Page:Letters of Cortes to Emperor Charles V - Vol 1.djvu/69

Rh enabled him to bring his wiser plans to fruition was denied him.

The fruits of conquest are bitterness of spirit and disappointment, though Cortes fared better than his great contemporaries Columbus, Balboa, and Pizarro, who after discovering continents and oceans and subduing empires were requited with chains, the scaffold, and the traitor's dagger. True, he saw himself defrauded of his deserts, while royal promises were found to be elastic; and in his last years he was even treated as an importunate suppliant, being excluded from the presence of the sovereign to whose crown he had given an empire.

Lesser men would have been content with the worldwide fame, the great title, and vast estates to which from modest beginnings Cortes had 'risen in a few brief years, but a lesser man would never have accomplished such vast undertakings, and it was his curse that his ambitions kept pace with his achievements. From the fall of Mexico until his death, his life was a series of disappointments, unfulfilled ambitions, and petty miseries, due to the malice of rivals, and the faithlessness of friends, relieved only by some brief periods of splendid triumph, illumined by royal favour. Even financial embarrassments were not spared him. A curse was on the Aztec gold, and it was not enough that little treasure was found in the city, but Cortes must be accused, in the unreasoning fury of the general disappointment, of being in collusion with Quauhtemotzin to conceal the hoard and share it together later on. He yielded to this murmuring and consented to the torture of the captive Emperor, for whose safety he had pledged his word, thus staining his name with an indelible blot of shame. His journeys to Yucatan and Honduras, so fully related in the Fifth Letter, would have won renown for another but they added nothing to his reputation. The several expeditions to the South Sea, and his discovery