Conquistador Voices (vol I) The Spanish Conquest of the Americas as Recounted Largely by the Participants

Conquistador Voices, a two-volume work by Kevin H. Siepel, is intended for the general reader. The book presents the history of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas principally through the voices of those who participated in that signal event. Its goal is to make this story engaging by substantial use of first-person narrative—much of it newly translated from Spanish and Italian sources.

The overall story is told in five parts, each part featuring a principal actor of the Spanish Conquest—an explorer or conquistador. Volume I is devoted to the four voyages of Christopher Columbus, and to the subsequent conquest of Mexico by Hernan Cortes.

Volume I opens with a scene-setting narrative and introduction to Christopher Columbus, a man with an unshakable belief in an idea and a dogged determination to carry out that idea. Columbus's budding relationship with the Spanish monarchs is covered, as are the four Columbus voyages—preparations for his first voyage, his landing and initial encounter with the peoples of the Americas, his worsening relationship with the colonists, his arrest and removal to Spain, his rehabilitation, and his subsequent year-long, mutiny-ridden isolation on a Jamaican beach. Equally well covered are the many aspects of his complex personality: his remarkable ingenuity, his great skill as a navigator, his supreme self-confidence, his deep lack of interest in administration, and his eventual drift into self-pity.

The second part of volume I covers the conquest of Mexico and the Aztecs by Hernan Cortes. We are taken on the early exploratory voyages to the Mexican coast, eventually to land there with Cortes and his not-totally-loyal troops. Through a combination of flattery, thinly-veiled threat, and stunning violence, we see Cortes take charge of his men, gather initially-hostile Indian warriors to his cause, and move this large force inexorably toward the Aztec island capital, Tenochtitlan. In addition to being treated to riveting descriptions of this now-lost city, we witness Cortes's bold move of taking the Aztec king Montezuma hostage, the Spaniards' terror in fleeing the capital on the noche triste, Cortes's determination to hold this land for himself against attacking Spaniards, and his final investiture and razing of the city with the slaughter of most of its inhabitants. Cortes, in these events, comes off as perhaps the most intelligent and clever of the five conquistadors examined in these two volumes.

An effort has been made throughout Conquistador Voices to avoid moralizing on these events, but to report them—with all possible filtering of fact from fantasy—as we have been told that they occurred. Nine maps accompany the text. An index, copious footnotes, and brief bibliography are included.