Spanish Ships Under Hernandez de Cordoba Make First Contact with the Maya
A slave-raiding expedition from Cuba lands on the Yucatan coast and is nearly wiped out by Maya warriors at Champoton, but brings back news of a wealthy, sophisticated civilization
Quick facts
- Expedition leader
- Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba
- Departure
- Cuba, Lent 1517
- Decisive battle
- Champoton, against war leader Moch Covoh
- Outcome
- Cordoba mortally wounded, roughly half his men killed
What happened
During Lent of 1517, Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba sailed from Cuba with three ships, by some accounts to capture slaves for Cuba's mines and by others to seek new lands, according to Diego de Landa's own 16th-century account, later translated and preserved in 'Yucatan Before and After the Conquest.' The expedition landed first at Isla Mujeres, where the Spanish found stone buildings and gold objects associated with local goddess figures, then reached Cape Catoche and the Bay of Campeche, where they were initially well received by local people curious enough to touch the Spaniards' beards. At Campeche, Landa's account describes a stone temple in the sea with an idol flanked by carved animals covered in the blood of sacrifices. The expedition's fortunes turned at the town of Champoton, where a war leader named Moch Covoh rallied Maya forces against the Spaniards; Hernandez de Cordoba himself was severely wounded and roughly half his men were killed in the resulting battle, and he died from his wounds after returning to Cuba.
Why it matters
This disastrous first contact nonetheless convinced Spanish authorities in Cuba that the Yucatan held a wealthy, organized civilization worth conquering, directly prompting the follow-up expeditions of Juan de Grijalva and then Hernan Cortes, whose 1519 landing began the broader Spanish assault on Mesoamerica.
How we know
The primary account comes from Diego de Landa's own 16th-century chronicle, written decades after the event based on testimony gathered in the Yucatan, since no Spanish participant left a surviving firsthand account of the 1517 voyage itself.
Sources
- Diego de Landa, trans. William Gates, Internet Sacred Text Archive. Yucatan Before and After the Conquest (translation of Diego de Landa's Relacion de las Cosas de Yucatan) · Primary source (author-declared)sacred-texts.com · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match).
- Bernal Diaz del Castillo, trans. John Ingram Lockhart, Project Gutenberg. The Memoirs of the Conquistador Bernal Diaz del Castillo (Vol. 1) · Primary source (author-declared)gutenberg.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Related timelines
- The Age of Exploration → · The 1517 Cordoba expedition was part of the same wave of Spanish exploration out of Cuba and Hispaniola that had already toppled the Taino chiefdoms and would soon reach the Aztec and Inca empires.