Soldiers of Conquest Read Free Page A

strengthened at the northern end with Fort Conception and at the southern end by Fort Santiago. He couldn’t see the opposite side of the city, but had studied reports describing the city’s defensive walls as being some fifteen feet high, three feet thick, and with nine well-constructed cannon bastions reinforcing it. Slots in the wall through which muskets could fire upon attackers were spaced every four feet. Besides its renowned fortifications, the city was famous in Europe and America for its pretty, free-spirited women, and for the dreaded and deadly el vomito, yellow fever.
    He tried to picture how this land of the Aztecs might have looked when in the spring of the year 1519 A.D. the eleven ships of the Spanish General Hernando Cortez appeared off the white sand beach. Perhaps there had been a village of brown skinned men, women, and children who watched in awe as the general and his five hundred and fifty soldiers, their blood hot with thoughts of gold and jewels, came ashore wearing their metal armor and armed with muskets and swords, fourteen bronze cannons, stores of powder and shot, and sixteen horses. Cortez had burned ten of his ships, and in a “do or die campaign”, built a road following the aged footpaths - the Aztecs had not invented the wheel - and climbed into the mountains where they had been told a fabulously rich city lay. After killing thousands of the Aztecs in battles, the Spaniards fought their way down into the valley and into the great capitol city of the nation. The Spaniards stole shipload upon shipload of the Aztec people’s gold, silver and jewels and sent all back to Spain. Cortez named the land Mexico. Spain ruled it for three hundred years, until 1821 when the Mexicans wrested back control.
    Lee turned his spyglass away from Veracruz and to the several ships hanging on their anchors and crowding the harbor. Most prominent were the three American battleships, the heavily armed Albany, Potomac, and John Adams showing the open bores of their big cannons to the fort and city, and as a warning to any Mexican or foreign ship’s captain that might be considering running the blockade.
    Also present were foreign men-of-war, two British frigates, a French frigate and a Spanish sloop. The foreign warships were here to protect their country’s nationals and business interests during the coming war. The British were most concerned for they owned most of the gold and silver mines in Mexico, and scores of other business ventures.
    Lee turned back to Fort San Juan de Ulua. The massive structure with its strong battlements was made of coral stone faced with tough granite. It had been built by the Spanish two centuries before to protect Veracruz from pirates, and had served its purpose admirably for no pirate fleet had ever captured the city. The fort, stained a dark brown by the ages, rose menacingly from the reef with vertical, sixty-foot tall walls, above which were two additional fortified levels. Towering still higher was a round tapering column of three levels, the topmost level being constantly manned by lookouts watching the sea. At the base of the fort, water batteries lay wherever it seemed possible to make a landing. The Mexican national flag, a tricolor of red, white, and green with an eagle holding a serpent in its beak, fluttered from a tall staff on the domed peak of the highest tower. Lee had spent four years strengthening the American forts along the Atlantic seaboard and knew from that experience that Ulua with its walls bristling with cannon had to be the strongest fortification in the western hemisphere. Capturing it would be a formidable endeavor.
    He saw Mexican artillerymen working swiftly at their cannons in Ulua and called out. “General Scott, there are men working at the guns on the second level of the fort.”
    Scott intently studying Veracruz, now swung his field glasses to Ulua. “Ah, yes. They’re sponging the barrels of their pieces