Prescott acknowledged missing / destroyed hieroglyphic documents as significant

    William H. Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico can be read like an adventure novel – it has the intriguing qualities of action and romance that so effectively move those types of stories along.  In the Introduction, James Lockhart says that, as a writer, Prescott belongs with Thoreau, Melville, and historian Washington Irving.  Lockhart calls him, affectionately, a “romantic historian,” who effectively wrote a page turner in History of the Conquest of Mexico, causing its undergraduate readers “to exclaim in their innocence that they felt they had been there.” (xxvii)   I believe Prescott’s book represents an example of a phase of development in the research and writing of history, written in the biased, romantic style of the author’s time, and especially given the fact that Prescott writes from an overwhelmingly Spanish point of view and his exclusive use of Eurocentric sources.  But, moving beyond Prescott’s seeming embrace of the Great Man theory, I believe the book can also be read as, and is useful as, one interpretation of an actual history of the conquest of Mexico.  Although the book is certainly biased (reflecting the time at which it was written), and at times outright pompous in the treatment of the “vanquished,” the work seems to be impeccably researched and cited using archives to the most effective extent, and given the author’s access to the most contemporary source material.  Though the History of the Conquest of Mexico is very broad and possibly, looking through today’s lens, overly generalized, the work has stood the test of time as, if nothing else, a relatively accurate chronology of the events that took place.  Here, Trouillot may be concerned with the silence around what the social and economic conditions of the indigenous peoples were like.  Again – modern lens.

  Something which really stood out to me was that in the lead up to the wild romantic ride that the adventurer / hero Cortes would take through Mexico, Prescott took the time to acknowledge (very broadly) the aspects of the basis of Aztec civilization.  One of the elements the author examined encompassed Mexican hieroglyphs and manuscripts and the knowledge the documents surely contained. Prescott spends time on Bernardino de Sahagun, the Franciscan friar who recorded many Aztec documents, translating them, and who became an authority concerning the Mexican hieroglyph, concerning religious and other texts of the Aztecs.  The author fairly acknowledges the “blind zeal” with which documents were destroyed during the conquest.  He even acknowledges that tragically only a very few manuscripts survived and made their way to European archives (he cites these Codices and manuscripts, along with Sahagun in his work).  Prescott clearly realizes the importance of these missing sources – and even seems intrigued by Mexican hieroglyphs.  One wonders, did he wish there were more plentiful extant Aztec sources available to him in the 19^th century?  Would he, as a scientific historian, have given them their due? One can see him recognizing “silence” here – maybe we can even imagine him possibly agreeing with Trouillot on this point, lamenting the missing story.  Consider Prescott’s own words:  “We contemplate with indignation the cruelties inflicted by the early conquerors.  But indignation is qualified with contempt, when we see them thus ruthlessly trampling out the spark of knowledge, the common boon and property of all mankind.  We may well doubt, which has the strongest claim to civilization, the victor, or the vanquished?” (p.80)  But before we can let Prescott completely off the hook, the 19^th century Eurocentric bias presents itself again as he criticizes the Aztec hieroglyph as inferior to the Egyptians, though partially recognizing they (Aztecs) didn’t have the thousands of years to perfect the hieroglyphs as the Egyptians did.  Going a little further still, Prescott calls the Aztec picture writing clumsy, but “to have been adequate to the demands of the nation, in their imperfect state of civilization.” (p. 77)

  I can imagine that if Prescott had had more prominent Aztec hieroglyphic sources that he would have found a way to dismiss them given his bias.  Or would he have?  In the end, I think that Prescott merely recognizing the potential importance of the missing documents as significant is a somewhat redeeming quality that speaks to the level of scholarship offered by the book and is perhaps why the History of the Conquest of Mexico endures to this day.