Word: cortez
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1941-1941
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...CORTEZ-John Steinbeck & Edward F. Ricketts-Viking...
Novelist John Steinbeck and his biologist friend. Director Edward F. Ricketts of the Pacific Biological Laboratories, decided to make an expedition to the Gulf of California, Mexico's long Pacific arm which used to be called the Sea of Cortez. They wanted to find out all they could about the sea creatures, especially the teeming invertebrates along the shores-how they changed in numbers, size, form from place to place, how they lived, loved, ate, fought, fled, hid, died...
Disillusion came quickly to the Spaniards themselves. At the sight of the white Aztec metropolis and its great temples amid blue lakes, green slopes and high peaks, a roughhewn, hard-bitten soldier of Cortez' army in 1519 cried, "It is like the enchantments they tell of in the Legend of Amadis! Are not the things we see a dream?" But soon he smelled the sickening stockyard stench which was wafted from the gorgeous temples, saw thousands of skulls threaded on poles in the public squares...