In late July, with 900 Spaniards and as many as 150,000 Tlaxcalteca and Texcoca, supported by brigantines on the lake, Cortés assaulted the city. Trained since childhood, hardened by cutting themselves with thorns and hallucinating on peyote, the Mexica fought wildly, sinking a brigantine and almost capturing Cortés himself, sacrificing prisoners and stringing up fifty-three heads. But in the end, wrote Cortés, they ‘could no longer find any arrows, javelins or stones’ and ‘our allies were armed with swords and breastplates and slaughtered so many of them on land and in the water that more than 40,000 were killed’. He freely admitted that his Tlaxcalteca auxiliaries ‘dined well’ on prisoners, ‘for they carried off all those killed, sliced them into pieces and ate them’. He did not give his allies credit for their help in battle, but conceded that ‘We had more trouble in preventing our allies from killing with such cruelty than we had in fighting the enemy. For no race, however savage, has ever practised such fierce and unnatural cruelty as the natives of these parts.’ Far from being a victory over four million people by 900 Spaniards, it was the triumph of overwhelming numerical and technical superiority, aided by the most punishing epidemic ever seen in the Americas. On 13 August, Cuauhtémoc was finally captured.
‘Strike me dead immediately,’ he told Cortés, asking him to spare his young wife Tecuichpoch. ‘So loud was the wailing of women and children,’ wrote Cortés, ‘that there was not one man among us whose heart did not bleed.’ It took a lot to make his heart bleed: ‘We could not prevent more than fifteen thousand being killed and sacrificed that day.’ The triumphant Spaniards and Tlaxcalteca soldiers looted and raped. The Mexica lamented their downfall in this threnody:
Broken spears lie in the roads
We’ve torn our hair with grief
The houses are roofless now
And their walls red with blood.
Cortés dismantled Tenochtitlan and built instead Mexico City, the Great Temple replaced by a great church. When the gold discovered proved inadequate, he had Cuauhtémoc tortured with fire to make him reveal more, while he rewarded his henchmen with
Shortly before Cortés laid siege to Tenochtitlan, Magellan was killed fighting locals in the Philippines who refused to convert to Christianity. Just as Cortés’s treasures reached Spain, one ship of desperate, cadaverous survivors arrived there from Magellan’s voyage. On a catastrophically bungled odyssey around the tip of south America into a ‘peaceful’ ocean that he named the Pacific, Magellan had lost men and ships to storms, mutinous fighting and fatal scurvy, before reaching Guam and then Brunei, the Moluccas and the Philippines,* where the explorer himself was smote. But one captain, Juan Sebastián Elcano, filled his ship with spices and with eighteen survivors sailed back around Africa to Spain. Charles, boasting that they had gone ‘where neither Portugal nor any other nation has been’, granted Elcano a coat of arms featuring a globe and the words
These Iberian adventurers had scarcely touched the vastness of the Pacific and its island realms. Some of these islands had been settled by Polynesians only recently: the last wave of Polynesian settlers had occupied the two islands of Aotearoa (New Zealand) only around 1300. The Maori remained in Aotearoa and for reasons unknown lost the will and technology to sail long distances. On Rapa Nui (Easter Island), settled since the third century, the islanders had built massive statues and temple platforms to honour ancestors and observe the stars.
In the middle of the Pacific, the four main islands of Hawaii were ruled by dynasties of intermarried chiefs descended from a founding goddess, Papa. The exact sequence is still unknown but around 700 Hawaii may have been settled by Polynesians from Tahiti, while it was a few centuries since new conquerors from Nuku Hiva (named the Marquesas by the Spanish) had arrived on the islands.
