Bernal Díaz

Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1490 – 1584) was a Spanish conquistador, who participated as a soldier in the conquest of Mexico under Hernán Cortés and late in his life wrote an account of the events. As an experienced soldier of fortune, he had already participated in expeditions to Tierra Firme, Cuba, and to Yucatán before joining Cortés. In his later years he was an encomendero and governor in Guatemala where he wrote his memoirs called The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. He began his account of the conquest almost thirty years after the events and later revised and expanded it in response to the biography published by Cortes's chaplain Francisco López de Gómara, which he considered to be largely inaccurate in that it did not give due recognition to the efforts and sacrifices of others in the Spanish expedition.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo* was born around 1492 to 1498 (the exact date is unknown) in Medina del Campo (Spain), he came from a poor family and received little education; however, he was literate, which indicates a certain level of education. He sailed to Tierra Firme (now Nombre de Dios in modern Panama) with the expedition led by Pedrarias Dávila in 1514 to make his fortune, but after two years found few opportunities there. Many of the settlers had been sickened or killed by an epidemic, and there was political unrest.

He later sailed to Cuba, where he was promised a grant of native laborers as a part of the Encomienda system. That promise was never fulfilled, leading Díaz, in 1517, to join an expedition organized by a group of about 110 fellow settlers, and similarly disaffected Spaniards, from Tierra Firme. They chose Francisco Hernández de Córdoba (the first European to encounter the Yucatán area), a wealthy Cuban landowner, to lead the expedition. It was a difficult venture and, after sailing from Cuba for 21 days, they came across the Yucatán coast in early March 1517, on the Cape Cotoche.

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