The True History of the Conquest of Mexico

Description

Author: del Castillo, Bernal Diaz  (c. 1492-1584)

Publisher: Robert M. McBride & Co.

Pub Date: 1927

Binding: Hardcover

Condition: Fair.  Binding tight.  No tears.  Previous owner’s bookplate on front pastedown, name written in pencil on ffep.  Without dust jacket.  Wear to head and foot of spine, some chipping to head.  Edge and corner wear.

Notes: Written 50 years after the conquest of the Aztecs and originally published in Spain in the 17th century.  The first English publication was in 1800.  del Castillo’s “Historia Verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España” is considered one of the most accurate accounts of the conquest of the Aztecs.  “Of the sources for the Conquest he is the soundest, and, I think, the most interesting.  There is nothing polished or literary about him, but that constitutes his charm.  You are meeting face to face a veritable Conquistador.  His pages quiver with life, raw, angry, painful, appalling.  Himself he strides forth of the type to meet you, a grizzled, ruddy-cheeked, rough-spoken ancient, curt in manner, opinionated, aggressive, narrowly religious, childishly vain, lion-hearted.  You cannot help liking him and laughing at him and his swaggering boasts of the hundred and nineteen battles he had fought, his casual practice of dressing his wounds with strips of fat cut with his sword from a dead Indian’s rump, his formal piety, his pungent estimates of human nature, his offhand references to the savage and lustful practices he took for granted, his persistent refusal to magnify exploits he regarded as too colossal to require exaggeration.”  (From the Introduction).  Okay, I dare you to unsee that description of wound-dressing.