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Discovery and conquest of Mexico, and the travellers who came after

The first Europeans to reach Mexico were castaways. In 1511 Gonzalo Guerrero and Jerónimo de Aguilar were wrecked on the coast of Yucatán; Guerrero married a Maya woman and later fought on the Maya side. In 1517 Francisco Hernández de Córdoba sailed along the peninsula from Cuba and saw stone towns, and in 1518 Juan de Grijalva followed and heard of a rich empire inland.

In 1519 Hernán Cortés landed near present-day Veracruz, guided by a Nahua interpreter, Malintzin, whom the Spaniards called doña Marina. On 8 November his men entered Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital built on a lake. The letters Cortés sent to Charles V, and the account the soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote around 1568, describe the causeways, the market of Tlatelolco, the temples and the sacrifices; Bernal likened the city to an enchantment from the books of chivalry. It fell in August 1521.

The defeated left their own record. From the 1540s the Franciscan Bernardino de Sahagún had elders of Tlatelolco set down the memory of their world in Nahuatl. The result, the Florentine Codex of about 1577, includes the conquest seen from the Mexica side. Motolinía and Diego Durán, then mestizo and Indigenous historians such as Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl and Hernando Alvarado Tezozómoc, wrote the history of the centuries before the Spaniards.

New Spain was then largely closed to foreigners. The English Dominican Thomas Gage crossed it in the 1620s and in 1648 published a portrait of Mexico City that served English propaganda. From 1565 the Manila galleon linked Acapulco with Asia; the Italian Giovanni Francesco Gemelli Careri sailed on it and described Mexico City in 1697. In 1780 the Creole Jesuit Francisco Javier Clavijero, exiled in Italy, published an ancient history of Mexico to answer European scholars who belittled the New World.

After independence in 1821 travellers poured in. Alexander von Humboldt, there in 1803 and 1804, had already given the first statistical portrait of the country in his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Fanny Calderón de la Barca, wife of the first Spanish minister to Mexico, described the years 1839 to 1842, while John Lloyd Stephens and the artist Frederick Catherwood revealed Uxmal, Palenque and Chichén Itzá. Désiré Charnay photographed the ruins from 1857, and the French intervention of 1862 to 1867 brought officers and scientists.

This collection gathers our editions of eyewitness accounts and a directory of other early accounts of Mexico.

Our titles on this subject

Cover of The Narrative of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

The Narrative of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, 1527-1536

Shipwrecked in Florida, he spends eight years crossing Texas and northern Mexico on foot to the Pacific

Cabeza de Vaca's account tells of Narváez's expedition to Florida, the shipwreck on the coast of Texas, then eight years among the peoples of the Gulf of Mexico and northern Mexico, up to the long march towards the Pacific. The conquistador becomes a slave, a trader and then a healer, and describes the nations that take him in. His return fuels the expeditions of Soto and Coronado towards the North.
Cover of The World Tour of Francesco Carletti by Francesco Carletti

The World Tour of Francesco Carletti

Francesco Carletti, 1594-1606

A Florentine merchant circles the globe out of curiosity, from Cape Verde to Japan and China, before losing everything at Saint Helena. A firsthand account, 1591-1606.

At the end of the sixteenth century, sailing round the world was still the business of the Iberian crowns and their fleets. Francesco Carletti, a Florentine merchant, travelled as a private man along Spain's routes to America and across the Pacific, then Portugal's routes through Asia, just when both empires answered to a single king. Dictated on his return for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, his account gives the rare view of an Italian with no official mission on this first global trade.
Cover of A Cruising Voyage Round the World by Woodes Rogers

A Cruising Voyage Round the World

Woodes Rogers, 1708-1711

The corsair who rescued from a desert island the sailor who became the model for Robinson Crusoe.

Published in 1712, the journal of Woodes Rogers is one of the great English privateering narratives of the South Sea, written in the time of the War of the Spanish Succession. It tells of the rescue of Alexander Selkirk at Juan Fernández, the source of Defoe's *Robinson Crusoe*, the capture of Guayaquil and of a Manila galleon, then the return by Guam, Batavia and the Cape. Its descriptions of the Spanish coasts of the Pacific fed the English expeditions of the eighteenth century.

Further reading: accounts and works on the same theme

Accounts and works around this subject, in date order, to place our titles in context. Each links to a free online edition when one exists, or to our own page when the work is in our catalogue.

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