Of the earliest historians of America, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, Fray Bartolome de las Casas and Fray Bernardino de Sahagun are among the most scholarly and the most accurate. Contemporaries of Columbus, they came to the New World early in the sixteenth century, and were participants in the few joys and many vicissitudes of the conquest and colonization. The marvels of the new lands and the courage and adventurous spirit of the conquistadores were theirs, as well as the gift to record their impressions and adventures in the most flourishing Spanish of the epoch.

The "Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra firma del Mar Oceano" was divided by Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes into fifty books, of which the first nineteen were published in 1535 and the twentieth in 1547. But it was not until 1851 that the Spanish Academy of Letters, represented by