Bernal Díaz del Castillo, born in Spain in 1492, came to the New World at the age of twenty-two to seek his fortune. After five disappointing years, he joined Hernán Cortés’s expedition to Mexico. A battle-hardened conquistador, Díaz participated in all the major events of the conquest. Afterwards, when he read slanted, inaccurate, and fabricated stories of the conquest, he decided to write his own eyewitness account. After working on his manuscript for almost thirty years, he sent a copy to the king of Spain in 1575. It lay buried in Spanish archives until it was published in 1632 as The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. In this selection (translated from Spanish), Díaz describes what he saw when he and the other Spaniards first arrived in Mexico.