The fifth letter of Hernando Cortes to the Emperor Charles V, describing his expedition to the bay of Honduras, has never, to our knowledge, been turned into English. In 1843, a citizen of the United States translated the second, third, and fourth—the only ones published during the conqueror's lifetime, and often reprinted since; but of the first and last in order no satisfactory account could then be given, as they had long been missing, and had not yet appeared in the original Spanish. Robertson was the first to suspect that they might possibly be discovered in some of the archives at Vienna, the Emperor Charles being in Germany when one of them reached Europe. And so it turned out to be, for in a manuscript volume of the Imperial Library, marked CXX, an attested copy of the former was found, of which that diligent historian soon published an abstract. Along with it, in the same volume, was Cortes' fifth letter, or Carta quinta derelacion, which we now give in English for the first time.

Of the missing letters, the first, dated July 10, 1519, wherein an account is given of the conqueror's first landing at Veracruz, and of his subsequent progress into the country, was first published in 1844, by the learned and much regretted Navarrete. The fifth appeared soon after; and since then both have been reprinted, first by Don Enrique de Vedia in Ribadeneyra's Biblioteca de Autores clasicos, and afterwards by the present translator.