CHAPTER XI.
THE SINKING OF THE FLEET.
July-August 1519.
Diego Velazquez once More — His Supporters in the Camp of Cortés — They Attempt Escape — Are Discovered — The Leaders are Seized and Executed — Cortés' Ride to Cempoala, and what Came of it — He Determines on the Destruction of the Fleet — Preliminary Strategems — Several of the Ships Pronounced Unseaworthy — The Matter before the Soldiers — The Fleet Sunk — Indignation of the Velazquez Faction — One Vessel Remaining — It is Offered to any Wishing to Desert — It is finally Sunk — Francisco de Garay's Pretensions — Seizure of Some of his Men.
To the top of a fir-tree, which he curbed and then let spring, Theseus fastened the robber Sinis, who had been accustomed himself to kill travellers in that way. In a hollow brazen bull, which he had made for the Sicilian tyrant to roast his victims in, Perillus the inventor was roasted. A famous detective was hanged at last for house-breaking. Matthew Hopkins, the witch-finder, who about the middle of the seventeenth century travelled the country over to discover and bring witches to punishment, was finally, with pronounced effect, subjected to one of his own tests. Witches, he had said, would not sink in water. This was a safe proposition for the prosecution; for if they sank they were drowned, and if they did not sink they were burned. Being at length himself charged with witchcraft, the people seized and threw him into a river; and as he floated, by his own law he was declared a witch, and put to death accordingly. In more ways than one, he who invents a guillotine
