13 March 1519
The taking of Potonchán
On the morning of 13 March the chaplains Bartolomé de Olmedo and Juan Díaz say mass, the first on the mainland of Mexico. Cortés sends Alonso de Ávila with 100 soldiers along the road to the town, with orders to attack when he hears the first shots, and takes the rest upriver in the boats. Before the town the royal notary Diego de Godoy reads out a demand that the Chontal let the Spaniards land, take water and food, and submit to the king of Spain. The answer is a war cry.
Warriors in canoes and on the bank shoot so many arrows that the Spaniards are held in water up to their waists, stuck in the mud, where Cortés loses a shoe. The Spaniards fire their guns, climb the bank and drive the defenders back to a wall of thick timbers, which they break through. Ávila comes in at the rear of the town, and the defenders flee into the woods.
Spanish boats and Chontal canoes fighting on the river at Tabasco, engraving in the Historia de la Marina Real Española, Madrid, 1854Wikimedia Commons, unknown engraver, Public domain (A055a160 0514.jpg)
In the main square, among halls and three temples, Cortés takes possession of the land for the king by striking a large ceiba tree three times with his sword. He then sends Pedro de Alvarado and Francisco de Lugo inland with 100 soldiers each. Lugo runs into Chontal squadrons, Alvarado comes to his aid, and together they drive them off. A prisoner says that the Chontal mean to attack, and Cortés has the horses landed from the ships.
Sources
- Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain, tr. J. M. Cohen (1963), pp. 68 to 71.
- Cipriano Aurelio Cabrera Bernat, Viajeros en Tabasco: Textos (1987), pp. 42 to 45.
- Manuel Gil y Sáenz, Compendio histórico, geográfico y estadístico del Estado de Tabasco (2nd ed. 1979), p. 80.
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