14 March 1519, morning
The foot on the plain
On 14 March Cortés leads the army out of Potonchán across the plains towards Cintla, a town subject to Potonchán, where Alvarado and Lugo fought the day before. The Spanish foot, with crossbows, muskets and a few guns, keep together in one body. Cortés rides separately with the horsemen.
On the savanna the Chontal army comes to meet them in squadrons, with great feather plumes, drums and trumpets, and faces painted red, white and black. The warriors carry large bows, spears and shields and cover the whole plain. Cortés and Bernal Díaz put them at 40,000 men from eight provinces, the historian Ana Luisa Izquierdo at 10,000 to 13,000.
The Chontal surround the Spanish foot on every side, and their first attack wounds more than seventy Spaniards. For about an hour the Spaniards keep their ranks and fire their guns and crossbows into the massed warriors, but they cannot make them give ground.
Cortés fights the Indians of Tabasco, engraving by Juan Moreno Tejada after Ildefonso Vergaz in Antonio de Solís’s Historia de la conquista de México, Madrid, 1783Wikimedia Commons, Fondo Antiguo de la Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla, CC BY 2.0 (Historia de la conquista de México (1783) "Pelea Cortes con los Indios de Tabasco y consigue de ellos una completa Victoria" (21719133954).jpg)
Sources
- Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, tr. J. M. Cohen (1963), pp. 74 to 76.
- Cipriano Aurelio Cabrera Bernat, Viajeros en Tabasco: Textos (1987), p. 111.
- Ana Luisa Izquierdo, Acalán y la Chontalpa en el siglo XVI: su geografía política (1997), p. 178.
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