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Return to First Page ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume LI (Spring 1992)
2
curious, if considerably less dangerous, than that of de Soto himself.
Turning first to the original documentation, upon which all subsequent accounts would be based, one confronts a body of evidence that is informative, clarifying, and complicating in about equal measure. To a degree this is so because of the usual problem of conflicting accounts, a commonplace for the historian of any subject, but only to a degree, for there is an added complication. It seems at first to be no more than an historiographical curiosoity, but, as we shall see, it had the power to shape the posthumous course of the expedition for a very long time.
The documentation comes mainly in the form of eyewitness reports, with official communications providing some sparse supplementation. Two eyewitnesses left independent testimonies. The first to gain wide attention was that of one "Gentleman of Elvas," so named becasue he was of a contingent of Portuguese who joined the enterprise from the small town of that name near the border city of Badajoz. Little was known about him at the time; little has been learned since. In 1557 his Relacam verdadeira was published in Portugal; the enterprising promoter of edxpansion Richard Hakluyt had an English version out by 1609, and another two years later. (1) Elvas's report, a lengthy one, is somewhat peculiar document. It contains little of the sort of specific information that woud suggest constant reference to a diary, yet it does not draw its bulk from the imaginative embroidery that is often a characeristic fo recollections witout such a mooring. Absent, too, is the dramatic framework so comon to conquest literature over the centuries. His main concern is getting the expedition from one
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1. Hakluyt entitled it Virginia richly valued by the Description of hte Mainland of Florida, her next Neighbor. It has received two modern translations: that of Buckingham Smith, which is used in Edward Gaylor Bourne, ed., Narratives of the Careeer of Hernando de Soto (2 vols,. New York, 1904), and that of James A. Robertson, which was published along with a facsimile of the original in a limited edition by the Florida State Historical Society under the title, True relation of the hardships suffered by the Governor Fernando de Soto and certain Portuguese gentlemen during the discovery of the province of Florida......(Deland, Fla., 1932-33). The latter, rare in the original, and blindingly difficult to read in the microprint edititon (Lost Cause Press: 1961P, is nevertheless very valuable, not only for comparative purposes b ut also for its detailed bibliographical and annotative informaiton. References here will be to the more accessible Bourne edition, cited as Gentleman of Elvas.