Or An Unexpected Window on the Renaissance
Upon the discovery of America by the Europeans, an extraordinary document was copied out and carried by Spanish expeditions on their treks into the wilds of the New World. It was called “El Requerimiento”.
Read it through. It’s not too long.
“On the part of the King, Don Fernando, and of Doña Juana, his daughter, Queen of Castille and León, subduers of the barbarous nations, we their servants notify and make known to you, as best we can, that the Lord our God, Living and Eternal, created the Heaven and the Earth, and one man and one woman, of whom you and we, all the men of the world at the time, were and are descendants, and all those who came after and before us. But, on account of the multitude which has sprung from this man and woman in the five thousand years since the world was created, it was necessary that some men should go one way and some another, and that they should be divided into many kingdoms and provinces, for in one alone they could not be sustained.
Of all these nations God our Lord gave charge to one man, called St. Peter, that he should be Lord and Superior of all the men in the world, that all should obey him, and that he should be the head of the whole human race, wherever men should live, and under whatever law, sect, or belief they should be; and he gave him the world for his kingdom and jurisdiction.
And he commanded him to place his seat in Rome, as the spot most fitting to rule the world from; but also he permitted him to have his seat in any other part of the world, and to judge and govern all Christians, Moors, Jews, Gentiles, and all other sects. This man was called Pope, as if to say, Admirable Great Father and Governor of men. The men who lived in that time obeyed that St. Peter, and took him for Lord, King, and Superior of the universe; so also they have regarded the others who after him have been elected to the pontificate, and so has it been continued even till now, and will continue till the end of the world.
One of these Pontiffs, who succeeded that St. Peter as Lord of the world, in the dignity and seat which I have before mentioned, made donation of these isles and Tierra-firme to the aforesaid King and Queen and to their successors, our lords, with all that there are in these territories, as is contained in certain writings which passed upon the subject as aforesaid, which you can see if you wish.
So their Highnesses are kings and lords of these islands and land of Tierra-firme by virtue of this donation: and some islands, and indeed almost all those to whom this has been notified, have received and served their Highnesses, as lords and kings, in the way that subjects ought to do, with good will, without any resistance, immediately, without delay, when they were informed of the aforesaid facts. And also they received and obeyed the priests whom their Highnesses sent to preach to them and to teach them our Holy Faith; and all these, of their own free will, without any reward or condition, have become Christians, and are so, and their Highnesses have joyfully and benignantly received them, and also have commanded them to be treated as their subjects and vassals; and you too are held and obliged to do the same. Wherefore, as best we can, we ask and require you that you consider what we have said to you, and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it, and that you acknowledge the Church as the Ruler and Superior of the whole world, and the high priest called Pope, and in his name the King and Queen Doña Juana our lords, in his place, as superiors and lords and kings of these islands and this Tierra-firme by virtue of the said donation, and that you consent and give place that these religious fathers should declare and preach to you the aforesaid.
If you do so, you will do well, and that which you are obliged to do to their Highnesses, and we in their name shall receive you in all love and charity, and shall leave you, your wives, and your children, and your lands, free without servitude, that you may do with them and with yourselves freely that which you like and think best, and they shall not compel you to turn Christians, unless you yourselves, when informed of the truth, should wish to be converted to our Holy Catholic Faith, as almost all the inhabitants of the rest of the islands have done. And, besides this, their Highnesses award you many privileges and exemptions and will grant you many benefits.
But, if you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it, I certify to you that, with the help of God, we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, and shall subject you to the yoke and obedience of the Church and of their Highnesses; we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can, as to vassals who do not obey, and refuse to receive their lord, and resist and contradict him; and we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us. And that we have said this to you and made this Requisition, we request the notary here present to give us his testimony in writing, and we ask the rest who are present that they should be witnesses of this Requisition.”
This text, originally drafted in 1510 by Spanish jurist Palacios Rubios, of the Council of Castille, and issued by King Ferdinand in 1513, was intended to be scrupulously proclaimed by Spanish expeditions upon making contact with any village or native population. It was read out loud, but of course most of the time in Spanish, a language none of the native people could comprehend. It might be read out the night before, when the glow of fires was glimpsed in the distance, or perhaps nailed to a nearby tree, or indeed read to the inhabitants, though not always within hearing distance. It would, however, be sedulously proclaimed, and witnesses would sign an affidavit that it had been properly read.
Then the arquebuses would be primed, the shackles readied and the war dogs let loose.
Isn’t it extraordinary? Miranda rights and last rites, all in one.
The Treaty of Tordesillas cut the New World in two along a north-south meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands (much haggling took place over exactly where it should go). On June 7, 1494, Portugal was given the lands east and Spain the lands west. (A Papal Bull signed 4 May 1493 by Pope Alexander VI had already conferred title over the Americas to the Spanish monarchs. One wonders what the Pope obtained in return for handing over two continents, though at the time the bull was promulgated, the new islands were still thought to be part of the Indies, which means the Pope blithely handed over half the then-suspected world. Given that Marco Polo’s accounts were well-known and widely read, that would have included not only Xipangu and other fabled isles but also Cathay, which would surely have seemed somewhat presumptuous to the Great Khan.) Curiously, nobody considered the antimeridian, and later on some alarm was raised in Lisbon about the Spice Islands, and which side of the line they just might be on. The Treaty of Zaragoza was signed in 1529 to take care of that particular loose end.)
Spain set about industriously occupying and exploiting the new land. Dozens of expeditions crossed the Atlantic, criss-crossed the Caribbean, destroyed the Inca, the Aztec and Maya civilzations. Vespucci sailed south, or at least claimed he did, Magellan followed the same coast, and when the Victoria limped into the Bay of San Lucar with eighteen ragged survivors aboard, the first ship had sailed around the world. Balboa climbed his hill in Darien, Columbus died in poverty, carping to Vespucci about ungrateful crowned heads and broken contracts. Ships laden with so much gold they could barely swim had turned the Atlantic into a common, if still periodically perilous, cruise. Martin Waldseemuller, in his scriptorium in Saint-Dié, deep in the Vosges, hundreds of miles from the sea, inscribed “America” on a new map.
The stuff of history books.
In the same century, Michelangelo was ruining his health in the Sistine Chapel ceiling, bickering with the Pope, complaining about his shiftless relatives and envying Raphaello’s cushier commissions. Dürer did a watercolour of a clump of grass, and another of a young hare. Leonardo da Vinci went off to spend his last years in France. Benvenuto Cellini would soon cast his Perseus with the head of Medusa. Many of what we consider the most significant works of art in history were being made.
Again, the stuff of history books.
This is the late Renaissance in full flower, a time of unparalleled innovation in art and literature, commonly held to mark the close of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern Western world, bringing renewed interest in Classical learning and values to Italy and subsequently the rest of western and central Europe from the late 13th to the early 17th century – “the impulse, initiated in Italy, towards improving the contemporary world by discovering and applying the achievement of classical antiquity” – and a time when domestic slaves in the Italian city-states made up between one-quarter to one-third of the urban population.
NOT always the stuff of history books.
But, back the the “Requirement”. It’s near-impossible to imagine what must have gone through the minds of native Americans. Admittedly, contact was not always destructive, or at least not immediately – sometimes the devastation was a time-bomb in the form of disease. Occasionally, harmonious relationships ensued, but by and large even friendly initial contact soon degenerated into burning, pillaging and enslavement.
Between 1550 and 1750, tens, if not hundreds of thousands of native Americans were rounded up and sold as slaves, largely to perish in gold mines on Hispaniola, before the African slave trade took over supplying the demand for plantations and mines. Once again, in all fairness, native populations practiced slavery and waged war, but they did not base their economy on it, and certainly did not destroy entire cultures. It is difficult to gauge with any certainty the number involved, though. According to some historians, in the American colonies in 1730, nearly 25 percent of the slaves in the Carolinas were Cherokee, Creek, or other Native Americans. Certainly not in all the history books; Thanksgiving at Plymouth Rock and Pocahontas saving John Smith are far more edifying tales.
Historian Alan Gallay (The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) suggests 24,000 to 51,000 for the number of Native Americans in southeast America sold in the British slave trade from 1670-1715. More slaves were exported from Charles Town than imported over this period. Thousands more were exported from ports like Boston and Salem, and by the French from New Orleans, though the numbers were far lower. (When the U.S. invaded California in 1848, the practice of enslaving Native Americans, originally organized through the Franciscan missions, was not halted, but continued in the new State of California from 1850 to 1867. With the complicity of local law enforcement, Native Americans could be rounded up for “vagrancy” and sold to property owners for four months to work off their fine.)
While slavery in Europe began in the 12th century, it only really became an important economic factor much later. In Renaissance Italy, the majority of slaves were Muslims from Spain, North Africa, Crete, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire. The most famous of them is Leo the African, to whom we owe the “Cosmographia Dell’ Africa”, long the West’s only eye-witness report of inland Africa. Europe’s black population grew during the 13th and 14th centuries, and dramatically so in the 1440s, with Portuguese slavers plying the coasts of sub-Saharan Africa. The Ottoman Empire and the Venetian Republic supplied many black slaves to Renaissance Italy. By 1505, as many as 140,000 to 170,000 Africans had been captured for sale in Europe. The beginning of the end would only come in England in 1807, with “An Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade”, nearly two and a half centuries after John Hawkins set sail for Queen Elizabeth to fill the Jesus of Lubeck with “black gold”.
So how does one reconcile the two – the humanistic Renaissance spreading to all Europe, centred on the value of the individual and the fulfilment of a meaningful life on Earth, against the destruction and enslavement of the peoples of not only Africa, but a new continent?
Not everyone could. Bartolomé de las Casas, in his book A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, penned a scathing indictment of the Spanish presence in the Americas, and spent his life preaching for fair treatment of native Americans.
Great and Injurious was the blindness of those praesided over the
“Indians”; as to the Conversion and Salvation of this People: for they
denyed in Effect what they in their flourishing Discourse pretended to,
and declar’d with their Tongue what they contradicted in their Heart;
for it came to this pass, that the “Indians” should be commanded on the
penalty of a bloody War, Death, and perpetual Bondage, to embrace the
Christian Faith, and submit to the Obedience of the “Spanish” King; as
if the Son of God, who suffered Death for the Redemption of all
Mankind, had enacted a Law, when he pronounced these words, “Go and
teach all Nations” that Infidels, living peaceably and quietly in their
Hereditary Native Country, should be impos’d upon pain of Confiscation
of all their Chattels, Lands, Liberty, Wives, Children, and Death
itself, without any precedent instruction to Confess and Acknowledge
the true God, and subject themselves to a King, whom they never saw, or
heard mention’d before; and whose Messengers behav’d themselves toward
them with such Inhumanity and Cruelty as they had done hitherto. Which
is certainly a most foppish and absurd way of Proceeding, and merits
nothing but Scandal, Derision, nay Hell itself. Now suppose this
Notorious and Profligate Governour had bin impower’d to see the
Execution of these Edicts perform’d, for of themselves they were
repugnant both to Law and Equity; yet he commanded (or they who were to
see the Execution thereof, did it of their own Heads without Authority)
that when they phansied or proposed to themselves any place, that was
well stor’d with Gold, to rob and feloniously steal it away from the
“Indians” living in their Cities and Houses, without the least
suspicion of any ill Act. These wicked “Spaniards”, like Theives came
to any place by stealth, half a Mile off of any City, Town or Village,
and there in the Night published and proclaim’d the Edict among
themselves after this manner:
You “Cacics” and “Indians” of this Continent, the Inhabitants of such
a Place, which they named; We declare or be it known to you all, that
there is but one God, one hope, and one King of “Castile”, who is Lord
of these Countries; appear forth without delay, and take the oath of
Allegiance to the “Spanish” King, as his Vassals….
He was certainly a brave man, given the circumstances, but a voice largely alone and preaching in a wilderness. Bartolome de las Casas’ ” A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies Or, a faithful NARRATIVE OF THE Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manner of Cruelties, that Hell and Malice could invent, committed by the Popish Spanish Party on the inhabitants of West-India, TOGETHER With the Devastations of several Kingdoms in America by Fire and Sword, for the space of Forty and Two Years, from the time of its first Discovery by them” is easily downloaded from the net if you wish to read it all. (The subtitle is: “POPERY Truly Display’d in its Bloody Colours: Or, a faithful NARRATIVE OF THE Horrid and Unexampled Massacres, Butcheries, and all manner of Cruelties, that Hell and Malice could invent, committed by the Popish Spanish Party on the inhabitants of West-India TOGETHER With the Devastations of several Kingdoms in America by Fire and Sword, for the space of Forty and Two Years, from the time of its first Discovery by them”)
When one reads the Requirement, it’s tempting to say, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, that it’s definitely written by a lawyer. Presentation, development, conclusion. “…(W)e… notify and make known to you, as best we can”, is already a disclaimer, decllning all responsibility.
The text makes it clear that a brotherhood of humanity is the order of the day: “one man and one woman, of whom you and we, all the men of the world at the time, were and are descendants, and all those who came after and before us.” This is somewhat of a step forward from earlier theological debates about the hypothetical inhabitants of the Antipodes. The question of course was, if all men are sons of Eve, then was the unattainable part of the world inhabited? Given that speculation long considered the torrid equatorial clime impassable, it could not be peopled. And if it was, had Christ made a second appearance “down under” so to speak, or were these poor devils, if indeed they existed, already condemned?
(Plato started it: “For if there were any solid body in equipoise at the centre of the universe, there would be nothing to draw it to this extreme rather than to that, for they are all perfectly similar; and if a person were to go round the world in a circle, he would often, when standing at the antipodes of his former position, speak of the same point as above and below; for, as I was saying just now, to speak of the whole which is in the form of a globe as having one part above and another below is not like a sensible man.” Latin authors took him up, speculating on the “fourth part of the world”. Saint Augustine delared those lands uninhabited: “… it is too absurd to say, that some men might have taken ship and traversed the whole wide ocean, and crossed from this side of the world to the other, and that thus even the inhabitants of that distant region are descended from that one first man.” (The word antipodes itself appeared in English only in 1398, from L. antipodes “those who dwell on the opposite side of the earth,” from Greek antipodes, plural of antipous “with feet opposite ours,” from anti- “opposite” + pous “foot”.)
“But, on account of the multitude which has sprung from this man and woman in the five thousand years since the world was created, it was necessary that some men should go one way and some another, and that they should be divided into many kingdoms and provinces, for in one alone they could not be sustained.” Another surprising declaration, one wonders whether it mirrors contemporary thought, or is a clever spin to give the Pope dominion over subjects whose existence he ignored prior to that. Also, if all men are descendants of Adam and Eve, how could they ignore their rightful spiritual and temporal authorities?
The mention of the age of the world is a curious detail. This is a century and half before Bishop Ussher famously claimed first day of creation as Sunday 23 October 4004 BC. (Adam and Eve were driven from Paradise on Monday 10 November 4004 BC, and the ark touched down on Mt Ararat on 5 May 2348 BC `on a Wednesday’. (It was Dr. John Lightfoot, b. 1602 – d. 1675, an Anglican clergyman, who fixed the hour of creation at 9 AM.)
Martin Luther estimated the Earth was created in 3961 BC, more or less agreeing with the Venerable Bede, who, in the 8th century, placed it nine years earlier. Julius Caesar Scalinger (1484 – 1558), a humanist scholar from Verona, Italy, decided on 3950 BC. In the Roman Martyrology published in 1580, Pope Gregory XIII would push it back a century of so to 5199 BC, a date that was later confirmed in 1640 under Pope Urban VIII. All in all, there is fair agreement on the creaion.
Saint Peter is equated with the first Pope – tradition holds him to be the first bishop of Rome, martyred by Nero, crucified head down (at his request; he felt unworthy to be crucified right-way-up, like Christ) and buried in Rome. The current Pope, having inherited dominion over the world, handed the lot over to the King and Queen of Spain,“as is contained in certain writings which passed upon the subject as aforesaid, which you can see if you wish.”
So basically, it’s just that the Native Americans hadn’t yet been informed of their status; it may have been news to them, but old news to those reading out the requirement. The invitation to consult Vatican archives was likely an offer rarely taken up, but it’s an early tribute to the principles of bureaucracy according to Kafka – make information theoretically available, put practically impossible to consult.
The most astonishing phrase is this one: “Wherefore, as best we can, we ask and require you that you consider what we have said to you, and that you take the time that shall be necessary to understand and deliberate upon it…”, especially when you consider that likely not a word of all this was being understood, a fact that those so meticulously reading, witnessing and signing couldn’t have ignored. Any “rightful” demand that might be resisted – the Spaniards might requisition supplies or even women for the troops, any reluctance to comply – provided thus the necessary casus belli. (Cortez, on one memorable occasion, read the Requerimiento to the Maya, with the help of a priest, Jeronimo de Aguilar, who had been shipwrecked on the Peninsula some years before and had learned enough of the language to translate, but only after letting loose a serious volley from his falconets to make his point first.)
“But, if you do not do this, and maliciously make delay in it… we shall powerfully enter into your country, and shall make war against you in all ways and manners that we can, …we shall take you and your wives and your children, and shall make slaves of them, and as such shall sell and dispose of them as their Highnesses may command; and we shall take away your goods, and shall do you all the mischief and damage that we can…”. Having been duly warned, that leaves all possibilites of pillage, killing and capture for slavery pretty much open and at the discretion of the invaders. (Many expeditions, especially in the early 1500’s in Mexico and Central America, were for “pacification”, which basically meant choosing a region which where the inhabitants had “rebelled”, setting fire to their villages, snatching them from their homes, clapping them in shackles, branding them in the face and marching them off to dig for gold with stone knives until they died from hunger, disease and exhaustion. Expeditions to the New World, while sanctioned and regulated by the crown, were financed privately by expedition leaders, who had often sold everything and gone into debt to pay for their ventures. Failure meant not only disgrace, but financial ruin.)
Lastly, it is concluded by a final disclaimer: “we protest that the deaths and losses which shall accrue from this are your fault, and not that of their Highnesses, or ours, nor of these cavaliers who come with us. ” Other than las Casas and a few others who wrote down their sentiments, one wonders what the soldiers and captains actually thought. It’s a shame their words have not been recorded. Did the really believe such a hollow pretense, or could they even have cared at all? Or was the hypocrisy and spin-doctoring reserved for an intellectual elite half a world away, not for the often hungry, exhausted soldiers with rusty gear searching for some hypothetical and elusive El Dorado in the middle of a new world? Whatever the case, an innocent mien for posterity, a clean slate for the record and a clean conscience before one’s maker and one’s peers, rather than any practical consideration (what difference would it have made on the ground?) seems the motivation behind the Requirement. As for the natives, they have no voice.
On the other hand, it may indeed have been sincere, which is even more consternating. In the last years of his life, King Ferdinand, perhaps concerned with the salvation of his own soul (he was to die shortly after, on 23 January 1516), was increasingly preoccupied with the fate of the indigenous populations of the New World. The “Laws of Burgos”, promulgated in December 1512, and followed by the “Instruciones”, given to Pedrarias on his expedition to Darién in 1513, were intended to provide a set of rules for the conduct of Spanish settlers. On one hand, they sound progressive for the time; pregnant slaves were not to be sent out to work in the the fields, natives were permitted to perform their own dances, nor were they to be “physically or verbally abused for any reason”, children under fourteen were not expected to do adult’s work.
On the other hand, here are the first four of the 35 laws:
1: The Indians are to be removed from their land and placed into encomiendas (plantations or farms). For every fifty Indians, four lodges shall be built (thirty by fifteen feet). This land cannot be taken from them since they were taken from their original land. Their original land will be burned so that they cannot return to it. The Indians will do the planting of all of the food. During the proper seasons, the encomenderos will have the Indians plant corn and raise the hens.
2: The Indians will leave their land voluntarily to come to the encomiendas so that they shall not suffer from being removed by force.
3: The citizen to whom the Indians are given must erect a structure to be used as a church. In the church must be a picture of Our Lady and a bell with which to call the Indians to prayer time. The person who has them in the encomienda must go with them to church every night and make sure they cross themselves and sing several hymns. If an Indian does not come to the church, he is not allowed to rest the next day.
4: To make sure the Indians are learning Christianity properly, they shall be tested every two weeks and taught what they do not know by the Encomendero. He shall teach them the Ten Commandments, the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Articles of Faith. Any encomendero that does not do this properly will be fined six gold pesos.
Few of these laws were actually applied; all depended on the attitude of the local governor, despite the belatedly laudable intentions of armchair imperialists an ocean away. (Pedrarias, for example, ignored them all, gaining for posterity the nickname “the Scourge of God”.) All in all, it is a savvy mix of divine justification and modern legalspeak serving a double ideal: proclaiming one’s interlocutors to be brothers and fellow humans, and reserving the right to kill and enslave them and steal their property. Medieval invading armies rarely felt the need to leave such a reliable paper trail to camouflage their misdeeds, but, a century into what we happily consider the modern age, the acts and the facts have not really changed, but the desire to portray unprovoked agression in a favourable light and to take refuge behind meaningless rhetoric and a ritualistic going-through of the motions is definitely a step into modernity.
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As as postscript*: “Discovery of the Mississippi” by William H. Powell** (1823–1879) showing de Soto seeing the Mississippi River for the first time. The original hangs in the rotunda of the United States Capitol.
I’ve never hid my unfashionable admiration for this kind of painting, which the French call the “style pompier”. The term is first recorded in 1888. Popular etymology claims the source to be the bright hemets on so many historical figures, reminiscent of so many Parisian firemen (sapeurs-pompiers). Other sources are « Pompéin » (from Pompeii) and finally “pomp” or “pompous”. Historical or Romanticism or Imperial Idealism is the closest you can come in English.
I think what I so love about these paintings is their undeniable genius of execution and their insufferable disdain for all else. They evoke grand painter’s studios piled high with accessories, resounding popular acclaim, Salons and crowned heads nodding approval – and oblivion. They are as futile as they are admirably painted.
At any rate, by the time de Soto reached the Mississippi, his entrada, which had failed to become the conquista he had imagined, was already an agonizing odyssey through alternatively friendly (or deserted) and hostile territory. His concession to exploit the riches of La Florida (basically the mainland United States) was a fever-ridden nightmare. When he caught sight of the largest river in America (the mouth of the Mississippi had of course been discovered – and by many – decades before) his main preoccupation was how to get across it.
However he arrived, it is very doubtful it resembled anything at all like Powell’s heroic canvas.
Occupying a village abandoned by its inhabitants, gratefully cooking and eating reserves of maize, repulsing occasional attacks, his ragged expedition built boats. De Soto traversed the muddy mile-wide torrent, wandered for nearly a year from dead end to dead end in Arkansas, (through a curious twist of fate, he came within three hundred miles of encountering Coronado’s equally ill-starred venture to discover Cibolà) and died a little farther downstream on the west bank on 20 June, 1542. His men buried his body, but a few days later, under the cover of darkness, because they feared the reaction of the local tribes (to whom de Soto had declared himself a god in order to command much-needed protection for his dwindling expedition) his men put his body in a hollowed-out log (or in a blanket, weighted with sand, depending on the account) and consigned it to the depths of the Spíritu Sancto. The final irony is that in 1539, before he had left on the entrada, de Soto set out the details of his tomb as follows:
“Thereon I order to be placed a tomb covered over by a fine black broadcloth, in the middle of which be put a red cross of the Commandery of the Order of the Knights of Santiago, that shall be for use on weekdays, and another pall of black velvet, with the same cross in the midst, with four escutcheons of brocade, bearing my arms; which escutcheons I wish and order to be likewise placed on the chapel, altarpiece, and railing, and vestments in such a manner to the patron and executors shall appear most becoming.” Instead of the finest black broadcloth and velvet, he received the black swirling waters of the Mississippi.
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Under the leadership of Luis de Moscoso, one of de Soto’s captains, the remnants of the entrada wandered far into Texas before doubling back to the Mississippi, which they followed downstream to the sea, finally making their way back to Mexico City, a year and a half after de Soto’s death.
For a thorough account of de Soto’s life: “Hernando de Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas” by David Ewing Duncan, 1996, University of Oklahoma Press. For a short account of the devastation wreaked by Hernando de Soto’s… pigs: “1491” by Charles C. Mann, 2005, Vintage Books, pp 107-110.
Other titles of interest about the period:
Andrés Reséndez, “A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca”, Basic Books, 2007.
Robert Silverberg, “The Golden Dream: Seekers of El Dorado”, Ohio University Press, 1967 (paperback 1985)
* And because a newsletter with no images doesn’t really feel like a newsletter…
** William H. Powell received the commission from the United States Congress in 1847 to paint the last large historical painting in the Capitol rotunda. He chose the discovery of the Mississippi River by Hernando de Soto, completing the painting in 1853. It was hugely popular, prompting Ohio to request a painting of Oliver Hazard Perry’s victory in the War of 1812 to hang in their state capitol; Powell completed the “Battle of Lake Erie ” in 1865, even doing a larger version in 1873.
