'Many expert narrators'1: History and fiction in the Spanish chronicles of the
New World
B.W. Ife, R.T.C. Goodwin
Michael McKeon has drawn attention to a central characteristic of the theory of the
novel, namely 'the premise that the novel, the quintessentially modern genre, is
deeply intertwined with the historicity of the modern period, of modernity itself.'2
But the modernity of the novel does not emerge at a particular place or point in time.
The papers presented at this conference have underlined the differential rate at which
modernity can be shown to have emerged across and beyond western Europe over a
period of at least three centuries.3
This paper focuses on a key moment in the
evolution of western consciousness, one with a particular significance for the origins
of the novel in Spain: the 'discovery' of America and the subsequent growth of
writing about America in Spain and abroad. If we were looking for a single event which
shifted western consciousness irreversibly towards the modern, that event would
undoubtedly be the encounter of 1492 and its aftermath. In this paper, and in the
broader project which underlies it, we ask how that shift in consciousness was
conceived and communicated in the language of fiction.
The Spanish contribution to the rise of the novel is rarely considered to extend
beyond the work of Cervantes. But the role of pioneer or precursor into which
Cervantes has invariably been cast contradicts what we know of Spanish literary
history in the early modern period. For hispanists, Cervantes has always marked the
culmination of over a century of experiment in prose fiction which began in the early
1490s, and embraced a wide range of genres, not just the sentimental and the chivalric.
There were pastoral novels and picaresque, revivals of Greek romance, novels set on
the boundaries of Christianity and Islam, short stories in the Italian and oriental
modes, wisdom narratives, prose satires, humanistic dialogues, and so on. At least one
major example of each of the genres which made up the warp and weft of Cervantes's
fiction around 1600 had been published in Spain by the accession of Philip II in 1556,
and in the case of the most popular genres, many tens of titles were published, in
scores of editions, before Don Quijote ever saw the light of day.
For a long time it has been unacceptable, in English, to call some of these fictional
types and genres 'novels'. Spaniards have cheerfully used the
term novela to refer to
long and short fiction in both realist and escapist modes ever since the sixteenth
century; but none of the works that influenced Cervantes look very much like the
classic realist novel described by Ian Watt.4
Nevertheless, Spanish prose fiction from
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries represents a very early flowering of the novel by
comparison with other European countries, particularly England, and it is reasonable
to ask why.5
There are a number of necessary conditions for the production of vernacular prose
fiction which were met in early modern Spain: the codification of Castilian by Nebrija
in 1492, and the systematic use of Castilian by the Catholic monarchs to build a
unified culture within the peninsula; a burgeoning printing industry; a growing
education system capable of producing a literate community; and a wealthy elite, in
which women figured prominently, with the money to buy books and the leisure to
read them. But Spain was not alone in being able to meet these conditions. Other
European countries codified and promoted the vernacular, established schools and
universities, set up printing houses, and bought and read books for pleasure.
But there are two factors which might qualify as sufficient conditions for the
early growth of the novel in Spain: one is religion and the other is the possession of an
overseas empire. Again, Spain was not the only Catholic country in Europe, although
a detailed comparison of Catholic and Protestant print cultures in Spain and England
would undoubtedly help to explain the differential rates of growth, and the contrasting
roles and status, of vernacular prose fiction in northern and southern Europe.6
As far
as America was concerned, however, Spain and Portugal probably were exceptional, at
least for the late fifteenth century and most of the sixteenth. It is true that other
countries, not least England, had overseas possessions, but there was a marked
difference in the rate and extent with which the colonies were settled. Nearly a century
separates the earliest Spanish colonies in the Caribbean from the first English
settlement at Roanoke in 1587; more than a century if we compare the founding of
Isabela in 1493, or even Santo Domingo in 1496, with that of Jamestown in 1607.
More important for our purpose is the fact that America had a much greater
impact on the Spanish imagination, much earlier, than it seems to have done in
England. This is partly a function of chronology: the first account of the English
experience in America did not come until 1588, in the shape of Thomas Harriot's Brief
and true report of the new found land of Virginia. But the main difference was as much
cultural as chronological: the Spaniards (including Columbus) wrote extensively about
the American experience. It is a commonplace that the Spanish empire was one of the
most bureaucratic undertakings known to man, and hardly a step was taken, hardly a
path slashed through virgin jungle, without a permit being issued, a government official
or a notary being present, and a report made back to headquarters. From the outset,
the Spaniards were simply used to the idea of writing everything down.
As a result, Spain has a rich literature of discovery and conquest which can be
summarised under four heads: eye-witness accounts of the conquistadores (Columbus,
Cortés, Bernal Díaz); early ethnographies compiled by friars who carried out the so-
called 'spiritual conquest' (Motolinia, Sahagún); works of synthesis by humanist
historians (Peter Martyr, Oviedo, López de Gómara); and the vast polemical literature
about the legal and moral implications of conquest (Las Casas and Sepúlveda). And for
every one of these works which was published at the time, there were many more
which were only published much later.7
Each of these writers had his own agenda: for the men of action, it was how to
secure recognition and reward while operating at the edge of the known world; for the
friars it was how to record and interpret the surviving fragments of the pre-Columbian
world so as more effectively to spread the word of God; for the historians and
moralists, it was a question of making sense and working out what was the right thing
to do. But all, in their different ways, were grappling with incommensurability. Even
for those writers who went there and saw everything with their own eyes, the gulf
between the world they knew and the world they had discovered was so great that it
could barely be bridged. Hence Cortés, in his second Carta de
relación, addressed to
Charles V on 30 October 1520:
in order to give an account to Your Royal Excellency of the magnificence,
the strange and marvelous things of this great city of Temixtitan and of the
dominion and wealth of this Mutezuma...and of the rites and customs...and of
the order there is in the government...I would need much time and many expert
narrators [muchos relatores y muy expertos]. I cannot describe one hundredth
part of all the things which could be mentioned, but, as best I can, I will describe
some of those I have seen which, although badly described, will, I well know, be
so remarkable as not to be believed, for we who saw them with our own eyes
could not grasp them with our understanding.8
Some of this is formulaic, (Columbus, Las Casas and even Oviedo9
make similar
points), but in among the ritual self-deprecation there is a network of genuine
frustrations: I can't describe it, and even if I could you wouldn't believe me, and I'm
not certain I understand it myself. One thing is clear, though: bridging the gulf of
understanding and communication will require expertise, skill, art.
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The contention that there might be a link between these two sets of
circumstances' rich vein of prose fiction on the one hand, and a rich
literature about the American experience on the other's not a new one.
The notion that they are somehow linked was there at the outset. There
is the fact that California was named after an island in a chivalric
novel (Las sergas de Esplandián, 1510); there is
Bernal Díaz's celebrated comparison of the Mexica capital
Tenochtitlan to the enchantments of the books of Amadís; there is
the way that the historians of the conquest all claim to be writing true
history (historia verdadera), not fiction. And there
are the constant links drawn by critics, from Irving Leonard's
Books of the Brave (Cambridge, Mass. 1949) to
Carlos Fuentes's much-repeated view that chroniclers such as Cortés
were 'not only our first historians, but our first novelists'.
But to sense that there might be a link is not necessarily to understand its nature. A
possible framework for investigating this relationship may be found in the opening
chapters of Anthony Pagden's excellent book European encounters with the new
world (New Haven and London 1993). Although the relationship between history and
fiction is not Pagden's primary concern, he is clearly aware that the key challenge for
the discoverers and the chroniclers was linguistic: how to make the voice carry across
an ocean which formed an implacable barrier between incommensurable worlds.
Pagden's analysis is subtle, and it would be difficult to do it full justice in a brief
introduction; but two concepts are important. One is what he calls the 'principle of
attachment', and the other he calls 'the autoptic imagination'.
The 'principle of attachment' is the process by which something familiar is
'attached' to something unfamiliar in order to assimilate and possess the unfamiliar.
But attachment often entails detachment; the new and the unfamiliar are wrenched out
of their original context. An example of attachment and detachment at work (not taken
from Pagden) might be Cortés's use of the word mezquita ('mosque') to refer to Aztec
temples. The word is entirely inappropriate in many ways, not least architectural, but
it is an effective way of situating Aztec religious observance with reference to
Christianity, and thereby justifying Cortés's subsequent iconoclasm. But the process
of attachment simultaneously detaches the Aztec cu from what is essential about
native religious observance, namely that it took place in the open air, and at the apex
of a pyramid.
As Pagden illustrates, the principle of attachment was widely used by Europeans
in America to assimilate the unknown to the known, and because the act of
assimilation was very often part of a process of communication, the conquistadores
were obliged to develop effective strategies as writers. Naming things entailed grasping
them intellectually and politically, but it also meant giving them substance in the
minds of the audience back home. In this they were doing just what writers of fiction
do, particularly when the reality they could see and were struggling to capture
consisted of what Bernal Díaz called 'things never heard of nor even dreamed of'
(cosas nunca oídas, ni aun soñadas). Both kinds of writers are dependent on familiar
concepts and lexis to give substance to the products of the imagination.
Not surprisingly, we can show this process at work in one of the founding texts
of the discoveries, the so-called Diario or 'Journal' of Columbus's 1492 voyage as
paraphrased by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas during the 1520s, and in
the two letters which Columbus wrote in February 1493 during the return voyage, one
to Luis de Santángel and the other, recently discovered, to the Catholic Monarchs.10
By carefully following the development of Columbus's conceptual and linguistic
practice during the first voyage, we can see how he attaches pre-supposition to
observation and as a consequence invents the cannibal.11
The news of Columbus's first voyage spread quickly throughout Europe with the
widespread publication of a letter supposedly written by Columbus to a Spanish
court official, Luis de Santángel.12
In this letter Columbus makes clear that, for him
and his contemporaries, medieval and classical notions of the Orient were fable, not
fact (Ife, Letters, p. 63):
Although these lands may have been spoken or written of, that was all
conjecture, without eye-witness, and those who heard the stories listened to
them and judged them more as fables than as having the least vestige of
truth.
This assertion comes at the end of a brief discussion about the existence of
monstrous races in the New World, in which he explains that (p.59-61):
until now I have not found any monstrous men, as many expected [...], nor
heard of any except on an island [...] which is inhabited by people who are held
in all the islands to be very ferocious and who eat human flesh.
These men are the cannibals, although the letter does not use this word. In the
letter Columbus is careful to distinguish between his own experience as an eye-
witness ('I have not found any monstrous men') and what he thinks the indians
believe ('people who are held [...] to be very ferocious and who eat human flesh'). But
in practice the two are elided. After all, the Spaniards and the indians could barely
communicate, and the beliefs which Columbus attributes to the indians are located
largely in his own, old-world mind. It is precisely this belief that forms the basis of
Columbus's new mythology of the Caribbean, and by looking closely at the daily
entries in the Diario it is possible to see how the
principle of attachment operated and Columbus's new mythology emerged.
In the prologue to the Diario Columbus confirmed that his main aim was to make
contact with the Great Khan.13
This aim comes to the fore once the ships have
arrived in the Caribbean: Columbus refers to the Great Khan 12 times between 12
October and 11 December, but then makes no further mention of the subject.
Nevertheless, this early focus on the search for the Great Khan determined to a large
extent the way Columbus interpreted the reality before his eyes, even as he responded
to changes in that reality on a daily basis.
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On his first day in the Caribbean, 12 October, Columbus noticed scars on the
bodies of some indians. He asked about these and the indians made signs that
suggested to him that they were the victims of aggressors. He concluded that the
attackers came from the mainland to take the indians captive.14
Given that the
Spaniards and indians could hardly understand one another, the idea that the people
who took the indians came from the mainland almost certainly originated with
Columbus himself. He already had a fixed idea about what he would find and he
proved himself willing to read this into whatever signs the indians made.15
The extent to which the Spaniards' understanding of the indians was dependent
on the search for the Great Khan is made clear by the entries which describe the arrival
and first days on Cuba. Columbus initially understood the indians to be telling him
that the Great Khan was known as 'cavila' (1 November, p.65) and sent merchants to
Cuba.16
Other members of the expedition reached the conclusion that they had
arrived at the mainland, that Cuba was the name of a city, and that the local king was
at war with the Great Khan, whom they called 'Cami'.17
How far Columbus believed these interpretations is uncertain: the text of the
journal suggests that he had reason to be doubtful. He maintains that the people on
that part of Cuba were at war with the Great Khan, yet he can also write shortly
afterwards that they were 'very gentle and very timorous [ɝ without weapons and
without laws' (4 November, p.69). Added to this uncertainty there was confusion
over the expedition's exact location. His sextant appeared to have failed, and on three
occasions he recorded an impossibly northerly position, adding to the general sense of
disorientation.
Needing an excuse for a rest, the expedition spent a week at a good natural
harbour, making repairs to the ships (5-12 November). An unsuccessful embassy
went inland in search of the Great Khan, resulting in further disappointment. The fact
that all the sailors were ashore also offered the opportunity for unrest amongst them:
the captain of the Pinta, Martín Alonso Pinzón was an able lieutenant, but there was
friction between him and Columbus from the start. Ten days after leaving this haven,
Pinzón abandoned Columbus and did not reappear until January 6. During November,
then, Columbus was clearly under extreme pressure: his men were mutinous, he had as
yet found nothing of any real value to justify his expedition, he had no concrete lead
to follow, and he had good reason to be uncertain of any information provided by the
indians because of the language problem.
The journal entries describing the first month spent in the Caribbean portray
Columbus as making a rational attempt to find the Great Khan, but also betray a
tendency to fit empirical evidence to a priori assumptions.
His eye-witness account at
times seems more a quasi-fictional narrative in which the products of his imagination
are portrayed as fact. During the period leading up to the desertion by Pinzón
Columbus increasingly describes the external world in terms of his internal
expectations. It is a process of retreat that he also acts out physically by spending
some days exploring a large lagoon which he named the Sea of Our Lady, where (14
November, p. 81-83):
he saw so many islands that he could not count all of them, all of good size
and very high lands, full of a thousand different kinds of trees and an infinite
number of palms. He marvelled greatly at seeing so many islands and so high,
and [ɝ it seems to him that there can be no higher mountains in the world [...],
nor any so beautiful and clear, without cloud or snow and with such deep
waters at their foot. And he says that he believes that these are the innumerable
islands which appear on world maps at the eastern edge [...] there were great
riches and precious stones and spices on them, and that they extend a long way
to the south and spread out in every direction [...] Some of them seem to reach
the sky and are pointed like diamonds; others form a sort of table at their
highest peak and at their foot the water is very deep.
Columbus uses literary language to describe the marvels of this lagoon, but the
extent to which he is fictionalising the external reality is clearest in his suggestion that
these are the quasi-mythological islands that appear on the medieval world maps and
in the writings of Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo. The mythology of these
islands included one that was inhabited by a man-eating race with the faces and heads
of dogs; another was populated by one-eyed men; and another was visited by
merchants with their cargoes of young children who were sold as food to man-eaters.
According to Marco Polo there were 7,448 of these islands,18
and on all the maps
they occupied thousands of square miles of ocean; yet Columbus claims to have
located them in a single lagoon on the coast of Cuba.
It is around this time that man-eaters first appear in Columbus's journal and the
plausible becomes ever more influenced by the fabulous. On Sunday 4 November he
understands from a group of indians that 'far away there were men with one eye, and
others with a dog's snout, who ate men, and on capturing one would cut his throat and
drink the blood and cut off his genitals' (p.69).
However, by 23 November, perhaps brought back to his senses by the desertion
of the Pinta, and in an entry in which the word 'caníbales' is used for the first time,
Columbus offers a rational interpretation of what he thinks he has been told. Some
indians tell him about 'people there with one eye in their forehead, and others called
cannibals of whom they appeared to be in great fear. And when they saw that he was
taking this course he said that they were speechless with fear that they would be
eaten' (p.91).
Columbus assimilates this to his long-standing idea that the more primitive
indians were taken captive by sophisticated people: he proposes that the aggressors
took captives who were never seen again and that this was why the indians believed
that their fellows had been eaten. At this stage Columbus does not state that these
civilised raiders are agents of the Great Khan, although the implication is there; he
makes that relationship explicit three days later19
and then reaffirms this belief on 11 December.20
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As in the letter to Luis de Santángel quoted earlier, Columbus holds two
conflicting ideas in his mind. On the one hand he consistently says that he does not
believe that the 'caniba' are man-eaters,21
partly because he is inherently resistant to
the idea of man-eating, but mostly because he was associating the aggressive mainland
with the Great Khan, who was known to be civilised. On the other hand two key
concepts were clearly linked in his mind: the aggressive 'others' called the 'caniba',
and the monstrous races that the old world imagination associated with the
cynocephali, cyclopes and anthropophagi of classical literature. What held these two
concepts apart was a third: the fabulous wealth and high culture of the Great Khan. If
the Great Khan were removed from the equation there would be nothing to stop the
anthropophagi being attached to the 'caniba', and nothing to stop the fabulous from
becoming real. This, in a sense, is precisely what was about to happen.
On 11 December Columbus was still certain that the 'caniba' were the people of
the Great Khan. It seems extraordinary, then, that he makes no further mention of the
Great Khan in the Diario, nor in his letter to Santángel. He abandons all mention of the
central purpose of his mission without so much as a word. The explanation lies in the
events that take place at the next island he visits, Española (English 'Hispaniola', now
the island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and the stressful circumstances in
which he once again finds himself.
The background to Columbus's shift in perspective was his relationship with a
tribal leader on Española, called Guacanagarí. Columbus styles this man a king with a
court, using language drawn from classical sources, despite the fact that reading
between the lines we can see that he is a primitive cacique
with tenuous control over a
limited number of people.22
In this aggrandising process we can see Columbus
transfering some of the hopes and desires he had placed in the Great Khan onto
Guacanagarí.
But then, on Christmas Eve, disaster struck: the Santamaría drifted into shallow
water and was sunk. The crew and cargo were saved thanks to the intervention of
Guacanagarí and, under pressure, Columbus exuberantly describes the actions and the
benevolence of the indians just as he had waxed lyrical about the Sea of Our Lady.23
He writes: 'I believe that there are no better people in the world and no better land.
They love their neighbours as themselves, and have the softest speech in the world
and are docile and always laughing' (p. 161). Without the Pinta and without the
Santamaría there were too many men to be able to return to Spain aboard the Niña and
he was forced to establish a settlement and leave some men behind. This made it
necessary to form an alliance with Guacanagarí, to whom Columbus already owed a
great personal debt.
Guacanagarí also seems to have appreciated the potential of this relationship and
knowing that what Columbus wanted was gold he provided a fair amount.
Columbus's attitude to the 'caniba' now changes completely: after dining with his
new friend Guacanagarí Columbus orders a demonstration of archery which brings up
the subject of the 'people from Caniba whom they call Caribs and who come to
capture them and carry bows and arrows' (p.165). In order to strengthen the alliance
Columbus explains to Guacanagarí using signs 'that the Monarchs of Castile would
order the Caribs to be destroyed and brought to them with their hands tied' (p.
165).
We should remember that until now Columbus apparently thought that the
'caniba', who from now on are referred to in the Journal as 'caribs', were one and the
same thing as the people of the Great Khan. His brief was to conduct a peaceful
embassy to this ruler, and yet he now enters into an alliance which would, by that
earlier understanding, put Castile at war with the Great Khan.
In this way Columbus was forced to abandon the idea that the 'caniba', or caribs,
had anything to do with the Great Khan. The incident that seals the Khan's fate and
brings the cannibal to the fore takes place on 13 January as Columbus is coasting
Española to the east on the first leg of his return journey. His men bring an indian back
to the boat and Columbus describes the man, in Las Casas's summary, as 'very ugly
to look at, more so than others he had seen. His face was all blackened with charcoal
[...] His hair was very long and drawn back and tied behind and gathered in a little net
of parrot feathers, and he was naked as the others. The Admiral thought he must be
one of the man-eating Caribs' (p.191-193).24
This encounter ends in a skirmish with
about 55 aggressive indians who are similarly dressed. Despite this, Columbus is still
not prepared to state categorically that these indians were indeed caribs. There is still
uncertainty in his mind and it is at this point that the races of old-world mythology
reappear in the Journal. Over the course of the entries for Monday 14 January and
Wednesday 16 he develops the idea that the caribs live near to an island that is only
populated by women, eventually explaining that the caribs arrive once a year to father
the children of the women and to take away the unwanted boys (p.201). The story is
derived from Herodotus's account of the Scythians and the Amazons, although
Columbus mis-attributes to the Scythians the cannibalistic practices of their
neighbours, whom Pliny calls the Casiri.
It is likely that at this point Columbus was again under particular stress at a time
when he starts to make reference to monstrous races and man-eating peoples: he was
heading for home having lost control of the Pinta, with his flagship sunk, having allied
himself to a primitive cacique, and having only found a limited amount of gold.
Moreover, Martín Alonso Pinzón claimed to have found gold on Española, and
Columbus ran the very real risk that his rival would arrive home first and claim the
prize for himself. Just before he reached the edge of the known world on his return
journey, things were to get worse. By the second week of February Columbus and his
pilots had little idea where they were and the Pinta had again disappeared. Then on 15
February Columbus was almost wrecked by a violent storm off the Azores. At the
height of the storm Columbus wrote to the Catholic Monarchs, wrapped the letter in
oil-cloth, put it in a barrel, and threw it overboard.
The idea of man-eating peoples had been sown in Columbus's mind in November,
but he dismissed it as local mythology. This inkling develops into a potent image at
the time of Columbus's alliance with Guacanagarí, which is then given almost tangible
form with the meeting with the ugly indian who is painted black. The process by
which the category 'anthropophagi' is attached to the name 'caníbal' has its
counterpart in the way the Great Khan disappears from the account. The key
moments in the process by which old-world myths were transformed into the
enduring image of the New World cannibal come at times when Columbus is under
great stress and he seems to be at his most imaginative. These are moments when he
stops trying to record fact and, drawing on fictional and fabulous models, starts to
write what can reasonably be described as fiction.
The attachment of old-world mythical and fictional models onto new-world
realities is a constant feature of early colonial writing as the eye-witnesses struggle to
bridge the gaps between what they saw, what they understood and what they could
communicate. Having in his mind collapsed the new-world 'caniba' and the old-world
man-eaters to create the new category of the cannibal, Columbus had to plant that idea
firmly and authoritatively in the minds of his absent readers. He was helped to an
extent by the fact that he brought his 1492 account back with him; others, like Cortés,
had to achieve similar feats of communication entirely at a distance, conjuring vivid
images of the unimaginable in reports which were not brought back, but sent back in
his absence.
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The issue of narrative authority is one which Anthony Pagden discusses in his
book under the heading 'the autoptic imagination'. As Pagden points out, the discovery
and its associated literature cut across the traditional view that knowledge depended
on textual interpretation and exegesis: 'all that could be known had to be made
compatible with what had once been said by a recognized canon of sacred and ancient
authors' (p.12). Hence Columbus's attachment of an old-world category to new-world
lexis. But for the most part there was, by definition, no place for the New World in
the ancient canon, and the men who went there and wrote back were having to create
texts where none existed before (p.54). For many of the eye witnesses, the first
person narrative was the cornerstone of their claim to authenticity.
Pagden's discussion of this issue centres on Oviedo and Las Casas, but the same
question arises with reference to Hernán Cortés. Cortés's accounts of the conquest of
Mexico, five long reports or Cartas de relación composed between 1519 and 1526,
were some of the most widely circulated accounts of discovery and conquest during
the 1520s. The first, which attempts to regularise Cortés's rebellion and the founding
of Vera Cruz on the Mexican mainland, survives as a third-person account over the
signatures of the municipal council, but was almost certainly authored by Cortés. The
other four letters are first-person accounts over his own signature.
The second letter, covering the initial capture of Tenochtitlan in 1520 and its loss
during the noche triste, and the third, recounting the siege and re-capture of the city
the following year, went through several Spanish editions in 1522 and 1523, and were
published in Latin, Italian, French, Dutch and German translations. The fourth letter
appeared in Spanish in 1525, but a decree issued in March 1527 prevented any further
printings of Cortés's letters in Spain, including the fifth.
The fifth letter is an account of a long journey undertaken by Cortés from
Tenochtitlan to Honduras in 1526, to put down a rebellion by Cristóbal de Olid, who
had disobeyed orders and headed off to found an empire of his own, just as Cortés had
done to Diego Velázquez, the Governor of Cuba, in 1519. The only sensible way to
get from Tenochtitlan to Honduras was by sea, around the Yucatán peninsula. But
Cortés decided, for reasons which he never really explains, to go overland, and to take
with him a large retinue. Bernal Díaz gives a rather withering account of the way in
which he and many other settlers were uprooted to go on this mad expedition,
together with a large number of servants, two falconers, five musicians, an acrobat, a
conjuror and puppeteer, a herd of pigs, and the captured Aztec leader Cuahtémoc. The
opening sequence of Werner Herzog's film Aguirre, wrath of God (1972) gives a good
idea of the size of Cortés's caravan and the difficulty of the terrain it had to
cross.
The expedition left Mexico on 12 October 1524 and Cortés finally staggered
ashore at Vera Cruz in May 1526, over eighteenth months later. But he did not have
the satisfaction of bringing the rebel home. Before Cortés even reached Honduras, Olid
had been killed by his own men in another cycle of rebellion. Back in Mexico, Cortés
was faced with the task of reporting to the Emperor how he had trekked several
hundred miles across some of the most inhospitable territory known to man, a journey
on which many Spaniards, and Cuahtémoc, lost their lives, all to no purpose. That
was the challenge of the fifth letter.
Cortés's strategy in the letter is to play up the treachery, but to play up the
arduousness of the journey even more. What made the journey so difficult was that at
no stage was the expedition going with the grain. The first half involved crossing the
vast lowland swamps of the Tehuantépec peninsula, then the delta of the river
Usumacinta; and finally the mountains of central Yucatán. The difficulties which such
a journey would present, even today, do not bear thinking about, but Cortés's account
squeezes every last drop of sympathy for the extremes of suffering he underwent in
the service of the Emperor. We know from the earlier letters, that Cortés was a gifted
advocate for his own cause. The first letter legitimates his own rebellion by recourse
to ancient legal precedent; the second, written without notes after the Spaniards had
been ejected from Tenochtitlan during the noche triste, manoeuvres the Mexica into
the position where they can be shown to be rebelling against their rightful lords; and
the third letter is a brilliantly remorseless account of the siege of the city, its recapture
and the surrender of Cuahtémoc. But the glorious pointlessness of the journey to
Honduras makes the fifth letter exceptional even by Cortés's standards.
It is hard to know how a man like Cortés, who dropped out of university to
become an adventurer, learned to write so well. Was he, to put the question in
Pagden's terms, glossing a pre-existing, canonical text, or was he composing a text
where none existed before and using his first person 'I' witness to authenticate it? In a
sense Cortés's writings are a classic example of the autoptic imagination, in which the
'yo' not only guarantees the veracity of the account by his presence, but in this case
by his primary role as agent. Not only did he see it, he did it; and the suffering he
underwent in the process warrants the veracity of the report, the extent of his service,
and his fitness to receive reward.
Yet we should be careful not to underestimate the expertise that is required of this
narrator. In Pagden's discussion of the autoptic imagination he makes reference to a
curious remark of Stephen Greenblatt in Marvellous possessions. The wonder of the
new world (Oxford 1992): 'The eyewitness directly possesses the truth and can
simply present it; he who has not seen for himself must persuade' (p.129). The use of
the word 'simply' here must surely be ironical. The plain style typical of the credible
eye-witness is never as simple as it appears to be. The poverty of vocabulary,
simplicity of style and lack of eloquence which are traditionally associated with
earnestness, are themselves often the product of great artifice. Once again, we should
not underestimate the extent to which new-world narratives reach out to their readers
through a common language learned from old-world, classical literature.
At a fairly early point on the expedition to Honduras, Cortés's party come to a
particularly wide river, and he decides to build a bridge. Of all the ways of crossing a
river, a bridge is almost always the most time-consuming and the most resource-
intensive. Cortés reviews all the options: turning back, crossing in canoes, wading,
finding a better place to cross. But he rejects them all. Instead he builds a bridge a mile
long over water which is four fathoms deep plus two fathoms of mud. He uses over a
thousand timbers between fifty and sixty feet long, all of them at least the girth of a
man, and countless smaller timbers. And he finishes the job in four days. It was, he
writes, 'the most remarkable feat ever seen' (Letters from Mexico, p.361), more
remarkable, we must assume than his earlier displays of bravado: the beaching of the
boats at Vera Cruz in 1519, or the prefabrication of brigantines which were then
carried overland to the lake prior to the siege of Tenochtitlan.
Cortés must have relied on his readers to make the link between this bridge and
another they would have known from their schooldays. In Book IV of De bello
gallico, Julius Caesar builds a similar bridge, over the Rhine, in similar circumstances,
although he takes ten days to complete it. In both cases, the purpose in building the
bridge, rather than taking one of the easier options is to make a series of statements: to
impose his will on his own people, to impress the enemy and to leave a highly visible
mark on the political and geographical landscape. And in each case, the bridge is a
rhetorical as much as an architectural construct. It stretches across a much greater void
than the mile or so of water that has to be crossed on the journey; it is built to stretch
across the vast gulf which separates the discoverer, the conquerer, the warrior from
the audience back home.
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Like the Cartas de relación, the books of the Gallic War were sent back from the
western front to the seat of power, in Rome. They were written to be read aloud in
the Forum, and they were composed to keep alive the influence and credibility of the
absent warrior in the minds of the forgetful and sceptical senators.25
Cortés's reports
were also written to remind the Emperor and his advisors of the extremes of suffering
which were being undertaken in his name in the New World. The purpose of drawing
attention to this parallel is not to identify sources, and it is unclear whether Cortés
had read Caesar or not.26
What the parallel does illustrate, however, is that the
autoptic imagination is also a construct, and one which will often entail writing a new
gloss on an ancient text.
Cortés was almost certainly one of the new-world authors who was most widely
read by his contemporaries. The first editions of the second and third letters were
both printed by the Crombergers in Seville in 1522 and 1523, not long after they
printed a History of Charlemagne, and not long before they brought out their own
edition of the first four books of (1526).27
It is hard to believe that the Cromberger's
patrons did not associate these works in significant ways: the history of the
prototypical emperor, the novels of chivalry and the reports from the New World
seem to have reinforced the crusading spirit with which the discovery and conquest
was being carried out. Though they all came at the issue from different standpoints, all
of these genres had much to gain from blurring the edges of history and fiction; all
were striving to give authenticity to the products of the imagination.
The writers of fiction famously passed off their inventions as 'true histories',
constructing false provenances involving the discovery and translation of antique
documents in dusty circumstances. In a context in which these purveyors of
falsehoods had poisoned the wells of credibility, the chroniclers undoubtedly had the
harder task: to gain credence for the truth in spite of its marvellous appearance. But
speaking across the ocean of incommensurability often entailed inscribing new texts
between the lines of existing ones with results which could be closer to fiction than
might be expected.
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