March Of The Spaniards To Honduras

( Originally Published 1905 )

'Tis a strange,

An awful conflict—an unearthly war! It is as if the dead had risen up

To battle with each other—the stern strife Of spirits visible to mortal eyes.

—Whittier.

THERE is not in modern history, and taking no account of numbers, perhaps not in all history an event less generally known or more striking to the imagination than the march of the Spaniards from the city of Mexico to the shores of the Bay of Honduras. It has no parallel in history. It was a trial of strength on the part of man—of human will and endurance—against the spectre of famine and the elemental forces of nature, not indeed of nature in its awful moods of hurricanes, cyclones, and volcanic wrath, but in its wild state, its anger and persistent irritability. The Parthian expeditions of the Romans, the Anabasis of the younger Cyrus, and the subsequent retreat of the ten thousand to the shores of the Black Sea, and above all the retreat of the French from Moscow are in a class by themselves and invite no comparison. The flight of the Tinontates—the last of the Hurons—before the pursuing hatred and hound-like pertinacity of the Iroquois, and the race for Manchuria of the Ubeck Tartars with the Cossack cavalry, amid starvation and pitiless cold in the early part of the eighteenth century, evoke our commiseration and pity, but the expedition of the Spaniards to Honduras asks only for our admiration and wonder.

After centuries of occupation by the white race there are yet in this mysterious land vast tropical regions where trackless wastes of pestilential jungles and reeking morasses rear an almost impassable barrier to exploration. There in the vast laboratory of the sun nature exults in her own monstrous fecundity, waited upon by a no less monstrous destruction. Prodigal of life, she seems to riot in a prodigious exuberance of creative force, and to fling out in reckless profusion whole systems of organisms, only to see them devour and prey upon each other.

Earth, quickened by the stimulus of solar energy and humidity, teems with germs, and, as in a seething hot-bed, forces them into rapid and luxuriant vitality followed by correspondingly swift dissolution. The very surface of the small lakes becomes covered each season with a tangle of succulent vegetation; a festering mass of decay where the putrescence of a disappearing vegetation vitalizes the birth of a new generation and feeds its rank redundance.

Into this tremendous orgy of nature man enters at his peril—an unwelcome intruder upon the wanton mood of the universal mother. All her elements conspire against him and develop monstrous activities hostile to his life. The earth breeds poison, the stagnant waters exhale fever, and the very air swarms with a microscopic life fatal to his own. Snakes and poisonous reptiles, of sanguinary and predatory habits, swarms of winged enemies of venomous bite and sting, and plants exuding infection make war upon the intruder and bar his path.

This was the land and these the enemies which confronted the daring Spaniard Cortez and his heroic band of veterans when he entered upon his historic march to the Bay of Honduras. Plutarch, writing of the achievements of Caesar, and comparing him with other great generals, says: " He surpassed one in the difficulty of the scene of action, another in the extent of the countries he subdued, this one in the number and strength of the enemies he overcame, that in the savage manners and treacherous dispositions of the people he humanized." Reading this encomium one would believe that the seasoned old campaigner and chronicler, Bernal Diaz, was recording his opinion of his friend and commander, Hernandez Cortez.

The Spanish chief had fought his way from the ocean, conquered the warlike Aztecs, rebuilt the city of Mexico after its ruin, and now hearing that his lieutenant, Christobal de Olid, whom he had commissioned to found a settlement in distant Honduras, revolted against his authority, Cortez, summoning the remnants of his veterans and his Indian allies to his aid, organized his punitory expedition. Early on the morning of October 12th, 1524, the troops mobilized in the plaza of Tacuba, a suburb of the Aztec city, and at once entered upon a march to the Caribbean Sea that will for all time hold a conspicuous place in the annals of military achievements. In advance rode the trumpeters, Ortego and Christobal; Coral, bearing aloft the banner of conquest, followed, and on their heels was a battery of artillery of four pieces. Then marched three thousand Indian allies, led and officered by their caciques and war chiefs. In their company, carried in palanquins and escorted by a plumed guard, were the king of Tacubaya and Guatemozin, the last of the Montezumas. Sandavel, the dauntless, rode at the head of his fifty marching veterans. Superbly mounted, unmailed and unvisored, came Cortez, conqueror of Mexico, and one of the most extraordinary men that ever trod the American continent. On his right was Father John de las Varillas, chaplain to the troops, and on his left, Pedro de Alvaredo, he of the giant leap and lion heart.

The romantic Marina, who saved the army at Cholula, female interpreter to the Spanish chief, and beloved of the army, was carried by negro slaves. Then came one hundred and fifty mounted men, battle-scarred veterans, bronzed to the hue of Etruscan statues, seasoned warriors all of them, revellers in the camp and fighting demons on the field. Masters of the sword they were, and trained to the use of the lance, whom no dangers could appal or fatigue conquer; with them were the scouts, whose work lay yet some weeks before them, two Flemish monks, a physician, and a surgeon. A drove of swine, a herd of cattle driven by negroes, a mob of camp followers, jugglers and tumblers, soon to succumb to fatigue and sneak back, imparted a ragged, finish to a brave and warlike cavalcade. Before the conqueror stretched one thousand one hundred miles of unexplored land, unprofaned by the boot of the white man. Rugged mountains, torrential rains, pathless forests, swollen streams and raging rivers divided with venomous reptiles, savage tribes, and gnawing hunger, the horrors of the march. Against these Cortez was warned by his Maya guides, but the unconquerable Spaniard held to his resolution and crossed the Rubicon.

When the expedition came to the Medellin River, Cortez shipped his artillery, much of his ammunition, and many of his small arms to the mouth of the Rio Tabasco, flowing through Yucatan to the ocean. And now began in earnest the march to Honduras with all its attendant horrors. In four days they stood on the banks of a watercourse eight hundred yards wide, where, drenched to the skin, they lost three weeks felling timber, skidding and rolling logs and building a bridge. Traversing the forests and swamp lands of Copilco, they constructed fifty bridges. Here the guides and sappers deserted them. The Spanish chief took the precaution to bring with him a compass and maps drawn on cotton by Indian draughtsmen, showing the mountains, rivers, fordable streams, towns and forests. By these he now directed his march.

On the frontiers of Chuatlau the expedition entered the marsh lands where the horses "sank to their ears," as Cortez expresses it, and where three Spaniards and many Indians were lost. In their rear stalked the spectre of famine, before them were rivers overflowing their banks, yielding humus, and everywhere eternal solitude and desolation. Exhausted and half-famished, with blistered feet and limbs chafed and raw from marching and wading, with unbroken spirits and undaunted hearts these men of iron held their course. Through forests almost impenetrable, across vast morasses, wading and swimming streams, bridging rivers swollen by tropical rains into great torrents, they kept the pace till at last they crossed into the land of snakes. Here they disappeared in the great mahogany and cypress forests, where the trees, swathed in dense masses of vines, swarmed with venomous serpents and noxious reptiles. Climbing lianas which crossed from tree to tree, like ropes passing from mast to mast, compelled the riders to dismount and lead their horses. The beasts, stung to madness by mosquitoes and maranbuntas—giant wasps—were controlled with difficulty by the men, who themselves were blistered and bleeding from the bites and stings of the poisonous pests.

Men began to fall in the ranks, overcome by exhaustion, hunger and mephitic exhalations escaping from a riotous and decaying vegetation. The weight of heavy armour, the cumbrous weapons, and an atmosphere charged with great humidity and carbonic acid wore down the troops, and Cortez called a halt. Here a temporary hospital was thrown up, a clearance made, a foraging party sent back, and the men went into camp. Nothing but the inexorable demand of exhausted nature induced Cortez to select this place to rest and refresh his command. The woods swarmed with tropical life, with creeping things and ants whose bite burned like the prick of a red-hot needle. Through trees, creepers, vines and undergrowth, snakes, venomous insects and poisonous plants crawled. The heat was oppressive; to great heat they were inured, but now they contended with a subtle condition, with the weight and septic nature of an atmosphere charged with debilitating forces, with mephitic humidity, with electricity, with mysterious agencies inimical to human life. The immense melancholy of tropical ruin, the heavy, damp smells of fetid, feculent, warm air, as of mould freshly upturned, and the swarms of venomous insects began to affect the spirits of the men. Around them were vines distilling venom, cold, clammy creepers, whose touch blistered the flesh, and fanged, poisonous plants whose resemblance to snakes bore in upon the men fear and loathing.

The vast profundity and loneliness of the forest, and the millions of strange sounds wrought upon their imaginations till the ghosts of their dead comrades materialized, walked, sat down and slept with them. In the perpetual struggle of the blood to preserve itself from fermentation there was such an expenditure of vital energy that little was left for bodily and mental exertion. Cortez buried his dead, broke camp, and, carrying his sick and exhausted on litters, began again his melancholy march. When they emerged from the gloomy depths, the soldiers were dazzled by the bright light, and staggered like men overcome with new wine. For one hundred and fifty miles they tramped, feeding on roots, mountain cabbage and food found in the deserted Indian villages. Through swales and marsh lands they waded, building more bridges, one of which consumed seven days and took for its completion one thousand trees, "thick," writes Bernal Diaz, " as a man's body." Overcome by hunger and fatigue, many unable to proceed lay down to die, and, to impart additional horror to their gruesome condition, captured savages were cooked and devoured by their Mexican allies. Here, says Torquemada, the Franciscan priest, Juan de Tecto, worn out by hunger and weakness, leaned his head against a tree and died.

Four miles from the town of Teotilac, a cacique of the Mayas, leading four thousand warriors, challenged their right to advance. Cortez shouting his battle-cry, "Santiago, y a ellos!" (St. James, and at them!), cut his way through the enemy with his cavalry and opened a passage for his exhausted men.

That night they bivouacked in Teotilac and fared sumptuously on maize and fruit. In one of the temples was the statue of a cruel goddess, whose fierce wrath could be appeased only by the flesh and blood of virgin maidens. Taken in childhood, girls were brought up in strictest seclusion till they ripened into the age for yielding their fair young bodies to the sacrifice. Cortez destroyed the idol, marvelling at the atrocious superstition.