by Hugh Thomas
Montejo’s crossing of the Atlantic back to Spain in 1520 was interesting since the great pilot Antonio de Alaminos took a route between Florida and the Bahamas along the line of the Gulf Stream (the usual route was still through the Windward Islands). Governor Velázquez later criticized that route as being dangerous, but it became normal within a short time. Indeed, Alaminos pioneered it.
Leaving Cuba on August 26, the conquistadors stopped again at Terceira in the Azores Islands, which must have been well-known to Alaminos, and were in Spain by November. Then Montejo and Hernández Portocarrero embarked on a long struggle at court to establish the respectability of Cortés, whose enemies—above all, Diego Velázquez—were active, powerful, and unforgiving.
After the Crown found in favor of Cortés, thanks largely to Montejo and partly to Cortés’s father, Montejo was named alcaide, or commander, of Villa Rica de la Veracruz.9 He returned to New Spain in 1524 but went back once more to Castile quite soon with 60,000 pesos of gold,10 having obtained from Cortés the valuable encomiendas of Azcapotzalco, Matlactlan, and perhaps Chila, worth 1,500 pesos a year. Montejo was at that time the procurador (official representative), of New Spain in Castile. There he sought his contract for Yucatán, in which pursuit he was supported by Pánfilo de Narváez and some others of his point of view. Having talked to Jerónimo de Aguilar, the interpreter, who had spent some years in Yucatán as a prisoner, Montejo had been led to believe that the territory in his contract was rich. Having obtained Charles’s permission in December 1526, he was able to set off from Sanlúcar in June 1527, with 250 followers.11
This group included one important veteran of the wars in New Spain, Alonso de Ávila, who must have remembered Cozumel from his time there with both Grijalva and Cortés. Ávila had had recently an even more complicated life than Montejo since he gained both the respect and the distrust of Cortés, but returning to Castile in 1522 in one of Cortés’s famous treasure fleets, he had been seized off the Azores by the French. He spent three years as a prisoner in France, and then he spent “all which I had in my patrimony” as a ransom.12 He had been a protégé of Bishop Rodríguez de Fonseca, and for that reason Cortés had distrusted him. Ávila was famous but penniless, so it is understandable that he should seize the chance of recovering his fortune under Montejo.13 Montejo secured four good ships, on which he loaded cannon, some small arms, horses, meat, flour, biscuits, wine, oil—enough food for a year.
Montejo was drawn to Yucatán less, it would seem, by the precious metals and jewels that he expected to find (though there were admirable jade objects there)14 than by the realization that Yucatán could be made a good agricultural-pastoral province. Commerce and industry could be developed. Even in the sixteenth century, the Maya were skillful makers of textiles. They had time and wealth enough for the production of good textiles and ornaments, as shown by their special preoccupation with headdresses.
Montejo was thus a man of vision and wisdom as well as of ambition. His attitudes toward the Indians were comparatively humanitarian. He must have known before he sought, and obtained, his contract that Yucatán was, as Bishop Landa would put it later, “a very flat land with no mountains for which reason it cannot be seen from ships till they are close inshore.”15
On his way to Yucatán, Montejo, as was customary, stopped at Santo Domingo to obtain more horses and soldiers, but he did not then seek an interpreter, though he should have known of the special value of such people from his own experience with Cortés. But he did add to his expedition in La Española Gonzalo Nieto, whom he made chief lieutenant (alférez mayor). Nieto had been at the comuneros’ battle against the Crown at Villalar in 1521, he had served against France, and he had been in New Spain with Luis Ponce and with Ayllón in Florida.
The fleet then continued along the southern coast of Montejo’s old home, Cuba, and made for Cozumel, just as Grijalva and Cortés had done. Montejo paid attention to the cacique there, Naum Pat, who over the previous ten years had become quite used to Spaniards.
Montejo and his little army crossed to the mainland. Gonzalo Nieto raised a standard and shouted the word Spain three times, adding, “In the name of God, I take possession of this land for God and the King of Castile.”16 That must be approximately where there is now to be found the delightful Playa del Carmen. There Montejo established a settlement, which, after his own birthplace, Salamanca, he named Salamanca de Xelhá, the last part of the name commemorating the previous Mayan settlement. The historian Oviedo drily commented that this was in a palm grove “near a swamp in the worst place of all the province.” Oviedo continued, “In that bad place, the ships were unloaded and a large house swiftly constructed to act as a residence for Governor Montejo.”17 Several Spaniards then set about learning Maya, among them Montejo himself and Fray Rodríguez de Caraveo, who recognized that his work of conversion would be far easier if he knew the language of his proposed flock. Pedro de Añasco of Seville turned out to be the best short-term interpreter.
After only a matter of weeks, difficulties arose. Although he had been assured that he had enough food for a year, Montejo’s supplies were soon used up, and Indian substitutes seemed inadequate, despite the assistance of the local cacique of Zama. It seems that Montejo’s men disliked tortillas and anything made from maize. The conquerors even began to be short of clothes. Montejo sent a ship up to Veracruz to buy more of them, but the master of the ship died there and his ship sailed off to Cuba instead of back to Yucatán.18 Montejo began to seize food from the Indians, an act which, of course, damaged relations. In an effort to avoid any attempt at desertion, Montejo did what Cortés had done: He destroyed his boats. The Catalan Juan Ote Durán plotted to leave with the seamen on the San Jerónimo.
Early in 1528, Montejo set out on a journey to find a better port than Salamanca de Xelhá. Though Montejo was different from most of his contemporaries because of his preoccupation with agriculture, his technique was much the same. He would march toward an Indian pueblo, out of which the natives would be inspired to emerge in a friendly fashion carrying presents of maize, turkey, and beans. The Spaniards would be astonished at the large number of idols that they observed everywhere, on the streets and temple steps, as well as in the shrines and temples themselves. Most were made of clay. Fray Diego Landa, later the first bishop of Yucatán, would comment, “There is not an animal or insect of which they did not make a statue.”19 Montejo would then receive the Indians as vassals. Indians who did not receive the Spaniards in peace would surround them close to their pueblos on the road and would quickly build half-moon palisades and prepare an ambush. Naum Pat of Cozumel was helpful to Montejo, however, and offered to test out the ground ahead of the Spaniards on several occasions. This enabled the latter to ensure his safe arrival at Mochí, a place of one hundred “good houses” with temples and shrines of stone. They there received chickens, tortillas, and fisol, a drink of fermented maize and honey. This town, like many others in Yucatán, had four ceremonial entrances at the cardinal points. But it was not, inside, laid out in regular streets. In the center of the town there was a raised temple in a plaza, surrounded by the houses of the rich—not unlike cities of Spain.
Then Montejo continued to Belma, perhaps the “Gran Cairo” that he and Ávila would have recalled from their previous visit ten years before with Cortés. The caciques there were friendly; they summoned their neighbors and looked at the horses. Montejo obliged with an impressive horse show, at which the natives were more afraid than impressed.20 Here the Spaniards were given jewel-encrusted necklaces of gold, which cheered them greatly. Montejo did not, however, accept what was offered him since he did not wish to give the impression that he had come just for gifts.21
Montejo was still looking for a place where he could establish a settlement as his capital. After Salamanca de Xelhá, he was impressed by Conil, a large commercial town in northeast Yucatán, with ample supplies of freshwater from springs close to the sea, a good port, and a generally friendly population—and perhaps as
many as five hundred houses.22 Here a man of great strength in the suite of the Indian lord of Chicaca seized a cutlass from a black boy belonging to Montejo and tried to kill the commander, who defended himself with his own sword till his men came “and the disturbance was quietened.”23
They moved west via Cachí, with its large square, and entered Sinsimato, in the land of the warlike Chikinchel, pervaded with a sweet scent of the resin copal. Then they reached Chuaca, the main city of the cacique of the Chikinchel, with its many ponds and artificial watercourses, with some buildings of carved stone and thatched roofs. The temples and other shrines were characterized by their fine workmanship. This territory had been ancient Mayan land in the past, so it is understandable that the level of craftsmanship should have been high.
The cacique received Montejo in friendly fashion, and the latter therefore abandoned his customary caution. But next morning, he and his army found the town abandoned and they themselves surrounded by “bowmen who aimed well [buenos punteros],” as Oviedo put it.24 Battle was engaged at first light. The Indians had weapons much like those Montejo was used to in New Spain—wooden bows and arrows with slender shafts and very hard stone heads. They had also the same macanas (swords) as the Mexica, with sharp stones set in wooden frames. They painted their faces to make themselves look more frightening in war.
Montejo showed much personal courage as he and his men ensured that, with their superior weapons and their horses, they checked and then pressed back the Maya. Then they moved on to Ake, a rival town to Chuaca but nevertheless ready for war: The lords there told those of Ake that the Spaniards were coming to steal their wives.25 When Montejo arrived, the people of Ake first abandoned their city and then prepared an assault on it.
The Spaniards entered Ake and made ready to defend themselves. They were attacked next day by what seems to have been a large force, but they fought well, killed many Maya, and lost no men themselves. At dusk, Montejo received the submission of the lords of Ake without any retribution. He and his men then continued their journey to Loché, where they encountered a cacique who kept a curtain of thin cloth between himself and the Spaniards when he talked to them. Montejo moved on along the coast toward Campeche. On the way, he divided his men into two sections, one group being asked to cut across the peninsula back to Chetumal, making their way through cacao and copal groves, till they reached the salt pans near the eastern coast.
To the explorers’ surprise, they encountered no golden city in the interior of Yucatán. There was neither gold nor silver nor emeralds. Nor, indeed, did there seem to be markets. There were in the northern towns fine cloths, which were sold in Campeche itself, said to boast two thousand homes, and in Champoton to its south, where the first Spanish expedition in 1517 had been defeated and their commander, Hernández de Córdoba, fatally injured.26 Cortés’s legendary interpreter Marina had originally come from Champoton. Montejo found that all these settlements had a deep cenote (natural well), which descended to the water table below. There was no other water supply and no rivers; many of the disputes and wars between these Mayan villages, even wars between provinces, were about water or access to remote cenotes. Most cenotes were close to the houses of lords.27 Maize was, as in New Spain and Guatemala, the principal food and indeed provided the main alcoholic drink. The Indians ate turkey, duck, and even little dogs. The temples in the places were usually of stone, but the houses, including the houses of the lords, were always of wattle, twigs, reeds, branches, and adobe. Many such settlements were remote: “Only birds could visit them freely,” recalled Fray Lorenzo de Bienvenida, one of the first eight Franciscans who later came to Yucatán.28
Inga Clendinnen has described the geographical background: “Scattered through the forest were the villages or towns, each sustained by cleared patches … where the Indians grew their maize and other basic crops. But without local knowledge of the vague tracery of paths webbing the forest it was easy to pass them by.… There were no vantage points in that flat land from which distances gained could be measured [or] future objectives identified. What small elevations there were revealed only the grey forest stretching to the rim of the horizon.”29
In these months, Montejo learned something of the structure of Mayan society. It naturally had much in common with Alvarado’s Guatemala. He may, however, not have appreciated the extent to which Mayan society, torn apart by wars, had declined absolutely in quality since the golden days. For example, the rich or upper class could still read and write, but neither letters nor important contracts were written down. Much Mayan science and learning had been forgotten.30
Among the lords there was something similar to primogeniture. Montejo gathered that sometimes caciques were subservient to a principal lord. Montejo also found that the entire peninsula of Yucatán talked the same Maya language but that there were many variations of dialect and vocabulary (Chontal, Yucatec Maya, Chol, and Chorti competed). Bishop Landa much later (in the 1560s) discovered that the lords of Yucatán, like the Spaniards, were interested in the ancestry of their families. Those who shared a patronymic regarded themselves as members of the same family and so avoided intermarriage, as if they were Christians limited by the rules of consanguinity. Bishop Landa, a curiously ambivalent witness, because his deep interest was balanced by his fanatical intolerance of “heresy,” would comment: “Before the Spaniards … the natives had lived together in towns in a politic fashion and they had kept the land very clean and free from weeds and [in the towns] had planted good trees. In the middle of the towns, there were temples with beautiful squares and, around the temples, were the houses of lords and priests.”31
There were in most of these towns professionals: potters, carpenters, sorcerer-surgeons, bead manufacturers, and, above all, merchants who would exchange, in Tabasco or even on the river Ulúa near Veracruz, salt, cloaks, and slaves for cacao and stone beads. Slaves were an important commodity and a stimulus here, as in the Old World, too, to wars. The Maya would count their beads and other things in their usual eccentric style—by fives up to twenty, by twenties up to one hundred, by hundreds up to four thousand, and by four hundreds up to eight thousand. They would usually do their counting on the floor.32
Harvesting was an activity common to the place concerned, but hunting was done in packs of men about fifty in number. They sowed, Landa commented, in many places so that, if one sowing failed, another harvest could replace it. Such social activities had communal consequences, making for economic collaboration in all spheres. Most Maya lived in multigenerational groups of a father and his sons, married and unmarried, and it was a group of related males who usually made up the people who went to work in the milpa, their system of crop rotation. Each person was expected to master the basic skills necessary for collective life. The Spaniards found that the Maya had the principle of recalling the names of both parents in the names of children: thus the son of Chel and Chan would be called Na Chan Chel. The Spaniards had a comparable tradition.
The invaders found, too, that the Maya admired a special type of facial beauty where the hair was brushed back to extend the curve of the nose in a single straight line. To enhance this elongated line, newborn babies often had their heads bound between two boards while they were still soft. The Maya also considered that to be cross-eyed was beautiful, and this deviation was encouraged by mothers, who hung from the foreheads of children a little black patch that was contrived to reach down between their eyebrows. Whenever the child raised his eyes, this patch moved in front of him, the process assisting the cross-eyed deformity to grow. Another family habit was to burn the faces of children with hot cloths to prevent the growth of beards and other bodily hair. Men used mirrors made of obsidian, though women did not. Clothing for both sexes was a strip of cloth the size of a hand, which was wound round the waist several times.
Houses in Yucatán had roofs of straw or palm leaves. The former were sloped steeply to carry off the rainwater. The Indians would build walls in the middle of their simple houses to di
vide them into two, and they would usually sleep in the back part. In front, the roof would be low, for protection against both heat and rain—and also human enemies.
The Maya seem to have considered that the Spaniards were uncouth warriors with their codpieces and their breastplates in quilted cotton, in imitation of Mexican armor. They seemed a new version of the Itzá, a group of soldiers who, led by Kukulcán, the feathered serpent (Quetzalcoatl among the Mexica), came down from central Mexico in the tenth century to establish themselves at the well of Chichén.
The Maya, like the Mexica, were addicts of sacrifice, but on a smaller scale. Thus they made sacrifices of their own blood, sometimes cutting pieces from the outer part of their ears. They also sometimes made a hole in the penis and passed thread through it. Women might draw the hearts out of animals and offer them whole to their gods. Sometimes the Maya might sacrifice individuals by shooting them with arrows, “turning the place in his chest above his heart into a hedgehog of arrows.” They might give the heart of a captive a blow with a stone knife, make a deep incision, and then, as happened in Mexico-Tenochtitlan, plunge in a hand to draw out the heart, which would be given to the priest, who would anoint the face of an idol with the fresh blood. Then they would throw the body down the steps of the temple. Priests would pick up the outraged body and flay it thoroughly, except for the hands and feet. Then the priest might strip naked and cover himself with that skin while others danced before him. It was the ruthless ghoulishness of this kind of scene that caused the Spaniards to harden their hearts and assure themselves that they were right to insist on bringing Christianity to the New World. Montejo and Alonso de Ávila had had experience of this kind of behavior over ten years since 1518, but newcomers from Castile were shocked. All the same, the number of human sacrifices—as in Guatemala—was far less than in New Spain/Mexico.