Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/62

42 ignorant adventurers in the New World at every turn.

There were three ends which according to Cortes's ethics justified any measures for their accomplishment, ist, the spread of the faith, 2nd, the subjugation of the Indians to Spanish rule, and 3rd, the possession of their treasures; and as his narrative of the conquest unfolds itself, it will be seen that his resolution stopped at nothing for the achievement of these ends. But there is no instance of tortures and suffering being treated by him as a sport. Whether he might not have accomplished all he did with less bloodshed, is a purely speculative question. Fr. Acosta (Storia de las Indias, lib. vii., cap. XXV.) states that so entirely were the Mexicans imbued with the belief that the Spaniards came in fulfilment of the prophecy of their most beneficent deity, Quetzalcoatl, that Montezuma would have abdicated, and the whole empire have passed into their hands without a struggle, had Cortes but comprehended the force of the prevailing superstition, and met the popular expectation by rising consistently to his rôle of demigod. There are facts which tend to lend weight to this argument, and had Cortes but realised the possibilities, he might have been equal to the part, though his followers fell so lamentably short, that it is doubtful if the illusion could have been long sustained. As it was, the awful tragedy of the Sorrowful Night, and the downfall, amidst bloodshed and suffering unspeakable of Mexico, was precipitated by the brutal folly of Alvarado, — not of Cortes.

In his relations with women, Cortes shows his primitive polygamous temperament. Even at the age of sixteen in his native Medellin, we find him falling from a wall and all but losing his life in an amorous adventure with an anonymous fair one, and throughout his life these intrigues succeeded one another unbrokenly; but his loves were so entirely things "of his life apart," that