On Prescott-- How and Why

VEGETATION AND SCENERY.- CLIMATE AND TEMPERAMENT.- RACE AND COLOUR.- CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM.

William Prescott’s epic volume History of the Conquest of Mexico has all sorts of things going on within its unending pages of flowery prose and alternating paeans to Mesoamerican advancements and the glories of the Spanish conquistadors who so magnificently subjugated the proud ‘barbarians’ and usurped or destroyed the accomplishments of these ‘barbarian’ peoples. But instead of looking at larger narrative arcs- such as the exaltation of the heroism of Cortes- I want to think through, if only heuristically, some of the motifs that appear again and again in Prescott’s grand story, motifs which go a long ways, I think, towards understanding the ways in which Prescott’s understanding of history operates and unfolds in his epic tale.

The very flowery nature of his prose underscores the sheer literal floweriness of much of his descriptive passages. They burst with colour and vibrant vegetation, as he traces the lines of the trees, naming different species and sometimes describing them in further detail; he fills out the mass of the jungle, the forest, the plains; revels in the luxuriousness of the tierra caliente. If Diaz’s narrative was replete with sensory signifiers- smell, sight, taste even- Prescott zooms in on the details of the landscape in particular, drawing a striking contrast to the Spartan descriptions of Cortes. Likewise, in drafting the textual record of the landscape as a whole, Prescott engages in minute detail, carefully describing what we can recognize as ecological zones along the route of the Spaniards’ journey.

While this exuberance of description no doubt conveys multiple levels of meaning and can be attributed to various influences, paramount is its role in shaping for our historian the nature of the human inhabitants of the land, themselves shaped in his understanding by the landscape, the climate, even the vegetation. The banana plant, for instance, due to its ease of cultivation and use, encourages laziness. The Spaniards, upon arriving in Cuba, become more martial and hot-blooded, literally, due to the great heat and humidity of the land. This in turn contributes to the Conquest, even if it does not entirely explain it. Perhaps the greatest juncture of geographical determinism, however, lies in Prescott’s painting of the Tlaxcala, the proud and quasi-Northern European at times inhabitants of an out-and-out ‘Republic.’ Having described  the alpine- and hence Northwestern-Europe like- setting of Tlaxcala, Prescott writes:

But, although the bleak winds of the sierra gave an austerity to the climate, unlike the sunny skies and genial temperature of the lower regions, it was far more favourable to the development of both the physical and moral energies. A bold and hardy peasantry was nurtured among the recesses of the hills, fit equally to cultivate the land in peace and to defend it in war. Unlike the spoiled child of Nature, who derives such facilities of subsistence from her too prodigal hand as supersedes the necessity of exertion on his own part, the Tlascalans earned his bread- from a soil not ungrateful, it is true- by the sweat of his brow… His honest bread glowed with the patriotism, or local attachment to the soil, which is the fruit of its diligent culture; while he was elevated by a proud consciousness of independence, the natural birthright of the child of the mountains. Such was the race with whom Cortes was now associated for the achievement of his great work. (226-7)

If the montane world of Tlaxcala was good for republican virtues and hence made for proper allies for heroic European conquerors, the Europeans themselves were not immune from climatic determination:

The ordinances then prohibit all blasphemy against God or the saints; a vice much more frequent among Catholic than Protestant nations, arising, perhaps, less from difference of religion than physical temperament- for the warm sun of the South, under which Catholicism prevails, stimulates the sensibilities to the more violent expressions of passion. (446)

Climate is not the only determining marker for Prescott. Even more consistently, skin colour emerges- not as an overt construction, laid out explicitly by Prescott, but emerging in the course of his pages- as a key factor in determining barbarity and civilization. When compared to the narratives of Cortes and Diaz, one is struck by the frequency in which the Spaniards are referred to, not just as Spaniards, Castilians, or Christians (though those terms do appear frequently), but as whites. They are white in contradistinction to the ‘dusky’ colour of the ‘natives’; the starkness of the difference is most on display when the white bodies of sacrificed Spanish prisoners are on display, bright against the dark background of indigenous savagery. White is white, even if there are distinctions within European peoples (for instance, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ settle the New World for the love of liberty, unlike the somewhat lower Spaniards and their sun-enriched hot-bloodedness). For Prescott, the demarcation into white and non-white is not, probably, an especially conscious decision; it is simply a map upon which he can understand the world. This becomes all the more important as Prescott sometimes finds it difficult to keep his distinction between ‘barbarian’ and ‘civilized’ from collapsing in so much irony.

This irony continually threatens the distinctions within the book, from the very beginning, as Prescott describes the history of Mesoamerica pre-Conquest, showing the many accomplishments of the various peoples there, accomplishments which continue to appear up to the very end of the narrative. However, we are also made to know that these are not truly civilized people- rather, they are somewhere on the scale of ‘Orientals’- but only particular Orientals:

In surveying them we are strongly reminded of the civilization of the East; not of that higher, intellectual kind which belonged to the more polished Arabs and Persians, but that semi-civilization which has distinguished, for example, the Tartar races, among whom art, and even science, has made, indeed, some progress in their adaptation to material wants and sensual gratification, but little in reference to the higher and more ennobling interests of humanity. (292)

The Aztecs, in particular, have many hallmarks of civilization: urban society, complex governance, a developed religion, intricate markets and a fairly advanced economy, extensive agriculture. Yet they are still barbarians; and the further into the fight the Spanish plunge the more the word ‘barbarian’ resounds. Prescott does not hide the splendours of the Aztec and other civilizations; but he continually drops them down below the level of the Spanish, and stubbornly maintains this distinction, even as he cannot fully embrace the Spaniards. As he notes, their desire for conquest is driven by a decidedly archaic approach to warfare, fueled by religious zeal. Prescott several times- accurately enough, one might argue- presents the Conquest as an extension of the Crusades; for him, the religious fervor and intention of the Conquistadors is genuine enough, but evidence of a less advanced age. He cautions the reader against judging the Spaniards upon modern standards; still, the fact remains that the Spanish, Cortes even, can come across as something less than civilized, and the irony of them being the bringers of civilization to what appear to be already civilized cultures can become quite heavy.

Prescott presents, as chief among his qualifiers for non-civilization, the Aztec practice of human sacrifice, and the degrading impact he argues it has upon wider culture. ‘Superstition’ is the great inhibitor of civilization, and the leading indicator of barbarism. Yet- the Spanish, by Prescott’s lights, have their own grave problems with superstition, and hence the appeals to not judge them. The use of religion and superstition as markers of barbarism is further problematized by Prescott’s insistence (in a manner oddly reminiscent- though perhaps not genealogically connected- to the Spaniards’ own arguments) that Aztec religion is not intrinsic to their ‘true selves,’ that it is somehow an epiphenomenon that can be detached and replaced with a more ‘enlightened’ and ‘progressive’ form of religion or philosophy. Indeed, Prescott espouses, towards the end of the story, a very explicit belief in the inevitability of progress- progress which can manifest itself anywhere, in anyone. Still- the barbarians, at least in this narrative, are always barbarians, even when the ‘convert’ and becomes allies of the Spanish. And the civilized peoples- even when they are hot-blooded, throwbacks to the Middle Ages, and bound by superstitions themselves- are always civilized. Much of the narrative and analytical tension and movement in Prescott’s history is devoted to the resolution of this sticky- and potentially disastrous- problem. Natives and conquerors, whites and dark-skinned: even in Prescott’s story, the lines are not as clear as they should be. For one final instance: sex between whites and non-whites is nearly invisible in Prescott. Yet we are made to know that it happened, for towards the end of the narrative Prescott must mention Cortes’ ‘natural son’ by Dona Marina, even as he does not speculate or elaborate upon the how of this progeny. The crossing between civilized and barbarian, the blending of white and dark, is there, almost- but not entirely- silent in the text, almost- not quite- swallowed in the massive sea of prose and heroics.