Isabel de Guevara

Isabel de Guevara was one of the few European women to accept the offer from the Spanish crown to join colonizing missions to the New World during the first wave of conquest and settlement. Guevara sailed in 1534 the first voyage of Pedro de Mendoza and with a group of 1,500 colonists, including twenty women. It left from Cádiz and was bound for the Río de la Plata region of what is now Argentina. According to Spanish archives, she “suffered all the discomforts and dangers of the conquest.” De Guevara's correspondences paint one of the most elaborate, enduring portraits of the hazards of colonial life.

Within three months of arrival, because of hostile indigenous people, starvation, and hardship, Isabel de Guevara estimated that a thousand of the settlers who had arrived with her in the New World had died of hunger. Estimates by other colonists at the time went as high as 10,000.

Colonial conquests In one of her earliest letters, de Guevara described leaving 160 colonists behind as a defensive force while "400 men and some horses” went ahead to the new fort of Corpus Christi.