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Already an old man, the former soldier Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote “The True History of the Conquest of New Spain” in an attempt to reap with his pen the rewards that had eluded him with the sword.

In his memoirs, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, one of Cortés’ soldiers, reported that Malinche was from Coatzacoalcos, a coastal settlement in present-day Veracruz, and that her family sold her as a child to Indigenous traders who then turned around and sold her to the Chontal Maya.

In his firsthand account, Díaz del Castillo describes onslaughts of arrows, darts and stones and the doleful sight of Spanish prisoners being placed on sacrificial altars as captors cut open their chests and “drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them.”

“These great towns … and buildings rising from the water, all made of stone, seemed like an enchanted vision,” Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a member of the expedition, wrote in “The Conquest of New Spain.”

“We could not walk without treading on the bodies and heads of dead Indians,” wrote Díaz del Castillo.