The period 1989-93 covered the 450th anniversary of Hernando De Soto’s expedition to the southeastern United States, and that is one reason for these volumes. Here, for the first time, all four “primary” accounts of the De Soto expedition are published together and in English translation. They are presented with literary and historical introductions and accompanied by brief essays about De Soto and the expedition, translations of De Soto documents from the Archivo General de Indias, two short biographies of De Soto, and bibliographical studies.
The four accounts are customarily referred to as Elvas, Rangel, Biedma, and Garcilaso, or the Inca. The “Account by a Gentleman from Elvas” was written by an otherwise unidentified Portuguese who marched with De Soto. The version published here is the James Alexander Robertson translation originally published in 1933 by Yale University Press for the Florida State Historical Society. It includes Robertson’s notes, with an updating by John H. Hann, plus Hann’s own notes and additional updating by Vernon James Knight, Jr.
Garcilaso’s La Florida is a translation made by Clair Charmion Shelby in 1935 for the U.S. De Soto Expedition Commission. It was not published then for lack of funding, and a proposed Haklyut Society publication in 1950 was abandoned when the University of Texas Press published the Varner translation. The Rangel and Biedma accounts were translated for this edition by John Worth. Rodrigo Rangel, De Soto’s secretary, covers the first three years of the expedition. His account was first published in 1851 in the Oviedo Historia general y natural de las Indias, from which this translation was made. The brief relación of Luys Hernández de Biedma, the crown’s factor on the expedition, survives in manuscript, from which Worth translated it.
Hernando De Soto’s expedition comprised more than six hundred men and included about two hundred cavalry. It spent four years, 1539–1543, traveling through parts of what is now the southeastern and south-central United States (Florida, Georgia, Alabama, South and North Carolina, Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas). De Soto, of course, is noted as the discoverer of the Mississippi River; perhaps more important, the expedition provided the first European contact with the indigenous inhabitants of these regions.
Controversy has persisted since “modern” historians began examining the De Soto expedition and its source material. But the same documentary sources also serve as a superb resource for archaeologists, anthropologists, and ethnologists interested in precontact populations and civilizations. These volumes advance the cause of De Soto studies. The two—differing—biographies of De Soto are supplemented by a 35-page bibliography. The convenient availability of all that these two volumes contain is to be commended, as is the obvious effort that went into presenting the material in English. For those interested in De Soto and his expedition, these volumes are an absolute necessity. Nevertheless, it is to be expected that the greater accessibility of this material is more likely to engender additional scholarly and public controversy than finally to end differences of opinion on De Soto, his expedition, and the sources of information about it.
