FBI Returns Stolen Conquistador Manuscript to Mexico
The front of the repatriated manuscript
The FBI has returned a stolen manuscript signed by Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés to the government of Mexico.
"This is an original manuscript page that was signed by Hernán Cortés on February 20, 1527," said Special Agent Jessica Dittmer, a member of the Bureau’s Art Crime Team currently embedded in FBI New York’s FBI-NYPD Joint Major Theft Task Force. "The document outlines the payment of pesos of common gold for expenses in preparation for discovery of the spice lands."
The repatriation of this manuscript which authorities believe was stolen in the 1980s or 1990s was the result of close collaboration between the FBI, the New York City Police Department, the Department of Justice, and the government of Mexico.
It contains a full accounting of the logistical and planning details related to Cortés' journey to what eventually became the territory of New Spain which stretched from present-day Washington State southeast through Louisiana and down through Latin America.
Mexico’s national archives El Archivo General de la Nación originally counted the repatriated manuscript among a collection of historical documents signed by Cortés. But after microfilming the collection in October 1993 as part of an inventory process, the institution discovered that 15 pages of it had gone missing.
In 2024, the Mexican government requested the FBI Art Crime Team’s help in locating page 28 of the collection.
The agency did not say where the manuscript was found or its owner, but emphasised that nobody will face prosecution in connection with the theft because investigators assessed that the manuscript "changed hands several times over" in the decades since its disappearance. The FBI Art Crime Team is still determined to locate and repatriate the other missing pages.
The FBI successfully returned a similar document, a 16th century letter from Cortés authorizing a purchase of rose sugar, to the Mexican government in July 2023.
