ranging from acute observations about personal adornment to what quickly became well‐worn European clichés about nakedness, sexuality, absence of culture and religion, and cannibalism. They are taken from The Letters of Amerigo Vespucci and other Documents Illustrative of his Career, translated with notes and an introduction by Clements R. Markham, London, The Hakluyt Society 1894. We have used the undated American reprint by Burt Franklin, Publisher, New York, pp. 42, 45–7.
Alberico Vesputio to Lorenzo Pietro di Medici, salutation. In passed days I wrote very fully to you of my return from the new countries, which have been found and explored with the ships, at the cost, and by the command, of this Most Serene King of Portugal; and it is lawful to call it a new world, because none of these countries were known to our ancestors, and to all who hear about them they will be entirely new. For the opinion of the ancients was, that the greater part of the world beyond the equinoctial line to the south was not land, but only sea, which they have called the Atlantic; and if they have affirmed that any continent is there, they have given many reasons for denying that it is inhabited. But this their opinion is false, and entirely opposed to the truth. My last voyage has proved it, for I have found a continent in that southern part; more populous and more full of animals than our Europe, or Asia, or Africa, and even more temperate and pleasant than any other region known to us. […]
As regards the people: we have found such a multitude in those countries that no one could enumerate them, as we read in the Apocalypse. They are people gentle and tractable, and all of both sexes go naked, not covering any part of their bodies, just as they came from their mothers’ wombs, and so they go until their deaths. They have large, square‐built bodies, and well proportioned. Their colour reddish, which I think is caused by their going naked and exposed to the sun. Their hair is plentiful and black. They are agile in walking, and of quick sight. They are of a free and good‐looking expression of countenance, which they themselves destroy by boring the nostrils and lips, the nose and ears: nor must you believe that the borings are small, nor that they only have one, for I have seen those who had no less than seven borings in the face, each one the size of a plum. They stop up these perforations with blue stones, bits of marble, of crystal, or very fine alabaster, also with very white bones and other things artificially prepared according to their customs; which, if you could see, it would appear a strange and monstrous thing. One had in the nostrils and lips alone seven stones, of which some were half a palm in length. It will astonish you to hear that I considered that the weight of seven such stones was as much as sixteen ounces. In each ear they had three perforations bored, whence they had other stones and rings suspended. This custom is only for the men, as the women do not perforate their faces, but only their ears. Another custom among them is sufficiently shameful, and beyond all human credibility. Their women, being very libidinous, make the penis of their husbands swell to such a size as to appear deformed; and this is accomplished by a certain artifice, being the bite of some poisonous animal, and by reason of this many lose their virile organ and remain eunuchs.
They have no cloth, either of wool, flax, or cotton, because they have no need of it; nor have they any private property, everything being in common. They live amongst themselves without a king or ruler, each man being his own master, and having as many wives as they please. The children cohabit with the mothers, the brothers with the sisters, the male cousins with the female, and each one with the first he meets. They have no temples and no laws, nor are they idolaters. What more can I say! They live according to nature, and are more inclined to be Epicurean than Stoic. They have no commerce among each other, and they wage war without art or order. The old men make the youths do what they please, and incite them to fights, in which they mutually kill with great cruelty. They slaughter those who are captured, and the victors eat the vanquished; for human flesh is an ordinary article of food among them. You may be the more certain of this, because I have seen a man eat his children and wife; and I knew a man who was popularly credited to have eaten 300 human bodies. I was once in a certain city for twenty‐seven days, where human flesh was hung up near the houses, in the same way as we expose butcher’s meat. I say further that they were surprised that we did not eat our enemies, and use their flesh as food, for they say it is excellent. Their arms are bows and arrows, and when they go to war they cover no part of their bodies, being in this like beasts. We did all we could to persuade them to desist from their evil habits, and they promised us to leave off. The women, as I have said, go naked, and are very libidinous, yet their bodies are comely; but they are as wild as can be imagined.
They live for 150 years, and are rarely sick. If they are attacked by a disease they cure themselves with the roots of some herbs. These are the most noteworthy things I know about them.
IB3 Hernán Cortés (1485–1547) Two letters from Mexico
The conquistador Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico on 22 April 1519, having left the Spanish base in Cuba in November of the previous year. After a series of battles and massacres in the autumn of 1519, the conquistadors arrived at the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, in November. By July of 1520, Moctezuma was dead and the Aztec Empire is deemed to have fallen by 13 August 1521. This left Cortés in charge of its territory, and as such, one of the most powerful men in the western hemisphere. Between 1519 and 1526, Cortés wrote five long letters – relaciones – to the Habsburg emperor Charles V, proclaiming both the importance of his work and his loyalty to the Spanish Crown. We include here extracts from two of them, the first and second. The first letter – dated July 1519 – has been lost, but a copy made by a notary exists and stands in for it. We include an extract here because it contains a list of gifts sent back to Charles V from the New World which must be very close to the works of art from ‘the new golden land’ seen by Albrecht Dürer in Brussels in the summer of 1520 (IC2). The second letter, written c.1520 and published in 1522, contains an account of Aztec civilization based on a description of the capital city of Tenochtitlan (Temixtitan to Cortés). In the present short extracts we have concentrated on Cortés’s description of the main Aztec temple and the pyramids (‘towers’) and religious sculptures it contained. He also tells of his destruction of them and their replacement by Christian images. Our extracts are taken from Hernán Cortés: Letters from Mexico, translated and edited by Anthony Pagden with an introduction by J. H. Elliott, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986, pp. 40–45 (the first letter), 102 and 105–6 (the second letter).
the first letter
The gold, jewels, precious stones and articles of featherwork which have been acquired in these newly discovered lands since our arrival here, which you, Alonso Fernández Puerto Carrero and Francisco de Montejo, who go as representatives of this Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz to the Very Excellent Princes and Most Catholic and Very Great Kings and Sovereigns, the Queen Doña Juana and the King, Don Carlos her son, are the following:
First a large gold wheel with a design of monsters on it and worked all over with foliage. This weighed 3,800 pesos de oro. From this wheel, because it was the best that has been found here and of the finest gold, a fifth was taken for Their Highnesses; this amounted to two thousand castellanos which belonged to Them of Their fifth and Royal privilege according to the stipulation that the captain Fernando Cortés brought from the Hieronymite Fathers who reside on the island of Hispaniola and on the other islands. The eighteen hundred pesos that remained and all the rest that goes to make up twelve hundred pesos, the council of this town bequeath to Their Highnesses, together with everything else mentioned in this list, which belonged to the people of the aforementioned town.
Item: Two necklaces of gold and stone mosaic, one of which has eight strings of 232 red jewels and 163 green jewels. Hanging from the border of this necklace are twenty‐seven small gold bells; and in the center of them arc four figures in large stones inlaid with gold. From each of the two in the center hang single pendants, while from each of the ends hang four double pendants. The other necklace has four strings of 102 red jewels and 172 which appear to be green in color; around these stones there are twenty‐six small gold bells. In this necklace there are ten large stones inlaid with gold from which hang 142 pendants.
Item:
