time being at any rate.

It was better than fighting, but it didn't satisfy Cortés, since the object of the expedition was not advanced. However, the two governors had brought with them a number of picture-writers, who were busy all the time drawing on cloth the ships, the cannon, the details of the religious ceremony, even portraits of Cortés and his captains. It was a further opportunity for an effective demonstration of power. Cortés had the cannon loaded with extra heavy charges and fired them under the noses of the Mexicans; all the horses were paraded with bells on their
breastplates, and Alvarado galloped his small cavalry force furiously along the hard sand at the sea's edge. The painter-scribes recorded it all.

Then an odd thing happened. Teudilli noticed one of the soldiers wearing a gilded and rather rusty helmet, asked to see it, and, having examined it, said he would like to show it to his master, the great Moctezuma. Cortés hinted that his emperor would be pleased to accept the helmet back filled with nuggets or grains of gold; his object in making this request was to check on the quality of their gold and the way in which they obtained it.

He got the helmet back seven days later, filled to the brim with mined gold, small grains of high quality worth 3,000 pesos. Teudilli brought it himself, having in the space of a week made the journey to Mexico-Tenochtitlan, reported to his master, and then journeyed back to the coast accompanied by a Mexican prince named Quintalbor and a hundred Indians carrying yet more gifts. This was the biggest haul of the voyage, and Quintalbor, who had been specially chosen by Moctezuma's priests because he resembled Cortés in appearance, presented the gift to him after all the Indians had first kissed the ground and their priests had perfumed the Spaniards with incense.

Here for the first time the word
teules
was used.
Teules
means gods. The earthen braziers pouring forth incense were a part of the ceremony of worship used at the teocalli. So, too, was the prostration and kissing of the earth. But Cortés, though he was learning fast, was more interested in hearing about Moctezuma's power and military dispositions than his superstitious beliefs. Had he, or his Indian ‘tongue', Doña Marina, appreciated the significance of the helmet and the behaviour of Moctezuma's embassy, he would have been at pains to act the role to which the Mexican prince had assigned him.

At that moment, however, his main interest was in the unusual value of the gifts now spread out before him on
petates,
or mats, covered with cotton cloth. Two items immediately held the eyes of every Spaniard. A golden disc, shaped like the sun, ‘as big as a cartwheel … a marvellous thing engraved with many sorts of figures' and another similar disc of engraved silver representing the moon. The sun and the moon, both about ten hand-spans in diameter, and the helmet full of gold were probably worth more than 20,000 gold pesos, but there was much else besides – twenty golden ducks, ornaments in the shape of dogs, others like pumas or jaguars and monkeys, ten necklaces, pendants, twelve arrows and a strung bow, and two rods ‘like staffs of justice 20 inches long'. All these were finely worked in gold. There were crests of silver and gold with plumes of green feathers, fans, models of deer, and thirty loads of the finest cotton cloth patterned and decorated with many-coloured feathers. It was, in fact, a farewell present, for when Cortés asked again about a meeting between himself and Moctezuma, he was told it was out of the question.

By then he knew enough about the power of Mexico and its allies to realize that he had no hope of advancing into Culhúan territory by force. He had sensed that
Moctezuma was afraid of something; the behaviour of the Indians and the value of the gifts made that clear. But he probably thought it was due to the ships, the cannon and the horses; at any rate he persisted in his request for a meeting, since it was only through diplomacy, through flattery and guile and the threat of a power unknown, that he could see any hope of gaining a permanent foothold on the mainland. The governors were emphatic that his request was pointless since Moctezuma had already refused to see him, but in the end they agreed to return to their master for further instructions. They left with various gifts for their king, including a Florentine glass cup ‘engraved with trees and hunting scenes and finely gilded'.

It was whilst the Spaniards were waiting for the result of this further embassy that Cortés sent Francisco de Montejo with two ships to reconnoitre the coast to the north. Montejo got as far as the area of the Pánuco river, where the modern oil port of Tampico now stands, about fifty miles further north than Grijalva had reached. Here he was halted by the strength of the adverse current. The only important information Montejo brought back was news of a town called Quiahuitztlan, thirty-six miles up the coast from San Juan de Ulúa. He described it as a fortified port, and since the harbour, which Alaminos, the pilot, thought might give shelter from the northerly winds, was the mouth of the San Juan river, it must have been about where the dusty little timber and thatch village of La Antigua now stands in its clearing amongst the trees.

The voyage had taken a fortnight, possibly more. Meantime, the main Spanish force, camped in the sultry heat of the sand dunes, plagued with mosquitoes, was getting short of food. The Indians coming to barter became fewer and more fearful. The cassava bread they had brought with them was sour and rotten with weevils. By the time Teudilli returned from Mexico they were reduced to eating the shellfish off the shore. He brought more presents, including a further 3,000 pesos' worth of gold, but that was all. Moctezuma flatly refused to see Cortes.