22 INTRODUCTION 
attached to fish as a food extract favourable comment from 
Cortez.! 
In spite of the pictographs, known as the Mendoza Codex,? 
being executed several centuries after the date I have roughly 
allotted myself, viz. 500 A.D., I cannot resist inserting two of 
these on account of their fourfold interest. 
They show first, that Mexican lads received early in their 
teens education in fishing. Second, that the Aztecs were 
AZTEC FISHING,. 
From the Mendoza Codex, vol. i. pl. 61, fig. 4. 
familiar with scoop nets. Third—and this surely will go to 
the heart of our Food Controller—that food was rationed. 
1 Montezuma’s table was provided with fish from the Gulf of Mexico 
brought to the capital within twenty-four hours of capture by means of relays 
of runners. Some five gods of fishing, of whom the chief seems to have been 
Opochtli, were worshipped: to him was ascribed the invention of the net 
and the minacachalli or trident. Cf. de Sahagun, Histoire général des choses 
de la Nouvelle Espagne, traduite et annotée par D. Jourdanet et Rémi Simeon, 
p. 36, Paris, 1880. De Sahagun, a Franciscan, came to Mexico in 1529 and 
died there in 1590. See also, C. Rau, op. cit., p. 214, and T. Joyce, op. cit., 
pp. 165, 221. Amnot uncommon practice was co-operative fishing, by which, 
after a portion had been set aside for the feudal lord, the rest of the catch was 
divided in fixed shares; see Joyce, p. 300. 
2 These pictographs were made by native artists shortly after the conquest 
of Mexico, and were sent by the Viceroy Mendoza, with interpretations in 
Aztec and Spanish, to the Emperor Charles the Fifth. A copy of this Codex 
in the Bodleian was reproduced by Lord Kingsborough in his first volume of 
Antiquities of Mexico (1831). 
