On the 12th of October 1524, Cortes left Mexico on his celebrated expedition to Honduras. The start from Mexico was made to the sound of music, and all the population of the newly conquered city turned out to escort him for a few miles upon his way.

The cavalcade must have been a curious spectacle enough. Cortes himself and his chief officers rode partly dressed in armour, after the fashion of the time. Then came the Spanish soldiers, mostly on foot and armed with lances, swords, and bucklers, though there was a troop of crossbowmen and harquebusiers to whom “after God” we owed the Conquest, as an old chronicler has said when speaking of the Conquest of Peru. In Mexico they did good service also, although it was the horsemen that in that conquest played the greater part. Then came a force of three thousand friendly Indians from Tlascala, and last of all a herd of swine was driven slowly in the rear, for at that time neither sheep nor cattle were known in the New World.

Guatimozin, the captive King of Mexico, graced his conquerors’ triumphal march; and with the army went two falconers, Garci Caro and Alvaro MontaÑes, together with a band of music, some acrobats, a juggler, and a man “who vaulted well and played the Moorish pipe.”

Cortes rode the black horse which he had ridden at the siege of Mexico. Fortune appeared to smile upon him. He had just added an enormous empire to the Spanish crown, and proved himself one of the most consummate generals of his age. Yet he was on the verge of the great misfortune of his life, which at the same time was to prove him still a finer leader than he had been, even in Mexico.

His black horse also was about to play the most extraordinary rÔle that ever horse has played in the whole history of the world.

With varying fortunes, now climbing mountains, now floundering in swamps, and again passing rivers over which they had to throw bridges, the expedition came to an open country, well watered, and the home of countless herds of deer. Villagutierre, in his History of the Conquest of the Province of Itza (Madrid, 1701), calls it the country of the MaÇotecas, which name Bernal Diaz del Castillo says means “deer” in the language of those infidels. Fresh meat was scarce, and all the Spanish horsemen of those days were experts with the lance. Instantly Cortes and all his mounted officers set out to chase the deer. The weather was extraordinarily hot, hotter, so Diaz says, than they had had it since they left Mexico. The deer were all so tame that the horsemen speared them as they chose (los alancearon muy Á su placer), and soon the plain was strewed with dying animals just as it used to be when the Indians hunted buffalo thirty or forty years ago.

Diaz says that the reason for the tameness of the deer was that the MaÇotecas (here he applies the word to the Indians themselves) worshipped them as gods. It appears that their Chief God had once appeared in the image of a stag, and told the Indians not to hunt his fellow-gods, or even frighten them. Little enough the Spaniards cared for any gods not strong enough to defend themselves, for the deity that they adored was the same God of Battles whom we adore to-day.

So they continued spearing the god-like beasts, regardless of the heat and that their horses were in poor condition owing to their long march. The horse of one Palacios Rubio, a relation of Cortes, fell dead, overcome with the great heat; the grease inside him melted, Villagutierre says. The black horse that was ridden by Cortes also was very ill, although he did not die—though it perhaps had been better that he should have died, for Villagutierre thinks “far less harm would have been done than happened afterwards, as will be seen by those who read the tale.” After the hunting all was over, the line of march led over stony hills, and through a pass that Villagutierre calls “el Paso del Alabastro,” and Diaz “La Sierra de los Pedernales” (flints). Here the horse that had been ill, staked itself in a forefoot, and this, as Villagutierre says, was the real reason that Cortes left him behind. He adds, “It does not matter either way, whether he was left because his grease was melted with the sun, or that his foot was staked.” This, of course, is true, and anyhow the horse was reserved for a greater destiny than ever fell to any of his race.

Cortes, in his fifth letter to the Emperor Charles V., says simply, “I was obliged to leave my black horse (mi caballo morzillo) with a splinter in his foot.” He takes no notice of the melting of the grease. “The Chief promised to take care of him, but I do not know that he will succeed or what he will do with him.”

He told the Chief that he would send to fetch the horse, for he was very fond of him, and prized him very much. The Chief, no doubt, received the strange and terrible animal with due respect, and Cortes went on upon his way. That is all that Cortes says about the matter, and the mist of history closed upon him and on his horse. Cortes died, worn-out and broken-hearted, at the white little town of Castilleja de la Cuesta, not far from Seville; but El Morzillo had a greater destiny in store. This happened in the year 1525, and nothing more was heard of either the MaÇotecas or the horse, after that passage in the fifth letter of Cortes, till 1697. In that year the Franciscans set out upon the gospel trail to convert the Indians of Itza, attached to the expedition that Ursua led, for the interior of Yucatan had never been subdued. They reached Itza, having come down the River Tipu in canoes.

This river, Villagutierre informs us, is as large as any river in all Spain. Moreover, it is endowed with certain properties, its water being good and clear, so that in some respects it is superior to the water even of the Tagus. It is separated into one hundred and ninety channels (neither more nor less), and every one of these has its right Indian name, that every Indian knows. Upon its banks grows much sarsaparilla, and in its sand is gold.

Beyond all this it has a hidden virtue, which is that taken (fasting) it cures the dropsy, and makes both sick and sound people eat heartily. Besides this, after eating, when you have drunk its water you are inclined to eat again.

At midday it is cold, and warm at night, so warm that a steam rises from it, just as it does when a kettle boils on the fire. Other particularities it has, which though they are not so remarkable, yet are noteworthy.

Down this amazing river Ursua’s expedition navigated for twelve days in their canoes till they came to a lake called Peten-Itza, in which there was an island known as Tayasal. All unknown to themselves, they had arrived close to the place where long ago Cortes had left his horse. Of this they were in ignorance; the circumstance had been long forgotten, and Cortes himself had become almost a hero of a bygone age even in Mexico.

Fathers Orbieta and Fuensalida, monks of the Franciscan order, chosen both for their zeal and for their knowledge of the Maya language, were all agog to mark new sheep. The Indians amongst whom they found themselves were “ignorant even of the knowledge of the true faith.” Moreover, since the conquest they had had no dealings with Europeans, and were as primitive as they were at the time when Cortes had passed, more than a hundred years ago.

One of the Chiefs, a man known as Isquin, when he first saw a horse, “almost ran mad with joy and with astonishment. Especially the evolutions and the leaps it made into the air moved him to admiration, and going down upon all fours he leaped about and neighed.” Then, tired with this practical manifestation of his joy and his astonishment, he asked the Spanish name of the mysterious animal. When he learned that it was caballo, he forthwith renounced his name, and from that day this silly infidel was known as Caballito. Then when the soul-cleansing water had been poured upon his head, he took the name of Pedro, and to his dying day all the world called him “Don Pedro Caballito, for he was born a Chief.”

This curious and pathetic little circumstance, by means of which a brand was snatched red-hot from the eternal flames, lighted for those who have deserved hell-fire by never having heard of it, might, one would think, have shown the missionaries that the poor Indians were but children, easier to lead than drive.

It only fired their zeal, and yet all their solicitude to save the Indians’ souls was unavailing, and the hard-hearted savages, dead to the advantages that baptism has ever brought with it, clave to their images.The good Franciscans made several more attempts to move the people’s hearts by preaching ceaselessly. All failed, and then they went to several islands in the lake, in one of which Father Orbieta hardly had begun to preach, when, as Lopez Cogulludo [114a] tells us, an Indian seized him by the throat and nearly strangled him, leaving him senseless on the ground.

At times, seated in church listening to what the Elizabethans called “a painful preacher,” even the elect have felt an impulse to seize him by the throat. Still, it is usually restrained; but these poor savages, undisciplined in body and in mind, were perhaps to be excused, for the full flavour of a sermon had never reached them in their Eden by the lake. Moreover, after he was thus rudely cast from the pulpit to the ground, Father Fuensalida, nothing daunted by his fate, stepped forward and took up his parable. He preached to them this time in their own language, in which he was expert, with fervid eloquence and great knowledge of the Scriptures, [114b] explaining to them the holy mystery of the incarnation of the eternal Word. [115] The subject was well chosen for a first attempt upon their hearts; but it, too, proved unfruitful, and the two friars were forced to re-embark.

As the canoe in which they sat moved from the island and launched out into the lake, the infidels who stood and watched them paddling were moved to fury, and, rushing to the edge, stoned them whole-heartedly till they were out of reach.

It is a wise precaution, and one that the “conquistadores” usually observed, to have the spiritual well supported by the secular arm when missionaries, instinct with zeal and not weighed down with too much common sense, preach for the first time to the infidel.

This first reverse was but an incident, and by degrees the friars, this time accompanied by soldiers, explored more of the islands in the lake. At last they came to one called Tayasal, which was so full of idols that they took twelve hours to burn and to destroy them all.

One island still remained to be explored, and in it was a temple with an idol much reverenced by the Indians. At last they entered it, and on a platform about the height of a tall man they saw the figure of a horse rudely carved out of stone.

The horse was seated on the ground resting upon his quarters, his hind legs bent and his front feet stretched out. The barbarous infidels [116a] adored the abominable and monstrous beast under the name of Tziunchan, God of the Thunder and the Lightning, and paid it reverence. Even the Spaniards, who, as a rule, were not much given to inquiring into the history of idols, but broke them instantly, ad majorem Dei gloriam, were interested and amazed. Little by little they learned the history of the hippomorphous god, which had been carefully preserved. It appeared that when Cortes had left his horse, so many years ago, the Indians, seeing he was ill, took him into a temple to take care of him. Thinking he was a reasoning animal, [116b] they placed before him fruit and chickens, with the result that the poor beast—who, of course, was reasonable enough in his own way—eventually died.

The Indians, terrified and fearful that Cortes would take revenge upon them for the death of the horse that he had left for them to care for and to minister to all his wants, before they buried him, carved a rude statue in his likeness and placed it in a temple in the lake.

The devil, who, as Villagutierre observes, is never slack to take advantage when he can, seeing the blindness and the superstition (which was great) of those abominable idolaters, induced them by degrees to make a God of the graven image they had made. Their veneration grew with time, just as bad weeds grow up in corn, as Holy Writ sets forth for our example, and that abominable statue became the chiefest of their gods, though they had many others equally horrible.

As the first horses that they saw were ridden by the Spaniards in the chase of the tame deer, and many shots were fired, the Indians not unnaturally connected the explosions and the flames less with the rider than the horse. Thus in the course of years the evolution of the great god Tziunchan took place, and, as the missionaries said, these heathen steeped in ignorance adored the work of their own hands.

Father Orbieta, not stopping to reflect that all of us adore what we have made, but “filled with the spirit of the Lord and carried off with furious zeal for the honour of our God,” [118] seized a great stone and in an instant cast the idol down, then with a hammer he broke it into bits.

When Father Orbieta had finished his work and thus destroyed one of the most curious monuments of the New World, which ought to have been preserved as carefully as if it had been carved by Praxiteles, “with the ineffable and holy joy that filled him, his face shone with a light so spiritual that it was something to praise God for and to view with delight.” Most foolish actions usually inspire their perpetrators with delight, although their faces do not shine with spiritual joy when they have done them; so when one reads the folly of this muddle-headed friar, it sets one hoping that several of the stones went home upon his back as he sat paddling the canoe.

The Indians broke into lamentations, exclaiming, “Death to him, he has killed our God”; but were prevented from avenging his demise by the Spanish soldiers who prudently had accompanied the friar.

Thus was the mystery of the eternal Word made manifest amongst the MaÇotecas, and a deity destroyed who for a hundred years and more had done no harm to any one on earth . . . a thing unusual amongst Gods.