The Vivero Letter

'He was consulting you as an expert in the field?' I said. I saw Katherine Halstead lean forward intently.

Fallon nodded. That's right. The name of the Spaniard was de Vivero, and the manuscript was a letter to his sons.' He Ml Silent.

Halstead said, 'Don't stop now, Fallon -- just when it's getting interesting.'

Fallon looked at me. 'Do you know anything about the conquest of Mexico?'

'Not much.' I said. 'I learned a bit about it at school -- ' Cortes and all that -- but I've forgotten the details, if I ever knew them.'

'Just like most people. Have you got a map of Mexico?'

I walked across the room and picked an atlas from the shelf. I drew up the coffee table and laid down the atlas turned to the correct page. Fallon hovered over it, and said, 'I'll have to give you some background detail or else the letter won't make sense.' He brought down his finger on to the map of Mexico close to the coast near Tampico. 'In the first couple of decades of the fifteen-hundreds the Spaniards had their eyes on what we now know as Mexico. There were rumours about the place -- stories of unimaginable wealth -- and they were noising themselves to go in and get it.'

His finger swept in an arc around the Gulf of Mexico. 'Hernandez de Cordoba explored the coast in 1517 and Juan de Grijalva followed in 1518. In 1519 Hernan Cortes took the plunge and mounted an expedition into the interior and we know what happened. He came up against the Aztecs and by a masterly mixture of force, statesmanship, superstition and pure confidence trickery he licked them -- one of the most amazing feats any man has ever done.

'But having done it he found there were other worlds to conquer. To the south, covering what is now Yucatan, Guatemala and Honduras was another Amerind empire -- that of the Mayas. He hadn't got as much gold from the Aztecs as he expected, but the Mayas were dripping with it if the reports that came up from the south were true. So in 1525 he marched against the Mayas. He left Tenochtitlan -- now Mexico City -- and hit the coast here, at Coatzacualco, and then struck along the spine of the isthmus to Lake Peten and thus to Coban. He didn't get much for his pains because the main strength of the Mayas wasn't on the Anahuac plateau at all but in the Yucatan Peninsula.'

I leaned over his shoulder and followed his exposition alertly. Fallon said, 'Cortes gave up personal direction at that point -- he was pulled back to Spain -- and the next expedition was led by Francisco de Montejo, who had already explored the coast of Yucatan from the sea. He had quite a respectable force but he found the Mayas a different proposition from the Aztecs. They fought back, and fought back hard, and Montejo was no Cortes -- the Spaniards were trounced in the first few battles.

'With Montejo was Manuel de Vivero. I don't suppose Vivero was much more than a common foot soldier, but something funny happened to him. He was captured by the Mayas and they didn't kill him; they kept him alive as a sort of slave and as a mascot. Now, Montejo never did pacify Yucatan -- he never got on top of the Mayas. Come to that, nobody ever did; they were weakened and absorbed to some extent, but they were never defeated in battle. In 1549, twenty-two years after he started out, Montejo was in control of barely half of the Yucatan Peninsula -- and all this time Vivero was a captive in the interior.

This was a rather curious time in the history of the Mayas and something happened which puzzled archeologists for a long time. They found that the Spaniards and the Mayas were living and working together side by side, each in his own culture; they found a Mayan temple and a Spanish church built next to each other and, what is more, contemporaneous -- built at the same time. This was puzzling until the sequence of events had been sorted out as I've just described.

'In any event, there the Mayas and the Spaniards were, living cheek by jowl. They fought each other, but not continuously. The Spaniards controlled eastern Yucatan where the great Mayan cities of Chichen Itza and Uxmal are, but western Yucatan, the modern province of Quintana Roo, was a closed book to them. It's still pretty much of a closed book even now. However, there must have been quite a bit of trade going on between the two halves and Vivero, captive though he was, managed to write a letter to his sons and smuggle it out. That's the Vivero letter.'

He dug into his briefcase again. 'I have a transcription of it here if you want to read it.'

I flipped open the file he gave me -- there was quite a lot of it. I said, 'Do you want me to read this now?'

'It would be better if you did,' he said. 'We'd be able to get on with the rest of our business a little faster. You can't understand anything until you read that letter.'

'All right,' I said. 'But I'll take it into my study. Can I trust you two not to kill each other in my absence?'

Katherine Halstead said coolly, 'There will be no trouble.'