The De Soto Chronicles Vol 1 & 2: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543
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The De Soto Chronicles Vol 1 & 2: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543
1242Overview
1993 Choice Outstanding Academic Book, sponsored by Choice Magazine.
The De Soto expedition was the first major encounter of Europeans with North American Indians in the eastern half of the United States. De Soto and his army of over 600 men, including 200 cavalry, spent four years traveling through what is now Florida, Georgia, Alabama, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. For anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians the surviving De Soto chronicles are valued for the unique ethnological information they contain. These documents, available here in a two volume set, are the only detailed eyewitness records of the most advanced native civilization in North America—the Mississippian culture—a culture that vanished in the wake of European contact.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780817384616 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alabama Press |
| Publication date: | 05/30/1995 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 1242 |
| Sales rank: | 1,022,684 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
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The De Soto Chronicles
The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539â"1543
By Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight Jr., Edward C. Moore
The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1993 The University of Alabama PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8461-6
INTRODUCTION
Introduction: The De Soto Expedition, a Cultural Crossroads by Paul E. Hoffman
SPANISH CONTEXT AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF DE SOTO'S EXPEDITION
We will probably never know when European seamen first laid eyes on peninsular Florida and lived to tell about it. The standard narrative accounts of early voyages, such as those of Peter Martyr, Gonzalo Fernández Oviedo y Valdés, and Bartholomé de Las Casas, and the manuscript correspondence, lawsuits, residencias, notarial records, and treasury records have failed, so far, to yield any clear evidence prior to the 1510s. Tantalizing clues exist: the Cantino Map, said to date to 1503; the discovery of Bermuda in 1505; the circumnavigation of Cuba in 1508; and in Juan Ponce de León's apparent knowledge of land west of the Bahamas when he asked for permission to seek "Bimini" in 1512. From the teens come more specific but still vague references to slaving voyages and the indirect evidence provided by the hostile reception that Ponce received.
After Ponce de León's voyage of 1513, there was no doubt that land existed north of Cuba and west of the Bahamas. The extent of that land in either direction was, however, less clear and remained vague until the 1520s, because Spanish exploration was still driven, even in the 1510s, by various forms of the Columbian-Vespuccian effort to fit the "new world" (Vespucci) or "another world" (Columbus) into Ptolemaic concepts of world geography. In those concepts, the new discoveries were either islands off of Asia or various peninsulas jutting out from it. The job of explorers, according to this conceptualization of the world, was to go around these islands and peninsulas to the southeast and south, or, if starting from the southern side of the Isthmus of Panama, to sail west across the "great gulf" thought to separate the "new world" peninsula (or island) from Asia proper. Ferdinand Magellan's voyage (1519–23), the explorations of Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1517–19) westward in the Gulf of Panama, and Gil Gonzalez Dávila's exploration up the west coast of Central America (1520–23) fit this pattern, as do the "minor voyages" along the northeastern coast of South America in the years 1499–1519.
A better understanding of the extent of North America developed rapidly after 1517. In that year, Francisco Hernández de Córdoba was sent to Yucatan, first explored by Vicente Yáñez Pinzón and Juan Díaz de Solis (1508–9). Hernández de Cordoba's findings, soon amplified by Juan de Grijalva's voyage as far as Cabo Rojo (1518), set in motion not only Hernán Cortés's expedition of 1519, which resulted in the conquest of central Mexico two years later, but also the voyage of Alonso Alvarez de Pineda, sent in 1519 by Francisco de Garay, governor of Jamaica. Alvarez de Pineda was to seek the strait that one variant on the Ptolemaic theory suggested might lie north of the "new world," now conceived as a very large island off the coast of Asia. Alvarez de Pineda did not find any opening along the northern and eastern shores of the Gulf of Mexico, nor did he divine that the "River of Flowers" that he had passed drained the interior of a continent. He did, however, visit Cortés's outpost at Vera Cruz and left a small Spanish force on the Pánuco River.
If, after Alvarez de Pineda's exploration, it was clear that a land mass enclosed the Gulf of Mexico, the questions then became how far to the north that land ran and if there was open water between it and the land areas associated with the cod fisheries in the far north. Answers to these questions were obtained in 1521–25. In 1521, slavers sailing on behalf of two companies, each involving judges of the Audiencia of Santo Domingo, made landfall at the South Santee River, in modern South Carolina. Subsequently, the Licenciado Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, one of the judges, obtained a royal contract for the exploration and then settlement of this new discovery, which he claimed was at 35°, 36°, and 37°N latitude (it was actually at 33°20'), the same "parallel" as Andalucía in Spain. His pilot, Pedro de Quejo, explored the coast from near Delaware Bay to Saint Simon's Sound (1525) but found no evidence of a strait. Meanwhile, from the north and in 1523, Esteban Gómez had sailed south to about the area of New York harbor, again finding no strait. Thus, by the end of 1525, the Spaniards knew that North America stood between Europe and Asia. In addition, thanks to the Magellan-El Cano voyage (1519–22), they knew that the Pacific Ocean was very wide. The Americas, or, as the Spaniards called them, the Indies, truly were a "new world."
Spanish attempts to conquer and colonize the newly revealed North American land mass began in 1521, when Francisco de Garay received a royal contract to conquer "Amichel," and Ponce de León made a final, fatal attempt to gain control over the Indians of south Florida. Garay's Amichel was a province whose southern border was at or near the Pánuco River in Mexico. To the east and north, "Amichel" ended wherever Juan Ponce de León's "Florida" began, an undetermined point on the northern Gulf Coast. There is evidence that Garay intended all along to force his way into Mexico and that he had Alvarez de Pineda leave men on the Pánuco River in 1519 in preparation for that attempt. In the end, he failed because Cortés had control of the rich central provinces of New Spain, as the Spanish called Mexico, and so was able to suborn most of Garay's men into joining him. Garay died at Mexico City in 1524, vainly trying to obtain recognition of his claim over the Pánuco drainage. Ponce de León died at San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1522 from wounds received when he and his men had tried to land among the Caloosahatchee Indians in April 1521.
Along the Atlantic Coast, the Spanish attempt at conquest and settlement began in 1526, when Ayllón landed a colony of six hundred persons at the Santee River-Winyah Bay area. His plan, apparently, was to have his native interpreters (captured in 1521) guide him to the Indian chiefdom of Duhae (also, Du-a-e), in the interior. However, the interpreters fled. Moreover, the coastal zone was found to be largely empty of inhabitants and lacking in foods familiar to the Spaniards. Scouting parties Ayllón sent to explore the coast to the south reported the existence of an area with an Indian population that grew maize. So Ayllón moved his colony to the area of the Guale Indians who lived around Sapelo and St. Catherine's sounds in modern Georgia. Established on or about September 29, 1526, as San Miguel de Gualdape, this new colony was abandoned in late October or early November, following Aylión's death on October 18.
The next Spanish intrusion into the Southeast was the result of accident rather than design. Pánfilo de Narváez obtained a grant in 1526 that made him heir to Ponce de León and Garay, thus allowing him to colonize anywhere from Amichel on the west to the Cape of Florida on the east. His intention was to move into Amichel, the gateway to Mexico. But bad luck, in the form of a storm as his fleet neared Havana, forced him to seek shelter on the middle west coast of Florida during Holy Week, 1528. He had evidently provisioned his ships only for the leg of the trip from Trinidad to Havana and so now found himself in a strange land on short rations.
Although not indisputable, the available evidence shows that he landed at Johns Pass, just north of the entrance to Tampa Bay. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, whose account is almost all that we know of this expedition's history, indicates that the pilots and officials of the expedition were uncertain of their geography or location. In the end, over Cabeza de Vaca's objection, they decided to send the ships northward and then south to Havana for supplies and to march the army north, in the belief that they would soon find a "deep bay" reaching ten leagues into the land. There they would wait for the ships, meanwhile living off the stored food of the inhabitants.
Following this design, Narváez marched northward within a few leagues of the coast until he crossed the Withlacoochee River. In all of that area, his men found little to eat and no Indians. Once across the Withlacoochee, he turned inland and used Indian guides to move northward to Apalachee. According to Cabeza de Vaca, the army met few Indians but did encounter their maize fields at intervals of seven or eight leagues (seventeen to twenty-five miles, depending on which league he was using). Apalachee was also a disappointment, apparently because they were fooled into thinking that an outlying, rather small village was the entire province. Having rested there, the Spaniards decided to go west to Aute, said to have abundant food, and then to the sea, with the intention of making boats, or making contact with their own ships, so that they might escape to Amichel or Mexico. And that, in summary, is what they did, except that the boats they built were wrecked on the Texas coast. Only Cabeza de Vaca and two other men survived to reach Mexico in 1536.
When Hernando de Soto returned from Peru to Spain to seek his own area of government in Ecuador or Guatemala, or permission to conquer some new area, the fate of the Narváez expedition was still not known, although its disappearance was. That fact fit with the gradually building reputation of the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of North America. Alvarez de Pineda had summed up his findings along the upper Gulf Coast by saying that "all the land is low and sterile." Ponce de León had found the Cape of Florida area inhabited by brave, skilled warriors who beat the Spaniards in pitched battles, an almost unheard-of event. The majority of Ayllón's surviving colonists spread the word that the Atlantic Coast, too, was not suitable for colonization, even where there were Indians. Although fish and fowl were abundant, few sources of carbohydrates that were familiar or acceptable to the Spaniards seemed available. Ayllón's propaganda about it being a "new Andalucía" was false. Only the rumored pearls and "terrestrial gems" of an inland province called "Xapira" might still be true. But no one really knew, because Ayllón's people had not reached into the interior, having lost their guides to that area at the Santee-Winyah Bay landing site (which was the one known to give access to Xapira, according to a report by a native captured in 1521). Cabeza de Vaca's return to the Spanish world allowed De Soto to fill in this picture with knowledge of the experiences of Narváez on the west coast of peninsular Florida.
Hernando de Soto was the inheritor not only of all the previous grants, now consolidated into a single province of "La Florida," but also of his predecessors' painfully gained knowledge about the coast and interior.13 Judging by his actions, he made as much use of this information as he could, beginning with the selection of a landing point and in deciding where to move next. The accuracy of this information was probably not very good, however, a fact that the modern reader should bear in mind.
Probably the first fruit that De Soto gathered from the work of his predecessors was that neither the Atlantic Coast nor the Gulf Coast was preferable. Neither offered deep, protected ports that also gave immediate access to large native populations. Ayllón's San Miguel, a possible exception to this rule, was of unknown location; not even the pilot major of the House of Trade in Seville recorded it in his collection of sailing directions and coastal descriptions. Because neither coast offered any particular advantage, De Soto seems to have opted for the Gulf Coast of peninsular Florida because it was close to Cuba and easy to reach on both legs of a trip back and forth. An Atlantic Coast port, while easy to reach from the Antilles, would have required a return via a long detour east of the Bahamas, through the Mona Passage, or even farther east into the Atlantic Ocean. Then there was the long and sometimes difficult journey around western Cuba and back into the Gulf to Havana. A voyage using the counter-current along the coast of Florida and then across the Gulf Stream to Havana was less difficult and lengthy, but it was more dangerous because it required sailing close to the shore in relatively shallow water.
Having decided his general line of approach to La Florida, De Soto next made use of Cabeza de Vaca's information about the bay that Narváez had glimpsed and that his ships had found on their voyage south. According to Cabeza de Vaca, this bay, modern Tampa Bay, was "so uninhabited and so poor [a land] as had ever been found in those parts." Accordingly, De Soto sent Juan de Añasco to seek a better harbor, which he found seventy-five to eighty leagues north of Havana, rather short of the hundred leagues that was the standard estimate of the distance to Bahía Honda, that is, Tampa Bay. Whether that newly discovered port is where De Soto actually landed is another, much-debated question. The point is that De Soto sought to avoid the sterile bay that Narváez had found.
In the same way, De Soto's path north in the interior (rather than close to the coast) of peninsular Florida seems to have been based on the experience of Narváez. De Soto had better scouting and an efficient policy of moving from the central town of each chiefdom to that of the next, a technique probably learned in Central America. This took him to Apalachee, where he found the central town. Then he subjected the entire province to foraging activities, unlike Narváez, who had been kept at a minor village with little food.
De Soto's pace may also have been determined, at least initially, by the experience of Narváez. Elvas says that De Soto marched five or six leagues a day in populated areas, and as rapidly as his men and swine would allow in unpopulated ones to avoid hunger from lack of maize. Swanton presents evidence that De Soto moved at about twelve miles per day during the m arch to the Withlacoochee River. These figures are estimated averages. They are very close to the minimum distance (seven leagues) that Cabeza de Vaca mentions as that between Indian maize fields. The figures suggest that De Soto intended to avoid Narváez's experience of hunger. Narváez attributed the difficulty in getting food to the fact that his men did not make a day's march between sources of maize. Jeffrey Mitchem has suggested that De Soto's inclusion of pigs in his expedition was another effort to avoid Narváez's hunger.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The De Soto Chronicles by Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight Jr., Edward C. Moore. Copyright © 1993 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsILLUSTRATIONS
BOARD OF ADVISERS
CONTRIBUTORS
FOREWORD
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES ON TRANSLATIONS AND NAMES
INTRODUCTION: THE DE SOTO EXPEDITION, A CULTURAL CROSSROADS
THE ACCOUNT BY A GENTLEMAN FROM ELVAS
RELATION OF THE ISLAND OF FLORIDA
ACCOUNT OF THE NORTHERN CONQUEST AND DISCOVERY OF HERNANDO DE SOTO
THE CAÑETE FRAGMENT: ANOTHER NARRATIVE OF HERNANDO DE SOTO
PARALLEL ITINERARY OF THE EXPEDITION Originally published as Appendix E in the Final Report of the United States De Soto Expedition Commission
Selected Items from NARRATIVES OF THE CAREER OF HERNANDO DE SOTO IN THE CONQUEST OF FLORIDA
CONVEYANCE OF DOWER BY THE WIDOW OF PEDRÁRIAS DÁVILA TO HERNANDO DE SOTO, IN CONSIDERATION OF THE ESPOUSAL OF HER DAUGHTER
LETTER OF HERNANDO DE SOTO RESPECTING CONCESSIONS HE DESIRES SHALL BE OBTAINED FOR HIM AT COURT
CONCESSION MADE BY THE KING OF SPAIN TO HERNANDO DE SOTO OF THE GOVERNMENT OF CUBA AND CONQUEST OF FLORIDA, WITH THE TITLE OF ADELANTADO
ROYAL CEDULA PERMITTING JUAN DE AÑASCO TO TRAFFIC WITH THE INDIANS OF FLORIDA, SO LONG AS THERE ARE NO DUTIES ON IMPORTS IN THAT PROVINCE
WILL OF HERNANDO DE SOTO
LETTER TO THE KING OF SPAIN FROM OFFICERS AT HAVANA IN THE ARMY OF DE SOTO
LETTER OF HERNANDO DE SOTO AT TAMPA BAY TO THE JUSTICE AND BOARD OF MAGISTRATES IN SANTIAGO DE CUBA
LETTER TO CHARLES V FROM THE JUSTICE AND BOARD OF MAGISTRATES OF SANTIAGO DE CUBA, GIVING A STATEMENT OF OCCURRENCES ON THE ISLAND
EL ADELANTADO DON HERNANDO DE SOTO A short biography, originally published by the Junta de Extremadura (Extremadura Enclave 92) in their Cuadernos Populares, November 1988.
HERNANDO DE SOTO: A BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
SOME NEW TRANSLATIONS OF DE SOTO DOCUMENTS FROM THE GENERAL ARCHIVE OF THE INDIES, SEVILLE
1 NAMING OF CAPTAIN HERNANDO DE SOTO AS LIEUTENANT GOVERNOR OF CUZCO, 1534
2. CÉDULA REAL PERMITTING THE SHIPS GOING TO THE INDIES TO GO IN THE COMPANY OF DE SOTO'S ARMADA, 1537
3. CÉDULA REAL REQUIRING THE SHIPS GOING TOWARD THE INDIES TO DO SO IN THE COMPANY OF HERNANDO DE SOTO, 1538
4. AUTHORIZATION FOR DOÑA ISABEL DE BOBADILLA TO BRING THREE SLAVE WOMEN TO THE ISLAND OF CUBA FOR HER SERVICE, 1538
5. INTERROGATION FOR THE CONCESSION OF THE HABIT OF SANTIAGO TO HERNANDO DE SOTO, 1538
6. POWER GRANTED BY THE ADELANTADO HERNANDO DE SOTO TO HIS WIFE, ISABEL DE BOBADILLA, 1539
7. INVENTORY OF THE ASSETS LEFT BY THE ADELANTADO HERNANDO DE SOTO FOLLOWING HIS DEATH, 1543
INDIAN PROPER NAMES IN THE FOUR NARRATIVES Originally published in the Final Report of The United States De Soto Expedition Commission
GLOSSARY
INTRODUCTION TO BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DE SOTO STUDIES
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF DE SOTO STUDIES
INDEX Contents - Volume II
ILLUSTRATIONS
FOREWORD
GARCILASO DE LA VEGA, THE INCA
LA FLORIDA
APPENDIX GENEALOGY OF GARCÍ PÉREZ DE VARGAS
INDEX