The treaty which England, France, and Spain made at Seville in 1729, wherein they covenanted for mutual forbearance and protection, was not enough to prevent capture and retaliation among their respective marines in these treacherous waters. England seemed the greater sufferer, and Spain, forced to a promise of indemnity, failed in the obligation, and a British fleet was sent to the scene. This was in 1739, and Admiral Edward Vernon was in command. He attacked Porto Bello and captured it,1 and then assailed the castle of San Lorenzo, at the mouth of Chagres River, which had been rebuilt since Morgan destroyed it in 1671. His attempt to reduce Cartagena failed. Commodore George Anson, in another fleet, had been sent round to the Pacific to coöperate beyond the Isthmus, but hearing on the South American coast of the repulse of Vernon at Cartagena, Anson steered for Manilla, and reached England by the Cape of Good Hope in 1744 If the Scots had not got their hoped-for commercial vantage from possessing the Isthmus route, the events we have been following, by increasing the hazards of the transit and approach, sensibly affected its value to the Spaniards, and the commercial importance of this route steadily declined. The local annals of the southern provinces are not free from a monotonous flow of events that mean little to the foreigner, though Guatemala had grown to be the city of the most importance after Mexico in Spanish America; and this in spite of the many earthquakes which in succession nearly destroyed it, noticeably those of 1751, 1757, and 1765, and finally that of 1773, which induced its people to seek a safer site for their habitations. In the last days of the Spanish rule, the same spirit that fired the priest of Dolores, farther north, raised counter-movements in these southern districts, and Dambrini essayed, but ineffectually, to fall upon the rear of Morelos. By equal steps, independence came at last to the south as to the north, and for a while these lower provinces were a part of the Mexican government, not, indeed, with full assent, for there were some regions that the fair promises of Iturbide did not stir with enthusiasm, and Costa Rica kept herself aloof. Such union as there was with Mexico lasted fifteen months, after which the Central American Confederation had its own constitutional government. The period which followed was characterized in part by the ins and outs, the ups and downs, of civil war, ending with a dissolution of the union, with each separate state left to the perils of internecine war, varied with reciprocal distrust and reprisal. Cf. Carter-Brown Catalogue, sub 1711-20. See the account in Ewald's Sir Robert Walpole, ch. 5. 1 His maps are noted in the King's Maps in the British Museum, ii. 201. Cf. Vernon's Orig inal Papers relating to the Expedition to Panama (London, 1744), and the New Hist. of Jamaica (London, 1740; Dublin, 1741; French transl., London, 1751). 2 See post, ch. 5. NOTE TO MAP ON THE PRECEDING PAGE.- - From Oexmelin's Avanturiers Flibustiers (Trevoux, 1744), vol. ii. For other plans, mainly in connection with Vernon's expedition in 1740, see a later page. NOTE. From Gage's Voyages (Amsterdam, 1720), vol. ii. Sanson's map of the Audience de Guatemala is also in Ibid. vol. ii. CRITICAL ESSAY ON THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION. THE 'HE bibliography of the history of Spanish North America subsequent to the period of the Conquest1 is best represented in the lists which are prefixed to H. H. Bancroft's histories of Central America, Mexico, California, and North Mexican States. At the present writing, other volumes of the series touching this territory have not yet appeared. These lists necessarily duplicate one another somewhat, and include a large mass of manuscript material, particularly as regards California,2 and still larger masses for the period since the acquisition of California by the United States. They are considerably extended by the enumeration of the separate documents under their authors' names, when they make part of the great collections of published documents, like the Coleccion de documentos inéditos para la historia de España; and those of Pacheco, Peralta,® Icazbalceta, the Cartas de Indias (down to 1586), the Documentos para la historia de Mexico (Mexico, 1853-57, in 20 vols.), Ternaux-Compans' Recueil de documents et mémoires originaux sur l'histoire des possessions Espagnoles dans l'Amérique (Paris, 1840),10 and Juan Suarez de Peralta's Noticias históricas de la Nueva España. Publicadas con la proteccion del ministerio de fomento por Don Justo Zaragoza (Madrid, 1878), which follows an old manuscript, mainly covering the interval 1565-1589, and called Tratado del descubrimiento de las Yndias y su conquista, y los ritos y sacrificios, y costumbres de los yndios; y de los virreyes y gobernadores, que las han gobernado, especialmente en la Nueva España [etc.]. The line of demarcation between the early authorities, who confined their survey of Mexican history to the Conquest and its immediate results, and those whose chronicle and commentary were extended into, for a greater or less extent, the vice-regal period, is well marked. Helps, in ending his Spanish Conquest11 at the middle of the sixteenth century, says that by this time "most of the chief historians and annalists had died, and the works of those who survived were not carried much beyond that period. Nothing more is to be gained from Peter Martyr, 12 Oviedo, 18 Bernal Diaz,14 Enciso,15 Las Casas,16 Garcilasso de la Vega,17 Cortés,18 or Gomara.19 Herrera, writing in another age, closes his decades 1 Cf. note on the bibliography of Mexico, ante, II. 429. Bancroft (Mexico, vi. 653) characterizes the successive Mexican historians, and (p. 660) he describes a large collection of minor Mexi cana which he has used; and he masses (p. 662) a large number of references on institutional subjects. On the archives of the Indies at Seville, see Calvo, Recueil des Traités (Paris, 1866), x. 258, 313. A considerable collection of Papeles varios de America (17 vols.) constitutes no. xcviii. of the Sparks MSS. in Harvard College library. (Cf. Calendar Sparks MSS., p. 82.) 2 Some of those derived from Pinart are enumerated in his No. Mex. States, p. xxxix. Quaritch recently held at £25 the following MS. in two volumes: Resumen del Descubrimiento de la Nueva España, demarcacion y descripcion de aquellas provincias divididas en las cinco Audiencias, estados de sus Iglesias y sus erecciones, noticia de los Obispos que hasta ahora las han gobernado, con otras noticias muy importantes; calling it "a valuable work prepared only for private use by order of the authorities, and kept in the royal archives, whence Joseph Bonaparte, during his soon after the reconquest of Peru.1 Remesal 2 has nothing of any general interest to commemorate after narrating the death of Las Casas, and all such writers as Torquemada are merely interesting when they refer to the early periods of the Conquest. It is the same with the ecclesiastical historians, Davila Padilla, Fernandez, Gil Gonçalez Davila, Colancha, and Melendez. The lawyers, also, such as Antonio de Leon and Solorzano, have comparatively little to relate after the time of Philip the Second; and the German and Italian writers, such as Benzoni, Gaspar Ens, and Levinus Apollonius, do not carry us farther." It is into the collections of documents already mentioned that the official reports and the correspondence of the period beginning with the viceroys have in the main been gathered, and to these there may be added such amassments of manuscripts as Bancroft uses,5 the accumulations in the Boletin of the Sociedad Mexicana de Geografía, the papers of Ramirez, the general works of Hakluyt, Purchas, Wytfliet, Acosta (who fills out the sixteenth century in a general way), and such conglomerate treatises as those of Gottfriedt, Montanus, De Laet, Ogilby, Heylyn, and the rest. All such descriptive material touching the laws, methods of government, judicial sys 1 Ante, II. 67. He is scant after the middle of the sixteenth century. 2 Ante, II., index. 3 Ante, II., index. 4 Ante, II. 346. He was in Mexico 1541-56. 5 Mexico, ii. 785. 6 Earlier known as the Instituto Nacional de Geografía, whose Boletin began in 1852. Cf. Bancroft's account, Mexico, vi. 659. 7 Bancroft, Mexico, i. p. xciv. 8 Ante, II. 347, 401. Cf. Bancroft's note, Mexico, iii. p. 550. *After a copperplate in the 1703 edition of his Politica Indiana. The original edition was in 1648. tems, commerce, revenue and finance, agriculture, manufactures and the arts, social and military life, education, science, and literature, is classified and separately treated in distinct chapters by Bancroft, and generally with a bibliographical apparatus appended. Similar material will be found in the additions which have been made to the Mexican edition of the Diccionario Universal de Historia y de Geografía (Mexico, 1853–55), based upon the original Spanish edition.1 The work of Bancroft on Mexico, in six volumes, is by all means the most extensive gathering of material which has been made, and he has summarized it in a popular history of a single volume, in which, however, the vice-regal period is hastily gone over. He makes a bibliographical summary at the end of the second and third volumes 2 of his larger work of the main sources of information for this period, in which he speaks slightingly of the Los tres Siglos de México of Andrés Cavo, of the Historia antigua y moderna de Jalapa of Manuel Rivera,1 and of the same author's Historia de Mejico, criticising them all as neglectful of documentary sources, and as defective in treatment. The history of the Church, the religious orders and missions, in Mexico is necessarily an essential part of the progress of the country. Bancroft has epitomized much of it in a single chapter, and it is interwoven with a considerable portion of his book elsewhere." His references to manuscript sources, like the records of the Concilios Provinciales and Concilios Mexicanos, though in considerable part in print; to collections of papal bulls and other documents, also in part in type, indicate something of the restricted opportunities of a student not so well equipped as he is.9 8 The better part of the material, however, in one form or another, is in books not difficult to meet with. Bancroft in a long note 10 indicates some of the more essential printed sources for the period immediately following the Conquest, introducing us at once to the Franciscan Order, the earliest of all to appear in Mexican history. The Historia de los Indios of Father Toribio de Benavente, known as Motolinía, — which was left in MS. at his death in 1568,11 and which, as well as the Historia eclesiástica indiana of Gerónimo de Mendieta, likewise kept for a long time in manuscript,12 were used by Torquemada in his Monarquia Indiana, — eked out by his own observations over the period following the Conquest, brings the chronicle down to 1612.13 1 Bancroft's Mexico, iii. 511; vi. 659. The Liceo mexicano (Mexico, 1844) offers a "Galería de los vireyes de México," - being memoirs of the viceroys of Mexico down to the 26th, appointed in 1673, with portraits accompanying them. Cf. Bancroft, Mexico, iii. 509, on diaries of this period; and the observations of Samuel de Champlain in his Narrative of a voyage to the West Indies and Mexico, 1599-1602, with maps and illus. Transl. from the original and unpublished manuscript, with a biographical notice and notes by Alice Wilmere. Edited by Norton Shaw (London, 1859); Martinez's Repertorio covers 1520-1590. (See ante, II. 421.) 2 Vol. ii. 784; iii. 505; also vi. 654. 8 Mexico, 1836-38, 1852, and Jalapa, 1860. Cf. ante, II. 428; and Bancroft, Mexico, iii. 508. 4 Mexico, 1869-71, in 5 vols. It is mainly concerned with the modern history, comprehensive enough to be national, beginning with 1808. Cf. Bancroft's Mexico, v. 806. 5 Barcelona, 1877-80, in eleven vols. 6 Mexico, iii. ch. 33. 7 As on the secular clergy, 1600-1800, in Mexico, iii. ch. 32; and on ecclesiastical affairs, 1800, 9 Mexico, i. p. xli; iii. pp. 724, 725, 727. 11 Ante, I. I 156; II. 397. 12 Cf. ante, II. 422. It was edited by Icazbalceta in 1871. 13 Cf. ante, Vol. I. 157; II. 399, 421, 422 ; Bancroft, Mexico, ii. 787, and iii. 512, 722, where mention is made of other Franciscan chroniclers: Balthassar de Medina's Chronica de la Santa Provincia de San Diego de Mexico (Mexico, 1862), with its map showing the various Franciscan convents in New Spain. He died in 1697, and Beristain gives the best list of his works. Francisco de Ayeta's Defensa de la Verdad (1683 or thereabouts) shows the efforts of the Franciscans of Jalisco to maintain their rights against the bishop. Bancroft (iii. 725), who cites a MS. of Francisco Antonio de la Rosa Figueroa, and notes others in his list (i. p. lii), · - one of which Quaritch (no. 363, of 1885, under 29,088) seems |