Map With A Legend
Rare Woodcut Of Aztec City Finds Its Way Back To Yale
January 24, 2007
By KIM MARTINEAU, Courant Staff Writer
The island city of the Aztecs was the Venice of the so-called New
World. Causeways stretched over a salt lake, past canals and floating
gardens. A grand market overflowed with exotic vegetables, medicinal herbs
and fine jewelry. Awestruck, Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés took it in.
The metropolis of Tenochtitlan looked as if it had materialized from
the pages of a Spanish romance novel. Here was the fame and fortune Cortés
had sought.
But Cortés had a problem. The governor of Cuba had not authorized his
travels or given him permission to trade or claim lands. A trespasser in
need of legitimacy, Cortés wrote directly to the King of Spain. He described
the wonders of Tenochtitlan, the ingenuity of its people and the abundance
of gold and jewelry. His letter was translated into Latin and published a
few years later, in 1524, with a woodcut map illustrating the city and the
Gulf of Mexico.
Yale owns one of the last surviving copies of the Cortés map, worth an
estimated $150,000. But for much of the last two years, the map had been
lost.
Its disappearance was discovered days after E. Forbes Smiley III, a
map dealer, was caught tearing maps from ancient books at Yale's Beinecke
library. Even after Smiley confessed to stealing a similar Cortés map from
Harvard, Yale's map failed to surface. Stubbornly, Yale posted a picture
online, and last month, a map dealer who had purchased the map from Smiley
came forward and returned it.
Rolena Adorno, a professor of Latin American literature at Yale, is
glad it's back. She likes to show the Cortés map to her students when they
read about the Spanish conquests. Printed on linen rag paper, the image
brings the period alive. "This is as close as you can get to touching the
16th century," she tells them.
Cortés wrote five letters to King Charles V, but this one, his second,
is the most famous, for describing the city's marvels. An attached map shows
aqueducts, dikes made of reeds, palaces and a royal aviary. At the center is
the Great Temple, where human beings were sacrificed to the gods. Cortés
found blood smeared on the temple walls and skulls slung on racks.
"You have a great civilization, but at the heart of it is a ritual
life devoted to human sacrifice," said Adorno, from her office above Naples
Pizza in New Haven. "It's the great paradox."
Raised on a farm in Iowa, Adorno's first real encounter with the
Spanish language was at a party where she met some Colombian factory
workers. She decided to study Spanish, which led her to the novels of
Gabriel Garcia Márquez and back through time, to the writings of the
conquistadors. She's publishing a new book, "Polemics of Possession in
Spanish American Narrative." A picture of Yale's stolen Cortés map is on the
cover.
Raised in Spain, Cortés sought adventure and crossed the ocean to the
Caribbean. From Cuba, he set out for mainland Mexico, but the governor of
Cuba, Diego Velazquez, tried to recall the expedition, afraid of losing
power. Defying the governor, Cortés established the Mexican town of Vera
Cruz and named himself mayor. There he encountered Indian tribes chafing
under Aztec rule, forced to pay taxes and surrender their young men. Through
fighting and diplomacy, Cortés made them his allies. In 1519, they marched
through the mountains to Tenochtitlan, the heart of the Aztec empire. The
emperor, Moctezuma II, welcomed Cortes warily and plied him with gifts -
including his own clothing - hoping his visitors might go away peacefully.
Cortés was dazzled by the wealth before him - tapestries, feather work
cloaks and gold ornaments. "In order to give an account to Your Royal
Excellency of the magnificence, the strange and marvelous things of this
great city," he wrote to the King of Spain, "I would need much time and many
expert narrators."
More than 200,000 people lived in Tenochtitlan. Afraid of their
numbers, Cortés eventually put Moctezuma under house arrest. When the
residents revolted against the Spanish and their allies, Cortes and his army
lay siege to the city. His victory was aided by an outbreak of smallpox that
would kill three-quarters of the Aztecs.
"Cortés was very wily," said Elizabeth Boone, a professor at the
University of Tulane. "He was a great manipulator of people. Moctezuma was a
philosopher. He was out of his league."
By the time the map was published, in Germany, Tenochtitlan lay in
ruins, and Cortés had its riches. Mexico City would rise from the rubble.
Cortés lived long enough, said Adorno, to be celebrated in some
mediocre poetry and gain a place in Spain's history, turning his map into a
commodity. Cortés may not have recognized it as a treasure, but another
fortune seeker did.
On his penultimate trip to the Beinecke library (which has millions of
rare books and maps) in May 2005, Smiley asked to see the second Cortés
letter, the one with the map. Smiley toted his prize to midtown Manhattan
and sold it to Harry Newman, owner of the Old Print Shop, for what Newman
called "mid-five figures."
When he confessed last summer to stealing more than 100 maps from
libraries around the world, Smiley didn't mention Yale's Cortés map. But
Yale advertised the theft and posted a picture online. Initially, the New
York dealer breathed a sigh of relief. His map didn't seem to have pinholes
poked in the fold like Yale's. A day later, he looked again. Faintly, he
could make out where the holes had been feathered over.
"The image was the clincher," he said.
The map made it home to the Beinecke before Christmas, for the last
weeks of an exhibition on the mapping of early Mexico. After the holidays,
Smiley turned himself in at Federal Medical Center Devens, a low-security
prison near Worcester Mass., to start his three-year sentence. He has
declined interview requests.
The case is closed, but another mystery remains. Smiley confessed to
stealing Harvard's copy of the Cortes map, but no one knows how two
facsimile reproductions found their way into the book the map came from.
Harvard discovered the two facsimiles - and its missing map - after Smiley's
arrest.
New York Public Library, it turns out, is missing a Cortes facsimile.
Did Smiley steal it and put it in the Harvard book to disguise his earlier
theft? If so, what about the second facsimile?
Four maps handled by Smiley have turned up since his sentencing,
including Harvard's 1578 world map by British explorer George Best and New
York's 1535 world map by Carthusian monk Gregor Reisch. Federal authorities
insist Smiley cooperated in good faith. A U.S. attorney's spokesman said he
couldn't comment on whether charges might be brought, but it appears
unlikely.
Smiley's lawyer, Richard Reeve, said Smiley's cooperation is ongoing,
a pledge made at sentencing. "He doesn't have a photographic memory for each
theft," he said.
Sightings of the Cortés map are rare, and antiquarian dealers can tick
off each one going back decades. Yale's copy was donated in 1970 by an
investment banker who went to Yale and collected early voyage accounts.
William Reese, a nationally known bookseller in New Haven, said the
map is the first to show Florida and accurately chart the Gulf of Mexico.
Symbolically, it reflects the brutal clash between two cultures.
"It's one of the greatest stories ever told," said Reese. "It's
amazing Mel Gibson didn't make a movie about it."