Page:The Mastering of Mexico.djvu/91

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Aguilar and Donna Marina
63

build a good altar for it. This they did at once, and two of our carpenters made a high cross.

When the image of Our Lady and the cross were set up on the altar we all paid our reverence there, and Padre Fray Bartolome de Olmedo said mass, the caciques being present, and we gave the name of Santa Maria de la Victoria to the town of Tabasco. With the aid of Aguilar, the friar also spoke many excellent things about our blessed religion to the twenty women, telling them not to believe in, and no longer offer sacrifices to, their idols, but to worship and adore the Lord. At once they were baptized. I can not now call to mind their names, but one was Donna Marina, a woman of distinction in bearing, good looking, intelligent and born a ruler over towns and peoples. How she came to be in such a condition happened in this wise:

Her father and mother were caciques of a town which held other towns subject. When she was still a little girl her father died and her mother married another cacique. Later a son was born, and the father and mother had so great affection for the younger child, and so wished to have him succeed after their death to their honors, that they secretly, in night-time, gave the little girl to some natives living at a distance, and then spread the rumor that she had died; which report gained further credit from the fact that a daughter of one of their slaves did