A Frolicking Trip to Mexico

I actually really enjoy books from the 1700s and first half of the 1800s and the excerpts I read from this book were no different. Prescott writes with a pleasant mixture of “fact” and narrative and manages to make the reader feel as if he is actually there. At the beginning of Chapter 1 I was struck by the way that he describes the land down the Atlantic coast. In Chapter 4 he describes Egyptian papyrus in a way that makes you feel as if you are holding it.

Now I specifically put “fact” in quotation marks earlier because I question his use of sources. From what I saw in his endnotes, many of his sources were from the 1700s and 1800s. Still others lacked dates and were difficult to trace back to their origins due to the fact that the title was in Spanish and all related search results were in Spanish. It is also rather apparent from his style of writing that he was not one to shy away from embellishing that facts that he collected.

I do have to give him credit though, despite the dubious nature of his sources, Prescott did a tremendous amount of research. Nearly a third of the book is endnotes and not suggested reading, although the does include such a list which has been updated to include more recent material in the 1990s and 2000s.

With regard to silences, it is difficult to really say without thoroughly reading the entire book. However, Prescott does paint an eerily rosy picture of the Mexicans throughout history. While I don’t doubt that’s at least partly true, I do doubt that it’s the whole story. I would have liked to know more about their interactions with other cultures and what the clashes were, if any.