Page:The Coronado expedition, 1540-1542.djvu/68

 the facts, and that the accusations were made before anyone knew how little basis there was for the stories which were the cause of the whole trouble. Without trying to clear the character of Cortes, it is possible to suggest the answer to the most evident reply to his accusations—that he never published the stories which he says he received from the Indians. Cortes certainly did persist in his endeavors to explore the country lying about the head of the Gulf of California. If he ever heard from the Indians anything concerning the Cibola region—which is doubtful, partly because Cortes himself complains that if Mendoza had not interfered with the efficiency of his expeditious, he would have secured this information—it would still have been the best policy for Cortes to keep the knowledge to himself, so that possible rivals might remain ignorant of it until he had perfected his own plans. It may be questioned how long such secrecy would have been possible, but we know how successfully the Spanish authorities managed to keep from the rest of the world the correct and complete cartographical information as to what was being accomplished in the New World, throughout the period of exploration and conquest.

The truce—it can hardly be called a friendship—between Mendoza and Cortes, which prevailed during the first years of the viceroy's administration, could not last long. Mendoza, as soon as he was fairly settled in his position in New Spain, asked the King for a license to make explorations. Cortes still looked on every rival in the work of extending this portion of the Spanish world as an interloper, even though he must have recognized that his prestige at the court and in the New World was rapidly lessening. The distrust with which each of the two regarded the other increased the trouble which was inevitable so soon as the viceroy, urged on by the audiencia, undertook to execute the royal orders which instructed him to investigate the extent of the estates held by Cortes, and to enumerate the Indians held to service by the conqueror. Bad feeling was inevitable, and the squabbles over forms of address and of precedence, which Suarez de Peralta records, were only a few of many things which reveal the relations of the two leading men in New Spain.