Getting It Right!

Starting out reading Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 (2006) by J. H. Elliott, I am immediately impressed with the depth and breadth of the author's work. There is much worthy of praise, including a single word in a one sentence: "Cortés, an inspired leader, beached his boats and led his expedition resolutely into the interior of an unknown land to conquer it for his royal master" (emphasis added, 16). Five years ago, I wrote about the common misconception that I had learned decades earlier and held to be true until early 2008 that Cortés had burned his boats (see "the burning of boats"). He did not burn them.

Elliott's bibliography and notes are impressive. There are several citations in the first chapter to Hugh Thomas, The Conquest of Mexico (1993), the text in a 2005 American edition with a slightly different title that set me straight on this small, but not insignificant point. There are several explanations that have been offered by several historians for the long-held and frequently repeated error. Thomas's simple observation of the handwriting in the original primary text offers the simplest and best explanation. Two words are easily confused: quebrando (breaking) and quemando (burning).

Employing the best available scholarship as the basis of his narrative, Elliott gets this detail right.

“the burning of boats”

The Treachery and Resolve of Cortés

To keep those who remained loyal to the Cuban governor [Valazquez] from returning to Havana and disclosing his treachery, Cortez resorted to a simple but drastic expedient. Once he and his men landed on the shores of Mexico he burned his ships.
Allen Weinstein and R. Jackson Wilson, Freedom and Crisis, 2nd ed., 11.

As a college freshman hoping to become a teacher of history, I highlighted the declaration that Cortés burned his ships and committed this fact to memory. Now, Hugh Thomas informs me that this fact is none such: it is a fabrication that results from bad handwriting.

The Caudillo next proceeded with audacity to an action which took even his friends by surprise. He ordered the masters of nine of the twelve ships which were anchored off Villa Rica to sail their vessels on to the sands.
Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico, 222.

It is important that we get these facts correct. Thomas states that the “action was, as all who observed the thing agree, and as Cortés himself wrote, a grounding, not a burning” (223). The phrase “the burning of the boats,” he tells us, first appeared in 1546 in Diálogo de la Dignidad del Hombre (Dialogue of the Dignity of Man) by Cervantes de Salazar. Thomas speculates that the error derives from confusion between two words rendered indistinguishable by sloppy handwriting: quebrando (breaking) and quemando (burning).

Whether burned or run on the sand and stripped of rigging and wood, it remains true that Hernán Cortés achieved two important aims, augmenting his army with former sailors now become soldiers, and, more important, committing his forces to success or death in Mexico. But the legend that he burned ships that were, in fact, run aground threatens to cast doubt on many other details of the enterprise. The legend carries history into the realms of myth.


Postscript 1 March 2008:

I found an old article, absent from the footnotes to pp. 222-223 in Conquest, that makes an effort to explain the development of the myth The conclusion sums the author's point.

The expression in English and Spanish "to burn one's boats" (quemar las naves), a reference to Cortés in the minds of many people, has contributed to its continuing popularity and perpetuation. In the end, to present the legend today as historical fact can only be attributed to ignorance; but its use in creative literature must not be condemned, for it is dramatically appealing and actually a mere embellishment of the truth. Cortés' deed, one way or the other, remains a universal symbol of bold vision and heroic action.
Winston A. Reynolds, "The Burning Ships of Hernán Cortés," Hispania 42 (1959), 322.

Books on my Desk

The Fall of Old Mexico

Among the texts that have been occupying my time the past week or so, and likely will for at least the next week, are several concerned with the success of Hernán Cortés in conquering the Triple Alliance (Mexica / Aztec Empire) in 1521.

Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico (1993).

The standard modern work on the subject.

Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (2001).

Offers a novel thesis regarding the causes of European military prowess through the centuries, and one detailed chapter concerned with Cortés and Montezuma: "Technology and the Wages of Reason."

Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (2005).

Part one, "Numbers from Nowhere?" concerns demography and depopulation, and devotes a portion of the text to the processes by which the Triple Alliance succumbed to Castilians that they outnumbered.

Allen Weinstein and R. Jackson Wilson, Freedom and Crisis: An American History, 2nd ed. (1978).

The first chapter, "Cortez and Montezuma," was the first thing I read in the first college history course I took. Suffice it to say that the book was new then, and that James Carter was still living at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Mexica Human Sacrifice 1487

Four-Day Slaughter: 80,400 Killed

After enlarging the Great Temple with shrines to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc in 1487, Mexica priests slaughtered an unprecedented number of victims over four days at the behest of Ahuitzotl, the Aztec king. Reports to the Spanish after their conquest of Tenochtitlán and passed along in letters to Emperor Charles V place the number of dead during this ceremony as high as 80,400. Victor Davis Hanson observes in Carnage and Culture (2001) that the “killing rate of fourteen victims a minute over the ninety-six-hour bloodbath far exceeded the daily murder record at either Auschwitz or Dachau” (195).

In A Patriot’s History of the United States (2004), Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen pass along this 80,400 figure without a note of skepticism.

[I]t was sacrifice, not science, that defined Aztec society, whose pyramids, after all, were execution sites. A four-day sacrifice in 1487 by the Aztec king Ahuitzotl involved the butchery of 80,400 prisoners by shifts of priests working four at a time at convex killing tables who kicked lifeless, heartless bodies down the side of the pyramid temple. This worked out to a “killing rate of fourteen victims a minute over the ninety-six-hour bloodbath.”
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 5.

They document this quote of the killing rate as reported by Hanson with the first of several references to Carnage and Culture in A Patriot’s History. Indeed, over the next several pages, Hanson’s book appears as the principal source for their central argument regarding the reasons for the success of the Spanish conquest of Mesoamerica. Although the authors of A Patriot’s History pronounce this estimate of the number of sacrificial victims without qualification, Hanson exhibits some reservation through use of the adverb “purportedly”:

Ahuitzotl purportedly organized the butchery of 80,400 prisoners during a four-day blood sacrifice at the 1487 inauguration of the Great Temple to Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlán—an enormous challenge in industrialized murder in its own right.
Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 194-195.

Schweikart and Allen’s uncritical acceptance of this 80,400 figure in Hanson is noteworthy in light of other numbers in his book that they reject. In particular, A Patriot’s History gives 100,000 as the number of Aztec dead during the 1521 victory of Cortés in the conquest of Tenochtitlán, “many from disease resulting from Cortés’s cutting the city’s water supply” (6). In the depopulation sidebar that interrupts their narrative of the conquest of Mesoamerica, they suggest that in North America there were “800,000 Indians who died from disease and firearms” (8). They do not offer an estimate of the dead in Mesoamerica beyond the 100,000. Such figures seem to offer a striking contrast to the tally in Hanson’s Carnage and Culture. Hanson mentions the 100,000 as an estimate in Tenochtitlán itself during the summer of 1521, and continues:

But that was a small percentage of the actual losses in the two-year struggle for Mexico City. Disease, hunger, and constant fighting had essentially wiped out the population of Tenochtitlán. The final tally of the dead would eventually reach more than 1 million of the people surrounding Lake Texcoco.
Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 193.

Estimating the Dead in 1487

One of several principal sources informing Hanson’s chapter on Tenochtitlán in Carnage and Culture is Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico (1993). Thomas buries the 80,400 figure in a discursive footnote, where it is attributed to Motolinía, also called Friar Toribio de Benavente. In addition according to Thomas, Fr. Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España (1867 and 1880) “has much the same number, on what he implies was the authority of what is now called the Crónica X” (646). Drawing on a range of primary and secondary sources, Thomas presents several other figures for this one ceremony and for the annual totals, including Sherburne Cook’s estimate of 11,520 based on two minutes per victim over four days. The text of Conquest is cautious:

The innumerable prisoners who died on fourteen pyramids over four days, with long lines of victims stretching from the site of the temple in four directions, as far as the eye could see, at a festival in 1487 to mark the inauguration of the new temple to Huitzilopochtli in Tenochtitlán, had no precedent. No evidence exists which enables anything more than a good guess.
Thomas, Conquest, 25.

Between 11,520 and 80,400, Schweikart and Allen might have suggested that estimates of the dead during one four-day ceremony in 1487 reveal a plus or minus reliability factor of nearly 700 per cent. They argue against “overestimates of millions” based on the 400 per cent variation in estimates for the population of the Inka (Inca) in Peru ranging from 4 to 15 million. It seems odd that their skepticism regarding the extent of aboriginal depopulation due to disease does not extend to skepticism regarding Spanish reports of the brutality of Aztec sacrifices four decades before they arrived.

Another View of Aztec Sacrifices

Charles C. Mann does not mention this event in 1487. In 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, he does observe, “[h]uman sacrifice is such a charged subject that its practice by the Triple Alliance [the Aztec Empire] has inevitably become shrouded in myths” (133). One myth he identifies is that “post-conquest accounts of public death-spectacles are all racist lies” (133), noting that Mexica art depicts such sacrifices enough that there should be no doubt. Mann identifies a contrasting myth, “that in its appetite for death as spectacle the Triple Alliance was fundamentally different from Europe” (133). Seizing upon Cortés’s own estimate that the Aztecs sacrificed three to four thousand per year, on the one hand, and scholarly estimates of seventy-five thousand public executions in England between 1530 and 1630, on the other, he offers a comparison.

At the time, [England’s] population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortés estimated for the empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to [Fernand] Braudel.
Mann, 1491, 134.

Mann’s assertion deserves scrutiny for his assumption that a larger population would have an equivalent proportion of candidates for execution. Moreover, his arithmetic relies on a rough estimate of Mesoamerica’s population twenty percent greater than the twenty-five million estimate of Sherburne Cook and Woodrow Wilson Borah (see citation at "Population and Demography"). But even a much larger margin of error does not negate his point that the spectacle of killing in Mesoamerica was not foreign to European conquistadors and colonists. Indeed, Mann’s statement is not altogether inconsistent with Hanson’s assertion early in his book.

I am not interested here in whether European military culture is morally superior to, or far more wretched than, that of the non-West. The conquistadors, who put an end to human sacrifice and torture on the Great Pyramid in Mexico City, sailed from a society reeling from the Grand Inquisition and the ferocious Reconquista, and left a diseased and nearly ruined New World in their wake.
Hanson, Carnage and Culture, 6.

Victor Davis Hanson on Iraq

Washington is an echo chamber. One pundit, one senator, one reporter proclaim a snazzy “truth” and almost immediately it reverberates as gospel. Conventional wisdom about Iraq is rarely questioned. A notion seems to find validity not on its logic or through empirical evidence, but simply by the degree to which it is repeated and felt to resonate.
Victor Davis Hanson, “Conventionally Ignorant: The same old simplicities about Iraq,” National Review Online

Thanks to Spinning Clio for highlighting Victor Hanson’s article. He takes issue with the predictions, analyses, and pre-historical assessments of spinsters whose perceptions change from day to day. It would be difficult to counter the truth of his opening shot above, or in the final paragraph:

In conclusion, we do know of one assertion about Iraq that really is true. The conventional wisdom of pundits, reporters, and politicians is predicated on their own daily perceptions of whether we are winning or losing the war—and thus what they say is true today they may well say is not tomorrow.
Hanson, “Conventionally Ignorant”

However, Hanson also echoes a common element proclaimed by supporters of President Bush’s policies. He begins his article with a caution against “snazzy truths,” but ends in the penultimate paragraph putting forth a snazzy line written by the spinsters in the White House public relations mill.

That we haven’t had another September 11th, while bin Laden’s popularity has plummeted in the Islamic Middle East—if both trends continue—will factor positively in any analysis.
Victor Davis Hanson, “Conventionally Ignorant”

September 11, 2001 was a momentous event with no precedent. There should be no reasonable expectation that it would happen again in the near future. The point that it has not been repeated clarifies the nature of the event rather than the success or failure of the actions it catalyzed.

Among the few events akin to the significance of 9/11, we might include the unprecedented use of nuclear weapons by the United States in August 1945. The Bomb was a new weapon, and it has not been employed since. But the deployment of nuclear devices came to dominate international relations through the next forty-five years, and remains a vital aspect of issues today. Do we assess the effects of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the basis that cities have not again been laid waste in the same manner? (Apologies to the sailors on the Lucky Dragon, residents of Paiute villages in Nevada, Karen Silkwood, ...)

A Note on Method

Yesterday, I gave my money to Victor Davis Hanson and a big box retailer. While doing some holiday shopping at the mall, I bought Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (2001) for myself. Hanson’s book has earned mixed reviews, but rose to the top of my reading list due to its centrality in an argument put forth by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen in A Patriot’s History (2004). I noted several days ago:

Schweikart and Allen offer an explanation of the success of Cortés, and by extension all Europeans, that emphasizes mobility (horses and ships), the economic power of Europe ("wealth made possible the shipping and equipping of large, trained, well-armed forces" [7]), and social organization. This third factor, "the glue that held it all together" (7), they argue is novel and interesting, and of central importance to their conservative ideology. It merits a separate post.
Stripes, “Practicing Objectivity,” Patriots and Peoples

Schweikart and Allen explain the factor that I summed as “social organization” thus:

But these two factors were magnified by a third element—the glue that held it all together—which was a western way of combat that emphasized group cohesion of free citizens. Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, Cortés’s Castilians fought from a long tradition of tactical adaptation based on individual freedom, civic rights, and a “preference for shock battle of heavy infantry” that “grew out of consensual government, equality among the middling classes,” and other distinctly Western traits that gave nemerically inferior European armies a decisive edge.
Schweikart and Allen, A Patriot’s History, 7.

The quotations in this extract, as well as the argument itself, originate in Victor Davis Hanson, Carnage and Culture. At the very least, my assessment of A Patriot’s History requires me to study Hanson’s first chapter, wherein he lays out his thesis in detail; chapter six, which explains the success of Cortés in Tenochtitlán; and the epilogue.

Reading Footnotes

I cannot read a book straight through except on the first reading, which is really skimming even when I read every word—something I tell my students is rarely needed with the history texts that I assign. Merely getting through the story an author puts forth is not reading except in the most general sense of the term. Rather, reading is rereading. Rereading requires probing, questioning, digging, and the piggybacking of additional texts. Every book or article opens more texts that must be tasted, chewed, savored, and swallowed or spat out (see Francis Bacon, “Of Studies”).

In terms of my reading practice, this distinction between the first reading (skimming) and the perusal called rereading is an artificial one. In the aisles of the bookstore, I start with the footnotes.

Superior European Technology

Colonial Firearms

Assertions of European technological superiority appeal to our common sense. We know that guns are better than bows and arrows, and when we read some of the primary sources from the colonial era we encounter numerous references to the enthusiasm of American indigenes for firearms. Indians wanted guns, Europeans needed gold or furs or food—exchanges were made.

As he became the first European to sail around the island on the west coast of North America that now bears his name, Captain George Vancouver found several groups of Native that had acquired firearms before they had seen a European. Certainly his observations support the notion that guns were valued by North American Indians.

In the afternoon [17 July 1792] we were visited by two canoes, having a musket, with all necessary appurtenances in each. … it would appear that the inhabitants of this particular part are amply provided with these formidable weapons.”
George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery, vol. 2 (1801), 264

The guns Vancouver saw, as well as those he had available for trade were far superior to those available in the sixteenth century, but not yet as good as those about which Ulysses S. Grant would complain more than seventy years later. Writing in his memoirs about the capture of Vicksburg, Grant wrote:

The small-arms of the enemy were far superior to the bulk of ours. Up to this time our troops at the West had been limited to the old United States flint-lock muskets changed into percussion, or the Belgian musket imported early in the war—almost as dangerous to the person firing it as to the one aimed at—and a few new and imported arms.
Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant (Library of America, 1990), 384

Virginia 1607

Our common sense understanding of the superiority of European firearms runs so deep that most of us experience no cognitive dissonance when we watch scenes such as my favorite from Disney’s Pocahontas (1995). John Smith is under a waterfall when he first encounters the voluptuous Indian maiden. As she sneaks up on him as a panther might, he slowly turns and points his matchlock. The tension is broken before he fires the weapon, and this resolution benefits him because the open flame required by his gun would have been extinguished as quickly as it was lit.

Smith lacked Diamond matches that he could strike on his denim, and also lacked the denim. Nor was Smith in possession of a Zippo with its patented protection from the elements. Even if he managed to light the wick which the serpentine (the lock) delivers to the flash pan, it would not continue burning under such moist conditions. If Smith’s protection had depended upon his firearm, and Pocahontas had been hostile, he would have died a long time before he could write and repeatedly revise his Generall Historie of Virginia (1630) that spawned the misreadings and fabrications which in turn facilitated the myths propagated by the Disney cartoon.

Smith published The Proceedings of the English Colonie in Virginia (1606-1612) in 1612 and The Generall History of Virginia, the Somer Iles, and New England in 1623. The former lacks his story of the rescue by Pocahontas, which first appears in the latter. Pocahontas died in 1617. There also is good reason to believe that Smith had read an almost identical story of the experience of Juan Ortiz who had come to Florida in 1528 in search of the missing Panfilo de Narváez. His story of rescue by an Indian maiden—Ulele was her name—whose father was prepared to roast him over a fire was published in accounts of the De Soto expedition. See chapter IX of the account of The Gentleman of Elvas.

Smith might have used a more expensive wheelock, which would not require an open flame but would still fail under a waterfall. Wheelocks had been available since the mid-sixteenth century, but never became as popular with soldiers as the matchlock. A good discussion of seventeenth century British weapons is available at the Plymouth Archaeological Rediscovery Project. The world’s library offers many other sources of reliable information regarding seventeenth century firearms, including the story of a project of replica manufacturing and a newspaper story (PDF) concerned with the film The New World (2005), another Smith-Pocahontas saga.

Correction (14 Dec 2007): My brother phoned to take issue with some inaccuracies in my initial description of the mechanism of Captain Smith's firearm. I have corrected these errors.


Florida 1528

In their failed attempt to conquer the land Juan Ponce de León had named Flowery Easter (Pascua Florida), the men under the command of Panfilo de Narváez were nearly helpless against the arrows of the Indians. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca was the highest ranking survivor of this failure. In his La Relación, first published in 1542, he recalled those traumatic days of 1528:

Good armor did no good against arrows in this skirmish. There were men who swore they had seen two red oaks, each the thickness of a man’s calf, pierced from side to side by arrows this day; which is no wonder when you consider the power and skill the Indians can deliver them with. I myself saw an arrow buried half a foot in a poplar trunk.
Cabeza de Vaca, Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, trans. and ed. by Cyclone Covey (1998), 42

Despite its collapsed chronology, the 1991 film Cabeza de Vaca by Nicolás Echevarría captures this scene well. One moment the Spanish are cutting their way through the flora and the next they are being cut to pieces by a rain of arrows coming in fast and thick. They flee, although a great many are killed.


Mexico 1519-1521

Before his death in the failed effort to conquer Florida, Narváez had failed in another enterprise. With orders reminiscent of those given much later to Charles Marlow (Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness) and Captain Willard (Francis Ford Cuppola, Apocalypse Now) to go after the renegade Kurtz, Narváez was ordered to capture or kill Hernando Cortés, who had disobeyed orders. This part of the story of the conquest of Tenochtitlán is obscured in Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen’s A Patriot’s History. They tell us that Spanish military technology—guns and tactics—“made any single Spanish soldier the equal of several poorly armed natives” (7). They tell us that Narváez’s “force of 600, including cooks, colonists, and women” was able to “overcome native Mexican armies outnumbering them two, three, and even ten times at any particular time” (7). They do not tell us that Cortés was able to overcome Narváez with a smaller army, nor do they tell us why he did so. In any case, the reinforcements from the captured army of Narváez and their Tlaxcalan allies returned to Tenochtitlán where they suffered astounding defeat on Noche Triste (melancholy night), returned a third time and laid seige , and finally overcame the great Aztec empire.

Mexico was born as Cortés put himself in place of Montezuma and his heirs in the now destroyed city.


Wars of the Iroquois 1648-1652

In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Iroquois all but destroyed the Huron, their traditional enemies. Many historians that have narrated these events have attributed the Iroquois success to the so-called 400 guns of the Mohawks, which allegedly they had acquired through trade with the Dutch. Brian J. Given investigated these claims, and published his findings in “The Iroquois Wars and Native Firearms,” in Bruce Alden Cox, ed., Native People, Native Lands: Canadian Indians, Inuit and Metis (1988).

Given notes, “[t]he premise that the European harquebuses of the seventeenth century were vastly superior to aboriginal projectile weapons is pervasive in the literature” (3). In his examination of these claims he set up field tests firing at a target measuring 2’ x 6,’ finding 50 to 75 yards the maximum range at which it could be hit when stationary “under ideal conditions” (10). In his summary of the bow vs. seventeenth century firearms, he points out the native bow had six times the rate of fire, could be reloaded while crouching (extremely difficult to do with a muzzle loaded firearm), and had an effective range of at least 100 yards. The bow could penetrate armour, and was accurate.

Bows never blow up and seldom misfire; the musket does both. A 20 to 50 percent misfire rate is usual in good weather under field conditions. In the lightest of rains the flint-lock becomes virtually useless, where the performance of the bow is little affected.
Brian J. Given, “The Iroquois Wars and Native Firearms,” 10

A New Thesis

In 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, Charles C. Mann offers a cogent summary of what he had learned from reading various secondary accounts of colonization. Mann states:

It is true that European technology dazzled Native Americans on first encounter. But the relative positions of the two sides were closer than commonly believed. Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically inferior to the British—or, rather, that terms like “superior” and “inferior” do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology.
Mann, 1491, 63.

The terms inferior and superior do not apply. Indeed, they cloud our judgment. The exchanges that began on Watling Island in 1492 and continued to be initiated again and again for more than three centuries were complex exchanges. Each side found itself attracted to or repulsed by cultural elements and technologies of the Other; each side was transformed through the encounter.