wihsbip] DECLARATIONS AGAINST NIZA 363 



good faith of the friar, Castaiieda continued it, mid scarcely a writer 

 on these events failed to follow their guidance until Mr Bandelier 

 undertook to examine the facts of the case, and applied the rules of 

 ordinary fairness to his historical judgment. This vigorous defender 

 of the friar has successfully maintained his strenuous contention that 

 Marcos neither lied nor exaggerated, even when he said that the Cibola 

 pueblo appeared to him to be larger than the City of Mexico. All the 

 witnesses agi"ee that these light stone and adobe villages impress one 

 who first sees them from a distance as being much larger than they 

 really are. Mexico in 1539, on the other hand, was neither imposing 

 nor populous. The great communal houses, the " palace of Monte- 

 zuma," had been destroyed during or soon after the siege of 1521. The 

 pueblo of Hawikuh, the one which the friar doubtless saw, contained 

 about 200 houses, or between 700 and 1,000 inhabitants. There is some- 

 thing naive in Mr Bandelier's comparison of this with Robert Tomson's 

 report that the City of Mexico, in 1556, contained 1,500 Spanish house- 

 holds. 1 He ought to have added, what we may be quite sure was true, 

 that the population of Mexico probably doubled in the fifteen years pre- 

 ceding Tomson's visit, a fact which makes Niza's comparison even more 

 reasonable. 2 



The credit and esteem in which the friar was held by the viceroy, 

 Mendoza, is as convincing proof of his integrity as that derived from 

 a close scrutiny of the text of his narrative. Mendoza's testimony was 

 given in a letter which he sent to the King in Spain, inclosing the 

 report written by Friar Marcos, the "premiere lettre" which Ternaux 

 translated from Rainusio. This letter spoke in laudatory terms of 

 the friar, and of course is not wholly unbiased evidence. It is at least 

 sufficient to counterbalance the hostile declarations of Cortes and Cas- 

 tafieda, both of whom had far less creditable reasons for traducing 

 the friar than Mendoza had for praising him. " These friars," wrote 

 Mendoza of Marcos and Onorato, " had lived for some time in the 

 neighboring countries ; they were used to hard labors, experienced in 

 the ways of the Indies, conscientious, and of good habits." It is pos- 

 sible that Mendoza felt less confidence than is here expressed, for 

 before he organized the Coronado expedition, late in the fall of this 

 year 1539, he ordered Melchior Diaz to go and see if what he could dis- 

 cover agreed with the account which Friar Marcos gave. 3 



However careful the friar may have been, he presented to the vice- 

 roy a rejtort in which gold and precious stones abounded, and which 

 stopped just within sight of the goal — the Seven Cities of Nunode Guz- 

 man and of the Indian traders and story tellers. Friar Marcos had 



'Tonison's exceedingly interesting narrative of his experiences in Mexico is printed in Hakluyt, 

 vol. iii, p. 447, ed. 1600. 



2 Compare the ground plan of Hawikuh, by Victor Mindeletf, in the eighth annual report of the 

 Bureau of Ethnology, pi. xlvi, with the map of the city of Mexico (1550?), by Alonzo de Santa Cruz, 

 pi. xliii of this paper. 



3 Diaz started November 17, 1539. The report of his trip is given in Mendoza's letter of April 17, 

 1540, in Paeheco y Cardenas, ii, p. 356, and translated herein. 



