cure imperial pardon for his offenses, as well as sanction to continue the conquest. Therefore, he pictured the El Dorado of which Spaniards were wont to dream, whose wealth would fill the emperor's depleted treasury, and whose greatness would augment the power of his realm. All that he saw and did was extravagantly colored in such language and terminology as would magnify his adventures, and at the same time picture the conquest of a country after the Spanish ideal. Besides this, he tells how the people were idolaters and human sacrificers; how he overturned their false idols and set up crosses and images of the Virgin in their stead; and how, by constant appeals to them to embrace the religion of the Spaniards, it pleased God to make him the means of converting many. Thus, by emphasizing his acts as religious, and giving his expedition the color of a holy war, did he also secure the necessary and powerful influence of the priests at court, who, in those days of a jealous Inquisition, the Romish sovereign dare not ignore.
These letters were dispatched by trusted messengers direct to his Majesty in Spain, and, that their object might be the more surely accomplished, a quantity of virgin gold was sent with one of them, which was either gathered from the Mexicans themselves or by the Spaniards with native aid.
These considerations should influence our judgment as to the truth of Cortes's Aztec story. Even Mr. Hubert Bancroft says that "he was ever ready with a lie when it suited his purpose," and that he sees in his letters "calculated misstatements both direct and negative." Dr. Robertson, too, though he accepts them as so much history, is forced to confess that such and such a statement "seems improbable."
Besides Cortes, however, both Gomora and Bernal Diaz speak of bronze and tin, but it is only in the single instance when the merchandise of the market-place is described. Gomora only enumerates the metals, without describing the form in which they were used, and Bernal Diaz's words are, "They had for sale bronze axes, copper, and tin."
But Gomora, it should be remembered, was Cortes's secretary and chaplain, and, as Dr. Robertson says, he probably composed his work at his master's dictation, we naturally expect him to repeat the latter's highly-colored and delusive account of Aztec art. If he obtained versions from other lips besides his master's, it was all doubtless recorded in the manner the latter desired. Indeed, Las Casas asserts this most positively, and in another place adds also the charge of "downright falsehood." Muñoz and Robertson have rejected him as a reliable authority, and even his contemporary, Bernal Diaz, has emphatically accused him of adulation and inaccuracy.
But Bernal Diaz himself can not be believed, and in him we have the last of the three authorities for aboriginal smelting. A reading of his work alone would lead the educated mind of to-day to doubt the
