The Route of the Conquistadors

A Brief Lament

In writing narrative nonfiction adventure history, one of the elements of research that is important to me is what I call "immersion research," which is active on-the-ground travel of the places and people one is hoping to understand and even conjure through language. Certainly, the hard academic book and library and archive and primary research is crucial, but if a writer wishes to recreate landscape, flora, and fauna from some 500 years ago, I believe it's important to travel the lands and rivers and seas of the people you are writing about (even though I understand full well that often the indigenous flora, fauna, and even people have in many cases been eradicated or replaced by marauding exotics). Such is the nature of history. 

In June of 2006, while researching the book CONQUISTADOR, I decided to follow the route of Cortes and his conquistadors from the east coast of Mexico, near where they landed in the spring of 1519 at Vera Cruz, up through the steaming jungles of the tierra caliente, over smoldering mountains and deep-fissured tablelands, and eventually make my way down into the Valley of Mexico, to the ruins of Tenochtitlan (modern day Mexico City) where Cortes would finally meet the emperor Montezuma. I traveled by bus and by car and also by foot, hiking in the mountains and hoping to feel first hand the heat and humidity of the sultry coastal jungle, the dry parchment of the central badlands, the thin air of the high mountains. 

On the eastern coast I visited the ruins of the temple pyramids at Cempoala, a vitally important place for Cortes as the Cempoalans, part of the Totanac Federation, were reluctant tributaries of the Aztecs and among Cortes’s first native allies. I crossed the Rio Antigua on a small bridge and looked down the muddy river toward the Gulf of Mexico just a few miles away, imagining Spanish ships anchored there, their banners snapping in the wind. Cortes and his cavalry crossed this same river by swimming their horses, the footsoldiers forded it on rafts fashioned from branches and tree trunks. Once ashore, they hacked through the dense and crowded palm foliage, rich and green as jadestone, on their way to Cempoala. 

I headed through the quiet river town of Antigua towards the ruins, remembering the first reports of Cortes’s excited scouts: 

“One returned, breathless and wide-eyed, saying that he had seen their gleaming temples from afar, and they were burnished with silver. Indeed, he believed their worship temples to be made of pure silver!”

This scout was later humiliated, and Cortes disappointed, when they discovered that the silver was merely an optical illusion—the gleam was the bright midday sun reflected off the freshly whitewashed stones. 

Just as they were that spring day in 1519, many of the houses in the little town of Antigua were still painted in yellow, blue, red, and green, the roofs tidy, the walls cleanly scrubbed with lime. I arrived at the entrance to the ruins, paid a small fee and entered the grounds, flanked by great, swaying palms. Though it was early, maybe ten in the morning, I was a bit surprised to find myself completely alone in this sacred place. Before me, a series of pyramids had been erected with order and design across an expansive, flat plain and ritual plaza. I strode up to a central ring of stones, used for religious and ceremonial “gladiator battles” in which a rival prisoner would fight numerous men, and if victorious, would win his own life and avoid, at least for a time, ritual sacrifice at the nearby temple. 

I walked over and slowly climbed the steps of the main temple, a slight chill and twitch contracting my neck muscles as I recalled from the chronicles Cortes’s first encounter with this very temple. He had strode to the top and found a scene that shocked his zealous Christian sensibilities:

“Here were freshly sacrificed young boys, blood still pooling from their viscera. The walls of the altar were bespattered with blood, and the victims’ hearts were set out on plates. In the center were large, square sacrificial stones and sharp obsidian blades glistening with blood. There were dismembered torsos, the arms and legs severed from them cleanly…”

I stood on the top of the pyramid for a while, quietly pondering these images and scenes, conjuring the clamor from the ecstatic throng below, the low, mournful blowing of conch shells, the cacophony of drums and flutes and chanting. 

I finished my tour of the ruins and headed to the riverside café Las Mariscos Delicias for a late morning seafood breakfast of prawns and octopus and stuffed soft-shell crab. 

Mexico's magnificence and scale were transformative. I followed the conquerors’ route by bus up into the thickly wooded mountains near Jalapa, stopping for a few hours to visit the University of Vera Cruz’s Museum of Anthropology, memorable for its fluid design and collection of giant Olmec heads, so large and grand and mesmerizing as to be inconceivable. 

Then it was up through more mountains, winding through the scrubby sierra and cresting finally onto the sprawling hardpan plateau. I leaned against my window like an excited child, looking for the same volcanoes that Cortes and his men had seen and hardly believed, the enormous Popocatepetl (now shortened to Popo, it  means The Hill that Smokes), its conical dome smoldering, spewing cinder ash and steam high into the sky. 

Finally there it was, a volcano nearly 20,000 feet high looming in the distance. I squinted and blinked and readjusted my vision, trying to gain some scope, more scale or perspective. The cone of its summit hovered before me like a mirage, and I couldn’t believe it was real--it appeared Photoshopped against the skyline before me, but as the bus rumbled along for an hour, then another, I realize that the volcano had been more than 100 miles away when I first gazed on it.  

I staged in Cholula for a few days, famous now (not, as many gringos erroneously believe, for the excellent hot sauce) for having practically as many churches as there are days in the year, and important during the conquest as the site of Cortes’s brutal and controversial massacre of thousands of unarmed Cholulans which took place during Cortes's first visit there in this ancient city of religious pilgrimage. I stayed in a villa located literally at the steps of one of the most important archeological sites in all of Mexico. In 1519 Cholula boasted a great pyramid honoring Quetzalcoatl, with 120 steps leading to the summit of the structure, said to be the largest free-standing man made structure in the world, twice as long as the great Egyptian pyramid of Cheops. The pyramid was razed by the Spaniards and is now topped with a Spanish remnant, the impressive (but tragic, from the indigenous perspective) Church of Nuestra Senora de Los Remidios, and on most days you can see (as the Spaniards certainly did) Popo in the distance. For a nominal fee and for those not overly claustrophobic, you can explore the well-maintained and well-lit five miles of catacombs and tunnels that are literally in the bowels of this ancient pyramid. I am claustrophobic, but in the name of research I forced myself inside and into the dank labyrinth, and though I broke into the occasional panicked flop-sweat, the hour-long underground tour was worth my heart-clenching anxiety. 

In Cholula I was fortunate to befriend a local business owner named Rodrigo Moctezuma (yes, a distant relative of the emperor who shared his name). Rodrigo owns a stylish little jazz bar named Jazzatlan, and in the evenings I would sit and eat grilled nopales cactus and drink wine with Rodrigo and his friends and listen to local bands and watch art films projected onto the stucco wall. We talked of Mexican history, and of the conquest, and I told Rodrigo of the book I was writing and of my desire to see the noted Pass of Cortes, the high mountain pass where Cortes and his men first beheld the magnificent Tenochtitlan far below in the Valley of Mexico. Rodrigo agreed to take me there in his 1974 VW bus, and the next day, with both of us a bit rough, he picked me up and we were off. 

We drove through farmlands and small towns and soon the road was no longer paved but gravel and then dirt and we rose up through scrub pine and brushy mountain flanks, heading for the slung saddle between the volcanoes Popo and Ixta.  Eventually the dirt road curved through deeper forest, across rivers and next to cooling waterfalls, and I could feel the altitude in my veins, in my throbbing head, nausea creeping over me. I remembered that Cortes had lost many of his appropriated native Totonac bearers on this mountainside, the early winter temperatures and heights too harsh for his coastal porters. The horses shivered through the nights, the Spaniards huddled in their armor before feeble fires. Even in June, when I was there, the nearly 12,000 foot pass was freezing, and I wore a fleece as we left the van at the Pass of Cortes sign and began hiking the narrow trails heading up to the pass proper, what amounted to a flinty game trail creased between jagged stone walls. 

Mist shrouded the mountaintops and only occasionally could I see the volcano arched above me, and then it would disappear again in the gauzy haze. The altitude had weakened me (as had, I must admit, the previous nights debauchery coupled with the early gurglings and rumblings of Montezuma’s famed and justifiable revenge) and I stopped, leaned against a rock, swayed back and forth slowly, held my belly while Rodrigo laughed at me. I asked him to point to where Tenochtitlan would be, the great city on the water, and he smiled knowingly, pointing just to our left, to the west. "There, look below the fog," he said. 

I could see the outlines of buildings dotting the valley, thousands of flecks visible those many miles below, and I closed my eyes as the mist rose and swirled around us. I tried to imagine what it might have looked like to the Spaniards seeing it for the first time, the miraculous city of some 200,000 people at the time among the most populated cities on earth, larger even than Paris or Peking.  I thought of the words left by chronicler Bernal Diaz: 

“And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and that straight level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded. These great towns and temples had buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, and it seemed like an enchanted vision from the tale of Amadis. Some of our soldiers asked if this was not all a dream.”

A dream indeed. Cortes himself would refer to Tenochtitlan as “The City of Dreams,” exclaiming that it was without question “the most beautiful thing in the world.”

It was a beauty he coveted, a thing that he believed he must possess for God and crown and country. 

Cortes and his men were soon to arrive, and for the Aztecs, a nightmare was about to begin unfolding, a nightmare that had been foretold in a bad omen that appeared in the sky, came “like a flaming ear of corn or the blaze of daybreak, seeming to bleed fire, drop by drop, like a wound in the sky. There was great outcry and confusion. The people clapped their hands against their mouths; they were amazed and frightened and asked themselves what it could mean.”

The fog had now completely enveloped us, and when I opened my eyes the mirage of my imagined Tenochtitlan had vanished. 

Rodrigo looked away, then said, "Let's go.  It’s gone."