Page:Mexico, Aztec, Spanish and Republican, Vol 1.djvu/54

42 was visible, that the conqueror received the startling news of the arrival on the coast of, with eighteen vessels and nine hundred men, who had been sent, by the revengeful Velasquez, to arrest the hero and send him in chains to St. Jago.

A more unfortunate train of circumstances can scarcely be conceived. In the midst of an enemy's capital, with a handful of men,—menaced by a numerous and outraged nation, on the one hand, and, with a Spanish force sent, in the name of law by authorities to whom he owed loyal respect, to arrest him, on the other,—it is indeed difficult to imagine a situation better calculated to try the soul and task the genius of a general. But it was one of those perilous emergencies which, throughout his whole career, seem to have imparted additional energy, rather than dismay, to the heart of Cortéz, and which prove him to have been, like Nelson, a man who never knew the sensation of fear. Nor must it be imagined that difficulty made him rash. Seldom has a hero appeared in history more perfectly free from precipitancy after he undertook his great enterprise;—and, in the period under consideration, this is fully exhibited in the diplomacy with which he approached the hostile Spaniards on the coast who had been despatched to dislodge and disgrace him. He resolved, at once, not to abandon what he had already gained in the capital; but, at the same time, he endeavored to tranquilize or foil Narvaez if he could not win him over to his enterprise; for it was evidently the policy of the newly arrived general to unite in a spoil which was almost ready for division rather than to incur the perils and uncertainty of another conquest.

Accordingly Cortéz addressed a letter to Narvaez requesting him not to kindle a spirit of insubordination among the natives by proclaiming his enmity. Yet this failed to affect his jealous country-man. He then desired Narvaez to receive his band as brothers in arms, and to share the treasure and fame of the conquest. But this, also, was rejected; while the loyal tool of Velasquez diligently applied himself to fomenting the Aztec discontent against his countrymen, and proclaimed his design of marching to Mexico to release the Emperor from the grasp of his Spanish oppressor.

There was now no other opening for diplomacy, nor was delay to be longer suffered. Cortéz, therefore, leaving the mutinous capital in the hands of Pedro de Alvarado, with a band of but one hundred and fifty men to protect the treasure he had amassed,—departed for the shores of the Gulf with only seventy soldiers, but