On November 10, 1522 Marin Sanudo recopied a letter from their Spanish ambassador giving a report on a description of the New World. How much this letter gets right I really don't know. But how fascinating to get such a ringside seat of such amazing news! Remarkable!
"Most Serene Doge, etc. The emperor having received news of the Indies in the past few days from individuals who have returned from the region, including items worthy of being brought to Your Serenity's attention, I will not fail to communicate them to you. May Your Excellency know, then, that the visitor is don Hernando Cortes, the governor of His Majesty on the island of Cuba; it is he who in past years discovered Yucatan and sent to His Majesty several presents offered by the people of Yucatan as a token of their obeisance. They included a sun made of gold and a moon made of silver and some other gifts, of which Your Excellency was informed by our most worthy procurator, the then ambassador Corner, in his letters. After landing, Cortes contained his journey and discovered that Yucatan, which he had believed to be an island, was joined to the mainland, which continued on to the west. He penetrated the interior and discovered various cities and castles inhabited by peoples of a higher level of civilization than have heretofore been encountered. He then arrived in a city named Tlascala [Editor's footnote: In Yucatan, spelled Scalteza by Sanudo", p 199], which is governed communally and which is a very large city. They are at war with a prince whom I will name below, who claims to have jurisdiction over that city, while the people wish to be free. Cortes and his men having arrived there, as I said, they soon persuaded the people, for the reasons I have given, to pledge obedience to and recognize [as their sovereign] the present Holy Roman Emperor, since the Spanish told them that His Highness was ruler of our world. The Spanish then penetrated more than sixty leagues into the interior, where they found a lake with a circumference of sixty leagues; its water is salty and rises and falls, as do most seas. In the middle of that lake they discovered a very large city called Temistitan, which they said had more than 40,000 hearths. Its ruler is that great prince I mentioned above who claimed to have jurisdiction over Scalteza; he is the lord of more than one hundred leagues of land all around this area. He is held in awe by all of his subjects and is scrupulously obeyed. The inhabitants are very civilized except in the matter of religion, because they worship pagan gods and make human sacrifice to them. Moreover, they are set in the following custom: when they go to war against their enemies, they eat all of those who die in battle.
Their homes are comfortable and nicely decorated with cloths made of cotton that they use for their garments. They have a great quantity of gold, which they do not use as coins; rather, they revere it and use it to make a variety of ornaments. All of their commerce is conducted by bartering one item for another. However, for small items that they need to buy and that are not easily obtained by bartering, they employ as currency a small fruit similar to an almond that is rare. This city and its prince is surrendered to the Spanish when they arrived. However, when the majority of the Spanish had left, they rose up in rebellion and killed those who remained, eating them as is their custom. When the Spanish captain don Hernando Cortes learned of this, he dispatched many Spanish with artillery and many citizens of Tlascala, who were enemies of Temistitan. They recaptured it, and the prince resumed his obedience to the emperor.
The inhabitants of the island described above eat bread made of Indian grain and meat and drink a potion similar to beer. They do not have an alphabet, but write the most important things with pictures of animals or other things, in the manner used by the ancient Egyptians. These characters, however, are not adequate for all matters. This is all that they related about those islands.
It was later said by the Spanish that they received letters [from their explorers] who remained there about how they traveled so far that they came to the sea, although they did not specify whether the sea they found was on the west or on the south. Then on the sixth of this month there arrived in Sybilliis [Seville, Spain] one of the five ships that the Spanish king had sent three years ago to discover the spice routes with several Portuguese who had fled from the most serene king of Portugal.... They returned by the Portuguese route, the eastern route, thus they went entirely around the world, as will be explained more clearly and completely to Your Serenity in the letters. They brought 600 hundredweights [cantere] of cloves and samples of every other kind of spice.
September 24, 1522 in Valladolid."
Here's a link to an English translation of don Cortes' Second Letter to Emperor Charles V, conveniently at the Jesuit University of New York, Fordham .edu.
All quotes as Sanudo Diaries or Editor's notes or Editor's Footnotes from Venice, Cita Excellentissima, Selection from the Renaissance Diaries of Marin Sanudo translated by Linda L Carroll, editors: Patricia H LaBalme and Laura Sanguineti White, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008
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