Going to Mexico with the Right State of Mind: The Spanish Conquistador

"The extraordinary actions and adventures of these men, while they rival the exploits recorded in chivalric romance, have the additional interest of verity. They leave us in admiration of the bold and heroic qualities inherent in the Spanish character which led that nation to so high a pitch of power and glory, and which are still discernible in the great mass of that gallant people by those who have an opportunity of judging them rightly".

(Washington Irving)

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Perversity and man's inhumanity to man were not, then, traits unique to the Conquistador, and his aberrations were common enough among his fellow Christians in the times in which he lived. Yet because his Spain was then politically dominant and feared by other nations of Europe who envied the spoils of conquest, the Spaniard became the symbol of the collective cruelty of the European peoples engaged in the westernization of the world. But the Conquistador, as the first to discover and exploit the riches of the New World, was no more than the expression of those drives which animated his generation, and a fairer appraisal of his character and significance comes from the pen of a famous English contemporary, Sir Walter Raleigh, who wrote in his History of the world:

"Here I cannot forbear to commend the patient virtue of the Spaniards. We seldom or never find any nation hath endured so many misadventures and miseries as the Spaniards have done in their Indian discoveries. Yet persisting in their enterprises, with invincible constancy, they have annexed to their kingdom so many goodly provinces, as bury the remembrance of all dangers past. Tempests and shipwracks, famine, overthrows, mutinies, heat and cold, pestilence, and all manner of diseases, both old and new, together with extream poverty, and want of all things needful, have been the enemies, wherewith every one of their most noble discoveries, at one time or other, hath encountered".

Hernan Cortes (Engraving by W. Holl, published by Charles Knight. "From a Picture in the Florence Gallery", undated)

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