| "Early the next morning many Caciques
and chiefs of Tabasco and the neighbouring towns arrived and paid great
respect to us all, and they brought a present of gold, ... [and] twenty
women that were given us, among them one very excellent woman called Doña
Marina, for so she was named when she became a Christian. . . she was truly
a great chieftainess and the daughter of great Caciques and the mistress
of vassals, and this her appearance clearly showed.
Cortés allotted one of the women to each of his captains and Doña Marina, as she was good looking and intelligent and without embarrassment, he gave to Alonzo Hernández Puertocarrero. When Puertocarrero went to Spain, Doña Marina lived with Cortés, and bore him a son named Don Martin Cortés."
|Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, XXII, 62, 64.|
| "As Doña Marina proved
herself such an excellent woman and good interpreter throughout the wars
in New Spain, Tlaxcala and Mexico (as I shall show later on) Cortés
always took her with him, and during that expedition she was married to
a gentleman named Juan Jaramillo at the town of Orizaba.
Doña Marina was a person of the greatest importance and was obeyed without question by the Indians throughout New Spain. . .
Doña Marina knew the language of Coatzaldoalcos, which is that common to Mexico, and she knew the language of Tabasco, as did also Jerónimo de Aguilar, who spoke the language of Yucatan and Tabasco, which is one and the same. So that these two could understand one another clearly, and Aguilar translated into Castilian for Cortés."
|Bernal Diaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, XXIII, 67-68.|
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