An Indian Farewell in Prescott's The Conquest of Mexico

Abstract

IN NEITHER OF HIS STATELY ACCOUNTS of reduction of American Indians, of Mexicans and Incas, does W. H. Prescott unequivocally deny European right of conquest. The natives of America may have suffered extreme atrocities, may have been massively disinherited and robbed, but by receiving a far higher civilization and a more humanitarian religion they were more than requited. Yet Prescott does exult in right Europeans earned with their superiority. He can speak scathingly of way Pope Alexander VI generously granted a large portion of Western Hemisphere to Spaniards and of Eastern to Portuguese, following that philosophy according to which the territory of heathen, wherever found, was regarded as a sort of religious waif, which in default of a legal proprietor, was claimed and taken possession of. And he further complicates his position by showing that struggle between fanatics and enlightened on both sides could often be as significant as story of conquest he is principally concerned with. Hence Aztec priests become Dominicans, barbarians of New World, and Tezcoco its Athens.' For this reason Nezahualcoyotl, ruler of Tezcoco in fifteenth century, becomes crucial to moral balance of Prescott's history of Mexican conquest. As a Tezcocan, Nezahualcoyotl inherited golden age which Sahagun's informants said Toltecs gave to Anahuac; he is a latter-day Quetzalcoatl, urbane and articulate. His noble architecture and academies, his laws and religion, his literary tastes, appear altogether compatible with certain Western ideals and were, Prescott admits, not to have been expected among aborigines of America. It was this man who resisted bloodsacrifices of Aztecs, his neighbors across lake in Tenochti-