american-holocaust

PESTILENCE AND GENOCIDE 79come out at night to fish in the canals between the houses, and wanderedthrough the places we had won in search of firewood, and herbs and rootsto eat. . . . I resolved to enter the next morning shortly before dawn anddo all the harm we could .... and we fell upon a huge number of people,;As these were some of the most wretched people and had come in search offood, they were nearly all unarmed, and women and children in the main.We did them so much harm through all the streets in the city that we couldreach, that the dead and the prisoners numbered more than eight hundred. 76With the advantage finally theirs-even if it was against "wretched . .unarmed ... women and children in the main"-Cortes and the Spanishpressed on. "That day," wrote Cortes, "we did nothing save burn and razeto the ground the houses on either side of that main street, which indeedwas a sad sight; but we were obliged to do it, there being no other way ofaccomplishing our aims." They moved their forces to another section ofthe city where they slaughtered and captured more than twelve thousandpeople. Within a day or two they had another multitude of helpless citizenspenned in: "They no longer had nor could find any arrows, javelinsor stones with which to attack us." More than forty thousand were killedin that single day, and "so loud was the wailing of the women and childrenthat there was not one man amongst us whose heart did not bleed atthe sound." Indeed, because "we could no longer endure the stench of thedead bodies that had lain in those streets for many days, which was themost loathsome thing in all the world," recalled Cortes, "we returned toour camps." 77But not for long. The next morning the Spanish were in the streetsagain, mopping up the starving, dehydrated, and disease-wracked Indianswho remained. "I intended to attack and slay them all," said Cortes, as heobserved that:The people of the city had to walk upon their dead while others swam ordrowned in the waters of that wide lake where they had their canoes; indeed,so great was their suffering that it was beyond our understanding how theycould endure it. Countless numbers of men, women and children came outtoward us, and in their eagerness to escape many were pusped into the waterwhere they drowned amid that multitude of corpses; and it seemed that morethan fifty thousand had perished from the salt water they had drunk, theirhunger and the vile stench. . . . And so in those streets where they were wecame across such piles of the dead that we were forced to walk upon them. 78In all their writings on the Aztecs, the Inquisition-loving Spanish-likemost Western writers who have followed them--expressed indignant horrorat their enemies' religious rituals involving human sacrifice. And indeed,the Aztec toll in that regard was great. Perhaps as many as 20,000enemy warriors, captured in battle, were sacrificed each year during the