Conquistador Voices: The Spanish Conquest of the Americas as Recounted Largely by the Participants, K. H. Siepel, ed.,  Kindle edition, 2015.

We do not have to accept at face value all the claims made by New Age historians for whom everything Colored is good and everything White, bad if not positively devilish. Witness the Conquistadores’ own accounts as recorded in their written works and, interlaced with the editor’s comments providing the context, assembled in the volumes under discussion. Following Columbus, the most important among them were Hernan Cortes, Francisco Pizarro, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (cowhead, in case you are interested), and Hernando de Soto. Most were scions of the Hidalgo, i.e minor nobility, class. With the notable exception of Pizarro, who was illiterate and remained so throughout his life, by the standards of the time most were fairly well educated. Again with the notable exception of Pizarro, a true never-do-good who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, all were more or less comfortably off even before they started on the grand adventure. The one that, for good or ill, would leave their names engraved on the historical record.

All insisted on their absolute devotion both to the Church and to the Emperor in whose name, and on whose behalf, they claimed to be acting. Thus motivated they purchased ships—often by borrowing—enlisted crews, gathered supplies, embarked, and sailed westward across the ocean. Having either hit on unknown lands or heard of them, they went on until they found what they had sought or thought they did. There they killed. They raped (by present-day standards, not by contemporary ones; most of the women with whom they slept were not simply captured but put at their disposal by the Indian caciques, or minor chiefs, they met and subdued). They robbed. They enslaved, using the victims as porters and forcing them to go on grueling marches from which few of them returned. They tortured—at least one Inca chief had his feet fried in boiling oil. Countless others were racked, crucified, burnt, and what not. Most important in the long run, they brought along deadly diseases and, deliberately or not, spread them, resulting in the deaths of millions of people. They depopulated entire districts. They committed genocide.

All that is a matter of record. Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel a sneaking admiration for the men—except for a few translators, especially Cortes’ Dona Marina, a Mexican princess who early on cast her lot with him, there were very, very few women among them—who, seeking their fortune, did all those things. All were leaders, born and bred. As indeed they had to be, given not only the obstacles they had to overcome but the frequent tendency among their men to disobey orders, split off, and engage in conspiracies of every kind; as, for example, Pizarro’s own brothers did. All were possessed of what can almost be called superhuman energy, courage, determination, and ruthlessness. It was these qualities above all that enabled them to operate thousands of miles from home, at the far end of lines of communication that caused months to pass from the moment a missive was sent to the time an answer was received (if it was). All set foot on unknown lands. There everything –the climate, the geology, the flora, the fauna, the people—was strange and, as often as not, menacing and even dangerous. To make things worse, often they were deaf and mute in the sense that they could not communicate with the natives and either pass information to them or receive it. What information they did receive—mainly concerning the objectives they sought, the routs to those objectives, and any resources and obstacles found on the way—was often misleading.

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Facing critical shortages, at times the Conquistadores manufactured their own; as by hammering nails into armor (or the other way around) and building ships to replace those that had been lost. At times they suffered great cold, at others terrible cold. At times they went naked, or practically so. At times there was a bonanza of food; at others, so scarce was the latter that they were forced to eat insects (this was long before anyone thought of them as “superfood”), lizards, roots, grass, and the bark of trees. On some occasions they were reduced to cannibalism. Well aware of how few they were, they looked after their injured comrades as well as they could. Their doing so may have done something to keep their numbers up; it certainly helped maintain morale.

Ploughing my way through all of this, I could not help but compare the Conquistadores with some others. Including, above all, the Western forces that, during the last few decades, repeatedly invaded Asian countries but failed to achieve their objectives or even hold their own.  On that, though, I’ve already written in Pussycats: Why the Rest Keeps Beating the West.

All these virtues apart, Siepel’s book reads exceptionally well. Once I had started I could hardly pull myself away from it, resulting in the present post. It also made me think—once again—about why certain human enterprises succeed and others, fail.

Highly recommended for anyone interested not just in the Conquista but in human nature as a whole.