Life's Pleasures Quote by Hernando Cortes

Cortes lingers on the banal infrastructure of commerce to make conquest sound like observation. Apothecaries, barbers, restaurateurs: the list reads like a traveler’s inventory, not a dispatch from a man in the middle of an imperial project. That’s the move. By cataloging familiar trades, he translates an unfamiliar world into a European key, signaling to the Spanish crown that this city is legible, governable, and worth owning. The details aren’t neutral; they’re rhetorical proof of “civilization” as his audience defines it, and therefore of extraction as a reasonable next step.

The phrasing turns markets into institutions. “Prepared medicines” suggests expertise and specialization; “wash and shave the head” evokes hygiene and order; fixed prices imply regulation, stability, and a taxable economy. Cortes is arguing, without arguing, that he hasn’t stumbled into a wilderness but into a functioning polity with surplus, skills, and systems - the kind of place empire can plug into and reroute.

The subtext is also a quiet rebuke to any Spanish expectation that the New World is simply raw nature awaiting European improvement. He’s telling his patrons: you’re not funding a gamble, you’re inheriting a machine. Yet there’s a chilling sleight of hand: by reducing complex social life to a set of shops, he flattens people into services and cities into assets. The sentence performs the first step of conquest - not the sword, but the narrative that makes the sword seem like administration.