The Spanish Pioneers. Charles Fletcher Lummis
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Cortez crushed a plot against him, and executed the new war-captain, with many of the caciques (who were not potentates at all, but religious-military officers, whose hold on the superstitions of the Indians made them dangerous).
But Cortez, whose genius shone only the brighter when the difficulties and dangers before him seemed insurmountable, tripped up on that which has thrown so many—success. Unlike his unlearned but nobler and greater cousin Pizarro, prosperity spoiled him, and turned his head and his heart. Despite the unstudious criticisms of some historians, Cortez was not a cruel conqueror. He was not only a great military genius, but was very merciful to the Indians, and was much beloved by them. The so-called massacre at Cholula was not a blot on his career as has been alleged. The truth, as vindicated at last by real history, is this: The Indians had treacherously drawn him into a trap under pretext of friendship. Not until too late to retreat did he learn that the savages meant to massacre him. When he did see his danger, there was but one chance—namely, to surprise the surprisers, to strike them before they were ready to strike him; and this is only what he did. Cholula was simply a case of the biter bitten.
No, Cortez was not cruel to the Indians; but as soon as his rule was established he became a cruel tyrant to his own countrymen, a traitor to his friends and even to his king—and, worst of all, a cool assassin. There is strong evidence that he had "removed" several persons who were in the way of his unholy ambitions; and the crowning infamy was in the fate of his own wife. Cortez had long for a mistress the handsome Indian girl Malinche; but after he had conquered Mexico, his lawful wife came to the country to share his fortunes. He did not love her, however, as much as he did his ambition; and she was in his way. At last she was found in her bed one morning, strangled to death.
Carried away by his ambition, he actually plotted open rebellion against Spain and to make himself emperor of Mexico. The Crown got wind of this precious plan, and sent out emissaries who seized his goods, imprisoned his men, and prepared to thwart his secret schemes. Cortez boldly hastened to Spain, where he met his sovereign with great splendor. Charles received him well, and decorated him with the illustrious Order of Santiago, the patron saint of Spain. But his star was already declining; and though he was allowed to return to Mexico with undiminished outward power, he was thenceforth watched, and did nothing more that was comparable with his wonderful earlier achievements. He had become too unscrupulous, too vindictive, and too unsafe to be left in authority; and after a few years the Crown was forced to appoint a viceroy to wield the civil power of Mexico, leaving to Cortez only the military command, and permission for further conquests. In 1536 Cortez discovered Lower California, and explored part of its gulf. At last, disgusted with his inferior position where he had once been supreme, he returned to Spain, where the emperor received him coldly. In 1541 he accompanied his sovereign to Algiers as an attaché, and in the wars there acquitted himself well. Soon after their return to Spain, however, he found himself neglected. It is said that one day when Charles was riding in state, Cortez forced his way to the royal carriage and mounted upon the step determined to force recognition.
"Who are you?" demanded the angry emperor.
"A man, your Highness," retorted the haughty conqueror of Mexico, "who has given you more provinces than your forefathers left you cities!"
Whether the story is true or not, it graphically illustrates the arrogance as well as the services of Cortez. He lacked the modest balance of the greatest greatness, just as Columbus had lacked it. The self-assertion of either would have been impossible to the greater man than either—the self-possessed Pizarro.
At last, in disgust, Cortez retired from court; and on the 2d of December, 1554, the man who had first opened the interior of America to the world died near Seville.
There were some in South America whose achievements were as wondrous as those of Cortez in Mexico. The conquest of the two continents was practically contemporaneous, and equally marked by the highest military genius, the most dauntless courage, the overcoming of dangers which were appalling, and hardships which were wellnigh superhuman.
Francisco Pizarro, the unlettered but invincible conqueror of Peru, was fifteen years older than his brilliant cousin Cortez, and was born in the same province of Spain. He began to be heard of in America in 1510. From 1524 to 1532 he was making superhuman efforts to get to the unknown and golden land of Peru, overcoming such obstacles as not even Columbus had encountered, and enduring greater dangers and hardships than Napoleon or Cæsar ever met. From 1532 to his death in 1541, he was busy in conquering and exploring that enormous area, and founding a new nation amid its fierce tribes—fighting off not only the vast hordes of Indians, but also the desperate men of his own forces, by whose treachery he at last perished. Pizarro found and tamed the richest country in the New World; and with all his unparalleled sufferings still realized, more than any other of the conquerors, the golden dreams which all pursued. Probably no other conquest in the world's history yielded such rapid and bewildering wealth, as certainly none was bought more dearly in hardship and heroism. Pizarro's conquest has been most unjustly dealt with by some historians ignorant of the real facts in the case, and blinded by prejudice; but that marvellous story, told in detail farther on, is coming to its proper rank as one of the most stupendous and gallant feats in all history. It is the story of a hero to whom every true American, young or old, will be glad to do justice. Pizarro has been long misrepresented as a blood-stained and cruel conqueror, a selfish, unprincipled, unreliable man; but in the clear, true light of real history he stands forth now as one of the greatest of self-made men, and one who, considering his chances, deserves the utmost respect and admiration for the man he made of himself. The conquest of Peru did not by far cause as much bloodshed as the final reduction of the Indian tribes of Virginia. It counted scarcely as many Indian victims as King Philip's War, and was much less bloody, because more straightforward and honorable, than any of the British conquests in East India. The most bloody events in Peru came after the conquest was over, when the Spaniards fell to fighting one another; and in this Pizarro was not the aggressor but the victim. It was the treachery of his own allies—the men whose fames and fortunes he had made. His conquest covered a land as big as California, Oregon, and most of Washington—or as our whole seaboard from Nova Scotia to Port Royal and two hundred miles inland—swarming with the best organized and most advanced Indians in the Western Hemisphere; and he did it all with less than three hundred gaunt and tattered men. He was one of the great captains of all time, and almost as remarkable as organizer and executive of a new empire, the first on the Pacific shore of the southern continent. To this greatness rose the friendless, penniless, ignorant swineherd of Truxillo!
Pedro de Valdivia, the conqueror of Chile, subdued that vast area of the deadly Araucanians with an "army" of two hundred men. He established the first colony in Chile in 1540, and in the following February founded the present city of Santiago de Chile. Of his long and deadly wars with the Araucanians there is not space to speak here. He was killed by the savages Dec. 3, 1553, with nearly all his men, after an indescribably desperate struggle.
There is not space to tell here of the wondrous doings in the southern continent or the lower point of this—the conquest of Nicaragua by Gil Gonzales Davila in 1523; the conquest of Guatemala, by Pedro de Alvarado, in 1524; that of Yucatan by Francisco de Montijo, beginning in 1526; that of New Granada by Gonzalo Ximenez de Quesada, in 1536; the conquests and exploration of Bolivia, the Amazon, and the Orinoco (to whose falls the Spaniards had penetrated by 1530, by almost superhuman efforts); the unparalleled Indian wars with the Araucanians in Chile (for two centuries), with the Tarrahumares in Chihuahua, the Tepehuanes in Durango, the still untamed Yaquis in northwestern Mexico; the exploits of Captain Martin de Hurdaide (the Daniel Boone of Sinaloa and Sonora); and of hundreds of other unrecorded Spanish heroes, who would have been world-renowned had they been more accessible to the fame-maker.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] This mutiny against Velasquez was the first hint of the unscrupulous man who was finally to turn complete traitor to Spain.