Prescott and His Sources: a Critical Appraisal

Abstract

JUST AS PRESCOTT was a historian, so too the authors of his sources were chroniclers. Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Francisco L6opez de G6omara, Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Hernan Cortes himself-all were men who, like Cervantes' magnificent creation, daba a leer libros de capallerias con tanta aficion y gusto, que olvido6 casi de todo punto el ejercicio de la caza, y aun la administracion de su hacienda.. Seemingly hypnotized by the romances of chivalry so popular in their day, these men were bent on transferring their visions to posterity either through their chronicles, or, as in the case of Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, through a novel as well.1 The chroniclers, like Prescott, approached their work with what David Levin has described as romantic formulas; therefore, Prescott found no need to impose his own romantic formula on that of his predecessors.2 Prescott's main problem was to extract from his sources some kind of consensus on the details of his narrative. Only in his rejection of the essence of Las Casas' arguments did Prescot impose, and then reluctantly. Perhaps Prescott's romanticism, brilliantly portrayed by Levin, made him more fit to translate the chroniclers than to impose on them or even incorporate them as sources for a true history. Diaz, Lo6pez de G6omara, and Herrera, in their affection for Cortes and the Crown, were not only eloquent and abundant in detail-they were also romantic, superstitious, and credulous. They lacked the moral indignation of Las Casas which, while perhaps not praiseworthy per se for the writing of history, did serve to dissipate the clouds of praise surrounding the Conquest. * The author is Humanities Teaching Associate at Antioch College. Oviedo 's Don Claribalte was published in 1519, prior to his chronicles; see Sterling A. Stoudemire, trans. and ed., Natural History of the West Indies (Chapel Hill, 1959), xiimi. 2Thus, Levin's question at the end of History as Romantic Art (Stanford, 1959), 230 is answered as quickly as it is raised: . . one might like to know just how deliberately the [nineteenth-century] historians imposed the formulas on the historical record.