Branz Mayers' Mexico [pp. 117-141]

1852.1 Br~ntz ilayer's Mexico. 121
achievement of a great purpose. He escaped from the
grasp of Velasquez, a new man. His genius sprang, full
armed, from the brain of circumstance, and instead of the
reckless, restless, purposeless youth, whose career, for
fourteen years, had been unmarked by praise, he developed
an instant fitness for every position, a prompt resource for
every emergency, an immovable decision of purpose, and
an astute forecast, as little to be expected from his pre vious life as consistent with his immature years. The
records of adventure and daring present to us no spect~ cle more striking than the muster of his little band of six
hundred men, upon the scorching sands of Vera Cruz.
Widely separated from each other in motives, they were
one in the face of a common danger, and under the rule
of a controlling mind. Before them stretched a great
empire, swarming with a hostile people, and appalling
the fancy with its untried dangers. Behind them was the
ocean, reddened by their burning ships, whose flames
lighted up the figure of Cortez, as he sternly watched the
destruction of the last hope of the wavering. As he re volved in his thoroughly awakened mind the perils and
results of the great enterpri~e before him, the treasure to
be gained was doubtless still one of his strongest inc en tives; but that passion was hardly so vile, now that it
was linked with a higher ambition and more extended
aims. Thts was the starting-point of his greatness, and
each onward step but served to develope his extraordinary
character. A young man, of but thirty-three years, he
won the hearts of his Indian allies with the prompt skill
of a trained diplomatist, and ruled the discordant elements
of his disaffected camp with the iron hand of a veteran
leader. In his after career, there was much that stained
his name, and deserved the severest censure; but, though
never a good man, even measured by the standard of the
age in which he lived, he was unswervingly bold and
-undeniably great.
The discontent that ripened into mutiny, and the envy
that plotted against his life-the barriers reared by nature,
and the armed myriads that swarmed around him-op posed no lasting obstacles in the path of his iuviucible
~ purposes, and, with an unwavering confide~ce iu himself,
that bordered on the sublime, he swept on in his appointed
course.