improbable stories, but he merely refers to these isles in passing
with a few texts from the Holy Scriptures to express his entire
disapproval. His chapters on the Chinese empire are a perfect model
of veracity, and he merely cocks on a few noughts to the statistics.
In outlying parts of Cathay he feels once more the need of a little
self-indulgence. One province is covered with total and everlasting
darkness, enlivened by the neighing of unseen horses and the crowing of
mysterious cocks. In the next province he found a fruit, which, when
ripe, is cut open, disclosing “a little beast in flesh and bone and
blood, as though it were a little lamb without wool. And men eat both
the fruit and the beast. And that is a great marvel. Of that fruit have
I eaten, although it were wonderful, but that I know well that God is
marvelous in all his works. And nevertheless I told them of as great a
marvel to them, that is amongst us, and that was of the barnacle geese:
for I told them that in our country were trees that bear a fruit that
become birds flying, and those that fall on the water live, and they
that fall on the earth die anon, and they be right good to man’s meat,
and thereof had they so great marvel that some of them trowed it were
an impossible thing to be.”
This mean doubt as to his veracity must have cut poor Maundeville
to the quick. In his earnest way he goes on to describe the people
who live entirely on the smell of wild apples, to the Amazon nation
consisting solely of women warriors, and so on past many griffins,
popinjays, dragons and other wild fowl to the Adamant Rocks of
loadstone which draw all the iron nails out of a ship to her great
inconvenience. “I myself, have seen afar off in that sea, as though it
had been a great isle full of trees and bush, full of thorns and briers
great plenty. And the shipmen told us that all that was of ships that
were drawn thither by the Adamants, for the iron that was in them.”
Beyond that Sir John reports a sea consisting of gravel, ebbing and
flowing in great waves, but containing no drop of water, a most awkward
place for shipping.
So far is Sir John moderate in his statements, but when he gets to the
Vale Perilous at last he turns himself loose. That vale is disturbed by
thunders and tempests, murmurs and noises, a great noise of “tabors,
drums and trumps.” This vale is all full of devils, and hath been
alway. In that vale is great plenty of gold and silver.
“Wherefore many misbelieving men and many Christian men also go in
oftentime to have of the treasure that there is; but few come back
again, and especially of the misbelieving men, nor of the Christian men
either, for they be anon strangled of devils. And in the mid place of
that vale, under a rock, is an head and the visage of a devil bodily,
full horrible and dreadful to see ... for he beholdeth every man so
sharply with dreadful eyes, that be evermore moving and sparkling like
fire, and changeth and stareth so often in diverse manner, with so
horrible countenance that no man dare draw nigh towards him. And from
him cometh smoke and stink and fire, and so much abomination, that
scarcely any man may there endure.
“And ye shall understand that when my fellows and I were in that vale
we were in great thought whether we durst put our bodies in adventure
to go in or not.... So there were with us two worthy men, friars
minors, that were of Lombardy, that said that if any man would enter
they would go in with us. And when they had said so upon the gracious
trust of God and of them, we made sing mass, and made every man to be
shriven and houseled. And then we entered fourteen persons; but at
our going out we were only nine.... And thus we passed that perilous
vale, and found therein gold and silver and precious stones, and rich
jewels great plenty ... but whether it was as it seemed to us I wot
never. For I touched none.... For I was more devout then, than ever I
was before or after, and all for the dread of fiends, that I saw in
diverse figures, and also for the great multitude of dead bodies, that
I saw there lying by the way ... and therefore were we more devout a
great deal, and yet we were cast down and beaten many times to the hard
earth by winds, thunder and tempests ... and so we passed that perilous
vale.... Thanked be Almighty God!
“After this beyond the vale is a great isle where the folk be great
giants ... and in an isle beyond that were giants of greater stature,
some of forty-five foot or fifty foot long, and as some men say of
fifty cubits long. But I saw none of these, for I had no lust to go to
those parts, because no man cometh neither into that isle nor into the
other but he be devoured anon. And among these giants be sheep as great
as oxen here, and they bear great wool and rough. Of the sheep I have
seen many times ... those giants take men in the sea out of their ships
and bring them to land, two in one hand and two in another, eating them
going, all raw and all alive.
“Of paradise can not I speak properly, for I was not there. It is far
beyond. And that grieveth me. And also I was not worthy.”
So, regretting that he had not been allowed into paradise, the hoary
old liar came homeward to Rome, where he claims that the pope absolved
him of all his sins, and gave him a certificate that his book was
proved for true in every particular, “albeit that many men list not to
give credence to anything but to that that they have seen with their
eye, be the author or the person never so true.” Yet, despite these
unkind doubts as to its veracity, Maundeville’s book lives after five
hundred years, and ranks as the most stupendous masterpiece in the art
of lying.
V
A. D. 1492
COLUMBUS
Columbus was blue-eyed, red-haired and tall, of a sunny honesty, humane
and panic-proof. In other words he came of the Baltic and not of the
Mediterranean stock, although his people lived in Italy and he was born
in the suburbs of Genoa. By caste he was a peasant, and by trade, up to
the age of twenty-eight, a weaver, except at times when his Northern
blood broke loose and drove him to sea for a voyage. He made himself a
scholar and a draftsman, and when at last he escaped from an exacting
family, he earned his living by copying charts at Lisbon. A year later,
as a navigating officer, he found his way, via the wine trade, to
Bristol. There he slouched dreaming about the slums, dressed like a
foreign monk. He must needs pose to himself in some ideal character,
and was bound to dress the part. The artistic temperament is the
mainspring of adventure.
In our own day we may compare Boston, that grand old home of the dying
sailing ship, with New York, a bustling metropolis for the steam
liners. In the days of Columbus Genoa was an old-fashioned, declining,
but still splendid harbor of the oared galleys, while Lisbon was the
up-to-date metropolis of the new square-rigged sailing ships.
From these two greatest seaports of his age, Columbus came to Bristol,
the harbor of England, in the Middle Ages, of the slow, scholarly,
artistic, stately English. They were building that prayer in stone,
Saint Mary Redcliffe, a jewel of intricate red masonry, the setting for
Portuguese stained glass which glowed like precious gems.
“In the month of February,” says Columbus, “and in the year 1477, I
navigated as far as the Island of Tile (Thule is Iceland) a hundred
leagues, and to this island which is as large as England, the English,
especially those of Bristol, go with merchandise. And at the time that
I was there the sea was not frozen over, although there were very high
tides.”
Here, then, is the record of Columbus himself that in his long inquiry
concerning the regions beyond the Atlantic, he actually visited
Iceland. A scholar himself, he was able to converse with the learned
Icelanders in Latin, the trade jargon of that age. From them he surely
must have known how one hundred thirty years ago the last timber ship
had come home from Nova Scotia, and twenty-nine years since, within his
own lifetime, the Greenland trade had closed. The maps of the period
showed the American coast as far south as the Carolines,--the current
geography book was equally clear:
“From Biameland (Siberia) the country stretches as far as the desert
regions in the north until Greenland begins. From Greenland lies
southerly Helluland (Labrador and Newfoundland), then Markland (Nova
Scotia); thence it is not far from Vinland (New England), which some
believe goes out from Africa. England and Scotland are one island, yet
each country is a kingdom by itself. Ireland is a large island, Iceland
is also a large island north of Ireland.” Indeed Columbus seems almost
to be quoting this from memory when he says of Iceland, “this island,
which is as large as England.” I strongly suspect that Columbus when in
Iceland, took a solemn oath not to “discover” America.
The writers of books have spent four centuries in whitewashing,
retouching, dressing up and posing this figure of Columbus. The
navigator was indeed a man of powerful intellect and of noble
character, but they have made him seem a monumental prig as well as an
insufferable bore. He is the dead and helpless victim, dehumanized by
literary art until we feel that we really ought to pray for him on All
Prigs’ Day in the churches.
Columbus came home from his Icelandic and Guinea expeditions with two
perfectly sound ideas. “The world is a globe, so if I sail westerly I
shall find Japan and the Indies.” For fifteen bitter years he became
the laughing-stock of Europe.
[Illustration: CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS]
Now note how the historians, the biographers and the commentators, the
ponderous and the mawkish, the smug and the pedantic alike all fail to
see why their hero was laughed at. His name was Cristo-fero Colombo,
to us a good enough label for tying to any man, but to the Italians
and all educated persons of that age, a joke. The words mean literally
the Christ-Carrying Dove. Suppose a modern man with some invention or
a great idea, called himself Mr. Christ-Carrying Dove, and tried to
get capitalists in New York or London to finance his enterprise! In the
end he changed his name to Cristoval Colon and got himself financed,
but by that time his hair was white, and his nerve was gone, and his
health failing.
In the ninth century the vikings sailed from Norway by the great circle
course north of the gulf stream. They had no compass or any instruments
of navigation, and they braved the unknown currents, the uncharted
reefs, the unspeakable terrors of pack-ice, berg-streams and fog on
Greenland’s awful coast. They made no fuss.
But Columbus sailing in search of Japan, had one Englishman and one
Irishman, the rest of the people being a pack of dagoes. In lovely
weather they were ready to run away from their own shadows.
From here onward throughout the four voyages which disclosed the West
Indies and the Spanish Main, Columbus allowed his men to shirk their
duties, to disobey his orders, to mutiny, to desert and even to make
war upon him.
Between voyages he permitted everybody from the mean king downward,
to snub, swindle, plunder and defame himself and all who were loyal
to him in misfortune. Because Columbus behaved like an old woman, his
swindling pork contractor, Amerigo Vespucci, was allowed to give his
name to the Americas. Because he had not the manhood to command, the
hapless red Indians were outraged, enslaved and driven to wholesale
suicide, leaping in thousands from the cliffs. For lack of a master
the Spaniards performed such prodigies of cowardice and cruelty as the
world has never known before or since, the native races were swept out
of existence, and Spain set out upon a downward path, a moral lapse
beyond all human power to arrest.
Yet looking back, how wonderful is the prophecy in that name,
Christ-Carrying Dove, borne by a saintly and heroic seaman whose
mission, in the end, added two continents to Christianity.
This text mainly contradicts a _Life of Columbus_, by Clements R.
Markham, C. B. Phillip & Son, 1892.
[Illustration: AMERICUS VESPUCCIUS]
VI
A. D. 1519
THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO
“Hernando Cortes spent an idle and unprofitable youth.”
So did I. And every other duffer is with me in being pleased with
Cortes for setting an example. We, not the good boys, need a little
encouragement.
He was seven years old when Columbus found the Indies. That was a time
when boys hurried to get grown up and join the search for the Fountain
of Youth, the trail to Eldorado. All who had time to sleep dreamed
tremendous dreams.
Cortes became a colonist in Cuba, a sore puzzle to the rascal in
command. When he clapped Cortes in irons the youngster slipped free and
defied him. When he gave Cortes command of an expedition the fellow
cheeked him. When he tried to arrest him the bird had flown, and was
declared an outlaw.
The soldiers and seamen of the expedition were horrified by this
adventurer who landed them in newly discovered Mexico, then sank the
ships lest they should wish to go home. They stood in the deadly mists
of the tropic plains, and far above them glowed the Star of the Sea,
white Orizaba crowned with polar snows. They marched up a hill a mile
and a half in sheer height through many zones of climate, and every
circumstance of pain and famine to the edge of a plateau crowned by
immense volcanoes, a land of plenty, densely peopled, full of opulent
cities. They found that this realm was ruled by an emperor, famous
for his victorious wars, able, it seemed, to place a million warriors
in the field, and hungry for captives to be first sacrificed to the
gods, and afterward eaten at the banquets of the nobility and gentry.
The temples were actually fed with twenty thousand victims a year. The
Spanish invading force of four hundred men began to feel uncomfortable.
Yet if this Cortes puzzled the governor of Cuba, and horrified his men,
he paralyzed the Emperor Montezuma. Hundreds of years ago a stranger
had come to Mexico from the eastern sea, a bearded man who taught the
people the arts of civilized life. Then birds first sang and flowers
blossomed, the fields were fruitful and the sun shone in glory upon
that plateau of eternal spring. The hero, Bird-Serpent, was remembered,
loved and worshiped as a god. It was known to all men that as he had
gone down into the eastern sea so he would return again in later ages.
Now the prophecy was fulfilled. He had come with his followers, all
bearded white men out of the eastern sea in mysterious winged vessels.
Bird-Serpent and his people were dressed in gleaming armor, had weapons
that flashed lightning, were mounted on terrible beasts--where steel
and guns and horses were unknown; and Montezuma felt as we should do if
our land were invaded by winged men riding dragons. To the supernatural
visitors the emperor sent embassy after embassy, loaded with treasure,
begging the hero not to approach his capital.
Set in the midst of Montezuma’s empire was the poor valiant republic
of Tlascala, at everlasting war with the Aztec nation. Invading this
republic Cortes was met by a horde of a hundred thousand warriors, whom
he thrashed in three engagements, and when they were humbled, accepted
as allies against the Aztecs. Attended by an Tlascalan force he entered
the ancient Aztec capital, Cholula, famed for its temple. This is a
stone-faced mound of rubble, four times the size and half the height of
the Great Pyramid, a forty-acre building larger by four acres than any
structure yet attempted by white men.
By the emperor’s orders the Cholulans welcomed the Spaniards, trapped
them within their city, and attacked them. In reply, Cortes used their
temple as the scene of a public massacre, slaughtered three thousand
men, and having thus explained things, marched on the City of Mexico.
In those days a salt lake, since drained, filled the central hollow
of the vale of Mexico, and in the midst of it stood the city built
on piles, and threaded with canals, a barbaric Venice, larger,
perhaps even grander than Venice with its vast palace and gardens,
and numberless mound temples whose flaming altars lighted the town at
night. Three causeways crossed the lake and met just as they do to-day
at the central square. Here, on the site of the mound temple, stands
one of the greatest of the world’s cathedrals, and across the square
are public buildings marking the site of Montezuma’s palace, and that
in which he entertained the Spaniards. The white men were astonished
at the zoological gardens, the aviary, the floating market gardens on
the lake, the cleanliness of the streets, kept by a thousand sweepers,
and a metropolitan police which numbered ten thousand men, arrangements
far in advance of any city of Europe. Then, as now, the place was a
great and brilliant capital.
Yet from the Spanish point of view these Aztecs were only barbarians to
be conquered, and heathen cannibals doomed to hell unless they accepted
the faith. To them the Cholula massacre was only a military precaution.
They thought it right to seize their generous host the emperor, to hold
him as a prisoner under guard, and one day even to put him in irons.
For six months Montezuma reigned under Spanish orders, overwhelmed with
shame. He loved his captors because they were gallant gentlemen, he
freely gave them his royal treasure of gems, and gold, and brilliant
feather robes. Over the plunder--a million and a half sterling in gold
alone--they squabbled; clear proof to Montezuma that they were not all
divine. Yet still they were friends, so he gave them all the spears
and bows from his arsenal as fuel to burn some of his nobles who had
affronted them.
It was at this time that the hostile governor of Cuba sent Narvaes
with seventeen ships and a strong force to arrest the conqueror
for rebellion. The odds were only three to one, instead of the
usual hundred to one against him, so Cortes went down to the coast,
gave Narvaes a thrashing, captured him, enrolled his men by way of
reinforcements, and returned with a force of eleven hundred troops.
He had left his friend, Alvarado, with a hundred men to hold the
capital and guard the emperor. This Alvarado, so fair that the natives
called him Child of the Sun, was such a fool that he massacred six
hundred unarmed nobles and gentlefolk for being pagans, violated the
great temple, and so aroused the whole power of the fiercest nation on
earth to a war of vengeance. Barely in time to save Alvarado, Cortes
reentered the city to be besieged. Again and again the Aztecs attempted
to storm the palace. The emperor in his robes of state addressed them
from the ramparts, and they shot him. They seized the great temple
which overlooked the palace, and this the Spaniards stormed. In face of
awful losses day by day the Spaniards, starving and desperate, cleared
a road through the city, and on the night of Montezuma’s death they
attempted to retreat by one of the causeways leading to the mainland.
Three canals cut this road, and the drawbridges had been taken away,
but Cortes brought a portable bridge to span them. They crossed the
first as the gigantic sobbing gong upon the heights of the temple
aroused the entire city.
Heavily beset from the rear, and by thousands of men in canoes, they
found that the weight of their transport had jammed the bridge which
could not be removed. They filled the second gap with rocks, with their
artillery and transport, with chests of gold, horses, and dead men.
So they came to the third gap, no longer an army but as a flying mob
of Spaniards and Tlascalan warriors bewildered in the rain and the
darkness by the headlong desperation of the attacking host. They were
compelled to swim, and at least fifty of the recruits were drowned by
the weight of gold they refused to leave, while many were captured to
be sacrificed upon the Aztec altars. Montezuma’s children were drowned,
and hundreds more, while Cortes and his cavaliers, swimming their
horses back and forth convoyed the column, and Alvarado with his rear
guard held the causeway.
Last in the retreat, grounding his spear butt, he leaped the chasm,
a feat of daring which has given a name forever to this place as
Alvarado’s Leap. And just beyond, upon the mainland there is an ancient
tree beneath which Cortes, as the dawn broke out, sat on the ground
and cried. He had lost four hundred fifty Spaniards, and thousands of
Tlascalans, his records, artillery, muskets, stores and treasure in
that lost battle of the Dreadful Night.
A week later the starved and wounded force was beset by an army of two
hundred thousand Aztecs. They had only their swords now, but, after
long hours of fighting, Cortes himself killed the Aztec general, so by
his matchless valor and leadership gaining a victory.
The rest is a tale of horror beyond telling, for, rested and
reinforced, the Spaniards went back. They invested, besieged, stormed
and burned the famine-stricken, pestilence-ridden capital, a city
choked and heaped with the unburied dead of a most valiant nation.
Afterward, under the Spanish viceroys, Mexico was extended and enlarged
to the edge of Alaska, a Christian civilized state renowned for mighty
works of engineering, the splendor of her architecture, and for such
inventions as the national pawn-shop, as a bank to help the poor. One
of the so-called native “slaves” of the mines once wrote to the king
of Spain, begging his majesty to visit Mexico and offering to make a
royal road for him, paving the two hundred fifty miles from Vera Cruz
to the capital with ingots of pure silver as a gift to Spain.
VII
A. D. 1532
THE CONQUEST OF PERU
Pizarro was reared for a swineherd; long years of soldiering made
him no more than a captain, and when at the age of fifty he turned
explorer, he discovered nothing but failure.
For seven years he and his followers suffered on trails beset by snakes
and alligators, in feverish jungles haunted by man-eating savages, to
be thrown at last battered, ragged and starving on the Isle of Hell.
Then a ship offered them passage, but old Pizarro drew a line in the
dust with his sword. “Friends,” said he, “and comrades, on that side
are toil, hunger, nakedness, the drenching storm, desertion and death;
on this side ease and pleasure. There lies Peru with its riches; here
Panama and its poverty. Choose each man, what best becomes a brave
Castilian. For my part, I go to the south.”
Thirteen of all his people crossed the line with Pizarro, the rest
deserting him, and he was seven months marooned on his desert isle in
the Pacific. When the explorer’s partners at last were able to send a
ship from Panama, it brought him orders to return, a failure. He did
not return but took the ship to the southward, his guide the great
white Andes, along a coast no longer of horrible swamps but now more
populous, more civilized than Spain, by hundreds of miles on end of
well-tilled farms, fair villages and rich cities where the temples
were sheathed with plates of pure red gold. As in the Mexico of eight
years ago, the Spaniards were welcomed as superhuman, their ship, their
battered armor and their muskets accounted as possessions of strayed
gods. They dined in the palaces of courtly nobles, rested in gardens
curiously enriched with foliage and flowers of beaten gold and silver,
and found native gentlemen eager to join them in their ship as guests.
So with a shipload of wonders to illustrate this discovery they went
back to Panama, and Pizarro returned home to seek in Spain the help
of Charles V. There, at the emperor’s court, he met Cortes, who came
to lay the wealth of conquered Mexico at his sovereign’s feet, and
Charles, with a lively sense of more to come, despatched Pizarro to
overthrow Peru.
Between the Eastern and the Western Andes lies a series of lofty plains
and valleys, in those days irrigated and farmed by an immense civilized
population. A highway, in length 1,100 miles, threaded the settlements
together. The whole empire was ruled by a foreign dynasty, called the
Incas, a race of fighting despots by whom the people had been more or
less enslaved. The last Inca had left the northern kingdom of Quito to
his younger son, the ferocious Atahuallpa, and the southern realm of
Cuzco to his heir, the gentle Huascar.