Revival: History of the Conquest of Mexico (1886)

With a Preliminary View of the Ancient Mexican Civilisation and the Life of the Conqueror, Hernando Cortes

William Prescott, John Foster Kirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138551749
• eBook ISBN: 9781351340564
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

A dramatic account of the conquest of Mexico, from first contact with the Aztec civilisation through to Cortes' expulsion and subsequent career. The book is not only interesting for the historic content withe relevance to Latin America to this day, but also as a notable example of historical scholarship and of English literature in general.

Appendix.

PART I.

ORIGIN OF THE MEXICAN CIVILIZATION.

Origin of the Mexican Civilization.—Analogies With The Old World

WHEN the Europeans first touched the shores of America, it was as if they had alighted on another planet,—everything there was so different from what they had before seen. They were introduced to new varieties of plants, and to unknown races of animals; while man, the lord of all, was equally strange, in complexion, language, and institutions.¹ It was what they emphatically styled it,—a New World. Taught by their faith to derive all created beings from one source, they felt a natural perplexity as to the manner in which these distant and insulated regions could have obtained their inhabitants. The same curiosity was felt by their countrymen at home, and the European scholars bewildered their brains with speculations on the best way of solving this interesting problem.

In accounting for the presence of animals there, some imagined that the two hemispheres might once have been joined in the extreme north, so as to have afforded an easy communication.² Others, embarrassed by the difficulty of transporting inhabitants of the tropics across the Arctic regions, revived the old story of Plato’s Atlantis, that huge island, now submerged, which might have stretched from the shores of Africa to the eastern borders of the new continent;³ while they saw vestiges of a similar convulsion of nature in the green islands sprinkled over the Pacific, once the mountain summits of a vast continent, now buried beneath the waters.⁴ Some, distrusting the existence of revolutions of which no record was preserved, supposed that animals might have found their way across the ocean by various means; the birds of stronger wing by flight over the narrowest spaces; while the tamer kinds of quadrupeds might easily have been transported by men in boats, and even the more ferocious, as tigers, bears, and the like, have been brought over, in the same manner, when young, “for amusement and the pleasure of the chase!”⁵ Others, again, maintained the equally probable opinion that angels, who had, doubtless, taken charge of them in the Ark, had also superintended their distribution afterwards over the different parts of the globe.⁶ Such were the extremities to which even thinking minds were reduced, in their eagerness to reconcile the literal interpretation of Scripture with the phenomena of nature! The philosophy of a later day conceives that it is no departure from this sacred authority to follow the suggestions of science, by referring the new tribes of animals to a creation, since the Deluge, in those places for which they were clearly intended by constitution and habits.⁷

Man would not seem to present the same embarrassments, in the discussion, as the inferior orders. He is fitted by nature for every climate, the burning sun of the tropics and the icy atmosphere of the North. He wanders indifferently over the sands of the desert, the waste of polar snows, and the pathless ocean. Neither mountains nor seas intimidate him, and, by the aid of mechanical contrivances, he accomplishes journeys which birds of boldest wing would perish in attempting. Without ascending to the high northern latitudes, where the continents of Asia and America approach within fifty miles of each other, it would be easy for the inhabitant of Eastern Tartary or Japan to steer his canoe from islet to islet, quite across to the American shore, without ever being on the ocean more than two days at a time.⁸ The communication is somewhat more difficult on the Atlantic side. But even there, Iceland was occupied by colonies of Europeans many hundred years before the discovery by Columbus; and the transit from Iceland to America is comparatively easy.⁹ Independently of these channels, others were opened in the Southern hemisphere, by means of the numerous islands in the Pacific. The population of America is not nearly so difficult a problem as that of these little spots. But experience shows how practicable the communication may have been, even with such sequestered places.¹⁰ The savage has been picked up in his canoe, after drifting hundreds of leagues on the open ocean, and sustaining life, for months, by the rain from heaven, and such fish as he could catch.¹¹ The instances are not very rare; and it would be strange if these wandering barks should not sometimes have been intercepted by the great continent which stretches across the globe, in unbroken continuity, almost from pole to pole. No doubt, history could reveal to us more than one example of men who, thus driven upon the American shores, have mingled ...

Table of contents

• Book I. Introductin.—View of the Aztec Civilization
• Book II. Discovery of Mexico
• Book III. March to Mexico
• Book IV. Residence in Mexico
• Book V. Expulsion from Mexico
• Book VI. Siege and Surrender of Mexico
• Book VII. Conclusion—Subsequent Career of Cortés
• Appendix.