In his firsthand account of Spaniard Hernan Cortes's 1519 to 1521 conquest of Mexico, soldier and chronicler Bernal Diaz wrote of the sheer numbers of warriors faced by the Spanish invaders. Yet in one particularly fierce battle of four hundred Spaniards facing thousands of Aztecs, Diaz reported that only one conqueror was killed. Diaz surmised that the enemy was not "well commanded," but he also gave another reason for the victory: "The steady bearing of our artillery, musketeers and crossbowmen, was indeed a help to us, and we did the enemy much damage." Such battles pitting relatively small numbers of Europeans against larger armies of native peoples were replayed often in the initial years of conquest and settlement of the New World—from the army of Francisco Pizarro in Peru to the soldiers commanded by Hernando de Soto in La Florida. As Diaz's account suggests, though, one...