Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830 Read Online Free PDF Page A

more gifts, and then made a speech of welcome in which, as reported by Cortes, he identified the Spaniards as descendants of a great lord who had been expelled from the land of the Nahuas and were now returning to claim their own. He therefore submitted himself and his people to the King of Spain, as their `natural lord'. This 'voluntary' surrender of sovereignty, which is likely to have been no more than a Spanish interpretation, or deliberate misinterpretation, of characteristically elaborate Nahuatl expressions of courtesy and welcome, was to be followed by a further, and more formal, act of submission a few days later, after Cortes, with typical boldness, had seized Montezuma and taken him into custody.'
    Cortes had secured what he wanted: a translatio imperii, a transfer of empire, from Montezuma to his own master, the Emperor Charles V. In Spanish eyes this transfer of empire gave Charles legitimate authority over the land and dominions of the Mexica. It thus justified the subsequent actions of the Spaniards, who, after being forced by an uprising in the city to fight their way out of Tenochtitlan under cover of darkness, spent the next fourteen months fighting to recover what they regarded as properly theirs. With the fall of Tenochtitlan in August 1521 after a bitter siege, the Mexica empire was effectively destroyed. Mexico had become, in fact as well as theory, a possession of the Crown of Castile, and in due course was to be transformed into Spain's first American viceroyalty, the viceroyalty of New Spain.
    By the time of Christopher Newport's departure from London in December 1606, the story of Cortes and his conquest of Mexico was well known in England. Although Cortes's Letters of Relation to Charles V had enjoyed wide circulation on the continent, there is no evidence of any particular interest in him in the British Isles during the reign of Henry VIII. In 1496 Henry's father, tempted by the lure of gold and spices, and anxious not to be excluded by the Spaniards and Portuguese, had authorized John Cabot to `conquer and possess' in the name of the King of England any territory he should come across on his North Atlantic voyage not yet in Christian hands.' But after the death of Henry VII in 1509, Tudor England, enriched by the discovery of the Newfoundland fisheries but disappointed in the prospects of easy wealth, turned away from transatlantic enterprises, and for half a century left the running to the Spaniards, the Portuguese and the French. In the 1550s, when Mary Tudor's marriage made Charles's son and heir, Philip, for a brief time King of England, Richard Eden used his translation into English of the first three books of Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World to urge his compatriots to take lessons from the Spaniards. It was not until around 1580, however, that they began to pay serious attention to his words.10
    By then, English overseas voyages had significantly increased in both number and daring, and religious hostility, sharpening the collective sense of national consciousness, was making an armed confrontation between England and Spain increasingly probable. In anticipation of the conflict, books and pamphlets became the instruments of war. In 1578 Thomas Nicholas, a merchant who had been imprisoned in Spain, translated into English a much shortened version of Lopez de Gomara's History of the Indies under the title of The Pleasant Historie of the Conquest of the Weast India. Here English readers could read, although in mutilated form, a vivid account of the conquest of Mexico, based on information derived from Cortes himself."i Not only did Nicholas drastically cut Gomara's text, but he also managed to give it a distinctively English colouring. Where Gomara introduced Montezuma's formal surrender of sovereignty to Charles V by saying that he summoned a council and Cortes `which was attended by all the lords of Mexico and the country round', English readers would no doubt have been gratified to