Conquistadors

By: Michael Wood

Narrated by: John Telfer

Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

Following in the footsteps of the greatest Spanish adventurers, Michael Wood retraces the path of the conquistadors from Amazonia to Lake Titicaca, and from the deserts of North Mexico to the heights of Machu Picchu. As he travels the same routes as Hernán Cortés, Francisco, and Gonzalo Pizarro, Wood describes the dramatic events that accompanied the epic sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires. He also follows parts of Orellana’s extraordinary voyage of discovery down the Amazon and of Cabeza de Vaca’s arduous journey across America to the Pacific. Few stories in history match these conquests for sheer drama, endurance, and distances covered, and Wood’s gripping narrative brings them fully to life.

Wood reconstructs both sides of the conquest, drawing from sources such as Bernal Diaz’s eyewitness account, Cortés’s own letters, and the Aztec texts recorded not long after the fall of Mexico. Wood’s evocative story of his own journey makes a compelling connection with the sixteenth-century world as he relates the present-day customs, rituals, and oral traditions of the people he meets. He offers powerful descriptions of the rivers, mountains, and ruins he encounters on his trip, comparing what he has seen and experienced with the historical record.

As well as being one of the pivotal events in history, the Spanish conquest of the Americas was one of the most cruel and devastating. Wood grapples with the moral legacy of the European invasion and with the implications of an episode in history that swept away civilizations, religions, and ways of life. The stories in Conquistadors are not only of conquest, heroism, and greed but of changes in the way we see the world, history and civilization, justice and human rights.

©2011 Michael Wood (P)2011 AudioGO

Critic reviews

“[An] accessible, literate, and lively book.” (Amazon.com, editorial review)

“The digestible narrative provides a provocative overview of a historical episode that was both magnificent and shameful.” ( Booklist)

“A handsome, lucidly written narrative of events that were, for the most part, a triumph of greed, brutality, and blood.” ( Houston Chronicle)

The trampling of people and culture

Wood does a good job of portraying the unbridled ambition that drove the conquest of the new world. This wa a very engaging read that mixed the history with the modern day quest to see the areas and understand the people of today that remain from the indigenous first people and the mixing of the foreign invaders.

Well thought out. Entertaining and informative

Pretty neat how he in real life is tracing the very footsteps of the men that the stories are about and travelling to visit the current versions of the cities that he is speaking of as he stitches together information from various sources in an effort to give us a more complete picture.

Excellent

Great book. Very informative, and great analysis. The narration is one of the best I've heard.

It’s a must.

No joke this was one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever had the pleasure of listening to. The writing was incredible and I found myself transported back through time to the age of conquest. This book was truly incredible 💯

Epic Adventure and Incredible History

I thought Australia explorers had it bad, but it seems too much water is a problem too! The story of making it to the mouth of the Amazon River was amazing. Really interesting history of so many cultures and very well presented.

Brilliantly written and fascinating

Brillantly written, a fascinating and comprehensive explanation of the discovery of the Americas by the unique group of men known as the conquistadors. What has seem to me always cold and factual history was brought to live in startling and compelling detail. When I was done with it I immediately play the book again and then planned a trip to Mexico to see what was highlighted in the book on the subject of the Aztecs

Fascinating historic narrative

I think this book covers a number of the major conquistador stories in a thorough and interesting fashion and was quite an entertaining read overall. The present-day portion of the narrative was not really introduced in any substantial way though and the periodic returns to modern, first-person narrative seem a bit disjointed and add little to the primary history. Bottom line though is good read with only the occasional tangent.

Epic History

This remarkable book, which traces four of the major Conquistadors through both primary documents and by literally retracing their routes of conquest and travel, provides an epic narrative. Sympathetic to both the Native peoples and their would be Conquerors, yet honest regarding the actions of both, Wood's work, beautifully read and presented by Telfer, presents in colorful and often moving detail the struggle and its aftermath. If you want to get a sense of both what it might have been like to be on either side in the 1500s (though the record is tilted heavily toward the Spanish given the preponderance of sources) and the impact of the Spanish Conquest in the centuries since, it would be hard to do better than this. It is most definitely worth your attention.

69

I thoroughly enjoyed this account of the Conquistadors. I was a little ignorant of some of the other Spaniards besides Cortez, but Michael Woods was able to vividly paint the picture of their personality, and the influence it had on their way of conquering. All the sad details of destruction and anguish are also present, giving a clear picture of what the Natives experienced.

Truly Compelling History with a Few Flaws

I went into Conquistadors expecting an airport-lobby accounting of Cortez and Pizzaro, but Michael Wood put together a brisk and solid account of the Age of Discovery that constantly pulled me along from word to word. The writing itself is the book's greatest strength, particularly in the first chapter detailing the conquest of Mexico. Nahuatl accounts tend to be pretty laconic, so Wood's literary flourish added a lot of vitality that isn't present in a good chunk of the source material. Beyond that, Wood recounts the world's first anti-colonial resistance movements with eye-watering power, and lends dignity to peoples who tend to be cordoned off as history's victims. He also provides along the way a number of contemporary accounts from Europeans involved in or adjacent to the birth of colonialism that throw salt on the notion that people had no idea they were committing evil by destroying American civilizations, which is vital both for understanding the mindset of people during this time and for countering a lot of revisionist conservatism.

Orellana's journey was the only one I wasn't familiar with at all, but I still found every chapter compelling and packed with a surprising amount of detail for what is ultimately a pretty quick read that quarters an already-short book. I've read longer books about more focused that didn't say nearly as much. Wood is obviously working with very compelling material (Cabeza de Vaca's story has almost magical power to it) but he handles it expertly.

This is clearly a book with its heart in the right place. That being said, there are a few points here where it shows its age and a certain tendency to view the idea of civilizational progress from a western perspective. The term "Indian" is used more than any other to refer to the indigenous peoples of the Americas. While opinions on the among Native Americans vary somewhat, I don't think it's a particularly good idea to use as a first choice a term born out of Columbus' mischaracterization of Native Americans in a book meant to cover their genocide with sympathy. Wood also tends to use the term "Bronze Age civilizations" as a shorthand analogy for the technology levels of the Aztec and Inca when compared to the Spanish. To me this gives the impression that American civilizations were behind some sort of universal technological curve, when the truth of the matter is that they worked in the presence of certain resources and the absence of others to innovate technological solutions often quite different from societies in Europe and Asia. There was likely not a people on Earth in the 16th century who could have developed agriculture in the Andes to the point the Inca did, for example. That's a forgivable expedient, but the one thing that really did get me is during Cabeza de Vaca's chapter when the excavation of a cemetery for a long dead indigenous nation is treated as nothing but a marvelous milestone for academia. This is graverobbing in a lab coat, and strikes me as especially heinous since there was literally no one to argue on behalf of these people that their burial site not be defiled. I'm honestly surprised the book treated that excavation as wholly positive, especially since it comes during a chapter that is thematically all about examining the more cooperative route the "Columbian Exchange" might have taken had it not been motivated by European greed.

There are portions of the book where Wood breaks from the historical narrative to recount his own travels to the (often approximated) locales his titular subjects came to. While there's a part of me that wishes there had just been more historical content, and a part of me that feels they're a bit gratuitous, for the most part I think they help ground these events of the distant past in the same world we live in today. If nothing else, they make me envy the experience of traveling to these places.