ft.

70-8670
■j

GUYLER, Sam Lerert, 1939- I

A LITERARY AND HISTORIOGRAPHICANALYSIS OFBERNAL I
DIAZ DEL CASTILLO *S iHSTORTA VERDADERA DF T.A j
CQNQUISTA DE T.A NITF.VA r.RPfttta, j

Cornell University, Ph.D., 1969

Language and Literature, general

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University Microfilms, A XERQ\ Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan
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PLEASE NOTE:
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 A LITERARY AND HISTORIOGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF

BERNAL DIAZ DEL CASTILLO'S

HIS TORIA VERDADERA DE LA CONQUISTA DE LA

NUEVA ESPANA

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A Thesis
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Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School

of Cornell University for the degree of

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Doctor of Philosophy

by

Sam Lerert Guyler

September 1969

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 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Sam Lerert Guyler was born on November 6, 1939

at Sealy, Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas

at Austin in June of 1962, with the degree of Bachelor of

Arts in Plan II. From 1963 to 1965 he was a teaching

assistant in Spanish and Italian at the University of

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Texas at Austin. He was a graduate student at Cornell
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University from 1966 to 1969, and during that period held

an NDEA Title IV Fellowship. He is a member of the Modern

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Language Association of America and of Phi Beta Kappa.

He was appointed assistant professor at the University of

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Pennsylvania in July of 1969.

ii

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Karl-Ludwig Selig
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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I should like to thank the members of my Special

Committee, Professor John Freccero and Professor H. G.

Koenigsberger for their help and valuable suggestions in

the preparation of this dissertation. Both have also been

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especially helpful as teachers. I should also like to

thank Professor Jean Parrish for a travel grant from the

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Berkowitz Fund which enabled me to consult material in the

Library of Congress and in the Folger Shakespeare Library.

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Last but not least, I should like to thank the Chairman of

my Special Committee and Director of my dissertation,

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Professor Karl-Ludwig Selig, who guided my graduate studies

both at the University of Texas and here at Cornell Univer­

sity. His help has been immeasurable over the past six

years, and ranges from drill sessions on German verbs to

careful guidance in writing the work at hand. l1Er war das

W o r t .M

iv

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter Page

I INTRODUCTION: Presentation of the biography,

description of the manuscripts and the first
edition, and general introduction to the
most important secondary writing on Bernal
Diaz and the Historia Verdadera............... 1

II A STRUCTURAL ANALYSIS: The Historia Verdadera

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as an organic unit in which the two principal
narrative threads are the narration of a
series of events and the narration of the bio­
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graphy of Cortes . * ......................... 36

III OTHER BOOKS IN THE HISTORIA VERDADERA: Prin­

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cipally a consideration of Gomara's La
conquista de Mexico, of Illescas1 Historia
Pontifical, of Giovio's Vite Breve, of
Fernandez de Oviedo's Historia general y
natural, of Cortes' Cartas de relacion, and
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of Las Casas ' Breve destruccion............... 56

IV THE BIOGRAPHY OF CORTES: Treatment of the

Historia Verdadera as a history "a lo novela
de caballeria" with a discussion ofBernal
Diaz's dualistic attitude toward Cortes.. . . 104

V SOME STYLISTIC TRAITS OF THE HISTORIA VERDADERA:

Primarily an analysis of Bernal Diaz's use of
the first person plural as a form of address
to the reader and as a reference to the 11ver-
daderos conquistadores” ......................... 136

BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................... 162

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 CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Bernal Diaz del Castillo along with the Inca Garci-

laso is probably the most widely known sixteenth century

historian of the Indies. Selections from his work, the

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Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva Espaha, are

included in even minimal anthologies of Latin American litera

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ture. Translated into English the Historia Verdadera is
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currently available in two paperback editions. In the

United States probably no other sixteenth century historian

has such an extensive reading audience. The popularity of

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the work, which is hardly limited to the United States,

is due in large part to the somewhat romantic tradition

that grew up around the Historia Verdadera during the nine­

teenth century. The tradition differs slightly according

to national perspectives, but for one reason or another

most readers and critics have been able to empathize.

Spaniards tend to single out the picturesque, and the

Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, having acquired the recently

discovered Alegria manuscript, describes a charming Spanish

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 2

primitive that reminds one of the small early Italian paint-

i
ings that characters in Henry James like to collect."

Americans acknowledge the appeal of the picturesque, but

are even more fascinated by the feat of conquest. The

restoration of the Guatemala mamiscript at the Library of

2
Congress in 1951 was preceded by Archibald MacLeish's
3
Pulitzer Prize-winning poem, Conquistador, based, of course,

on Bernal Diaz's history. Diego Rivera, the Mexican muralist,

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drew heavily on Bernal Diaz for his depictions of Cortes

with a rat's face, translating character flaws into visual

images.
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Rivera's impact and the loudly proclaimed cruth

in the title, Historia verdadera, have helped to elevate

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the work to the canon of Mexican national literature,

thereby making it required reading for schoolboys and also

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Maria Luisa Pardo Morote, "El codice Alegria en

la Biblioteca Nacional,” Direccion General de Archivos
y Bibliotecas. Boletin, No. 51 (1959), 7-9.
2
"Restoration of an Ancient Manuscript," United
States Library of Congress Quarterly Journal of Current
Acquisitions, X (Nov. 1952), 13-17.
3
New York, 1932. Macleish was Librarian of Congress
when the manuscript was restored. His poem, so I have been
led to believe by Professor Bernard Weinberg, was once very
popular with young New Deal Liberals. It is not completely
forgotten even today, and exerpts translated into Spanish
can be found in the article by Manuel Villalonga Guerra,
"Bernal Diaz y su verdadera relacion," Ejercito, XXI (1960),
41-47 in the issue conveying the journal's annual birthday
greetings to General Franco.

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 3

one of the Baedekers that Sanborns recommends for the

tourist. Indeed in Mexico Bernal Diaz seems to have such

an aureole of sanctity that at least one reader was able

to reconfirm the current government's verbal commitment to

a pro-Indian policy in the pages of the Historia verdadera.

The feat required that he pass silently over those passages

referring to the Indians as dogs and describing a concubine

as not bad looking for an Indian, and all the while he had

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to apologize for the omnipresent condemnations of human
4 *
sacrifice and anthropophagy. In Guatemala Bernal Diaz is
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A* *4 «4
See Hector Ortiz D., "Bernal Diaz ante el indigena,"
Historia Mexicana, V (1955), 233-39.
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Because of the absense of a critical edition, all

references to the Historia Verdadera are given according to
the chapter in which they are located. The Garcia edition
(Mexico, 1904-05), the Mayora edition (Guatemala, 1933-34),
and the so-called "edicion critica" (Madrid, 1940) are
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generally not readily available. The best currently available

text is the Ramirez Cabanas edition. It was first published
by Robredo in three volumes (Mexico, 1939); it was reedited
in 1942 and has been reprinted in two volumes every few
years since then by Porrua. The Ramirez Cabanas edition and
the Mayora edition both have important introductory essays.
Mayora has the best bibliography, but Ramirez Cabanas has
an index and an appendix with related documents. The 1940
Madrid edition is incomplete, and the Carcia edition is almost
impossible to read because it follows the gramatical ideo-
syncracies of the Guatemala manuscript exactly. The content
of my quotations from Bernal Diaz follows the Garcia edition.
The orthography and the punctuation have been modernized,
using both Mayora and Ramirez Cabanas as guides. References
to the Historia Verdadera will be made through Bernal Diaz's
initials (BDC) followed by the chapter in Roman numerals.
For the passages referred to above, see BDC, LII, LIV,
LXXVII, CLIV, CXXVIII.

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 4

considered to have been a founding father of the country.

The Historia Verdadera (in manuscript) is revered as the

cornerstone of Guatemalan literature and is more closely

guarded than the national domain. United Fruit accumulated

its extensive land holdings with less fuss than was involved

in the arrangement for the restoration of the manuscript

at the Library of Congress."*

But Bernal Diaz has not always been held in such

high esteem by a large reading audience. It was not until

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almost fifty years after his death (1584) that his history
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was first published (1632— two editions in the same year).

After 1632 the work was not published again until 1795.
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Antonio de Herrera (1549-1625) and Fray Juan de Torquemada

(15637-1624) do cite Bernal Diaz as an authority, and

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though he may not have been available to most readers, he

was not unknown, as is shown by the citations in Leon Pinelo

"*See the privately published monograph of Benjamin

F. Grauer, How Bernal Diazfs 1'True History" Was Reborn (New
York, 1955).
g
Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas, Historia general
de los hechos de los castellanos en las islas y tierrafirme
del mar Oceano, ed. Antonio Ballesteros Beretta (Madrid,
1934). The work was first published in 1601-1605. See
Decade II, Book 5, Chapter VI and also II, 6, I.
Fray Juan de Torquemada, Los veinte y un libros
rituales y monarquia indiana (Seville, 1615), Book IV,
Chapters IV, V, XVIII.

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 5

/ y
and Nicolas Antonio. However, the wide diffusion and frequent

publication of the work did not begin until the nineteenth

century, nurtured by the romantic perspective of most readers

and by their exaggerated belief in the veracity of Bernal

Diaz's memory of the days when he was one of Cortes' most

trusted soldiers. This is the general outline of the rather

misguided popular tradition that has surrounded the Historia

Verdadera, and in varying degrees of emotional intensity

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it is still present today in most secondary writing on

the subject. IE
Antonio de Leon Pinelo, Epitome de la biblioteca
oriental y occidental, nautica y geografica (Madrid, 1629),
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p. 75 cites the Remon manuscript. The revised edition by

Andres Gonzalez de Barcia (Madrid, 1737-38) adds the Remon
edition, Vol. II, 604.
Nicolas Antonio, Bibliotheca Hispana Nova, I
(Madrid, 1788), 244. This is the second edition; the first
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was published in 1672 and was not available.

In his Historia de la conquista de Mexico (Madrid,
1684) Antonio de Solis correctly evaluated Bernal Diaz's
negative attitude toward Cortes (Book I, Chapter II).
Solis played up the role of Ccrtes even more than Gomara
did, rejecting Bernal Diaz as an upstart who tried to denigrate
the image of Cortes, a Spanish national hero. The influence
of Solis' attitude is probably one of the major reasons for
Bernal Diaz's unpopularity through the eighteenth century.
See the article on Solis by Enriqueta Lopez Lira, "La
conquista de Mexico y su problema historiografico," Revista
de Historia de America, No. 18 (1944), 307-33. Also see
Juan Carlos Ghiano, "Veracidad y naturalidad de Bernal Diaz,1'
Revista de Literatura Argentina e Iberoamericana (Mendoza,
Argentina), I (1959), pp. 54-55; and Luis A. Arocena,
Antonio de Solis, cronista indiano. Estudio sobre las
formas historiograficas del Barroco (Buenos Aires, 1963),
pp. 148-50.

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 6

Since most of the secondary material reflects the

frequently misguided reasons for the popularity of Bernal

Diaz's history, for my purposes a complete survey of it is

not pertinent. My bibliography includes a list of editions

and also a list of books and articles on Bernal Diaz; those

which have not been used and commented on in the main body

of the dissertation are accompanied in the bibliography by

a brief description that should explain why. I have also

included some citations of Bernal Diaz by other historians,

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Prescott, Bancroft, etc. IEHowever, my intent is to consider

the Historia Verdadera in terms of certain aspects of

Renaissance literary and historiographic modes and ideas,

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and therefore, a discussion of the work as a source for other

historians is really not necessary. The reader should be

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aware, however, that Bernal Diaz is considered to be the

primary authority on the conquest of Mexico, and since the

nineteenth century almost everyone who writes on that sub­

ject will try to cite him at least once. These citations

like most of the secondary material tend to be overly

credulous, though on occasion one does find a very sceptical

article or statement. Of course, only the most naive

reader of the Historia Verdadera can fail to realize that

Bernal Diaz availed himself of other written sources. But

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 which ones and to wbat extent? The question is difficult

to answer because of the current state of studies on the

history and the historians of the Indies— there are few

critical editions, and some of Bernal Diaz’s probable

sources have not been reprinted since the sixteenth

century. Uncertainty about the correct version of the text

has also complicated the problem. Current scholarship has

still not resolved all the questions raised by the newly

rediscovered Alegria manuscript, and at present the situa­

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tion is similar to the one that existed at the end of the
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seventeenth century when Francisco de Fuentes y Guzman,

Bernal Diaz's great-greatgrandson, pointed out the discrep­

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ancies between the Remon edition and the manuscript that he

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had in his possession. After numerous delays, Genaro
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Garcia finally published an edition based on Fuentes y

Guzman’s manuscript (Mexico, 1904-05). (All modern editions

of Bernal Diaz are based primarily on Garcia’s edition.)

8 ✓
Historia de Guatemala o recordacion florida
(Guatemala, 1932), Book I, Chapter I. The manuscript
that Fuentes y Guzman was referring to is probably the one
known today as the Guatemala manuscript. See also the
anonymous, early eighteenth century Dominican's Isagoge
historico apologetico general de todas las Indias, y
especial de la provincia de San Vicente Ferrer de Chiapa
y Goathemala (Madrid, 1892), Book II, Chapter XIII; and
Juan Jose de Eguiara, Bibliotheca Mexicana (Mexico,
1755).

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 8

However, the manuscript is not entirely in the hand of

Bernal Diaz, as Garcia claimed, and the picture that he

popularized, of an old soldier whose handwriting changed

and deteriorated as he approached old age and hurried to

finish his history, is a false one. The realization that

Garcia's description of the Guatemala manuscript is inac­

curate has been further complicated by the uncertainties

surrounding the Alegria manuscript, which to date has not

been properly studied or described. This state of fluctua­

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tion and revision is rather chaotically reflected in most

of the secondary material.

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obfuscations to the textual problem at the end of this

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chapter=

The biographic studies on Bernal Diaz published

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at the turn of the century by Luis Gonzalez Obregon and

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Genaro Garcia, have now been superceded. While the works

9 * * * *
Luis Gonzalez Obregon, El Capitan Bernal Diaz del
Castillo (Mexico, 1894).
Genaro Garcia, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, noticias
bio-bibliograficas (Mexico, 1904). This study has appeared
separately and also as the introduction to Garcia's edition
of the Historia Verdadera.

■^Ramon Iglesia Parga, "Ttoo Articles on the Same

Topic," Hispanic American Historical Review, XX (1940),
517-50; and "Introduccion al estudio de Bernal Diaz del
Castillo y de su verdadera historia," Filosofia y Letras
(Mexico), I (1941), 127-40. All three articles are avail­
able without annotation in Iglesia's book, El hombre Colon
y otros ensayos (Mexico, 1944), 53-116.

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 9

of Garcia and Gonzalez Obregon are still important today

because of the documents they discovered and used for the

first time, their interpretation of the material was not

always accurate or complete. A correct analysis of Garcia's

work, which was based to some extent on Gonzalez Obregon,

can be found in Iglesia's article in Filosofia y Letras.

This article, though not the most thorough of the three

modern studies that I have mentioned, is compact and is

a good initial orientation to Bernal Diaz and the Historia

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Verdadera. The author of the second study, Henry Wagner,
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is a bibliophile who also seems to be an iconoclast— he

questions everything. Unfortunately some of the questions

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he poses are basically epistemological ones, and it is

doubtful that anyone will ever know with certainty whether

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or not some of the witnesses who testifed in Bernal Diaz's

probanzas were telling the truth. But in most cases Wagner

has raised very important questions, especially about the

written sources of what Bernal Dia*, claims is an eyewitness

account. Wagner's three articles do not read well and can

Henry R. Wagner, "Three Studies on the Same Sub­

ject," Hispanic American Historical Review, XXV (1945),
155-211.
Herbert Cerwin, Bernal Diaz. Historian of the Con­
quest (Norman, Oklahoma, 1963).

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 10

be confusing because of the poor organization. The foot­

notes, however, did make a good seminal bibliography for

Herbert Cerwin's biography of Bernal Diaz, which is the

best available if one can stand a style a lo Fernan Caballero

and does not mind occasionally adding a grain of salt to

counteract the sweetly picturesque. Cerwin has answered

many of Wagner's questions satisfactorily by using unpublished

documents from the Guatemala and Seville archives. Aside

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from the publication of a critical edition of the Historia

Verdadera, one collating the two manuscripts and the first

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edition, it would seem that the most important work on

Bernal Diaz still to be done will involve archival research

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in Medina del Campo, the flourishing sixteenth century

commercial center of Spain, where Bernal Diaz says his

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father and brother were regidores,"^ and where it is supposed

that he was born.

Though an official record giving the date of Bernal

Diaz's birth has not been found, several documents in

which he testified to his age indicate that he was born

11 /
BDC, I, CCV. In the appendix of the Ramirez
Cabanas edition see the royal cedula (1551) to Cerrato
where Bernal Diaz is described as "deudo de servidores y
criados nuestros."

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 11

12
in 1495 or 1496, supposedly in Medina del Campo. If

he told the truth in claiming that his father and brother

were regidores in that city (the rather explicit tone of the

braggart soldier in the Historia Verdadera makes many of

his personal statements open to doubt), then he was probably

a younger son who decided to try to make a position for

himself by going to the newly discovered Indies. Bernal

13
Diaz frequently makes claims to being a person of quality,

but even if these statements and those about his father and

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brother are true, which is certainly possible, the position
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of regidor in Medina del Campo did not automatically open

the ranks of hidalguia— in itself not necessarily more than

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white collar middle class— to Bernal Dxaz. Antonio

Dominguez O r t i z h a s pointed out that Medina del Campo

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was a Spanish city in which members of social classes below

12 *
In the appendix of the Ramirez Cabanas edition
see Bernal Diaz's testimony on behalf of Doha Leonor de
Alvarado. He states his age here in 1563 as 67. Also
see Wagner, op. cit., p. 160; and Cerwin, p. 170, where
records in the Guatemala archives show Bernal Diaz's age
in 1564 as sixty-eight.
13
BDC, II, VII (claims relationship to Diego
Velazquez), XCVII (where Montezuma remarks, "De noble
condicion me parece Bernal Diaz."), CLX, CLXVI, CLXXV,
CCVII.
14
La Sociedad Espahola en el Siglo XVII (Madrid,
1963), p. 263.

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 12

that of the hidalgo were not excluded from municipal govern­

ment. Cerwin^^ has found that throughout the sixteenth

century someone with the name Dxaz is found filling a

local governmental position in Medina del Campo, but

unfortunately he has not tried or been able to prove that

any of them were related to Bernal Dxaz. Althor^h specific

archival documentation pertaining to his family background

is lacking, it seems safe to assume that Bernal Diaz came

16
from a middle class family. (Iglesia has pointed out

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that he was more of an encomendero and manager than an
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adventurous soldier.) All of this about hidalgos could

properly be relegated to pedantic trivia were it not for

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the fact that by giving Bernal Dxaz at least a middle class

background, it can be assumed that he had more than a

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haphazard rudimentary education. I would not go so far as

to say that he may have spent several years at a university

such as Salamanca, as was the case with Cortes (undoubtedly

he would have vaunted it), but certainly the romantic

version of a child of nature who fought his way through

Mexico and 296 folios of a history is absurd. To cite

15
Op. cit., p. 17.
16
El hombre Colon y otros ensayos, 112-113.

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from Bernal Diaz's history his own disclaimers to an

17 . 18
education is to cite Curtius1 topos of affected modesty,

and at the same time to be the victim of the topos' intent,

"to put his hearers in a favorable, attentive and tractable

19
state of mind." Bernal Dxaz knew more about rhetoric

than has been realized. His reference to Jugurtha (BDC,

20
CLVI), cited by John Elliott as an indication of Cortes'

gentry education, is in fact an exemplum used by Bernal

Dxaz. Even Bernal Diaz's inability to translate Cortes'

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21
Latin motto, "porque n os e Latin," must be seen in terms
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17
BDC, I ("yo no soy latino, no se del arte."
This line first appears in the Guatemala manuscript on a
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page that has been badly mutilated, and the words following
"arte" are missing. The complete line in the Alegria manu­
script is "ni se del arte de marear.") For a similar line
of thought on Bernal Diaz's social status see the introduc­
tion in the Garcia edition (Vol. I, p. xxii); and Part V
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of the introduction in the Ramirez Cabanas edition.

18
Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the
Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1963), 83-85.
19
Curtius, p. 83.
20
John H. Elliott, "The Mental World of Hernan
Cortes," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society,
5th Ser, , Vol. 17 (London, 1967), p. 47 n. 1/
21
BDC, CCIV. This is one of numerous instances
that indicate that Bernal Diaz is following the account of
Gomara very closely. At the end of La conquista de Mexico
Gomara gives Cortes' Latin motto: "Judicium Domini aprehendit
eos, et fortitudo ejus corroboravit brachium meum" [The
judgement of God seized them and his strength invigorated
my arm], BAE, XXII, p. 455. Bernal Diaz's vocabulary is

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 14

of his disparagement of Cortes and in terms of the praise

of his Spanish put into the mouth of those anonymous

readers: "Dijo uno de ellos, que era muy retorico y tal

presuncion tenia de si mismo, despues de la sublimar y

alabar la gran memoria . . . y dijo en cuanto a la retorica

que va segun nuestro comun hablar de Castilla la Vieja y

que en estos tiempos se tiene p o r m a s agradable porque no

van razones hermoseadas ni de policia dorada, que suelen

componer los que han escrito, sino todo a las buenas lianas

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22
y que debajo de esta verdad se encierra todo bien hablar."
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considered to be a very pure Castillian one, and he is listed
by the Real Academia de la Lengua as an authority. (See Julio
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Caillet-Bois, "Bernal Diaz del Castillo, o de la verdad en la

historia," Revista Iberoamericana, XXV (1960), p. 227 where
the unpublished University of North Carolina thesis of Elbert
Daymond Turner, The Vocabulary of Bernal Diaz del Castillo's
"Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva Espaha,"
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(1949), is cited.) I have found only one instance of a

Latinism that casts some doubt on Bernal Diaz's professed
lack of knowledge of Latin. In Chapter CXXII the Latin word
"copias" is used to mean "soldiers." "Copias" meaning "soldiers"
is not listed in Sebastian de Covarrubias1 Tesoro de la lengua
castellana o espahola (1611), nor is it listed in the Diccionario
de autoridades. While a single instance such as this one is
not sufficient to prove that Bernal Diaz probably knew Latin,
it does make the grounds for his refusal to translate Cortes1
Latin motto dubious, especially since Bernal Diaz could
easily have gotten help from a local cleric.
22
BDC, CCXII. In many respects this statement is
little more than an elaboration of the phrase used by Gomara:
"El romance que lleva es llano, y qual agora usan." (BAE,
Vol. XXII, 155.) See the article by Juan Carlos Ghiano,
"Veracidad y naturalidad de Bernal Diaz," Revista de Litera­
ture Argentina e Iberoamericana (Mendoza, Argentina), I

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 15

When seen beside Antonio de Nebrija's dedication of his

grammar to Isabella, "siempre la lengua fue companera del

23 *
imperio," Bernal Diaz's position as regards the language

can be understood as the complement of the extension of

Spanish power in the New World. Though I would hardly

overendow Bernal Diaz with a humanist education, I should

like to attribute to him the kind of background that would

have prepared him to become a gentleman reader— and writer.

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From his own statements it is supposed that Bernal

Diaz came to the Indies in 1514 as a member of the Pedrarias

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Davila expedition to Panama.^ The absense of his name from
25
the lists of passengers to the Indies leaves this open
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to doubt. It should be pointed out, however, that the Council

of the Indies eventually accepted most of his statements

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(1959), pp. 55-56; and also Rafael Lapesa, Historia de la

lengua espahola (Madrid, 1959), pp. 195-217 for a discus­
sion of these ideas on the language as they relate to the
"questione della lingua" in the sixteenth century. Bernal
Diaz is very clearly in the mainstream, and his professed
lack of knowledge of Latin must also be considered in terms
of the debate of the ancients and the moderns. (See
Lapesa, pp. 202-05.)
23
/
Gramatica de la lengua castellana, ed. Ignacio
Gonzalez-Llubera (Oxford, 1926), p. 3. See also p. 8.
24
BDC, I.

^ S e e Cerwin, pp. 94-95.

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 16

about his background, and on this basis made several

encomienda awards and governmental appointments. From

Panama Bernal Diaz says that he went to Cuba, and from

there to Mexico, first on the exploratory, trading expedi­

tions of Cordoba (1517) and Grijalva^ (1518), and then with

Cortes (1519). By his own account he served under Cortes

and Alvarado through the siege of Tenochtitlan as a coura­

geous soldier and member of the inner circle of Cortes'

advisers (this latter distinction is of dubious accuracy).

W
27
After the siege of Tenochtitlan he was awarded encomiendas
IE
in the province known as Coatzacoalcos, which at the time

was a promising agricultural and gold mining region, and

EV

Bernal Diaz expected Mexico's primary eastern port to be

situated along the banks or at the mouth of the Coatzacoalcos

28
PR

river. Considering these prospects, his reward for ser­

vice under Cortes was certainly a satisfactory one, and he

set about establishing his authority (he uses the term

26
See Wagner, pp. 158-59 for the reasons for reject­
ing Bernal Diaz's presense on the Grijalva expedition.
Cerwin, pp. 22-23, accepts it.
27
See the grant by Cortes dated 1522 in the appendix
to the Ramirez Cabanas edition.
OQ
BDC, CXXIV, CLX.

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.