Transforming Discoveries^39
Aztec emissaries agreeing to a treaty with Cortes, who is seated with his interpreter
standing to his left.
remembered, “the noise of the cannon was as the noise of thunder in the
heavens and the flashes of fire of their guns were like flashes of lightning
in the sky: and the noise of their matchlocks was like that of ground-nuts
popping in the frying-pan.”
Steeped in tales of crusading chivalry and conquest, the conquerors set
out looking for adventure and wealth. Cortes, for example, was of a modest
Castilian noble family; his father had fought against the Moors in southern
Spain, and thus was himself a veteran of another imperial conquest, the
Reconquista, which had expelled the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula.
“We came here to serve God and the king,” said one Spaniard in the Ameri
cas, “but also to get rich.” Most died young, far from home, their dreams of
wealth shattered by the harsh realities of life in what seemed to them a
strange and often inhospitable world. Ferdinand Magellan (c. 1480-1521),
the Portuguese-born explorer, was killed by angry islanders on a Pacific
beach. His crew nonetheless circumnavigated the globe, having proven that
a southwest passage to India did exist, returning to Spain in 1522.
Many of the conquistadors, and many of the later settlers (mostly men)
who were attracted by tales of gold and silver, died in the New World; dur
ing the first ten years of Spanish settlement of Hispaniola, as much as
