The earliest sustained effort to colonise North America took place not in Virginia or New England, but along the Gulf Coast of Florida. Between 1513 and 1570, a series of Spanish expeditions generated several ‘first contact’ encounters with native peoples, as well as an invaluable documentary record of those indigenous cultures. Some of these ventures are well known, at least in broad outline, like that of Ponce de Leon. Others produced texts that have entered the scholarly canon, such as the dramatic Naufragios of Cabeza de Vaca. But by and large, Florida’s early colonial history is little recognized outside of specialist circles, and it is particularly neglected by Anglophonic historians. Even among specialists, it may be that the Gulf Coast has been overshadowed by the more familiar story of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the founding of St. Augustine on the Atlantic Coast.
John E. Worth is an anthropologist and archaeologist who has earned a reputation for his meticulous archival work on indigenous and Spanish colonial Florida. His latest book is a collection of transcriptions and original translations of primary source documents related to these Spanish visits to Florida’s Gulf Coast in the sixteenth century. This volume mainly features well-known sources, most of them previously published and even translated. Those publications are scattered, however, and many of them out of print. Translations are often faulty, incomplete, or simply outdated. Worth has created new transcriptions from the original sources, as well as original translations from Spanish for all the documents in this collection. This makes the documents both more accurate and more accessible to students and scholars.
The sources are collected into five sections, each corresponding to one or more related expeditions. The first section naturally deals with the Juan Ponce de León expeditions (1513-1521), credited with discovering Florida for Spain. Most of the original sources are lost, so Worth included excerpts from several prominent 16th century historians, including Herrera and Oviedo, as well as Ponce’s original contracts and a few of his letters. For his next section, Worth chose to link two large colonization attempts, the Pánfilo de Narváez and Hernando de Soto expeditions (1528-1539). They are linked because of Juan Ortiz, a Spaniard captured from the Narváez expedition and recovered years later by Soto. Ortiz’s ethnographic knowledge comes to us via the well-known narratives of Cabeza de Vaca and El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, which are excerpted here. Worth also includes a letter by Soto himself.
Soto’s catastrophe led to reforms and a nominal turn away from conquest, and the next collection of documents pertains to the Dominican priest Fray Luís Cancer’s attempt to peacefully convert the Florida Indians (1549). This consisted only of brief landfalls, during the last of which Cancer was killed. Though Cancer’s project was relatively inconsequential, we have the benefit of the priest’s own diary to illuminate his motivations and experiences. Worth supplements this with Fray Agustín Dávila Padilla’s 1596 history of this and other Dominican missions, as well as a letter written by Cancer.
Next, Worth provides an updated translation of the narrative of Hernando de Escalante Fontaneda (1549-1566). Fontaneda was shipwrecked around 1549, after which he spent seventeen years as a captive and a translator, mostly for the Calusa Indians. His narrative delivers numerous details about the indigenous cultures that are found nowhere else, and although Fontaneda has been previously translated, Worth incorporates recently discovered additions and contextual details, as well as a letter referring to Fontaneda. That letter was written by Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the founder of St. Augustine, and with it, the permanent Spanish colony in Florida. His attempts to construct forts and missions on the Gulf Coast (1566-1569) comprise the final collection of documents, as well as the last serious Spanish presence in the region for nearly half a century. For this material, Worth includes a long excerpt from the account written by Gonzalo Solís de Merás, brother-in-law of Menéndez and companion on the expeditions, as well as a few other letters and documents.
The collection of sources is preceded by a chapter-length introduction, and each source also includes a brief contextual introduction. Worth is a scholar’s scholar; the volume introduction leans more technical than introductory. It begins with an archaeological understanding of the different indigenous cultures, including their nomenclature, and then moves into the textual history of the various expeditions and encounters. All the while, the reader’s eye is continually drawn back to the sources. Worth engages in a detailed analysis of the history of the sources and the ambiguities and discrepancies among the various instances of the texts, a close-grained examination that befits the relatively slim and problematic documentary record. The analysis verges at times on textual criticism in its level of detail. This will be welcomed and appreciated by scholars who want not only the factual minutiae but also a fine-grained analysis of the evidence itself.
The collection consists of only the most important and relevant sources, so experts on this topic may already know most of the documents included here and wish for some of the more obscure sources that have been omitted (especially for Soto and Menéndez). But this edition makes the documents far more accessible to other researchers so that someday these texts might rise into the historical canon alongside such luminaries as John Smith and William Bradford. In the meantime, this collection will greatly facilitate comparative study by historians of colonial and native America who lack the Spanish language and palaeographic skills to work directly with the source material. In this sense, Discovering Florida’s true value might be for future generations of historians who can build upon or challenge Worth’s interpretations thanks to his precise transcripts.
