Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/126

106 than in those passages where he writes of the intrigues and detractions of his enemies, men whose ambitions were selfish and whose characters were vulgar and unscrupulous. Judged by his letters alone, Cortes must be ranked high amongst the Spanish-American discoverers and conquerors. His rudely honest contemporary and faithful follower Bernal Diaz del Castillo resented — and perhaps not unnaturally — the scanty mention of the other officers and men of the expedition, and, occasionally, in the course of his gossipy chronicle, he breaks into acrimony over what seems to him a cheating of others of their dues.

On the whole, however, Cortes was wise to eschew personalities in his reports, for no distribution of praise would have satisfied his followers, and he would have merely risked wearying the Emperor with a useless repetition of meaningless names. Cortes cannot be fairly reproached with self-laudation; he evidently knew the value also of occasional self-effacement, and he never loses sight of the high dual mission with which he felt himself invested, — the spreading of the Faith and the extension of the Spanish sovereignty; while the glory of victory is invariably ascribed to divine protection or the intervention of the saints, rather than to his own courage or ability, and the fruits of his victories were laid at the feet of his sovereign.

The notes with which the present edition is supplied have been carefully compiled from the best authorities, ancient and modern. Among these authorities, the soldier chroniclers contemporary with Cortes, and the Spanish priests in America at the same early period, take the first rank, and some brief notice of the character of these men, the circumstances under which, and the motives for which, they wrote may be of service in enabling the reader to estimate their testimony at its just historical worth.

It should always, however, be borne in mind that the letters of Cortes have the unique and superlative merit of having been composed on the spot from day to day, in the midst of the events in which their writer was playing the chief part, and that they were destined for the Emperor alone, hence misstatements of fact could only result from an