The Creators: A History of Heroes of the Imagination (63 page)

His friend George Ticknor (1791–1871) had also abandoned the practice of law for a career in letters. At twenty-six, the brilliant Ticknor, as professor of French, Spanish, and belles lettres, was trying to broaden the antique Harvard curriculum, and was writing his landmark
History of Spanish Literature
. American interest in Spain had been awakened by the works of Washington Irving, who had been a diplomatic attaché in Madrid, and whose romanticized
Christopher Columbus
(1828) was vastly popular. The Peninsular War (1808–14) and the exploits of Bolivar in the Latin American wars for independence had kept Spain in the news. Spanish scholars had been editing their archives, but no epic history had been written from them.

Prescott’s fellow Bostonians, to whom he was only a half-blind gentleman of leisure, were astonished in 1837 at the publication of his three-volume
History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic
. Though he had spent ten years at work in his darkened study, he had to be persuaded to send his manuscript to the publisher. His father insisted that “the man who writes a book which he is afraid to publish is a coward.” The first printing sold out in five weeks, and the work was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. Prescott then decided to turn to the American scene for his saga of the Spanish conquest. When he heard that Irving was already at work on the conquest of Mexico, Prescott offered to abandon the subject. But Irving generously deferred to the newcomer.

For his writing on the Spanish conquest Prescott had all the help that his patrician position and his wealth could provide. To supplement his personal library of five thousand volumes he enlisted a Harvard classmate, then minister to Spain, to secure copies of manuscripts and to find learned assistants in the archives. The copied manuscripts arrived in Boston by the thousands. To fix them in his mind Prescott had some read to him a dozen times. For a friend of his youth, Fanny Erskine, who had married the Spanish minister to Mexico, Prescott bought a daguerreotype camera. And from Mexico she sent pictures and descriptions of the historic scenes.

Three years of labor produced the three volumes of his
Conquest of Mexico
in 1843. Without stopping to take breath, he turned to the companion
History of the Conquest of Peru
, which appeared in three volumes in 1847.

Prescott’s polished histories were a product of his miraculous memory. During his morning horseback rides to Jamaica Plain he would compose in his mind whole chapters at a time. “My way has been lately to go over a large mass in my mind—over and over—till ready to throw it on paper—
then
an effort rather of memory than of creation.”

Despite his prodigious industry Prescott considered himself indolent. To keep his writing on schedule he made playful bets with himself or his secretary. On one occasion he promised his favorite reader-secretary, James English, the sum of one thousand dollars if he did not finish his next stint of pages on time. “39 pages in 15 days,” he boasted in Boston as he was writing about Cortése advance in Mexico, “not bad for the giddy town where I have been spinning about in dances and dinners,
plus quam suf
.”

Though Prescott has been called the nation’s first “scientific historian” for his use of manuscript sources, he would live on as a creator of literature. “The Conquest of Mexico” Prescott called “the greatest miracle in an age of miracles.… It is, without doubt, the most poetic subject ever offered to the pen of the historian.”

And one of his greatest feats as a “scientific” historian, was to depict the scenes of his drama so vividly without ever having been there—for he never visited Spain, Mexico, or Peru.

The enduring interest in Prescott’s
Conquest of Mexico
comes less from his engaging survey of Aztec civilization than from his genius for the epic. Hernando Cortés, “his enlightened spirit and his comprehensive and versatile genius,” dominates the book in a bitter-end contest with his noble antagonist the “barbarian” emperor Montezuma. The better we know the wealth and weaknesses of the Aztec emperor the more poignant is his downfall. The grandeur and elegance of the Aztec monuments offer ironic contrast to the horrors of cannibal savagery. Prescott awes us by this unlikely combination of “refinement” with “the extreme of barbarism.” The saga of the “knight-errant” Cortés follows his triumphal march to Mexico City, his residence there, receiving the allegiance and treasure of Montezuma, his expulsion by the fury of the Mexicans, his retreat, his triumphal return and siege, overcoming famine and conspiracy in his own camp, and achieving the final surrender of Mexico. Cortés’s heroic career is rounded out by his defeat of enemies’ intrigues in Spain, and his royal confirmation as supreme commander.

Prescott captures the suspense of the living experience, and never better than in his classic account of the
Noche Triste
. On that “melancholy night”
of July 1, 1520, Cortés’s forces retreating from Mexico City were slaughtered by a surprise attack.

He concludes his history with a ruthless but charitable portrait of his hero. “Cortés was not a vulgar conqueror. He did not conquer from the mere ambition of conquest. If he destroyed the ancient capital of the Aztecs, it was to build up a more magnificent capital on its ruins. If he desolated the land, and broke up its existing institutions, he employed the short period of his administration in digesting schemes for introducing there a more improved culture and a higher civilization.” And Cortés was not cruel, “at least, not cruel as compared with most of those who followed his iron trade.… He allowed no outrage on his unresisting foes. This may seem small praise, but it is an exception to the usual conduct of his countrymen in their conquests, and it is something to be in advance of one’s time.”

Finally, Prescott notes and explains Cortés’s “bigotry, the failing of the age, for, surely it should be termed only a failing. When we see the hand, red with the blood of the wretched native, raised to invoke the blessing of Heaven on the cause which it maintains, we experience something like a sensation of disgust at the act, and a doubt of its sincerity. But this is unjust. We should throw ourselves back (it cannot be too often repeated) into the age; the age of the Crusades. For every Spanish cavalier, however sordid and selfish might be his private motives, felt himself to be the soldier of the Cross.… Whoever has read the correspondence of Cortes, or, still more has attended to the circumstances of his career will hardly doubt that he would have been among the first to lay down his life for the Faith.” And Prescott ends by humanizing Cortes, with the aid of his companion-in-arms, Bernal Díaz, who recounts how “when very angry, the veins in his throat and forehead would swell, but he uttered no reproaches against either officer
or soldier,” how he loved cards and dice, would take a nap after his meals under a tree, even in stormy weather. Cortés never became rich from his conquests. “It was perhaps intended that he should receive his recompense in a better world.”

There is a strange symmetry in the lives and works of the two pioneers of a literature of American history, William Hickling Prescott and his successor Francis Parkman. It is almost as if a dissatisfied editor had chosen to revise the life of Prescott for another emphasis in the next generation. Both labored under disabilities that made their works deeds of heroism. But while Prescott had his blindness thrust on him by a crust of bread in his eye, Parkman at eighteen was energetically creating his own disabilities. And he was bolder than Prescott in his choice of subject. Spain, Prescott’s point of departure, was an eminently respectable area for historical literature, proven by Washington Irving’s popular
Columbus
(1828), his
Conquest of Granada
(1829), and his
Alhambra
(1832). Europe seemed the proper base for serious American historians. Even George Bancroft’s immensely popular three-volume
History of the Colonization of the United States
had followed that convention. And Prescott, too, followed the fortunes of Spain in the New World.

Parkman made a bold and risky thrust. As an eighteen-year-old sophomore, also at Harvard College, his literary ambitions “crystallized into a plan of writing the story of what was then known as the ‘Old French War,’ that is, the war that ended in the conquest of Canada.… My theme fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night.” Soon he “enlarged the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict between France and England, or, in other words, the history of the American forest.” Boston friends who heard his plan were dismayed that a man of Parkman’s talents and resources should choose a subject so peripheral to the mainstream of European history, a tale whose actors were red savages and crude colonists.

Parkman had been attracted by his love of the forest, an unconventional enthusiasm for a New England Brahmin. His grandfather was one of the richest Boston merchants, his father the minister of the New North Church. And his mother was descended from the Reverend John Cotton, the Patriarch of New England, who had defended the magistrates against troublemakers like Roger Williams. The sickly but hyperactive Frank was sent at the age of eight to live with his maternal grandfather, Nathaniel Hall, in neighboring Medford on the ancestral estate that bordered six thousand acres of wild woodland. “I walked twice a day to a school of high but undeserved reputation, in the town of Medford. Here I learned very little, and spent the intervals of schooling more profitably in collecting eggs,
insects, and reptiles, trapping squirrels and woodchucks, and making persistent though rarely fortunate attempts to kill birds with arrows.” This first taste of the domesticated wilderness stirred his interest in the wilder wilderness, its inhabitants and their ways. After four years his father brought him back to Boston to the Chauncy Hall School to prepare for the Harvard entrance examinations.

He inevitably entered Harvard, “the center of the intellectual aristocracy of our country,” in the class of 1844. There he studied Latin, Greek, mathematics, natural and ancient history, and a modern language. Longfellow was lecturing on French and Spanish literature. The pioneer professor of history, Jared Sparks, was teaching a new university subject, the American Revolution. Parkman received highest honors in History.

Since college “athletics” did not exist—Harvard had not yet put its first boat on the Charles, baseball and football were still decades in the future, and there was no proper gymnasium—students had to find their exercise off campus. By the time his successor historian of the West, Theodore Roosevelt, came to Harvard, athletics would be well established. The undergraduate Parkman eagerly returned to the wilderness paths that he had come to love as a boy. At Harvard he would study early by candlelight so he could be outdoors when the sun was up. In the summer of his sophomore year, he took off from Albany with a friend, visited the battlefields of the French and Indian Wars around Lake George and Lake Champlain, crossed Vermont and New Hampshire into Canada, and then returned to Cambridge via Mount Katahdin in Maine. At eighteen he was already keeping a journal of his adventures, of sleeping outdoors and living off the country. He later attributed his painful harvest of physical ailments, disabling headaches, insomnia, and blindness, to one strenuous undergraduate excursion when he spent three days and nights in the woods in the rain without shelter after his spruce-bark canoe had fallen apart.

The avalanche of his ills, as his biographers explain, seems to have come from his relentless determination to make his easy Boston life into a struggle. Wealth and social position had smoothed his path to a literary career. But he seems to have enjoyed making his simplest literary task a battle against obstacles. Even in Harvard’s primitive gymnasium, which offered nothing but gymnastics, he overstrained himself. He idealized struggle, the heroic, the dangerous, and the masculine, which helps explain his passionate opposition to woman suffrage. If a struggle did not offer itself, he somehow managed to create one. His tendency toward depression, headaches, and weak eyesight appears to have run in his family. But he built up his ills to dramatize his life. His letters expand on his heart trouble, depression, headaches, semiblindness, insomnia, water on the knee, rheumatism, and arthritis. He had “so thoroughly studied his own case” that the famous
Dr. S. Weir Mitchell had no help to offer. Somehow the one ailment Parkman never imagined for himself was hypochondria. The shadow of Prescott was always with him. Both had impaired eyesight. But Parkman thought his own worsening disability outdid Prescott’s. “Prescott could see a little—confound him and he could even look over his proofs, but I am no better off than an owl in the sunlight.”