When Montezuma Met Cortes by Matthew Restall

Author:Matthew Restall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-01-09T05:00:00+00:00

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Cortés stood on the beach, waving his sword, yelling at Martín de Castro. Write this down, he told Castro, the senior notary among the men and horses gathered on the sand. Write, he “loudly declared,” that I am “the very illustrious lord don Fernando Cortés, Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, Captain General of New Spain and the South Sea for His Majesty the King”; that “I have discovered this land, that I have come with my ships and fleet to conquer and settle it!” Shouting that he was thereby “taking control and possession of this newly discovered land,” the Marquis

“gave the port and bay the name of the Port and Bay of Santa Cruz, and he walked back and forth” across the beach “from one part to another and with his sword struck certain trees which were there, and ordered the men who were standing there to accept him as Governor of these lands for His Majesty.”73

It is tempting to see something pathetically quixotic in this scene. For it has no place in the traditional narrative of Cortesian triumph. The ceremony of possession occurred not during the invasion of Mexico, but in May 1535, on a beach at the tip of the peninsula known today as Baja California. For all the talk of discovery and conquest, there was no civilization on the horizon, no embassy to engage, not even a few unsuspecting locals to enslave or ensnare. A small map was sketched, ending up in the archives in Seville, along with Martín de Castro’s record of the moment. The map shows only the tip of the peninsula, its short coastlines going nowhere—just like Cortés’s expedition.74

For all his titles, his ships and horses, his shouting and striking trees with his sword, Cortés might as well have been don Quixote tilting at windmills. A week later, he had the expedition’s public crier read out loud on the same beach a royal edict, issued years earlier, in 1529, giving Cortés license to “discover, conquer, and settle any islands in the South Sea of New Spain” (that is, off Mexico’s Pacific coast), and the notary made a record of that reading. It was as if Cortés were repeating the legal rituals from the beach at Veracruz of sixteen years earlier, only this time he really was in control of his company. But there was another difference: no city-states were nearby. There was no conquest to come. He was not even in charge of the lands for whose conquest he was given credit.75

A few days later, he wrote to Cristóbal de Oñate (conqueror of New Galicia—the region northwest of central Mexico—and its governor for most of the next decade) to inform him that he had found “pearls and fishing grounds,” but that he was not yet writing to the governor of New Spain (Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán) or the archbishop (fray Juan de Zumárraga) until he had discovered “the secrets” of these new lands. In fact, there were no secrets. A paltry

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