What the Survivor Knew

The following is an account of the failed siege of the great city of Tenochtitlan, composed by Juan de Espinosa, soldier of the expedition under Hernán Cortés, now returned to the port of Veracruz, in the month of November 1521, at the request of the officials of the Governor of Cuba. The account is intended to set down, with precision, the events of the siege and its conclusion, for the purposes of official record and such future action as may be determined.

I have been writing this account for three months. I have written, and set aside, and begun again, a number of times. I can account for this difficulty without dishonesty: I am not, by training or habit, a writer of accounts, and the events in question are complex and, in certain particulars, still not fully clear to me. I will set down what I know, in the order in which I knew it.

What I know is: we failed. The siege of Tenochtitlan, which began in May of 1521 and which was expected by all those in command to conclude in our favour within a matter of weeks, ended in our defeat on the eighteenth day of July. Of the force that remained under our command at that point — some four hundred Spanish soldiers and several thousand of our Tlaxcalan allies — fewer than a third reached the shore of the lake alive. Of those, approximately one hundred and twenty Spanish soldiers eventually returned to Veracruz. I am one of them.

What I have been unable to write, in three months of attempting to write it, is the account of the eighteenth day of July itself, and in particular the account of what I saw in the afternoon of that day, at approximately the third hour after midday, at the eastern edge of the main causeway, during the engagement that became the final rout.

I will attempt to write it now.

By the third hour of that afternoon, it was clear that the engagement had gone wrong in a way that could not be corrected. I will not recount the full sequence of the day's events — other accounts have done this, or will do it, and I was not in a position to observe the whole engagement. What I can say is that by the third hour the Tlaxcalan forces on our left flank had broken and retreated, and that this had the effect of exposing that flank to the Mexica warriors advancing from the north shore of the lake in their canoes, and that within the space of perhaps a quarter hour what had been a contested position became an indefensible one.

I was at the eastern edge of the causeway with a group of approximately thirty men, Spanish and Tlaxcalan mixed, when the order came — by word of mouth, shouted from man to man — to fall back toward the western end of the causeway and the shore.

We fell back. I will not describe the details of that retreat in full. There was fighting and there was running and there were men who did neither and I did not stop for them. I have thought about this since, and I have concluded that there is nothing useful to say about it.

What I will describe is what I saw approximately halfway along the causeway, at the point where it narrows and where there is, on the southern side, a gap in the stone facing that in ordinary times admitted water traffic between the lake and the city.

At this point, the retreat had compressed — we were moving in a mass, too close together for effective fighting, more concerned with the force at our backs than with what was ahead. The press of bodies slowed me, and I found myself briefly at the edge of the causeway, my left hand on the stone facing, looking south across the water toward the city.

I saw, at this moment, a group of Mexica warriors in a canoe approximately thirty yards from the causeway. This was not unusual — there were canoes on both sides of us throughout the engagement. What made me look at this particular group was that they had stopped. In the midst of everything around them, they had ceased to paddle. They were watching.

I understand, setting this down, how ordinary that sounds. Men stop and watch during battles. There is nothing remarkable about it.

What I cannot account for, and what I have been trying to account for in three months of failed drafts, is what I saw in their faces.

I am aware that this is an inadequate description. I saw men's faces at thirty yards in poor light, through smoke and in the midst of extreme physical stress. I cannot claim accuracy for my observation of their expressions. I know this.

What I saw was: recognition. Not the recognition of a specific person or thing. Something more general. The recognition of a moment that had been anticipated, understood, prepared for — not as individuals but as people who had been told, or had inherited, or had arrived at, a way of comprehending what was happening that I did not share.

It lasted perhaps three seconds. The men in the canoe returned to paddling. The press of the retreat carried me past them. I did not look back.

I have spent three months trying to determine what I actually saw and what I have added to the seeing in the course of remembering it.

I have concluded that this is not the right question. Whatever I saw or did not see at that moment, the question it produced in me is one I cannot resolve by examining my own reliability as a witness. The question is not what did I see but what did they know that I did not?

We came to this country with considerable knowledge. We had horses and steel and firearms and tactics developed across centuries of European warfare. We had alliances with the peoples who had suffered most under Mexica rule, and those alliances gave us soldiers who knew the land and the enemy's methods. We had the advantage of the unfamiliar — our weapons and our appearance produced terror, at least at first. We had, all of us, an absolute certainty that what we were doing was legitimate, ordained, the natural extension of a right that derived from God and king.

We lost.

I am a soldier of limited education and I do not propose to draw conclusions about the nature of our failure. There are better qualified men doing that, and I am sure the conclusions will include errors in the command structure, the inadequacy of our siege equipment, the tactical adaptations our opponents made in the months of the siege, the particular problem of the causeways and the canoes. All of this is probably correct.

What none of it accounts for is the faces of the men in the canoe.

Or rather, what none of it accounts for is what those faces suggested: that our opponents were not simply defeating us. They were demonstrating something. Not to us — they had no particular interest in our understanding. But the defeat had a shape that we could not read, and they could, and the shape mattered in a way that our tactical analyses would not capture, because the shape was not tactical.

I wrote, and crossed out, a version of this sentence that said: they knew something about the world that we did not. I crossed it out because it seems too large and too vague to be useful. But I have not found a better sentence.

I will set down, for the officials who need it, the account of the decisions made, the orders given, the engagements fought. I will account for the failure in terms they can use. I am capable of this and I will do it.

But I find I cannot close this account without recording, however inadequately, the specific thing I have been trying to write for three months. I am a man who survived the defeat of something that was supposed to be unstoppable, and I saw, in the faces of the people who stopped it, a quality of recognition that suggested they had been expecting us for longer and in more detail than we had been expecting ourselves.

What they knew, I do not know. I only know that they knew it, and that the knowing was in their faces, and that the war ended three hours later when the last of our force reached the shore of the lake, and that I walked north along the coast for four months to reach this port, and that I am alive, and that the city of Tenochtitlan stands, and that I am writing this account which I cannot properly finish because the thing at its centre cannot be fully described.

I will describe it anyway. That is what accounts are for.

The men in the canoe were watching with the faces of people who understood something about what was happening that I did not understand. They were not surprised. They were, I believe, relieved. Not that we were defeated — the defeat itself had been hard and costly and nothing in their bearing suggested triumph at our expense. Relieved, rather, in the way that a person who has been waiting a long time for something important is relieved when it finally occurs, not because the thing itself was desired but because the waiting is over and what they prepared for has arrived.

This is what I saw. I do not know what it means. I record it because it is true and because I have not been able to leave it unrecorded, and because the account that does not include it is not the complete account, whatever its other accuracies.

The rest will be appended separately, in the form the officials require.

Juan de Espinosa, Veracruz, November 1521