Motolinía's Historia de los indios de la Nueva España (1541)

The account finished at Tehuacán in 1541 by fray Toribio de Benavente, one of the twelve Franciscans sent to Mexico in 1523, who signed himself with the Nahuatl word for "poor". Its first chapter catalogues ten plagues: smallpox, the war dead, famine, the overseers, the tributes, the gold mines, the rebuilding of Mexico City, the branding of slaves, the road to the mines, and the Spaniards' own factions — an accounting of the cost of the conquest, by a member of the mission that followed it.