Cortes Attacks Tenochtitlan May 1521; Nahuatl Eyewitness Account

In a few days Cortes had returned to Texcoco, after pressing as far as Tlacopan. By April 28th he had assembled his forces and paraded them. The boats were built too. They were to sail across Lake Texcoco itself from the east, carrying horsemen and guns and then surround the central complex of Tenochtitlan that lay in the center of the Lake. The troops had been split up with those under Pedro de Alvarado staying to the north and those with Cortes who took his group around the Lake and set up to the south. After the next several more days of preparation the ships then drew sail and set off across the water to land at the southern end. It was a maneuver at the beginning of a siege that would last some seventy-five days.

The sudden rush of the ships that Cortes had ordered was well captured by the elders who thirty years later remembered and retold the story of that day. Set down in black ink by younger scribes for Friar Sahagùn these stories of how they remembered that day became Nahua voices in the now famous Codex Florentinus.

"The cannons were mounted in the ships, the sails were raised and the fleet moved out onto the lake. The flagship led the way, flying a great linen standard with Cortes' coat of arms. The soldiers beat their drums and blew their trumpets; they played their flutes and chirimias and whistles. 

When the ships approached the Zoquiapan quarter [southwest portion of the central complex], the common people were terrified at the sight. They gathered their children into the canoes and fled helter-skelter across the lake, moaning with fear and paddling as swiftly as they could. They left all their possessions behind them and abandoned their little farms without looking back. 

Our enemies seized all our possessions. They gathered up everything they could find and loaded it into the ships in great bundles. They stole our cloaks and blankets, our battle dress, our tambors and drums, and carried them all away. The Tlatelolcas followed and attacked the Spaniards fom their boats but could not save any of the plunder.

When the Spaniards reached Xoloco, near the entrance to Tenochtitlan, they found a wall was built across the road to block their progress, They destroyed it with four shots from the largest cannon. The first shot did little harm, but the second split it and the third opened a great hole. With the fourth shot, the wall lay in ruins on the ground,

Two of the brigantines, both with cannons mounted in their bows, attacked a flotilla of our shielded canoes. The cannons were fired into the thick of the flotilla, wherever the canoes were crowded closest together. Many of our warriors were killed outright, others drowned because they were too crippled by their wounds to swim away. The water was red with the blood of the dead and dying. Those who were hit by the steel arrows were also doomed; they died instantly and sunk to the bottom of the lake."

The power of the steel arrows, and steel swords, in time however, became a most persistent scourge. But steel was just one of the many elements, and later popularized as crucial to the success of the Spanish. It wouldn't always be so. Though 'extenuating circumstances' complicate some narratives, the element of surprise worked well for the attackers too.
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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.

Bernardino de Sahagún, Conquest of New Spain: 1585 revision , trans. Howard F Cline, ed S.L. Cline (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1989).