Pestilence and Genocide - 1

III

Unlike most of the Caribbean peoples the Spanish encountered, the inhabitants of Mexico had a good deal of experience with warfare. To be sure, Aztec warriors were trained in highly individualistic fighting techniques, since the aim of battle was not to kill masses of the enemy, but rather to capture and bring back a single worthy opponent to be sacrificed at the following year's ceremonies of fertility.⁶³ Still, those fighting skills were formidable. And when combined with the Aztecs' enormous numerical advantage, they were more than a match for any invading army out of Europe. As the European interlopers' own accounts make clear, individual Indian warriors repeatedly showed themselves the equal, and more, of any among the Spanish militia. The story of one Aztec soldier who, in hand-to-hand combat, fought off a handful of Spanish horsemen — "when they could not bring him down, one of the Spaniards threw his lance at the Indian, who caught it and fought for another hour before being shot by two archers and then stabbed" — was but one among innumerable such reports from the conquistadors themselves.⁶⁴

The Indians' battlefield experience, however, was the result of complex political rivalries that had existed in the region for centuries, rivalries the Spanish under Hernando Cortes were able to turn to their advantage. As one scholar of Aztec military strategy recently has emphasized, "while the Spanish conquest is now seen as a major watershed in the history of the New World," to the various competing Indian polities at the time "the Spanish were simply another group, albeit an alien one, seeking to gain political dominance in central Mexico." As such, although the first people the Spanish confronted, the Tlaxcaltecs, could easily have defeated the conquistadors, they saw in them instead potential confederates against their traditional adversaries.⁶⁵ It was thus with a formidable army of Indian allies — at one point Cortes refers to 150,000 warriors who accompanied his band of less than a thousand Spanish soldiers — that the conquistadors marched on Tenochtitlan.⁶⁶

Rather than meeting resistance when he approached the great city, Cortes was greeted in friendship and was welcomed by Montezuma. In retrospect this behavior of the Aztec leader has usually seemed foolish or cowardly or naive to Western historians. But Mesoamerican political traditions had always dictated that war was to be announced before it was launched, and the reasons for war were always made clear well beforehand. War was a sacred endeavor, and it was sacrilegious to engage in it with treachery or fraud. In fact, as Inga Clendinnen recently has noted: "So important was this notion of fair testing that food and weapons were sent to the selected target city as part of the challenge, there being no virtue in defeating a weakened enemy."⁶⁷ In this case, therefore, not only was there no reason for Montezuma to suppose Cortes intended to launch an invasion (the Tlaxcaltec troops who accompanied him could have been part of an effort to seek political alliance), but Cortes had plainly announced in advance that his purposes were not warlike, that he came as an ambassador of peace.

Once the Spanish were inside the city's gates, however, it soon became apparent that this was a far from conciliatory mission. In the midst of a great public celebration of the feast of the god Huitzilopochtli, the Spanish, led by Cortes's ruthless lieutenant Pedro de Alvarado, entered and surrounded the ceremonial arena. It was filled, recalled the sixteenth-century Spanish historian Bernardino de Sahagun, with "nobles, priests, and soldiers, and throngs of other people." Still unaware of the conquistadors' intentions, says Sahagun, "the Indians thought that [the Spanish] were just admiring the style of their dancing and playing and singing, and so continued with their celebration and songs." Then the assault began:

The first Spaniards to stan fighting suddenly attacked those who were playing the music for the singers and dancers. They chopped off their hands and their heads so that they fell down dead. Then all the other Spaniards began to cut off heads, arms, and legs and to disembowel the Indians. Some had their heads cut off, others were cut in half, and others had their bellies slit open, immediately to fall dead. Others dragged their entrails along until they collapsed. Those who reached the exits were slain by the Spaniards guarding them; and others jumped over the walls of the courtyard; while yet others climbed up the temple; and still others, seeing no escape, threw themselves down among the slaughtered and escaped by feigning death. So great was the bloodshed that rivulets fof blood] ran through the courtyard like water in a heavy rain. So great was the slime of blood and entrails in the courtyard and so great was the stench that it was both terrifying and heartrending. Now that nearly all were fallen and dead, the Spaniards went searching for those who had climbed up the temple and those who had hidden among the dead, killing all those they found alive.⁶⁸

As word spread of what was happening, Aztec soldiers appeared and drove the Spanish into the royal quarters where they held Montezuma prisoner. Before this event had occurred, the ruling nobles and priests had expressed unhappiness with Montezuma's apparent weakness when confronted with these heavily armed strangers. Now, when Montezuma appeared on the palace rooftop, in chains and accompanied by Spanish soldiers, and appealed through a spokesman for peace, the populace revolted. According to Sahagun: "One of them spoke out, 'What is he saying, this whore of the Spaniards ?' " And a siege of the palace began. Montezuma was killed in the ensuing battle. Two weeks or so of intermittent struggle later, says Sahagun, Cortes demonstrated the "courage and skill" that all "brave captains [do] in the time of greatest need." He ordered a retreat from the city under cover of night.⁶⁹

In retreat, however, Cortes left behind an invisible killer that would prevent the Aztecs from following and destroying his broken army, and that would begin the process of wreaking his revenge: the microscopic smallpox bacillus. Smallpox was a fearsome killer wherever it existed, but among a people with no previous exposure to the disease it was catastrophic. It first had appeared in the New World in 1518 on the huge and dying island of Hispaniola, a sort of dreadful coup de grâce to that once enchanting place's dwindling few survivors.⁷⁰ After being released among the Aztecs, wrote Cortes's secretary Francisco Lopez de Gomara, "it spread from one Indian to another, and they, being so numerous and eating and sleeping together, quickly infected the whole country. In most houses all the occupants died, for, since it was their custom to bathe as a cure for all diseases, they bathed for the smallpox and were struck down." Gomara continues:

Those who did survive, having scratched themselves, were left in such a condition that they frightened the others with the many deep pits on their faces, hands and bodies. And then came famine, not because of a want of bread, but of meal, for the women do nothing but grind maize between two stones and bake it. The women, then, fell sick of the smallpox, bread failed, and many died of hunger. The corpses stank so horribly that no one would bury them; the streets were filled with them; and it is even said that the officials, in order to remedy this situation, pulled the houses down to cover the corpses.⁷¹

The epidemic seems to have lasted for about two months, during which time, and for months after, Cortes was reorganizing his defeated forces and marching on and burning smaller towns in the region.⁷² Once the disease dissipated — having devastated the city's residents and killed off most of the Aztec leaders-Cortes prepared to attack again. First, he had ships constructed that were used to intercept and cut off food supplies to the island capital. Then he destroyed the great aqueduct that brought fresh water to the city. Finally, the Spanish and their Indian allies laid siege to the once brilliant white metropolis and its dwindling population of diseased and starving people.

"Siege," as Inga Clendinnen has observed, was for the Aztecs "the antithesis of war." Viewing it as cowardly and dishonorable, "the deliberate and systematic weakening of opposition before engagement, and the deliberate implication of noncombatants in the contest, had no part in their experience."⁷³ But it had been the European mode of battle for many centuries, deriving its inspiration from the Greek invention of ferocious and massively destructive infantry warfare.⁷⁴ To the Spanish, as to all Europeans when committed to battle, victory — by whatever means — was all that mattered. On the other side, for reasons equally steeped in ancient tradition, the people of Tenochtitlan had no other option than to resist dishonor and defeat until the very end.

The ensuing battle was furious and horrifying, and continued on for months. Tenochtitlan's warriors, though immensely weakened by the deadly bacteria that had been loosed in their midst, and at least initially hobbled by what Clendinnen calls their "inhibition against battleground killing," were still too formidable an army for direct military confrontation. So Cortes extended his martial strategy by destroying not only the Aztecs' food and water supplies, but their very city itself. His soldiers burned magnificent public buildings and marketplaces, and the aviaries with their thousands of wondrous birds; they gutted and laid waste parks and gardens and handsome boulevards. The metropolis that the Spanish had just months earlier described as the most beautiful city on earth, so dazzling and beguiling in its exotic and brilliant variety, became a monotonous pile of rubble, a place of dust and flame and death.

Because of the way the city was built on canals, however, burning was not always the most efficient means of despoliation. Often "we levelled the houses to the ground," recalled Bernal Dfaz, "for if we set fire to them they took too long to burn, and one house would not catch fire from another, for each house stood in the water, and one could not pass from one to the other without crossing bridges or going in canoes."⁷⁵ Every day the Spanish crushed houses and other buildings in the city, and piled the debris into the canals; and each night the Aztecs dredged the canals in a desperate effort to keep the waters running free. Some captured Indians finally told the Spanish just how bad things were for the city's residents. Recalled Cortes:

We now learnt from two wretched creatures who had escaped from the city and come to our camp by night that they were dying of hunger and used to come out at night to fish in the canals between the houses, and wandered through the places we had won in search of firewood, and herbs and roots to eat. . . . I resolved to enter the next morning shortly before dawn and do all the harm we could. . . . and we fell upon a huge number of people_.' As these were some of the most wretched people and had come in search of food, they were nearly all unarmed, and women and children in the main. We did them so much harm through all the streets in the city that we could reach, that the dead and the prisoners numbered more than eight hundred.⁷⁶

With the advantage finally theirs — even if it was against "wretched . . unarmed ... women and children in the main" — Cortes and the Spanish pressed on. "That day," wrote Cortes, "we did nothing save burn and raze to the ground the houses on either side of that main street, which indeed was a sad sight; but we were obliged to do it, there being no other way of accomplishing our aims." They moved their forces to another section of the city where they slaughtered and captured more than twelve thousand people. Within a day or two they had another multitude of helpless citizens penned in: "They no longer had nor could find any arrows, javelins or stones with which to attack us." More than forty thousand were killed in that single day, and "so loud was the wailing of the women and children that there was not one man amongst us whose heart did not bleed at the sound. " Indeed, because "we could no longer endure the stench of the dead bodies that had lain in those streets for many days, which was the most loathsome thing in all the world," recalled Cortes, "we returned to our camps."⁷⁷

But not for long. The next morning the Spanish were in the streets again, mopping up the starving, dehydrated, and disease-wracked Indians who remained. "I intended to attack and slay them all," said Cortes, as he observed that:

The people of the city had to walk upon their dead while others swam or drowned in the waters of that wide lake where they had their canoes; indeed, so great was their suffering that it was beyond our understanding how they could endure it. Countless numbers of men, women and children came out toward us, and in their eagerness to escape many were pus.ped into the water where they drowned amid that multitude of corpses; and it seemed that more than fifty thousand had perished from the salt water they had drunk, their hunger and the vile stench. . . . And so in those streets where they were we came across such piles of the dead that we were forced to walk upon them.⁷⁸

In all their writings on the Aztecs, the Inquisition-loving Spanish — like most Western writers who have followed them — expressed indignant horror at their enemies' religious rituals involving human sacrifice. And indeed, the Aztec toll in that regard was great. Perhaps as many as 20,000 enemy warriors, captured in battle, were sacrificed each year during the peak of the Aztecs' brief reign as the lords of central Mexico — although what one conquistador said of the reports of Inca human sacrifice may hold true here as well: "These and other things are the testimony we Spaniards raise against these Indians," wrote Pedro de Cieza de Leon in 1553, "endeavoring by these things we tell of them to hide our own shortcomings and justify the ill treatment they have suffered at our hands .... I am not saying that they did not make sacrifices ... but it was not as it was told."⁷⁹ Las Casas claimed the same was true of the reports from Mexico — "the estimate of brigands," he claimed, "who wish to find an apology for their own atrocities," — and modern scholars have begun to support the view that the magnitude of sacrifice was indeed greatly exaggerated by the New World's conquerors, just as it was, for the same reasons, by Western conquerors in other lands.⁸⁰ Even if the annual figure of 20,000 were correct, however, in the siege of Tenochtitlan the invading Spaniards killed twice that many people in a single day — including (unlike Aztec sacrifice) enormous numbers of innocent women, children, and the aged. And they did it day after day after day, capping off the enterprise, once Tenochtitlan had been razed, by strip-searching their victims for any treasure they may have concealed before killing them. As an Aztec chronicler recalled: "The Christians searched all the refugees. They even opened the women's skirts and blouses and felt everywhere: their ears, their breasts, their hair."⁸¹ Lastly, they burned the precious books salvaged by surviving Aztec priests, and then fed the priests to Spanish dogs of war.

This initial phase of the Spanish bloodbath in the region finally over, Cortes now returned to camp where he spent three or four days "attending to many items of business .... concerning myself with the good order, government and pacification of these parts." What this meant, first of all, as he says in his very next sentence, was the collecting and dividing up of the gold ("and other things, such as slaves") that were the spoils of the carnage. Although much had been destrofed or lost in the fury of the battle, these valuables included "many gold bucklers," which he promptly melted down, "plumes, feather headdresses and things so remarkable that they cannot be described in writing nor would they be understood unless they were seen."⁸²

Through prior arrangement with his king, Cortes's share of the loot was one-fifth. In gold and jewelry and artwork, that was a fortune, probably more than $ 10,000,000 in 1990 American currency. In terms of slaves, it meant at least 3000 human beings for his personal and private use, not counting about 23,000 Indian "vassals," even after the Crown reduced his holdings in 1529. Immediately setting his slaves to labor in the placer mines, he drove them until they dropped. Before long, almost all of them had died from neglect and overwork. No matter how quickly he moved to replenish his human capital (an individual slave cost only six or seven pesos because they were so plentiful), Cortes killed faster than he could purchase or commandeer. By the time of his own death in 1547 his personal holdings in Indian slaves, despite constant infusions of new bodies was barely one-tenth of what he started with.⁸³

Meanwhile, Tenochtitlan effectively was no more. About a third of a million people dead, in a single city in a single lake in the center of Mexico. And still this was just the beginning.

Smallpox and other new diseases — new, at least to the Indians — were now rippling out in currents of destruction across the Mexican and Central American landscape. The microbes moved even faster than the ambitious conquistadors on their horses, but the conquistadors moved as quickly as they could. And few if any were as ambitious as Pedro de Alvarado, who had led the temple massacre during the feast day ceremonies for the god Huitzilopochtli. Alvarado and his compatriots headed south, seeking gold for their coffers and flesh for their mines. Others headed north. Like parasites feeding on the remains of whatever was left alive once the winds of epidemic fever had passed over the native populations they encountered, the Spanish adventurers invaded, conquered, and enslaved the peoples living in the rest of Mexico and in what today is Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.

No one knows how many they killed, or how many died of disease before the conquistadors got there, but Las Casas wrote that Alvarado and his troops by themselves "advanced killing, ravaging, burning, robbing and destroying all the country wherever he came." In all, he said:

By other massacres and murders besides the above, they h,ave destroyed and devastated a kingdom more than a hundred leagues square, one of the happiest in the way of fertility and population in the world. This same tyrant wrote that it was more populous than the kingdom of Mexico; and he told the truth. He and his brothers, together with the others, have killed more than four or five million people in fifteen or sixteen years, from the year 1525 until 1540, and they continue to kill and destroy those who are still left; and so they will kill the remainder."⁸⁴

Alvarado, of course, was but one among many engaged in this genocidal enterprise. Nuiio Beltran de Guzman was one of those who led armies to the north, torturing and burning at the stake native leaders, such as the Tarascan king, while seizing or destroying enormous native stores of food. Guzman later was followed by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, by Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, by Francisco de Ibarra, and countless other conquerors and marauders. As elsewhere, disease, depredation, enslavement, and outright massacres combined to extinguish entire Indian cultures in Mexico's northwest. Among the region's Serrano culture groups, in barely more than a century the Tepehuan people were reduced in number by 90 percent; the Irritilla people by 93 percent; the Acaxee people by 95 percent. It took a little longer for the various Yaqui peoples to reach this level of devastation, but they too saw nearly 90 percent of their numbers perish, while for the varied Mayo peoples the collapse was 94 percent. Scores of other examples from this enormous area followed the same deadly pattern.⁸⁵

To the south the story was the same — and worse. By 1542 Nicaragua alone had seen the export of as many as half a million of its people for slave labor (in effect, a death sentence) in distant areas whose populations had been destroyed. In Honduras about 150,000 were enslaved. In Panama, it was said, between the years of 1514 and 1530 up to 2,000,000 Indians were killed. But again, since numbers such as these are so overwhelming, sometimes it is the smaller incident that best tells what it was like — such as the expedition to Nicaragua in 1527 of Lopez de Salcedo, the colonial governor of Honduras. At the start of his trip Salcedo took with him more than 300 Indian slaves to carry his personal effects. Along the way he killed two-thirds of them, but he also captured 2000 more from villages that were in his path. By the rime he reached his destination in Leon only 100 of the more than 2300 Indian slaves he had begun with or acquired during his journey were still alive.⁸⁶ All this was necessary to "pacify" the natives.

As Bishop Diego de Landa (who was a brutal overlord himself) described the process in his region of the Yucatan: "the Spaniards pacified [the Indians of Cochua and Chetumal] in such a way, that these provinces which were formerly the thickest settled and most populous, remained the most desolate of all the country." In these besieged provinces, added Fray Lorenzo de Bienvenida, "the Indians fled from all this and did not sow their crops, and all died of hunger. I say all, because there were pueblos of five hundred and one thousand houses, and now one which has one hundred is large."⁸⁷ The Spanish had a saying, recalled Alonso de Zorita, that it was easy to find one's way from province to province, because the paths were marked with the bones of the dead. There are "certain birds," he added, "that, when an Indian falls, pick out his eyes and kill and eat him; it is well known that these birds appear whenever the Spaniards make an incursion or discover a mine."⁸⁸ Indeed, to this day there exist in Yucatan towns and villages Spanish buildings and monuments that celebrate the sixteenth-century slaughter. One example is Montejo house in Merida — on the coast, near the sites of the ancient Maya cities of Uxmal and Chichen ltza — whose facade is decorated with two proud and preening conquistadors, each of whom has his feet planted atop the severed heads of Indians.⁸⁹

The gratuitous killing and outright sadism that the Spanish soldiers had carried out on Hispaniola and in central Mexico was repeated in the long march to the south. Numerous reports, from numerous reporters, tell of Indians being led to the mines in columns, chained together at the neck, and decapitated if they faltered. Of children trapped and burned alive in their houses, or stabbed to death because they walked too slowly. Of the routine cutting off of women's breasts, and the tying of heavy gourds to their feet before tossing them to drown in lakes and lagoons. Of babies taken from their mothers' breasts, killed, and left as roadside markers. Of "stray" Indians dismembered and sent back to their villages with their chopped-off hands and noses strung around their necks. Of "pregnant and confined women, children, old men, as many as they could capture," thrown into pits in which stakes had been imbedded and "left stuck on the stakes, until the pits were filled."⁹⁰ And much, much more.

One favorite sport of the conquistadors was "dogging." Traveling as they did with packs of armored wolfhounds and mastiffs that were raised on a diet of human flesh and were trained to disembowel Indians, the Spanish used the dogs to terrorize slaves and to entertain the troops. An entire book, Dogs of the Conquest, has been published recently, detailing the exploits of these animals as they accompanied their masters throughout the course of the Spanish depredations. "A properly fleshed dog," these authors say, "could pursue a 'savage' as zealously and effectively as a deer or a boar .... To many of the conquerors, the Indian was merely another savage animal, and the dogs were trained to pursue and rip apart their human quarry with the same zest as they felt when hunting wild beasts."⁹¹

Vasco Nunez de Balboa was famous for such exploits and, like others, he had his own favorite dog — Leoncico, or "little lion," a reddish-colored cross between a greyhound and a mastiff — that was rewarded at the end of a campaign for the amount of killing it had done. On one much celebrated occasion, Leoncico tore the head off an Indian leader in Panama while Balboa, his men, and other dogs completed the slaughter of everyone in a village that had the ill fortune to lie in their journey's path. Heads of human adults do not come off easily, so the authors of Dogs of the Conquest seem correct in calling this a "remarkable feat," although Balboa's men usually were able to do quite well by themselves.⁹² As one contemporary description of this same massacre notes:

The Spaniards cut off the arm of one, the leg or hip of another, and from some their heads at one stroke, like butchers cutting up beef and mutton for market. Six hundred, including the cacique, were thus slain like brute beasts . . . . Vasco ordered forty of them to be torn to pieces by dogs.⁹³

Just as the Spanish soldiers seem to have particularly enjoyed testing the sharpness of their yard-long rapier blades on the bodies of Indian children, so their dogs seemed to find the soft bodies of infants especially tasty, and thus the accounts of the invading conquistadors and the padres who traveled with them are filled with detailed descriptions of young Indian children routinely taken from their parents and fed to the hungry animals. Men who could take pleasure in this sort of thing had little trouble with less sensitive matters, such as the sacking and burning of entire cities and towns, and the destruction of books and tablets containing millennia of accumulated knowledge, wisdom, and religious belief.

Even when supposedly undoing the more extreme acts of violence perpetrated by their compatriots, the conquistadors seemed unable to restrain themselves from one last act of savagery. For a number of years Indians who were enslaved had their chattel status burned into their faces with branding irons that stamped them with the initials of their owners. When sold from one Spaniard to another, a replacement brand was made. Consequently, some slaves' faces were scarred with two or three or four branding mutilations identifying them as transferable pieces of property. Once, however, writes William Sherman, "when a ship put in at a Nicaraguan port loaded with illegally enslaved encomienda Indians, the governor freed them and sent them home. But first the natives, some of whom were women and suckling children, had their face brands canceled. Fresh letters spelling 'libre' were burned into their scarred faces."⁹⁴

The treatment of Indian females is particularly revealing, in light of the Catholic machismo ideology of the Spanish that celebrated the purity of their own women. The tone for such treatment was set at the start, with the first description that exists of a sexual encounter between a European and an Indian woman. It occurred during Columbus's second voyage and was described by the protagonist himself, not a Spaniard in this case, but the Italian nobleman Michele de Cuneo:

While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom, having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that, (to tell you the end of it all), I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such manner that I can tell you she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.⁹⁵

Cuneo here expresses an attitude toward raped women that soon would become a staple of violent pornography and male sadistic fantasy: she enjoyed it. While still in the Caribbean, a report to the king's minister by a group of Dominicans provides a different, but equally vivid, example of the other classic function and fantasy of rape — the demonstration of power and the degradation of both the victim and her loved ones. Typically, when an enslaved workman returned from the mines at the end of a day, the friars reported, "not only was he beaten or whipped because he had not brought up enough gold, but further, most often, he was bound hand and foot and flung under the bed like a dog, before the [Spanish] foreman lay down, directly over him, with his wife."⁹⁶

These were just precursors to the open trade in enslaved women that the Spanish delighted in as the decades wore on. Native women — or indias — were gambled away in card games and traded for other objects of small value, while stables of them were rented out to sailors who desired sexual accompaniment during their travels up and down the coast. If an india attempted to resist, she was whipped or tortured or burned alive. Even when laws were passed to curb the more extreme of such atrocities, the penalties were a joke. When, for example, an uncooperative Nicaraguan Indian woman was burned to death in her hut by a Spaniard who tried to rape her, he was prosecuted by the governor — and fined five pesos.⁹⁷

Those women who were not valued as enslaved concubines were forced to do back-breaking work. Writes one modern historian:

Some of the indias even as late as the 1580s were being broken physically, their insides literally bursting in some instances from the heavy loads they had to carry. Unable to endure more, some of them committed suicide by hanging, starving themselves, or by eating poisonous herbs. Encomenderos forced them to work in open fields where they tried to care for their children. They slept outside and there gave birth to and reared their babies, who were often bitten by poisonous insects. Mothers occasionally killed their offspring at birth to spare them future agonies .... [Other] working mothers present a poignant image when we hear of them returning home after weeks or months of separation from their children, only to find that they had died or had been taken away.⁹⁸

Concludes this writer: "All of those factors help explain the fact that on tribute rolls married couples were frequently entered as having no children at all or only one, and seldom more than two."⁹⁹ In even the most healthful of environments birth rates of this level will mean zero population growth at first, and then increasingly precipitous decline. In an environment of such enormous mortality from genocide and firestorms of disease, as was the rule in the Americas during the Spanish conquest, birth rates this low were a blueprint for extinction.

And that is precisely what happened in community after community. Almost everyone was killed. There were, of course, exceptions. But overall in central Mexico the population fell by almost 95 percent within seventyfive years following the Europeans' first appearance — from more than 25,000,000 people in 1519 to barely 1,300,000 in 1595. And central Mexico was typical. Even using moderate estimates of the pre-1492 population, in southeastern Mexico the number of inhabitants dropped from 1,700,000 to less than 240,000 in a century and a half. In northern Mexico, over a somewhat longer period, the native population fell from more than 2,500,000 to less than 320,000. Wherever the invaders went, the pattern was the same. On the island of Cozumel, off the eastern coast of Mexico, more than 96 percent of the population had been destroyed less than 70 years after the Spaniards' first arrival. In the Cuchumatan Highlands of Guatemala the population fell by 82 percent within the first halfcentury following European contact, and by 94 percent — from 260,000 to 16,000 — in less than a century and a half. In western Nicaragua 99 percent of the people were dead (falling in number from more than 1,000,000 to less than 10,000) before sixty years had passed from the time of the Spaniards' initial appearance. In western and central Honduras 95 percent of the people were exterminated in half a century. In Cordoba, near the Gulf of Mexico, 97 percent of the population was extinguished in little more than a century, while simultaneously, in neighboring Jalapa, the same lethal pattern held: 97 percent of the Jalapa population was destroyedfalling from 180,000 people in 1520 to 5000 in 1626. With dreary regularity, in countless other locales across the length and breadth of Mexico and down into Central America, the European intrusion meant the sudden and near total disappearance of populations that had lived and flourished there for thousands upon thousands of years.¹⁰⁰

Those natives who survived remembered, however, and in poetry they passed on to posterity the dreadful tale of what had happened. Recalled an Aztec poet:

Broken spears lie in the roads;
we have tom our hair in grief.
The houses are roofless now, and their walls
are red with blood.

Worms are swarming in the streets and plazas,
and the walls are splattered with gore.
The water has turned red, as if it were dyed,
and when we drink it,
it has the taste of brine.

We have pounded our hands in despair
against the adobe walls,
for our inheritance, our city, is lost and dead.¹⁰¹

The Maya book of Chilam Balam adds "what the white lords did when they came to our land":

They taught fear and they withered the flowers. So that their flower should live, they maimed and destroyed the flower of others. . . . Marauders by day, offenders by night, murderers of the world.¹⁰²

Then the Spanish, joined now by other European adventurers and their military escorts, pushed on into South America.