Contemporary with these and less famous authors of commentaries is the long line of writers usually classed together by the Spaniards as Early Historians of the Indies.[48] The desire to record what they had seen and suffered was strong in the _conquistadores_, and a long list might be made of their names. Only the most famous can be mentioned here. No more amazing story of shipwreck and misery among savages has ever been told than in the _Naufragios_ of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. He was wrecked in Florida, and remained wandering among the native tribes for ten years, 1527-1537. A power of endurance, wellnigh more than human, was required to bear up against all he suffered; but he lived to hold a governorship in the Rio de la Plata, of which also he has left an account. A much gayer and a more famous book is the account of the conquest of Mexico written by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of the companions of Cortés, who survived nearly all his brothers in arms, and died at a great age in Guatemala, on the estate he had won with his sword. His _True History_ was provoked by the earlier narrative of Gómara, and was written to vindicate the honour due to himself and his fellow-adventurers, which he thought had been unduly sacrificed by the official historian of Cortés. Bernal Diaz is a Spanish Monluc, but both ruder and more mediæval than the inimitable Gascon. Francisco de Jerez, Augustin de Zarate, and Pedro Cieza de Leon (the work of the last-named has only been wholly published in our own time) give the Peruvian half of that wonderful generation of conquest. [SN: _General Historians of the Indies._]