An Expedition That Should Not Have Sailed

Hernán Cortés was thirty-four, a colonial notary with debts and ambitions, and the governor of Cuba had already thought better of sending him. Diego Velázquez revoked his commission before the fleet sailed. Cortés sailed anyway — eleven ships, some 500 men, sixteen horses, and a handful of cannon — making himself a mutineer before he had accomplished anything at all.

The first fighting came in Tabasco, where a Chontal Maya army met him on the plains of Centla. Outnumbered enormously, the Spanish held with cannon and crossbows and then broke the Maya with a charge by their sixteen horses — animals no one on the mainland had ever seen. In the peace that followed, the defeated lords gave Cortés twenty women. One of them, baptised Marina and remembered as La Malinche, spoke both Nahuatl and Maya, and Cortés had a shipwrecked Spaniard who spoke Maya. He had accidentally acquired the one thing the expedition could not do without: a voice.

On the coast he performed his most audacious act of lawyering. He founded a town — the Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz — had its brand-new council elect him captain-general, and declared himself answerable directly to the king rather than to Cuba. Then, hearing the Totonacs of Cempoala complain bitterly about Aztec tribute collectors, he understood the shape of the thing he had walked into. This was not a nation. It was an empire of the resentful, and resentment could be recruited.

To end all argument about going home, he had his ships run aground and stripped of everything useful. The iron, sails, and rigging went into storage. Two years later they would be built into the thirteen brigantines that decided the war.