The First Shipping Constructed in New Spain
Amid the mixed emotions with which Cortés prepared A% to enter the Mexican capital in early November, 1519, was the gnawing fear that his military position therein would be an untenable one. Even the most courageous and least professional military man among the invaders must have realized that a Spanish force of fewer than five hundred men, far within the interior of a hostile and strange land, literally had entered a lion’s den as it marched into the populous island-city of Tenochtitlán via the narrow and ever so vulnerable causeway that stretched some seven miles between it and the mainland. So it was that even as his courage and curiosity took him into Tenochtitlán, his military mind and his sense of responsibility for the welfare of his men led Cortés to seek a means whereby the Spaniards could dominate the waters of Lake Texcoco and the lacustrine communities, including Tenochtitlán itself. Only after the Spaniards had become masters of the adjacent countryside—in this instance the waters and shores of a lake—could they know that inner satisfaction and quiet confidence that comes from a sincere sense of physical security. Only when the Spaniards had established their mastery over the lake area could it be said that the initiative so important to continuance of the conquest rested in their hands. With his infantry, his cavalry and his artillery momentarily stalled in the insular setting in which they found themselves, Cortés needed to create a new military force which, when thrown into the balance, would tip the scales once again in favor of the Spaniards.