ve savages. It can not be claimed that the
Aztecs were superior to these Mantatees, or that the force of Cortez
was inferior in equipment to the hundred unwarlike Griquas whose
"thunder and lightning" (as they termed the musketry) drove them back.
The missionary was a Protestant, a man of truth, and had no glory to
win, and therefore told only the simple truth. Cortez, out of a much
inferior affair, has fabricated a romance, with such verisimilitude
that he has astonished the world by an account of achievements which he
never performed. To write well is nine tenths of a hero; and in the
time of Cortez, as it is even now at Mexico, it was the easiest thing
imaginable to manufacture an astonishing victory out of the very
smallest amount of material. If no lives were lost in the battle, so
much more astounding is the victory. This practice of sacrificing human
life is only a modification of cannibalism, and the very mission on
which the Spaniards came to Mexico was to extinguish that crime, so
that they would jeopardize their title to the country should they
presume to shed the blood of each other in their interminable wars. And
so long as only women, and children, and Indians are the sufferers,
they do no violence to the rules of warfare which Cortez and the
Conquistadors introduced. The armies of Mexico have never been
deficient in good writers; a specimen of the capacity of one of them I
have already given in the chapter on Texas; so that their stately and
dignified histories of the national squabbles of the last thirty years
are equal to Cortez in gross exaggeration, and not a whit behind him in
elegance of composition.

MORGAN AND CORTEZ.

A hundred years after the conquest of Mexico, there sailed out of the
harbor of Port Royal, now Kingston, in Jamaica, an unlawful military
enterprise, about equal in force to that with which Cortez first landed
at Vera Cruz, but immensely inferior to the panic-stricken host that
fled by night from the city of Mexico. The fitting out of this unlawful
expedition, like that of Cortez, had the connivance of the local
authorities. The difference between the two was, that Morgan did not
understand the Spanish Oriental style of proclaiming his own heroism,
and furthermore, his expedition was not directed against a
miserably-armed rabble of Indians, but against the fortified city of
Panama, held by a garrison of royal troops.

Mooring his little fleet in the harbor of Chagres, Morgan m