Montezuma's lake-girt capital Tenochtitlan, the heart of an empire or confederation whose nominal subjects (many of them however far from submissive) may be counted as somewhere between fifteen and twenty-five millions,^[11] fell in mid-August 1521. It was only forty months since Cortes had reached the already known northwest tip of Yucatan, with about 600 men, including the crews of his ships; of these only thirty-two were crossbowmen and thirteen musketeers, and they had seven small guns. He had quelled two near-mutinies, destroyed his ships, and set up a municipality at Vera Cruz before setting out with some 400 men and fifteen horses on the march of about 625km to the central valley of Mexico. There by inducements and menaces Cortes brought Montezuma to accept Spanish suzerainty, and there he learnt that he himself had been proclaimed a traitor by Panfilo Narvaez, sent from Cuba to supersede him. He had to divide his little force and dash back to the coast, where he won over nearly all of Narvaez’ army of over 800 infantry and 80 cavalry, twice his own numbers. But meanwhile a massacre of Aztec nobles by Pedro de Alvarado, left in command at Tenochtitlan, had provoked a rising. The useful puppet Montezuma was killed by his own people, disgusted by his capitulation;^[12] and all was to do again.

At the end of June 1520 the enlarged but still very small force had to cut its way out of Tenochtitlan over the lake causeways, losing over 400 men (some two-thirds of its Spanish strength) in the confused fighting of la noche triste. The remnant retreated to independent and friendly Tlaxcala, which after a stout initial resistance had joined the invaders to break the Aztec stranglehold on the little ‘Republic’. Here Cortes reorganised, bringing his numbers up to 600 again by the seduction of reinforcements meant for Narvaez and from chance arrivals at Vera Cruz. Then came the building of the thirteen bergantins at Tlaxcala and their portage to the Lake of Mexico, the reduction of the lakeside towns, and the final assault, nearly three months of filling-in the constantly renewed breaches in the causeways and destroying the city block by block, against a most gallant and desperate resistance.^[13]

Many factors contributed to this amazing triumph. Armour, horses, crossbows, firearms, disciplined tactics and valour, all important, would not by themselves have sufficed against the numerical odds. But the harsh, and often recent,- 62 -Aztec domination was bitterly resented by many of the tributary states, some of which were in chronic rebellion, and Cortes marshalled these discontents with surpassing diplomatic skill: this was perhaps the most important factor. Tlaxcala had never submitted to Aztec power, but was walled in by it and under constant attack, never pressed home since the wars provided a perennial source of prisoners for sacrifice on the altars of Tenochtitlan; it formed a loyal and secure forward base, and the Tlaxcalans were not alone in preferring the new yoke to the old. Gomara's estimate that Cortes had 200,000 men under his command at the siege may be a large exaggeration, but the indigenous allies certainly greatly outnumbered the Spaniards.^[14]

Cortes was a master in the manipulation of men, and ably seconded by his Indian mistress Marina; Montezuma was cut off from reality by his almost sacerdotal position, which yet was more that of the head of a tribal confederacy than one of autocratic power, and both he and his people were unnerved by portents of disaster. Indeed, the ‘Aztec Empire’ was scarcely a consolidated state structure, but rather a very frangible one, and its chiefs were naturally unable to react decisively—until the bitter final struggle—to a crisis so novel as to be incomprehensible. Their wars had been bloody but not total: more important than the destruction of the enemy was the capture of victims for the human sacrifices which in their cosmogony were the only means of preserving the fabric of the universe. Their ruthlessness and that of the Spaniards were of different orders. They seem to have been gripped by a general premonition of doom; in Chaunu's words, an inner cosmic anguish, sapping resistance.^[15]

Be this as it may, the Conquest of New Spain was now an achieved fact, and Cortes could turn his great administrative gifts to the task of building the new dominion. High on his priorities was the extension of that dominion to, and over, the South Sea.

Already in Montezuma's time Cortes had heard that this other sea was only about twelve or fourteen days' march from Mexico; and soon after the fall of the city he received an offer of vassalage from Michoacan, an independent territory lying to the west. He lost no time in sending out two pairs of Spaniards—such was their self-confidence—who were to take ‘Royal and entire possession’ of the South Sea; both assignments were carried out by the first weeks of 1522. Alvarado was despatched with some 400 men, a large force for the times, to the conquest or pacification of Tutupec, on the Pacific coast in Oaxaca, and before March 1522 possession had again been taken. During the next two years Alvarado pressed on, close to the coast, into southern Guatemala, and by October 1524 Cortes was able to claim that over 500 leagues along the South Sea were under Spanish subjection.^[16]

‘Possession’ by rhetoric was one thing; exploitation another. Cortes's Third Letter to the King (15 May 1522) states that he had already, ‘with much diligence’, provided for the building on the South Sea of two caravels for exploration and- 63 -two bergantins for coastal work; in the Fourth Letter (15 October 1524) he speaks of sending expeditions south to explore the land discovered by Magellan and north to the supposed strait, precursor of ‘Anian’ (below, Ch. 9), linking the Mar del Sur with Los Bacallaos in the Mar del Norte—that is, with the cod fisheries of the Newfoundland region, known since around the turn of the century from the voyages of the Cabots and the Corte Reals, if not indeed to men of the Azores and Bristol a generation earlier. Such a discovery would shorten the distance between Spain and the Spice Islands by two-thirds.^[17]

The beginnings of maritime history on this coast are known in fascinating but sometimes confused detail. There seems to have been pre-Spanish trade in sailing canoes between Tehuantepec and Panama, and there are vague and unsubstantiated references to a Portuguese ship blown from the Moluccas to the Mexican coast in 1520, but the first European craft actually to sail in Mexican Pacific waters was probably the pinnace Santiago, not locally built but direct from Spain. The Santiago had become separated from Loaysa's fleet (a follow-up to Magellan; below, Ch. 4) after passing the Straits and, being short of food, made for New Spain, ending up in July 1526 near Tehuantepec—it is said after fifty days on a daily ration of 21/2 ounces of biscuit dust per man.^[18]

Although shipbuilding had begun four years earlier at Zacatula, northwest of Acapulco, Cortes's reports to the King somewhat anticipated results. He brought in forty artisans, but two of his ships were burnt in the yards, and of the four completed in 1526 two sank and two went with Alvaro de Saavedra for the Moluccas in October 1527, sailing from Zihuatanejo. By 1526 Cortes's estate at Tehuantepec was an active building centre: the harbour was only a poor roadstead but there were fine stands of large ‘pines’, and gear could be brought from Spain via Vera Cruz and the Rio Coatzacoalcos, which was navigable to 120km from the Pacific (or for small canoes 30km), whence the portage to Tehuantepec was at only 200 or 230 metres above sea-level. It was soon rivalled by Guatulco or Huatulco, about 60km to the southwest, which had a far better harbour, and became the principal Pacific port of New Spain from about 1537 until the rise of Acapulco in the 1570s. Guatulco had much better connections with central Mexico than that town, though even so the ‘roads’ were mostly unpaved trails, for the most part suitable only for pack-mules, though ox-carts could be used in the broader valleys. By the mid-1540s Guatulco was building substantial ships, and later in the century it had a church and a customs-house, ‘very faire and large’, some hundred brush and wattle huts, and a number of resident traders. Such as it was, it may stand as a type of the bush ports on this hot (in summer broiling) coast, ports for the most part even less developed. By 1538 Cortes had nine ships based in this region, employed in exploration to the north and in victualling other conquistadores from the produce of his estates; but he suffered from a shortage of pilots.^[19]

Thus within two decades of the first penetration to the South Sea in New- 64 -Spain, its shores were dotted with a great number of tiny ports and shipyards (Figure 6, “EL MAR DEL SUR: FIRST PHASE. ”),^[20] including from 1528 Acapulco, a fine harbour but set in a poor and unhealthy hinterland, and linked in 1531 with Cortes's seat at Cuernavaca by a difficult trail. The great days of the ‘City of the Oriental Galleons and the Modern Sirens’ were not to come for another four decades, when the return route from the Philippines was discovered.^[21]

Although suitable shipbuilding timber was available in several places, the ports of New Spain were not so well off for local raw materials as those beyond Tehuantepec: Nicaragua had pitch and excellent fibres for sails and cordage, while New Spain often fell back on second-hand gear from Europe. After mid-century Tehuantepec decayed and Guatulco was used mainly for repairs, but the yards at La Posesion, the fine port of Realejo in Nicaragua, were capable of bigger things, up to the 700-ton Santa Ana captured by Cavendish off Baja California in 1587. But this was very exceptional; the general run, even in the 1580s, would have been 12–15 tons for cabotage, 60–120 for inter-colonial trade. But the port was lively enough: discovered in 1523 by Davila and Niño, ten years later it- 65 -had between fifteen and twenty slaving caravels. This trade had been organised by Pedrarias, and was fostered by the impracticability of moving Indian slaves overland.^[23] Much basic equipment for shipping, especially metal work, still had to cross the Atlantic and then the Mexican plateaus, although Cortes had begun the exploitation of the abundant copper and less rich tin and iron deposits of central Mexico, and the sulphur of the volcanoes for gunpowder.^[24] Spanish building on the eastern shores of the Pacific never reached the high standard of the Manila yards, which could marry European technology with the traditional skill of Chinese shipwrights; in Borah's words, most American vessels were ‘poor, nasty, brutish, and crank’, and there is abundant evidence of this even in the eighteenth century.^[25] Moreover, shipping in American waters was always highly vulnerable to the broma, the boring ship-worm which could make timbers ‘like a honeycomb or a sponge’, and although lead sheathing was tried on the ships with which Pedrarias came to Darien in 1514, a very early use, it was too expensive, too unreliable, and too cumbersome for general application.^[26] Later, worm-resistant timbers were found, and contributed greatly to the rise of Guayaquil as the great shipbuilding centre of the American South Sea; but these of course were not available at all times and places. Crews were also a source of difficulty; they might have a core of real seamen, but were for the most part drawn from the scrapings of a badly mixed society.