Page:Young Folks History Of Mexico.pdf/132

 126. It is not unlikely that unusual importance was given to these mysterious events, owing to the arrival of Europeans on the coast of Central America. Can we doubt that the obedient subjects of Montezuma had failed to inform him of the arrival of Columbus on the coast of Honduras in 1502? Four years later his army had invaded Guatemala. When they later returned, with prisoners for the priests, did they not report, what they could not have failed to have heard from the Guatemala Indians, that a white man's vessel had touched their shore and bartered with the natives? In 1506 De Solis and Pinzon, Spanish navigators, had coasted the eastern shore of Yucatan. Is it possible that Montezuma should not have heard of one of these arrivals? At the opening of the sixteenth century, when these omens first began to agitate the minds of the Mexicans, the islands of the Caribbean Sea had been ten years visited by Europeans. The currents of that sea set up directly against the eastern coast of Yucatan and Mexico from the southernmost of these islands. Is it not probable that some article belonging to the white strangers should have been washed upon these shores? One of the early historians, Herrera, says that the king had in his possession "a box containing wearing apparel, and a sword of a style unknown to the natives."

The appearance of the comet terrified them exceedingly; the superstitious Montezuma consulted his astrologers, but they could give him no satisfactory explanation. Then he applied to Nezahualpilli, King of Tezcoco, who, of late years, had given so much attention to the study of astronomy and astrology. Between the two monarchs a coldness had existed for some years, owing to the public execution, by Nezahualpilli, of one of his wives, a sister of Montezuma, and of a son, for whose life the Mexican king had interceded in vain. But in this extremity the disasters