Produced by Julia Miller, Jane Hyland and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) THE MEMOIRS OF THE CONQUISTADOR BERNAL DIAZ DEL CASTILLO WRITTEN BY HIMSELF CONTAINING A TRUE AND FULL ACCOUNT OF THE DISCOVERY AND CONQUEST OF MEXICO AND NEW SPAIN TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL SPANISH BY JOHN INGRAM LOCKHART, F.R.A.S. AUTHOR OF "ATTICA AND ATHENS" IN TWO VOLUMES VOL. I LONDON J. HATCHARD AND SON, 187, PICCADILLY MDCCCXLIV. C. AND J. ADLARD, PRINTERS, BATHOLOMEW CLOSE. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE. The History of the Conquest of New Spain is a subject in which great interest is felt at the present day, and the English public will hail these memoirs, which contain the only true and complete account of that important transaction. The author of this original and charming production, to which he justly gives the title of 'The True History of the Conquest of New Spain,' was himself one of the Conquistadores; one who not only witnessed the transactions which he relates, but who also performed a glorious part in them; a soldier who, for impartiality and veracity, perhaps never had his equal. His account is acknowledged to be the only one on which we can place reliance, and it has been the magazine from which the most eloquent of the Spanish writers on the same subject, as well as those of other countries, have borrowed their best materials. Some historians have even transcribed whole pages, but have not had sufficient honesty to acknowledge it. The author, while living, was never rewarded for the great services he had rendered his country, and it is remarkable that, after his death, his very memoirs were pillaged by court historians, to raise a literary monument to themselves. Most of the other writers on the conquest, particularly the Spanish, have filled their works with exaggerations, to create astonishment and false interest; pages are filled with so termed philosophical remarks, which but ill supply the place of the intelligent reader's own reflections. Bernal Diaz differs widely from those writers, for he only states what he knows to be true. The British public, fond above all others of original productions, will peruse with interest and delight a work which has so long been the secret fountain from which all other accounts of the conquest, with the exception of those which are least faithful, have taken life. In respect of its originality, it may vie with any work of modern times, not excepting 'Don Quixote.' The author seems to have been born to show forth truth in all its beauty, and he raises it to a divinity in his mind. Can anything be more expressive of an honest conscience than what he says in his own preface: "You have only to read my history, and you see it is true."