Page:The Coronado expedition, 1540-1542.djvu/59

 good faith of the friar, Castañeda continued it, and scarcely a writer on these events failed to follow their guidance until Mr Bandelier undertook to examine the facts of the case, and applied the rules of ordinary fairness to his historical judgment. This vigorous defender of the friar has successfully maintained his strenuous contention that Marcos neither lied nor exaggerated, even when he said that the Cibola pueblo appeared to him to be larger than the City of Mexico. All the witnesses agree that these light stone and adobe villages impress one who first sees them from a distance as being much larger than they really are. Mexico in 1539, on the other hand, was neither imposing nor populous. The great communal houses, the "palace of Montezuma," had been destroyed during or soon after the siege of 1521. The pueblo of Hawikuh, the one which the friar doubtless saw, contained about 200 houses, or between 700 and 1,000 inhabitants. There is something naïve in Mr Bandelier's comparison of this with Robert Tomson's report that the City of Mexico, in 1556, contained 1,500 Spanish households. He ought to have added, what we may be quite sure was true, that the population of Mexico probably doubled in the fifteen years preceding Tomson's visit, a fact which makes Niza's comparison even more reasonable.

The credit and esteem in which the friar was held by the viceroy, Mendoza, is as convincing proof of his integrity as that derived from a close scrutiny of the text of his narrative. Mendoza's testimony was given in a letter which he sent to the King in Spain, inclosing the report written by Friar Marcos, the "première lettre" which Ternaux translated from Ramusio. This letter spoke in laudatory terms of the friar, and of course is not wholly unbiased evidence. It is at least sufficient to counterbalance the hostile declarations of Cortes and Castañeda, both of whom had far less creditable reasons for traducing the friar than Mendoza had for praising him. "These friars," wrote Mendoza of Marcos and Onorato, "had lived for some time in the neighboring countries; they were used to hard labors, experienced in the ways of the Indies, conscientious, and of good habits." It is possible that Mendoza felt less confidence than is here expressed, for before he organized the Coronado expedition, late in the fall of this year 1539, he ordered Melchior Diaz to go and see if what he could discover agreed with the account which Friar Marcos gave.

However careful the friar may have been, he presented to the viceroy a report in which gold and precious stones abounded, and which stopped just within sight of the goal—the Seven Cities of Nuño de Guzman and of the Indian traders and story tellers. Friar Marcos had