"Cortez" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... along each narrow path came a straggling file of men and women, all on a run for the river-side. I went ashore with a boat-load of troops at once. The landing was difficult and marshy. The astonished negroes tugged us up the bank, and gazed on us as if we had been Cortez and Columbus. They kept arriving by land much faster than we could come by water; every moment increased the crowd, the jostling, the mutual clinging, on that miry foothold. What a scene it was! With the wild faces, eager figures, strange garments, it seemed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867 • Various
... the colonists here were constantly spread reports of a great and rich Indian monarchy upon the mainland to the west. These stories inflamed the imagination of the more adventurous among the settlers, and an expedition was organized and placed under the command of Hernando Cortez, for the conquest and "conversion" of the heathen nation. The expedition was successful, and soon the Spaniards were masters of the ...
— A General History for Colleges and High Schools • P. V. N. Myers
... know, are a saint; I am not, though very near it. I do err at long intervals; and then I think with indulgence of the many circumstances that plead for this poor girl. The Spanish armies of that day inherited, from the days of Cortez and Pizarro, shining remembrances of martial prowess, and the very worst of ethics. To think little of bloodshed, to quarrel, to fight, to gamble, to plunder, belonged to the very atmosphere of a camp, to its ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... Diego, where, a century and a half before, the primitive navigators under Cortez communed with the rude and unsophisticated native—there, where the zealous devotee erected his altar on the burning sand, and with offerings of incense and prayer hallowed it to God, as the birthplace of Christianity in that region—upon that sainted spot commenced the spiritual ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... date of this view of the Pacific by Balboa was September 25, 1513. Readers of the poems of Keats are familiar with the error in his sonnet "On First Looking Into Chapman's 'Homer,'" where, by a curious error, never corrected, he makes Cortez, instead of Balboa, the Spaniard who stood "silent upon ...
— Great Epochs in American History, Volume I. - Voyages Of Discovery And Early Explorations: 1000 A.D.-1682 • Various
... was menacing, everything that was venerable. Think of the subtleties to which they had to oppose their unlettered message. Think of the moral corruption that was eating like an ulcer into the very heart of society. Did ever a Cortez on the beach, with his ships in flames behind him, and a continent in arms before, cast himself on a more desperate venture? And they conquered! How? What were the small stones from the brook that slew Goliath? Have we got them? Here they are, the message that they spoke, the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: The Acts • Alexander Maclaren
... not progress from Melendez to Roger Williams? from Cortez and Pizarro to William Penn? The Quakers, ignorant of the homage which their virtues would receive from Voltaire and Raynal, men so unlike themselves, exulted in the consciousness of their humanity. 'We have done better,' said they truly, 'than if, with the proud Spaniards, ...
— The Witch of Salem - or Credulity Run Mad • John R. Musick
... untrodden lands, See where adventurous Cortez stands, While in the heavens above his head, The eagle seeks its daily bread. How aptly fact to fact replies, Heroes and eagles, hills and skies. Ye, who contemn the fatted slave, Look on this emblem ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... as objects of beauty only, for these were the Tewana, the people, who for the sake of freedom, had trampled material wealth under foot; had held Montezuma in check and resisted the encroachments of the Spaniard ever since the days of Cortez, knowing themselves to be a superior people and ...
— When Dreams Come True • Ritter Brown
... his very coronet at stake in the question. "The Man from Baker Street," with his preternatural audacity, appeared to him a being ominous and awful—not so much to be regarded with resentment as with superstitious terror. He felt as felt the dignified Montezuma, when that ruffianly Cortez, with his handful of Spanish rapscallions, bearded him in his own capital, and in the midst of his Mexican splendour. The gods were menaced if man could be so insolent! wherefore, said my Lord tremulously, "The Constitution is gone if the Man ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... downcast. Did you not tell me that your grandfather went, some fifty years ago, with Cortez, to Mexico; has he ever been ...
— The Resources of Quinola • Honore de Balzac
... great clemency towards the Poles, though he exiles them by thousands to the snows of Siberia, and tramples them down by millions, at home. Who discredits the atrocities perpetrated by Ovando in Hispaniola, Pizarro in Peru, and Cortez in Mexico,—because they filled the ears of the Spanish Court with protestations of their benignant rule? While they were yoking the enslaved natives like beasts to the draught, working them to death by thousands in their mines, hunting them ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Continent belongs to the Ancient Britons. But, in truth, conquest is only oppression and Inhumanity. If different nations could be brought to live together in peace, and honestly and amicably carry on Trade, it would be highly advantageous to the World; but conquest, such as that of Mexico by Cortez, and of Perun and Chili by Pizarro and Almagro, in nature and in reason, can give no just right to territory. In such cases, conquest is only another name for ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams
... his college studies he had read the romantic history of Cortez's conquest, and his mind had become deeply imbued with the picturesqueness of Mexican scenes; so that among the fancies of his youthful life one of the pleasantest was that of some day visiting the land of Anahuac, and its ancient capital, Tenochtitlan. After leaving ...
— The Free Lances - A Romance of the Mexican Valley • Mayne Reid
... given in a memorial to a secretary of state at my first coming over; because, whatever lands are discovered by a subject belong to the crown." But I doubt whether our conquests in the countries I treat of would be as easy as those of Ferdinando Cortez over the naked Americans. The Lilliputians, I think, are hardly worth the charge of a fleet and army to reduce them; and I question whether it might be prudent or safe to attempt the Brobdingnagians; or whether an English army would be much at their ease with the Flying ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... See where adventurous Cortez stands; While in the heavens above his head The Eagle seeks its daily bread. How aptly fact to fact replies: Heroes and eagles, hills and skies. Ye who contemn the fatted slave Look on this ...
— Moral Emblems • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the great crisis of the Reformation is the best justification of their princes. The era was great throughout Europe. The Italians of the age of Michael Angelo, the Spaniards who were the contemporaries of Cortez, the Germans who shook off the Pope at the call of Luther, and the splendid chivalry of Francis I. of France, were no common men. But they were all brought face to face with the same trials, and none met ...
— Froude's History of England • Charles Kingsley
... besieged his holiness in the Castle of St. Angelo. The Elector of Saxony and the Prince of Orange follow. Solyman the Magnificent is attended by his Admiral; and Bayard's pure spirit almost quivers at the whispered treason of the Constable of Bourbon. Luther and Melanchthon, Erasmus and Rabelais, Cortez and Pizarro, Correggio and Michael Angelo, and a long train of dames and dons of all nations, succeed; so long that the amphitheatre cannot hold them, and the procession, that they may walk over the stage, makes a short ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... have a bigger epic than the Iliad. Accordingly, Barlow makes Hesper fetch Columbus from his prison to a "hill of vision," where he unrolls before his eye a panorama of the history of America, or, as our bards then preferred to call it, Columbia. He shows him the conquest of Mexico by Cortez; the rise and fall of the kingdom of the Incas in Peru; the settlements of the English Colonies in North America; the old French and Indian Wars; the Revolution, ending with a prophecy of the future greatness of the new-born nation. The machinery of the Vision was borrowed ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... cotton garments worn by the natives of the West Indies. Later Cortez found that cotton was used in Mexico; hence, cotton is indigenous to America. In 1519 Cortez made the first recorded export of ...
— Textiles • William H. Dooley
... plant is supposed to have been made by Fernando Cortez in Yucatan in the Gulf of Mexico, where he found it used universally, and held in a species of veneration by the simple natives. He made himself acquainted with the uses and supposed virtues of the plant and the manner of cultivating it, and sent plants to Spain, as part of the spoils and ...
— Tobacco; Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture and Commerce • E. R. Billings
... put his stamp upon every style which he attempted; he renovated every part. He restored Gluck to life; he revealed Spontini to himself. The latter—the illustrious author of "Fernando Cortez"—was at a musical entertainment where Delsarte, whom he had never known, sang. He had drunk deep of the composer's inspiration: he showed this in the very first phrase of ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak ...
— English Literature - Its History and Its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World • William J. Long
... Hernando de Grijalva was sent by Hernando Cortez to discover something or other, and it was probably he who then saw the peninsula of California; but a quarter of a century before this a romance called Esplandian had appeared in Spain, narrating the adventures of an Amazonian queen who brought allies from "the right hand of the Indies" ...
— A Summer in a Canyon: A California Story • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... greed. Macaulay, the eulogist of both Lord Clive and Warren Hastings, thus describes India when Great Britain, without a shadow of excuse, laid her marauding paw upon it in the same manner and for the self-same purpose that Cortez invaded ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann |
