The Spanish Explorers of the New World



On-Line Chronology
Christopher Columbus ( 1451-1506 ), Four Voyages. See translation by J.M. Cohen, Penguin, 1969. A Genoese and no Spaniard, Columbus was nevertheless sponsored by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain.
Samuel Eliot Morison, Admiral of the Ocean Sea. Little, Brown. 1970. Life of Columbus.
Bartolomé de las Casas ( 1474-1566 ), History of the Indies.
Hernán Cortés ( 1485-1547 ), Letters from Mexico. Translated and edited by Anthony Pagden. With an introduction by J. H. Elliott. Yale, 1986.
Cabeza de Vaca ( 1490-1558 ), Relation. On Line. Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America is translated and edited by Cyclone Covey. New Mexico, 1983.
Bernal Díaz ( 1492-1584 ), The Conquest of New Spain. Translated by J. M. Cohen in a Penguin edition, 1963.
Francisco Vasquez de Coronado ( 1510-1554 ). Leader of an ill-fated expedition, in 1550-1552, from Mexico across what is now territory occupied by the Southwestern United States and Kansas, in search of the Seven Cities of Cíbola. See the account by Pedro de Castñeda et al. The Journey of Coronado. Translated and edited by George Parker Winship. Dover reprint, 1990. On Line

Two Good Collections
Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543. Edited by Frederick W. Hodge and Theodore H. Lewis. Scribner's, 1907. Reprinted by Barnes and Noble, 1959.
Spanish Exploration in the Southwest, 1542-1706. Edited by Herbert E. Bolton. Scribner's, 1916. Reprinted by Barnes and Noble, 1967.

Some Recommendations
Samuel Eliot Morison, The Great Explorers: The European Discovery of America. Oxford, 1978. An abridgement of Morison's two-volume Northern (1971) and Southern (1974) Voyages.
Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico. Touchstone, 1995.
First Encounters: Spanish Explorations in the Caribbean and the United States, 1492-1570. Edited by Jerald T. Milanich and Susan Milbraith. Florida, 1989.
1492: An Ongoing Voyage. From the Library of Congress.

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