Worlds in Collision

One spring afternoon in 1813, a 16-year-old Harvard junior named William Hickling Prescott left the college dining hall after lunch and began to stroll across the Yard when he was hit in the left eye “by a hard crust of bread” hurled during a food fight. He was permanently blinded in that eye. Two years later, William suffered a severe inflammation of his right eye brought on by an attack of rheumatism, a condition that would follow him for the rest of his life.

We might consider such quirky circumstances to be unfortunate were it not that in this astonishing case, the career of one of the most prolific and ambitious American historians was launched by an unexpected disability. Raised into a wealthy Brahmin family--his father, William Prescott Sr., was a sagacious attorney and investor, and his mother, Catherine, was the daughter of a Boston merchant and diplomat--young William did not have to be concerned about his lack of gainful employment.

He resolved to enter the field of intellectual labor. “By the time I am 30 (God willing),” Prescott wrote in his commonplace book, “I propose . . . to be a very well read English scholar, to be acquainted with the classical and useful authors (prose and poetry) in Latin, French, and Italian--especially History.” In quick succession, he helped found a literary magazine, schooled himself in the aesthetics of epic poetry and mastered the Romance languages, with a special concentration in Spanish.

Prescott settled in with his wife, Susan, and (eventually) four children at his father’s house on Bedford Street, where--warned by family doctors against travel and undue exertion--the wide-ranging historian who virtually never left Boston brought the world to his doorstep.

Prescott established a network of friends, scholars, antiquarian booksellers, Harvard graduates, members of the diplomatic corps, and collaborators in America and abroad to help him build an unparalleled personal archive, out of which he constructed four major works over two decades: histories of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, the conquest of Peru, Philip the Second and the magisterial “Conquest of Mexico.”

From the newly opened manuscript holdings of the Royal Academy of History in Spain; from the letters of Frances Calderon de la Barca, wife of the Spanish ambassador to Mexico; from the personal libraries of colleagues Washington Irving, George Bancroft, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and George Ticknor; from the great “scientific traveller” Baron Alexander Von Humboldt in Germany; from the deepest recesses of the British Museum--from all these sources and many more, by the time he began work on his “History of the Conquest of Mexico” in October 1839, William Prescott owned a library of 4,000 to 5,000 volumes and a manuscript collection comprising copies of 8,000 previously unpublished pages.

Coupled with this pack-rat mania was a complex system for composing his original histories. Despite his severe handicap, Prescott invented a hands-on writing process. He awakened early for a daily horseback ride. Following family breakfast, he went into his study for three hours with his well-spoken (and well-paid) “reader,” who sat behind and to the left of him by the carefully modulated light from the window. When the reader came across a passage in a primary text or manuscript that Prescott’s attuned ear deemed noteworthy, he would say, “Mark that!” while at the same time writing on a noctograph. This was a frame holding carbon paper mounted beneath evenly spaced parallel wires, which allowed the nearly blind Prescott to move an inkless stylus from left to right along pre-set lines.

At the end of morning and afternoon sessions (and an additional period after dinner when Mrs. Prescott read to her husband), the “marked” passages from the day’s historical readings, interspersed with noctograph impressions, were transcribed in very large script for Prescott’s review and edit.

Prescott would then have these annotated versions read aloud to him again, “over & over--till ready to throw it on paper--an effort rather of memory than creation,” until he was ready to return once more to his noctograph and set down the chapter entirely from recollection, speedily, often singing to himself.

The “History of the Conquest of Mexico” was first published in three volumes by Harper & Brothers in New York City in 1843. To our modern eyes, it is as much a triumph over the genre as it is a saga of religious imperialism, Hernan Cortes’ harsh victory over the Aztec nation. In its occasionally stilted and romanticized celebration of heroic figures and its endorsement of the inherent and at times exaggerated drama that shapes the events, the book is certainly a product of its time. In its exhaustive attributions, discursive historiography and refreshingly uneven moral topography, the book is equally a product of Prescott’s unique sensibility, which he was astute enough to acknowledge: “The subversion of a great empire by a handful of adventurers, taken with all its strange and picturesque accompaniments, has the air of romance rather than of sober history, and it is not easy to treat such a theme according to the severe rules prescribed by historical criticism.”

To achieve a kind of balance, the fair-minded Prescott brackets the story with introductory and concluding chapters tracing the history of the origins, rise and decline of what he correctly calls “the loose foundations of the Aztec nation.” He takes great pains to inform the reader of the single greatest challenge facing a historian of Mexico in the middle of the 19th century (indeed, for all ages to come): that virtually all contemporary indigenous texts in existence at the time of the conquest were burned by the conquistadors and their immediate priestly followers. Everything Prescott knows of the crucial period 1519-1521 that is the white-hot center of his narrative--the Spanish landing, their march inland to the Aztec “metropolis” of Tenochtitlan, first contact with King Montezuma and his retinue, the bloody battles, hasty retreat of the invaders, Spanish resurgence, final sack and pillage of the city and its magnificent pyramid temples, stealing the fabled realms of gold--was derived in the first instance from subjective oral history accounts by elderly native informants transcribed from Nahuatl dialect and set down into Spanish in the mid-1520s and subsequently.

Nevertheless, across this irreparable linguistic and cultural “rupture,” (in the words of the late Octavio Paz), Prescott strives to understand the “barbarian” Aztecs. He wonders how a people with such a highly developed religious pantheon, a calendar of ritual events, monumental architecture, an appreciation of the arts, literature and music could indulge in human sacrifice; could worship, and then eat, effigies made of maize-paste; and carry on so wildly, tearing out the hearts of captive slaves within their “temples of Mammon.”

When the opportunistic Hernan Cortes, a former notary from Extramadura province, arrives by way of Cuba with his dozen ships and 500 men off the island of San Juan de Ulua in what is now the Gulf of Campeche, he bears the holy cross of Our Lady and the “banner of Christ” of his Caesarean emperor Charles V of Spain, chief defender of the Catholic faith. To Prescott, the dialectic is at that instant clearly established: “The light of civilization would be poured on the land,” he writes. “But it would be the light of a consuming fire, before which [the Aztecs’] barbaric glory, their institutions, their very existence and name as a nation, would wither and become extinct!”

When Cortes suspected 50 members of the Tlascalan nation of being spies and infiltrating his encampment under false pretenses, he cut off their hands “and in that condition sent them back to their countrymen” as an example of the consequences of defying Spanish might. Here and in many other instances throughout the narrative, Prescott departs from the strict linearity of his tale to editorialize (we might even say agonize) about the appropriateness of such an action. He does so by trying mightily to put the reader into a 16th century context, lest we condemn the conqueror before considering the exigencies of his situation. After all, Prescott cautions, “man in a state of excitement, savage or civilized, is much the same in any age . . . such are the inevitable evils of war, even among the most polished people. . . . To judge the conquistadors fairly, we must not do it by the lights of our own age.”

By the same empathic token, “None trembled more than the Aztec emperor [Moctezuma] on his throne among the mountains. He read in these events the dark characters traced by the finger of Destiny. He felt his empire melting away like a morning mist.”

Painstakingly, Prescott contrasts and compares the voluminous ecclesiastical and historical works of Bernardino de Sahagun, Bernal Diaz de Castillo, Peter Martyr, Bartolomeo de las Casas, Fernando Alva de Ixtlilxochitl, Toribio de Benavente and others from the three centuries preceding him, in every case where there is even the slightest variant in the account of an incident or event. He cites cadences of Aztec poetry in Spanish translation. He cites Humboldt’s French reminiscences of his travels in Mexico in the early 1800s. He even corroborates an account of the grid-like layout of the streets of the Aztec capital by comparing maps from not one but two ancient books.

The sheer accumulation of substantiated detail is propelled forward by Prescott’s unsparing identification with the fundamentally tragic nature of the conflict. “I have not drawn a veil over these evils,” Prescott concedes toward the end, once again addressing his reader directly. He has intuited that the “conquest” of Mexico was, in fact, the unsuccessful enterprise of grafting one civilization upon another. He points out that the foundations of the great colonial cathedral in the center of Mexico City were symbolically laid with the broken stones of Aztec temples.

Today evidence of that imperfect conquest can be found throughout Mexico. Idols hide behind the altars of Mexican churches, while the cries of Indian voices emanate from the impenetrable Chiapas highlands. If only Prescott were listening from his study in Boston.