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Sternly he again accused Montezuma of having been the original contriver of the treacherous deed, and said that a crime which merited death in a subject must in some way be atoned for even by a king, whereupon he ordered the soldier to fasten the fetters upon Montezuma's ankles, and after coolly waiting until it was done turned his back and quitted the room.
The Mexicans dare not send a vessel of war to sea, which would be sending them to Norfolk, or New York, at once; but no one can say when they may begin to make a prey of our commerce." "They have taken nothing as yet, Mr. Mulford, and, to tell you the truth, I'd much rather fall in with one of Don Montezuma's craft than one of Uncle Sam's."
They desired to know whether he would teach his methods to some of the chief scribes of the emperor. Cacama warmly congratulated Roger on the result. "You are now safe, for the present, at any rate," he said, "and the priests are silenced. You may have trouble in the future, but for the time Montezuma's love of art has overcome his doubts and fears as to good and evil omens."
He had just made a rough campaign with the natives of Tabasco, in Yucatan, where he learned that farther up the Gulf, where he finally landed, there was "a people who had much gold." That was what he sought. It was not God but gold that drew him onward from Vera Cruz to Montezuma's capital. He was not seeking to christianize the natives; that was a plausible subterfuge.
Neither number, however, was quite sufficient to meet the conceptions of the historiographer of Spain, and accordingly three thousand, all guards, were adopted by Herrera as a suitable number to give eclat to Montezuma's dinner.
In order to understand so simple an event in Indian life as Montezuma's dinner, it is necessary to know certain usages and customs, and even certain institutions of the Indian tribes generally, which had a direct bearing upon the dinner of every Indian in America at the epoch of the Spanish conquest.
Cortes was suffered to rejoin his comrades in the palace of Axa without attack, I do not know why, and on the following day Cuitlahua, Montezuma's brother, king of Palapan, was released by him that he might soothe the people. But Cuitlahua was no coward. Once safe outside his prison walls, he called the council together, of whom the chief was Guatemoc.
Montezuma's dinner, witnessed by Bernal-Diaz and others, and elaborately described by a number of authors, shows that the Aztecs had a smoking hot dinner each day, prepared regularly, and on a scale adequate to a large household; that the dinner of each person was placed in one bowl, and all these bowls to the number of several hundred were brought in and set down together upon the floor of one room, where they were taken up one by one by the male members of the household, and the contents eaten sitting down upon the floor or standing in the open court, as best suited them.
As late as 1781 they executed a sentence of death on a descendant of the Peruvian Incas for declaring his royal origin. When Montezuma's tree fell the people gathered on the house-tops to watch the east-in vain, for the white man was there.
So it comes to pass that the canoe-traffic is carried on in much the same way as it was in Montezuma's time. There is one curious difference, however. These canoes are all poled about the lakes and canals; and I do not think we saw an Indian oar or paddle in the whole valley of Mexico.
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