The Spanish crown’s attempts to place settlements in the eastern United States finally were realized in 1565 when Pedro Menéndez de Avilés founded St. Augustine. The next year Menéndez laid out a sister city, Santa Elena, on Parris Island, South Carolina. Santa Elena was to serve as the colony’s principal settlement and to anchor an overland route that would lead from that coast west to the silver mines of Zacatecas in Mexico, which were erroneously thought to lie at the southwestern end of the Appalachian Mountains.

In 1566, Menéndez sent Capt. Juan Pardo and 125 soldiers inland from Santa Elena to find such a road and to bring the native inhabitants under Spanish control. Pardo and his men traveled northward, reaching a major native town at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, where they built a fort and then returned to Santa Elena. The journey took slightly more than three months. A second expedition led by Pardo left Santa Elena in 1567. The soldiers crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains and moved westward, reaching the upper Tennessee River valley south of Nashville. Along the route Pardo established five forts, although none would last long. The journey took six months.

These reconstructions of Pardo’s routes are an exciting detective story. Using primary accounts, translated and annotated by Paul E. Hoffman, Hudson convincingly traces the Spaniards’ entradas across the sixteenth-century La Florida landscape. He also shows how he applied the accounts to help reconstruct the route of Hernando de Soto’s expedition, which, in 1540, had visited some of the same native towns that Pardo would reach more than a quarter-century later.

But Hudson does not stop there. He uses the documents and his reconstruction to provide unprecedented interpretations of the native societies encountered along Pardo’s routes. Information on political alliances and hegemony, social structure, material culture, linguistic affiliations, ethnicity, and the relationships among these cultural attributes provide scholars with previously unknown data.

Juan Pardo is an excellent example of the research being carried out by historians, anthropologists, and archeologists engaged in interpreting the sixteenth-century native societies of the southeast United States and the impact of colonization on them.