LÓPEZ DE GÓMARA, Francisco.

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Historia de Mexico, con el descubrimiento de la nueva España One of the most important early chronicles of the Spanish conquest of the New World, López de Gomára's work is one of the two chief accounts of Cortés's conquest of Mexico.López de Gomára served as Cortés's secretary and chaplain and made use of his position to gather information relating to the extraordinary exploits surrounding the overthrow of the Aztec empire. "'The two pillars, on which the story of the Conquest mainly rests', wrote Prescott, 'are the Chronicles of Gomara and Bernal Diaz'... Gomara (1510-55) never visited the scene of his master's glory, but when Cortés returned to Spain in 1540, the young cleric became his private chaplain and secretary... Gomara's resulting Historia... is a eulogistic panegyric of his hero, which in consequence sorely galled the other participants of the conquest... Yet one cannot deny that, in spite of all its partiality, Gomara's history is a good history; he derived his information from the highest sources and he wrote with an elegant brevity and sense of arrangement that contrasted favorably with the rambling incoherencies of many of his contemporaries" (Penrose, p. 295).The work includes a biography of Cortés and accounts of his travels, as well as those of Francisco de Ulloa in 1539 to the Pacific coast of Mexico and Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo in 1542 along the coast of California. The work is particularly noted by Wagner and others for including the earliest mention of Ca

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