Life's Pleasures Quote by Hernando Cortes

Cortes makes infrastructure sound like destiny. By reducing a sprawling, sophisticated water system to a neat, almost anatomical comparison - a volume "equal in bulk to the human body" - he frames Tenochtitlan as both marvel and specimen: impressive enough to praise, legible enough to measure, claim, and eventually control. The sentence is engineered to travel well back to Spain. "Excellent water" is not just a practical detail; it's a credibility play, a way of saying: this is no barbarous backwater, but a city with civic order that rivals (and quietly shames) European norms.

The intent is double-edged. On the surface, Cortes is the awed observer reporting a technological achievement: pipes, distribution, public use. Underneath, he's doing political accounting. Water is power in an island city built on a lake, and by narrating the system with calm, administrative clarity, he positions it as an asset that can be understood and therefore appropriated. The phrasing "used by the inhabitants for drink and other purposes" has the cool tone of inventory, not admiration; people become users, the city becomes a network, and conquest becomes a matter of rerouting.

Context sharpens the stakes. Cortes is writing as a commander justifying an audacious campaign, needing to impress a monarch and investors while hinting at the prize: a disciplined metropolis worth taking. The quiet marvel of public water doubles as a moral alibi - if such a city exists, then capturing it can be framed not as looting, but as inheriting a civilization.