This practice of sacrificing human life is only a modification of cannibalism, and the very mission on which the Spaniards came to Mexico was to extinguish that crime, so that they would jeopardize their title to the country should they presume to shed the blood of each other in their interminable wars. And so long as only women, and children, and Indians are the sufferers, they do no violence to the rules of warfare which Cortéz and the Conquistadors introduced. The armies of Mexico have never been deficient in good writers; a specimen of the capacity of one of them I have already given in the chapter on Texas; so that their stately and dignified histories of the national squabbles of the last thirty years are equal to Cortéz in gross exaggeration, and not a whit behind him in elegance of composition.
MORGAN AND CORTÉZ.
A hundred years after the conquest of Mexico, there sailed out of the harbor of Port Royal, now Kingston, in Jamaica, an unlawful military enterprise, about equal in force to that with which Cortéz first landed at Vera Cruz, but immensely inferior to the panic-stricken host that fled by night from the city of Mexico. The fitting out of this unlawful expedition, like that of Cortéz, had the connivance of the local authorities. The difference between the two was, that Morgan did not understand the Spanish Oriental style of proclaiming his own heroism, and furthermore, his expedition was not directed against a miserably-armed rabble of Indians, but against the fortified city of Panama, held by a garrison of royal troops.
Mooring his little fleet in the harbor of Chagres, Morgan marched his small force across the Isthmus, which then presented greater difficulties to his passage with cannon and munitions of war than Cortéz encountered in his march to Mexico. Like Cortéz in his first expedition,