"On the tenth day of February, 1519, having heard mass, we set sail along the southern coast in nine ships with the great number of horsemen and soldiers ... with the two ships on the north coast, including the one that Pedro de Alvarado had with sixty soldiers, we were eleven. I was in Pedro de Alvarado's company, and the pilot we carried, Comacho, did not heed what Cortés had ordered." [p. 25]
This is Bernal Díaz in the book now called The True History of the Conquest Of New Spain recalling the day that Cortés, in deed went against the stated wishes of the first Cuban Governor Diego Valásquez. The Governor had just stripped Cortés of his command of the proposed third expedition to the mainland of Mexico. Cortés had decided to strike out for Mexico with as many men as would go with him. Bernal Díaz was one of those men. Many years later he would write his own recollection of those expeditions and these were then found many years after his death in the 1630's and would shed an every-man's viewpoint on these tumultuous events of so many years before. This expedition of Cortés of course, would continue to break all the rules and go on for thirty months. Historians would call it and refer to this as the conquest of Mexico. But it started as a kind of rebellion. The Governor had withdrawn from Cortés his command and don Hernando went and did what he felt he should do, anyway. Bernal Díaz would be among the first Europeans to not only set foot on the Mexican mainland, but would stay with the group marching across and taking Mexico until the fall of the capital city Tenochtitlan in August 1521.
To be sure, there are several accounts of the seizure of Mexico by several authors. The recent editor and translator of the recent True History of Bernal Diaz lays this out, openly stating that when lain alongside each other, together they give a full account of motives, methods and personalities [pp xxiii -xxx]. This includes, to an extent, the local inhabitants, the Mexica, Tlaxcala and others. Some of those were set down years later from oral retellings and they comprise a narrow view into the world of the Nahua, those whom westerners refer to as members of Aztec society. The first in a series of bad omens foretold before the Spaniards arrived can give some introduction.
"Ten years before the Spanish first came here, a bad omen appeared in the sky. It was like a flaming ear of corn, or a fiery signal, or the blaze of daybreak; it seemed to bleed fire, drop by drop, like a wound in the sky. It was wide at the base and narrow at the peak, and it shone in the very heart of the heavens.
This is how it appeared: it shone in the eastern sky in the middle of the night. It appeared at midnight and burned til the break of day, but it vanished at the rising of the sun. The time during which it appeared to us was a full year, beginning in the year 12-House.
When it first appeared, there was great outcry and confusion. The people clapped their hands against their mouths; they were amazed and frightened, and asked themselves what it could mean." [p. 4]
from The Broken Spears: the Aztec account of the conquest of Mexico, translated, edited with an introduction by Miguel León-Portilla, expanded and with a postscript, Beacon Press, 2006.
The True History of the Conquest Of New Spain Bernal Díaz del Castillo, translated and with an introduciton and notes by Janet Burke, Ted Humphrey, Hackett Publishing Company, 2012.
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