Prescott on Cortés

Prescott’s wonderful romp of a tale of Hector Cortés conquest of the natives of Mexico is a narrative history in the most classical of sense: full of dubious details, and resplendent in its flowery depiction of the Spanish.  Prescott, untrained as it were, in what we would call the profession of history today, manages quite well in his description of Cortés through various sources which (at least in my version of the publication) are cited in footnotes.  His description of Cortés youth and early career are particularly storied and rife with details that one could easily see being fabricated.  In all likelihood, even the sources Prescott cites for these snippets seem like classical (Greek) writing of history.  What I mean is that in this type of history writing what was more important to the “historian” was what the figure would have or should have said/done rather than what actually happened.  There are legitimate nuggets of truth in this narrative, but they are clouded by poor research; stories, true or otherwise, often are revealing. 

Cortés arrogance is on display in the narrative, as is the struggle of the natives against the Spanish, despite their portrayal as savages and inferior in all ways the martial Spaniards.  The battle scenes that Prescott describes are as vivid as any one might read today (one could see this sort of writing from Ambrose) albeit, with less reliable secondary sources and no primaries.  In any case, Prescott’s narrative tells us loads about the writing of history during the mid-nineteenth century, as well as how the Spaniards interpreted their successes in Mexico.  Most of the sources that Prescott cites are official Spanish or at least, Western sources.