Christopher Columbus and Hernan Cortes are two of the most famous explorers of the New World; they helped to spur the Spanish colonization of the Americas. But after centuries of history books, it's easy to forget how difficult reporting was back then; it was pretty impressive if you could write and read. A lot of what we know comes from the collected memories of one conquistador.
Bernal Diaz del Castillo was born in 1492, the same year as Columbus' first voyage across the sea. He came from a poor family in Medina del Campo, and had relatively little education as a child. In 1514, he joined the expedition to Tierra Firme (modern-day Panama) to make his fortune in the New World; however, the colony suffered under political unrest and a debilitating epidemic. Diaz left for Cuba, where he was promised a land grant and slaves. But he found disappointment on the island too; he wrote that "...as three years had already passed...and we haven't done a single thing worth the telling." Other disaffected Spaniards organized a new expedition, and he joined up with the 110 men in 1517. The group chose wealthy landowner Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba to lead the group.
The expedition has the honor of being the first to attempt a conquest of the Yucatan Peninsula. Unfortunately, the Maya natives were wary of the visitors and much more advanced than the Spaniards thought possible; after tricking the explorers into thinking they were friendly, the Maya ambushed them on the shore and drove them back. The group barely escaped the encounter, but soon ran out of potable water and were forced to sail to Florida in search for more. All but 22 of the original 110 men were killed in various ambushes and encounters with the natives; the survivors returned to Cuba, severely wounded. Diaz wrote the only first-person account of the doomed expedition, and was an invaluable help for other conquistadors.
After being attacked by natives and nearly dying from thirst, it's understandable that some men would never explore that area again. But Diaz was undeterred; during an expedition led by Juan de Grijalva, he returned to the Yucatan in April 1518. This mission was purely one of exploration and cartography. Resisting the urge to exact revenge for the Hernandez mission, this second voyage was successful; aside from a few cannon shots, the explorers had relatively little negative interaction with the Maya, and even traded with some villages.
Diaz landed back in Cuba and immediately enlisted to sail with conquistador Hernan Cortes, who led a huge contingent of men to the shores of Mexico in mid-1519. It was Diaz's third effort to find wealth and fame in the new land; he was considered the unofficial scribe of the group, because of his love for chronicling the stories of his fellow soldiers. Diaz wrote down these stories, as well as descriptions of battles, human sacrifice, idolatry, and other observations gleaned from the two-year Aztec conquest.
After returning home, Diaz was appointed governor of the Santiago de los Caballeros colony, in present-day Guatemala. He spent much of the next fifty years writing down the full history of his adventures. He called his book 'The True History of the Conquest of New Spain', but died in 1585 without seeing it published. The book was assumed lost until a full manuscript was found in a Madrid library in 1632. Diaz's work has been invaluable in understanding the Spanish conquest from a soldier's perspective; he did fairly well for himself, when one considers that his travels and conquests sprang from boredom.
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