Bitter Chocolate Read Online Free Page B

others for promotion. The young officer had none of the experience of the soldiers under his command, men who had honed their military skills in the barbaric battles of the Moorish wars. But while Cortés may not have been as skilled or as bloodthirsty as the older men, he was certainly as acquisitive.
    Diego Velasquez, the governor of Cuba, was anxious to invade the coastal areas of the Gulf of Mexico before others did, chasing rumours of gold and silver. He didn’t entirely trust Cortés, but Velasquez had been impressed with the charismatic captain’s abilities. The governor chose him to lead an important expedition into the heart of Mexico, promoting him to the rank of captain-general.
    Cortés set sail for the Yucatán Peninsula on February 18, 1519, arriving on the mainland in early spring. He immediately renounced his prior loyalty to the governor in Cuba and founded his own capital: Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz (the “Rich Town of the True Cross”). So his men couldn’t leave him, Cortés had all but one of his ships scuttled—filled with water and sunk up totheir masts. Almost immediately Velasquez had lost control over Cortés’s expedition. Though he betrayed his immediate sponsor, the newly minted captain-general knew enough to keep in the good books of the Spanish king.
    Cortés understood that Charles was primarily interested in wealth and territory. But the monarch was also anxious to appear to be more than just another greedy acquisitor and he wanted his conquistadors to be more than just murderous, rapacious thugs. Charles instructed his officers to serve God as well as himself by converting to Christianity any Indians they encountered in the New World. Such a command gave the expeditions a veneer of noble purpose. No matter how savage the conquest, Spaniards—and their sovereign—could sleep at night in the knowledge that they were killing and conquering in the name of the Almighty. Cortés used his one remaining ship to dispatch letters to the royal palace in Spain, promising that he would give the poor wretches of the New World the Good News of Christianity and kindle a light in their pagan darkness while he conquered Mexico. King Charles replied that he heartily approved.
    Along with his dubious piety, Charles also possessed a redeeming curiosity. He demanded more from his explorers than gold and territory. Because the native people in the new lands were to be his subjects, he wanted to know as much as possible about their customs and indigenous products. If not for this interest, Europe might never have learned about cocoa—or would have discovered it long after the extermination of any native who might have been able to explain the mysteries of its goodness and how it could be liberated from the unlovely cocoa bean.
    There wasn’t much interest in anthropology amongst the conquistadors. They were ravenous tourists, looking to see what they could cart away from the New World. But Cortés had also brought with him men of the cloth, whose job it was to convert the Indians. The priests also served as record-keepers, methodically investigating and describing the customs and habits of thenative people. Among their most enduring discoveries would be the processing of cocoa beans, first into an edible paste, then into the various potions that were so popular in Meso-America.
    The new Spanish settlement of Vera Cruz was in the middle of the former heartland of the Olmec and was one of the chief cocoa-producing regions of Mexico. Written records indicate that Cortés was obliged by native customs to drink
cacahualtl
. Though he never developed a taste for the New World beverage, he did start to understand its worth.
    Cocoa as legal tender dated back to the Maya and was so entrenched in the monetary system of the Americas that counterfeiting cocoa beans out of painted clay or stone had become a thriving industry. Goods could be priced in units of cocoa: