From: msmorris@watsci.waterloo.edu (Mike Morris)
Subject: The Conquest
Organization: University of Waterloo, Waterloo, Ontario
Date: Wed, 22 Jul 1992 22:59:08 GMT


                                        Wednesday, the 22nd of July, 1992

Roger Squires asked me about reading Prescott, Bernal Diaz del
Castillo, and Cortes.

First of all, these are all part of a twenty-pages-per-night reading
program in American literature that I've been pursuing since the summer of
1990 (paralleling a similar thing I've been doing with world classics
since 1986). It started out just reading The Library of America set, but
you can see I've allowed myself to wander a bit, and Francis Parkman's
magnificent history suggested immediately that I ought to go try Prescott,
and what with the big Columbus anniversary coming up, I figured I might
devote some time to learning about that time. So, since before last Christmas
my ``American'' structured reading has been spending time with voyages of
discovery and pre-Columbian Indians, and with the Conquest. Here is a
cutting from my logfile listing the related books with dates I finished
them:

***
_The Four Voyages of Columbus: A History in Eight Documents, Including
  Five by Christopher Columbus, in the Original Spanish, with English
  Translations_, edited by (Lionel) Cecil Jane (1879--1932)
           (Dover,1988 republication in one volume of Nos. LXV and LXX
            of the second series of works published by The Hakluyt Society,
            London, in 1930 and 1933, clv+188 pages and lxxxix+164 pages,
            20ppn+40ppn)
                                       Thursday, the 17th of October, 1991
***
_The Diario of Christopher Columbus's First Voyage to America 1492-1493,
  Abstracted by Fray Bartolome de Las Casas_, transcribed and translated
  into English with Notes and a Concordance of the Spanish by Oliver Dunn and
  James E. Kelley, Jr.
           (Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1989, xii+491, 40ppn)
                                       Saturday, the 26th of October, 1991 
***
_History of the Conquest of Mexico & History of the Conquest of Peru_,
   by William Hickling Prescott (1796-1859)
           (Modern Library Edition, xxxvi+1288, 20ppn)
                                        Friday, the 27th of December, 1991
***
_Letters from Mexico_, by Hernan Cortes, tr. and ed. by Anthony Pagden,
    with an introduction by J.H. Elliott
          (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1986, lx+563)
                                     Wednesday, the 29th of January, 1992
***
_The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages, A.D. 500--1600_,
     by Samuel Eliot Morison
          (Oxford University Press, New York, 1971, xviii+712)
                                     Saturday, the 29th of February, 1992
***
_The European Discovery of America: The Southern Voyages, A.D. 1492--1616_,
     by Samuel Eliot Morison
          (Oxford University Press, New York, 1974, xviii+758)
                                           Monday, the 6th of April, 1992
***
_Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus_,
     by Samuel Eliot Morison, with an Introduction by Mauricio Obregon
          (The American Past, Book-of-the-Month Club, New York, 1942,
           intro. 1992, xxviii+686 pages)
                                            Monday, the 11th of May, 1992
***
_Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: The Americas Before Columbus_,
     by Brian M. Fagan
          (Thames and Hudson, London, 1991, 240 pages)
                                            Friday, the 22nd of May, 1992
***
_Popol Vuh: The Great Mythological Book of the Ancient Maya_,
     Newly Translated and with an Introduction by Ralph Nelson
          (Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 1977, 86 pages)
                                           Tuesday, the 26th of May, 1992
***
_The Ancient American Civilisations_, by Friedrich Katz
      Translation of _Vorkolumbische Kulturen_, 1969
     (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, 1972, x+386 pages)
                                           Friday, the 12th of June, 1992
***
_The Cities of Ancient Mexico: Reconstructing a Lost World_,
      by Jeremy A. Sabloff
     (Thanes and Hudson, New York, 1989, 224 pages)
                                           Monday, the 22nd of June, 1992
***
_Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Quiche Maya_, English version by
      Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the Translation of
      Adrian Recinos
     (University of Oklahoma, Norman, 1950, xx+268 pages)
                                          Saturday, the 4th of July, 1992
***
_The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico 1517-1521_, by Bernal Diaz del Castillo
      Edited from the only copy of the original MS (and published in Mexico)
      by Genaro Garcia. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by A.P.
      Maudslay, Introduction to the American edition by Irving A. Leonard.
     (Noonday Press, division of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1956,
      xxxiv+478 pages)
***
_Popol Vuh: The Definitive Edition of the Mayan Book of the
 Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings_, translated by
      Dennis Tedlock, with commentary based on the ancient knowledge
      of the modern Quiche Maya
     (A Touchstone Book, Siom & Schuster, New York, 380 pages)
***
_A Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of The Ancient Maya_, by Linda Schele
      and David Freidel
     (William Morrow and Company, New York, 1990, 542 pages)
***
_The Incas_, by Garcilasso de la Vega (1539--1616), edited by Alain Gheerbrant
     (Avon Books, New York, 1964, 447 pages)
***

Whew! It's longer than I thought. The story of the conquest rates an
unqualified WOW! Prescott's two histories are masterpieces of 19th-Century
narrative. The Mexican conquistadores fought maybe a hundred battles
in taking Mexico, and it's not at all the massacre after massacre of
technologically impoverished Indians that I had somehow expected it was
going to be. Cortes' men were made out of iron and Cortes himself a shrewd
devil of a military commander. These qualities were required of them and him
again and again, from Cortes getting the expedition started under the jealous
eye of Velazquez, Governor of Cuba, Cortes, once in Mexico, resigning his
command from Velazquez, and getting himself declared Captain
General of New Spain by his men, Cortes getting his men to relinquish the
gold they first got in order to send it back as a special gift to
Charles V, Cortes then borrowing from the ancient general-and-tyrant
Agathocles of Sicily in burning his ships behind him so his men couldn't
pine for home, Cortes exploiting every political dissension in the
Aztec Empire to promise Spanish succour against the Imperial rule of
Tenochtitlan (he had 500 men, the Mexican population may have been
in the millions), defeating the hitherto unconquered ``Republic of Tlascala''
in a series of pitched battles, making them staunch allies against the
Aztecs, commiting a massacre against the Indians in the Aztec town
of Cholula maybe preempting thereby an Aztec ambush, marching right
into Tenochtitlan, which was a complete military trap because it stood
in the middle of the lake, befriending Montezuma, then taking him into
protective custody in the middle of his own Empire, acting as his
Praetorian Guard, learning suddenly that Velazquez has sent out
Panfilo de Narvaez with 18 ships and 1200 men to capture Cortes and
bring him back in chains, taking under 300 of his men in a forced march
back to the coast and by clever diplomacy and swift attack, completely
defeating Narvaez at 3- or 4-to-1 odds, then learning that Pedro
de Alvaredo, left behind in Tenochtitlan to guard Montezuma has
stupidly precipitated a massacre, and that the population is now up
in arms, forced marching back to the city, Montezuma killed in
the subsequent negotiations and crossfire, the ``noche triste'' where half
the Spaniards and Tlascalans were killed hacking their retreat out
along a causeway from which the Aztecs had removed the bridges, the hungry
retreat from the Valley of Mexico with Cortes already vowing ``I shall return''
and the Battle of Otumba, where, within sight of the mountains of Tlascala,
the defeated Spaniards and Tlascalans were surrounded by a sea of Aztecs
determined to make an end of them, no guns, no powder,
no crossbows, no cannon left, less than twenty horses and only swords and
lances between them and death, St. Iago supposedly helping them
at the climax of the battle, when the exhausted horsemen charge the Aztec
standard and cut down the chieftain, causing the Aztec army miraculously
to dissolve, resting and recovering in Tlascala, and then 
some reinforcements arriving, some powder, some weapons, Cortes
getting the shipbuilder Martin Lopez to begin the construction of
13 brigantines for the final siege of Tenochtitlan, excursions
to capture and secure all the surrounding territories, finally
the return to the Valley of Mexico, Cortes basing himself in Texcoco,
collecting thousands of Indian allies, Tlascalans and Spaniards
transporting the thirteen ships in pieces Fitzcarraldo-like
over the mountains where they are reassembled
on the lake, then the systematic isolation and siege of Tenochtitlan,
but the Aztecs fight on and on and on, suffering extreme famine and
the imported smallpox, until Cortes, in despair of getting them to surrender,
levels the vast city block by block.

Cortes' Five Letters probably rate with Caesar's
Commentaries, and I'd strongly recommend them in the version I listed above,
because the good critical apparatus presents a more skeptical account of
Cortes' motives than you'll get from Prescott. I'm now in Bernal Diaz, who
was an ordinary conquistador under Cortes, and as I said I am again finding
the same story wonderful.  Unfortunately, it's an abridgement and I HATE
ABRIDGEMENTS! (Sorry, had to get that off my chest.) The trouble with my
edition (found in a used bookstore) is it doesn't let me know how much
I'm missing. The story of the exploration and conquest has seemed complete
through now up to Cortes' return to Tenochtitlan after the noche triste.
But the intro says that stuff irrelevant to the conquest of Mexico has been
left out.  I've recently ordered the Penguin edition in Cohen's translation
from Barnes and Noble and I'm hoping that it has not abridged.

I have yet to read in this thread Garcilasso Inca de la Vega's account of
the conquest of Peru from the Incas' viewpoint, also another _Popol Vuh_
version, and _A Forest of Kings_, about the Mayans and the Mayan glyphs.
After I'm sufficiently sated with conquistadores, I figure next stop
will be back to the Library of America and Benjamin Franklin's writings.

I've been thinking to post about how wonderful Samuel Eliot Morison
is for some time, but that will have to wait for another day.

I'd *love* to find a copy of Bartolome de las Casas' History (Las Casas
wrote a large History of the Indies, he was untiringly pro-Indian,
anti-conquistador, and fought the Spanish settler's habit of enslaving
the Indians under the ripartimientos system) as well
as some account of the conquest and ``pacification'' of the Caribbean islands.
I'd also grab up a copy of Prescott's _Ferdinand & Isabella_ if I
ever see it again (I now kick myself for not having bought the copy I once
saw in a Milwaukee used bookstore). And Hakluyt (used to exist
in multiple volumes in Everyman I think) I'd grab in an instant. And
I want to find Columbus' _Book of the Prophecies_, which I'm told has
been recently translated.

I'd welcome any and all other recommendations.

              Mike Morris
        (msmorris@watsci.uwaterloo.ca)

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