Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/46

26 band of marauders, which rioted unchecked through Mexico, pillaging, torturing, and outraging the natives, has been lightly formed, and too generally accepted. These facts, however, point to a different state of things.

We read in the first letter the concise and simple account of the change in the character of the expedition, and of the founding of a Spanish settlement at Vera Cruz, and that this decision originated spontaneously, and all but unanimously, among the members of it. Their high motives—the conversion of barbarians to the true faith, and the subjection of vast and fabulously rich kingdoms to the Spanish crown—impelled them in these superlative interests to set aside the trivial projects of Diego Velasquez, and to impose upon Cortes the office of His Majesty's lieutenant. They required his acceptance of this duty by formal act of a notary public, and under menace of reporting his disloyalty to the emperor should he refuse to comply with the will of the community. Thus, from the simple commander of a few trading vessels commissioned by the Governor of Cuba to take soundings and exchange Spanish beads for Mexican gold, in the interest of his employer, Cortes appears, transformed into the Spanish sovereign's lawful representative, holding power conferred by a legally established Spanish municipal corporation, recognising no superior in the new world, and exercising his functions in the royal name; and the band of adventurers becomes a regularly organised colony, with its administration and its municipal officers bearing the same titles, and empowered to perform the same functions, as though the scrambling settlement of Vera Cruz were stately Seville or historic Toledo. All these creations are described as existing subject to an expression of the sovereign's will, and the royal sanction for all that had been done in the interest of the crown is humbly petitioned. In dealing with the Indians the same strict observance