Slavery
Bernal Díaz de Castillo (Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, Chapter XXIX) said Aguilar told them some of the ship's crew were sacrificed almost immediately, while the rest were put into cages. They managed to escape but were captured by other Mayan lords, who enslaved them. By 1519, the year Hernán Cortés began his Conquest of Mexico, only two from the original shipwreck were still alive: Gonzalo Guerrero, who by this time had become famous in the Mayan world as a war leader for Nachan can, Lord of Chactemal; which includes parts of Mexico and Belize, and Gerónimo de Aguilar, who had taken holy orders in his native Spain. Guerrero had by then married Nachan Can's daughter Zazil Há and was the father of America's first mestizo children.
Read more about this topic: Gonzalo Guerrero
Famous quotes containing the word slavery:
“New York, you are an Egypt! But an Egypt turned inside out. For she erected pyramids of slavery to death, and you erect pyramids of democracy with the vertical organ-pipes of your skyscrapers all meeting at the point of infinity of liberty!”
—Salvador Dali (19041989)
“It cannot in the opinion of His Majestys Government be classified as slavery in the extreme acceptance of the word without some risk of terminological inexactitude.”
—Winston Churchill (18741965)
“In nothing was slavery so savage and relentless as in its attempted destruction of the family instincts of the Negro race in America. Individuals, not families; shelters, not homes; herding, not marriages, were the cardinal sins in that system of horrors.”
—Fannie Barrier Williams (18551944)