The Mapmaker's Wife by Robert Whitaker Read Free Book Online Page A

marching off to magical lands of a sort that had once appeared on medieval Christian maps. The foreign countries were inhabited by dog-faced monsters, serpents that had human feet, and fighting Amazon women who lived in a land called California. There were giants, centaurs, lions, and dragons to be seen and mountains of gold and silver to be found. Amadís and the other knights of Christendom typically went into battle against great odds, a handful of men against armies of thousands. During the ensuing clashes, the knights, who were often wounded but rarely died, would attack with such ferocity that the ground would turn crimson, littered at every turn with the severed heads and limbs of the vanquished.
    Although the knights were fearless and brutal in battle, they were of the most delicate sort when it came to matters of love. Knights in a faraway land were constantly heartsick over beautiful maidens back home, who were locked away in castles. So great was their mutual passion that should a knight return and appear at his maiden’s window, her honor would be at great peril. How could she resist him? Yet the virtuous woman would find a way to remain in her chamber, offering her knight only a hand to kiss, for it was essential that she preserve her honor and remain a virgin until marriage. A similar chastity was not expected of the knight, however. He was quite adept at luring lower-class women into his bed, and in his travels abroad, he regularly took time out from his fighting to dally with the ladies. A knight, the writers made clear, was skilled at the art of seduction.
    While the romances were fanciful in the extreme, they were presented to the public as historical novels, and readers often thought of them as true. As one sixteenth-century priest wrote, the books had to be factual,“for our rulers would not commit so great a crimeas to allow falsehoods to be spread abroad.” Authors exploited this naiveté by calling their romances “chronicles,” often claiming that that they had simply rediscovered old handwritten texts recording past crusades. Tirant lo Blanch employed this device, as did the Chronicle of Don Roderick , which was sold as a “history” of the Moorish invasion of Spain.
    This was the imaginative world that Spaniards inhabited in the early 1500s, and thus it was, their minds feverish with such fantasies, that they set off to conquer the New World.
    T HE S PANISH CONQUISTADORS came from the same class of men that had waged the Reconquest. Many were poor, hailing from the harsh plains of Castile. In the first twenty-five years after Columbus’s 1492 voyage, they established control over Hispaniola and Cuba, explored most of the islands in the West Indies, and crossed over the Panama isthmus to the Pacific Ocean. And everywhere they went, they queried natives about where to find the mythical lands they had read about. Mexico was whispered to be such a place, and in 1518, those on an exploratory voyage from Cuba to Yucatán returned with thrilling news.“We went along the coast where we found a beautiful tower on a point said to be inhabited by women who live without men,” reported a priest, Juan Diaz. “It is believed that they are a race of Amazons.”
    This report stirred the governor of Cuba, Diego Velázquez, to enter into a contract with Hernando Cortés for the conquest of Mexico. Velázquez warned Cortés to expect the fantastic,“because it is said that there are people with large, broad ears and others with faces like dogs.” He also directed Cortés to find out “where and in what direction are the Amazons.”
    Cortés sailed from Cuba with 600 men, sixteen horses, thirteen muskets, and one cannon—a small contingent to conquer an empire. After landing on the coast at a site he christened Villa Rica de Vera Cruz, Cortés took a page from the tales of knighthood and burned all his ships but one, which he offered to anyone who wantedto turn back.“If there be any so craven as to