The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Vol 1

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 1496-1584Project Gutenberg · United StatesDec 2019

Rating 4.3
Word count
1.1M words
Chapters
107

Tags

English Originals Oral HistoryWorld History Legendary LivesAdventure JourneyPower GameDocumentary NarrativeExotic Culture

Summary

Project Gutenberg was the first provider of free electronic books, or eBooks. Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, invented eBooks in 1971 and his memory continues to inspire the creation of eBooks and related technologies today.The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Vol 1 (of 2)Author: Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 1496-1584,Language: English, Class: F1201: North America local history: Mexico, Release Date: May 21, 2010

Editor's review

This is the first volume of Bernal Díaz del Castillo's firsthand memoir. As a direct participant in the conquest of Mexico, he records marches, negotiations, conflicts, and everyday observations from a veteran's perspective, offering a rare personal narrative for understanding sixteenth-century Spanish expansion in the Americas. Compared with later retellings or official histories, this kind of eyewitness writing is dense in detail, vivid in character and scene, and retains the narrator's stance and biases, making it suitable for careful comparison with other sources. This volume is the first half of a two-volume work and serves as useful supplementary reading for world history, colonial history, and early modern cross-cultural exchange. The public-domain English electronic edition from Project Gutenberg is easy to search and cite, and can be read chapter by chapter during commutes or course preparation; for systematic reading, pairing it with maps and a timeline is recommended.

Who it's for

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Reading tips

  1. Read the introduction or publisher's note first to understand the source of the edition and the two-volume structure, then proceed to the main text
  2. Prepare a map of central Mexico and a timeline, marking march routes and key events as you read each chapter
  3. Take brief notes on people and events chapter by chapter to facilitate comparison with other sources
  4. Read alongside later historians' research, paying attention to the narrator's stance and selective memory

About the publisher

Project Gutenberg United States · Founded in 1971

Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.

Contents

  1. 1
  2. 2
  3. 3
  4. 4
  5. 5
  6. 6
  7. 7
  8. 8
  9. 9
  10. 10
  11. 11
  12. 12
  13. 13
  14. 14
  15. 15
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  18. 18
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  45. 45
  46. 46
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  51. 51
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  60. 60
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  62. 62
  63. 63
  64. 64
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  66. 66
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  68. 68
  69. 69
  70. 70
  71. 71
  72. 72
  73. 73
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  76. 76
  77. 77
  78. 78
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  80. 80
  81. 81
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  84. 84
  85. 85
  86. 86
  87. 87
  88. 88
  89. 89
  90. 90
  91. 91
  92. 92
  93. 93
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  95. 95
  96. 96
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  99. 99
  100. 100
  101. 101
  102. 102
  103. 103
  104. 104
  105. 105
  106. 106
  107. 107

FAQ

Is this book the complete memoir or only part of it? This is the first volume of a two-volume memoir, covering the first half of the narrative. To read the complete account, you need to read it together with the second volume; reading this volume alone can still give you the marches and observations of the first half, but the ending is not the end of the whole book.
Can I read this public-domain e-book if my English is not good? This is an English public-domain text with long sentences, old-fashioned spelling, and many historical proper names, so readers with weaker English skills will find it challenging. You may first read a reliable Chinese translation to understand the content, then return to the English original for comparative reading or close reading of selected passages.
How should I handle the narrator's stance when reading? The author was a participant in the conquest, and his narrative carries a clear stance and the limitations of his era. It is advisable to treat the text as eyewitness testimony rather than neutral historical fact; for key events, compare it with other sources and scholarly works, and note his selective presentation of people, motives, and violence.

This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.

About the author

Díaz del Castillo, Bernal, 1496-1584 Author · Spanish · 1496–1584

Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1496–1584) was a Spanish conquistador and chronicler who recorded the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of the Americas as an eyewitness. He is best known for The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, and the library also holds volumes one and two of The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo. These works narrate marches, battles, and everyday observations in the first person, in a plain and concrete style that conveys the immediacy of a veteran's recollections. They preserve detailed testimony about the conquest and remain important sources for the study of Spanish conquest history and early colonial writing. Because public information is limited, little is known about his early life, education, or other offices; scholarly attention focuses mainly on the historical value and narrative style of his chronicles.