The World полностью

While starry-eyed European travellers later idealized Hawaii as a free-loving, easy-going paradise, this was a hierarchical, polyamorous society of warriors dominated by kapu, the Polynesian religion, with rituals, foods and lands specified for each class. The chieftains earned mana, divine charisma, by inheritance and war, which granted them the right to sacrifice humans to the gods. Subjects bowed to the floor before chiefs. The struggles for power were as ferocious as those in Europe; noble babies were killed if they cried when they were laid on the sacred Naha Stone; victories were celebrated by human sacrifices. The losing chieftain was personally sacrificed – usually strangled – by the victor.

Their entire concept of family was more flexible than that prevailing in Europe: women, high and low, enjoyed a degree of independence unthinkable in China or Europe and were allowed lovers; children often treated two men as fathers and were usually raised by cousins rather than parents. Older men took teenage boys as aikane – lovers. But genealogy was chronicled and treasured. Around this time, the main island was governed by a semi-mythical alii nui or queen called Kaikilani, the ancestress of the kings who would encounter the Europeans.

Cortés knew little of the Pacific, but he understood there were lands there to conquer. At forty-nine, he had lost none of his ambition or energy. Before permitting more expeditions, Emperor Charles ordered that indigenous peoples ‘must be allowed to live in liberty’, but Cortés was already forcing them to work to death in encomiendas, while spasms of epidemic – measles, smallpox, mumps, haemorrhagic fevers, – were killing large numbers of them: by 1580, some 88 per cent of the people of the Valley of Mexico had died.

As other conquistadors competed with Cortés to ‘explore’ (seize) the lands around the Valley, he felt forced to pre-empt them, orchestrating expeditions up the Pacific coast, starting with his own to the Sea of Cortés followed by that of a henchman who sailed up the coast as far as San Francisco, mapping the coast of a new territory named California.^*

Cortés’s allies remained independent, with many kingdoms untouched by Spanish control for over a century. In 1523, Cortés sent his sidekick Pedro de Alvarado to conquer the Maya kingdoms of Kiche and Kaqchikel in Guatemala and Salvador, but failed. Ultimately it took massive assistance from Nahua peoples to crush the Kaqchikel; to the north, Zapotecs helped Cortés take the lush Oaxaca Valley. The second largest kingdom, that of the Purépecha, was conquered in 1530, but the last independent Maya kingdom did not fall until 1697.

North America was even more challenging. In 1528, an expedition led by Pánfilo de Narváez tried to found a colony in La Florida, the vast lands between Alabama and modern Florida, but it was a disaster. Trudging 2,000 miles, starving and eating each other, the Spaniards were enslaved by Coahuiltecan Indians: four survivors made it to Mexico City.^*

On his own expedition to Honduras, Cortés took with him Cuauhtémoc, the Supreme Speaker, afraid to leave the last ruler in Mexico City. But when he discovered a plot to rebel, he had him beheaded and impaled.

Back in Mexico City, Cortés was joined by his long-time wife, Catalina Suárez, but she died mysteriously, probably murdered by her husband. Malinche, his Maya interpreter and in some ways the architect of the decisive alliance with the Mesoamerican allies, became his mistress – whether by force or choice we cannot know – giving birth to his first son Martín known as El Mestizo (the Mixed Race). Cortés took the boy away, had him legitimized by the pope and raised in Spain. As for Malinche herself, Cortés gave her an encomienda and married her to another Spaniard, with whom she had a daughter. Still only around twenty-three, this remarkable woman had endured fourteen years a slave; now she was a landowner and the wife of a Spanish gentleman. But she died soon afterwards, perhaps in one of the epidemics.

Amid the killing of Mexica, Cortés presided over a strange melding of Spanish conquistador and Mexica royalty, Motecuhzoma’s bloodline being especially revered. Cortés regarded Motecuhzoma’s daughter Tecuichpoch, now twenty-five, this widow of three Supreme Speakers, as an important symbol of the new order. He converted her to Christianity with the name Isabel Montezuma, marrying her to a henchman (who soon died) and granting her an encomienda, worked by local and African slaves. Described as ‘very beautiful’, she became a devout Christian, but she too was unable to avoid becoming Cortés’s mistress.^*