Friday, March 8, 2013

Cortés Off Coast Approaches Carefully: March 9, 1519



Cortés and his fleet hovered off the north end of Yucatan a few more days, slowly moving its way west and and then south. One ship captained by Juan Velázquez de León was not with the others and they all went back and found him anchored, unable to find enough wind. So Bernal Díaz said they all stayed an extra day. 

"... we put two boats into the water in which the pilot and a captain, Francisco de Lugo, went ashore. Some settlements with maize fields were there, the people made salt, and they had four houses for idols called cus, in which were many figure, mostly of women with tall bodies. That land came to be called the Punta de las Mujeres. I remember Aguilar said that the town where he had been a slave was near those outlying settlements, that he came there loaded down with what he was carrying for his master and fell ill from carrying the burden, and that Guerrero's town was not very far off. He said that all the towns had gold but not very much, and if Cortés wanted Aguilar to guide him, we could go there. Cortés, laughing, told him he did not come for things of such little account, but to serve God and the king." [pp. 36-7]

Cortés ordered the captain named Escobar to go ahead and scope out the Laguna of Terminos to see if it could handle their boats, if there was good hunting nearby and to make a sign somehow if it was and so on. Escobar went and did so, He then tried to wait in his boat but the wind pushed him out to sea, The next day Cortés and the rest sailed south from Campeche and made it to the Laguna de Terminos. Though they saw where he had left a sign and a letter of his having been there, Cortés sent out a boat with ten men with crossbows, But Escobar was nowhere in sight. The fleet continued south anyway and Escobar caught up with them. While they neared Champoton,  Cortés wanted to stop there but the pilot warned it would not be easy as there is a great ebb tide and they would have to anchor away from the shore. [pp. 37-8]

"Cortés was thinking of giving the Indians of that town a good lesson for the defeat of Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba [1517] and Grijalva [1518]. Many of us who had been in those battles begged him to go in and not leave without soundly punishing them, even though it might detain us for two or three days. The pilot Alaminos and the other pilots insisted that if we entered there, in a week we would not be able to leave because of adverse weather, and that now we had a good wind and would arrive in two days at Tabasco, so we went by it." [p. 38]

This happened on or about the ninth of March, 1519. Each step of the way seems to increase the tension. It's as if a drum is beating, increasing in tempo with every brief episode.


Taken from The Conquest of New Spain translated with an introduction and notes by Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Co, Inc. 2012

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