The Hernando de Soto Expedition Review

Print ISSN: 0022-7953

Edited by Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb

Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30.3, Winter 1999

The Hernando de Soto Expedition: History, Historiography, and Discovery in the Southeast. Edited by Patricia Galloway. (Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1997) 447 pp. cloth.

Reviewed by Jon Muller, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

This valuable book concerns the first European expedition, under the leadership of Hernando de Soto, to penetrate deeply into the interior of eastern North America. Data and sources about this expedition are important evidence for the nature of Southeastern political and organizational forms at the time of first contact. These issues are doubly important because of the sparse historical record afterward, during times that may have seen significant changes. In addition, the nature of these early contacts arguably shaped interactions between European and Native Americans for generations.

The Hernando de Soto Expedition is a collection of essays under four topics: sources (5 essays), discussion of the expedition itself (6 essays), the expedition and Native American history (3 essays), and Euro-American history (5 essays). The sad truth is that historians and anthropologists (including archaeologists) alike have competed until now in naiveté concerning use of these documents and other evidence relating to the Soto entrada. Neither camp has understood the strengths and weaknesses of the other, ~~and~~ or even sometimes of its own field. The editor called for an “archaeology” of the sources on this expedition nearly a decade ago, so we may examine this volume to see what progress has been made toward that end.

The first section on the nature of the documents includes analyses of a kind that are too often neglected. As several authors demonstrate, the independence of the sources has been overestimated. The single primary source is that of Hernández de Biedma. The account usually described as that of Rodrigo Ranjel survives only partially in a summary history by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés. Galloway argues convincingly that this secondary source had, at the very least, a strong influence on the formation of the text generally known as the Relaçam of the “Gentleman of Elvas” and then in turn on the writing of Garcilaso de la Vega’s Florida del Inca. However, M. and I. Elbl argue in their paper that the Elvas account has more historical value than a mere literary expansion of Oviedo’s version of Ranjel. As important as these cautions are, I would merely caution that it would be well not to become so deeply embedded in ‘critical criticism’ that the delineation of the material and behavioral aspects of these accounts is abandoned. After all, the search for biases and interpolations in the sources is not a task pursued for its own ends but should be a means to assess what parts of these accounts describe, within their own limits to be sure, the sights seen by the Iberian explorers of the 16th century Southeast. Neither textual analysis nor tracing the route of the expedition constitutes the full usefulness of these data. Finally, two essays see the Garcilaso account in as a kind of ‘novelization’ based mostly on secondary and tertiary sources with a healthy dose of both Classicism and Incan overgeneralization.

The second section shifts to the character of the expedition. These essays begin with efforts to understand Hernando de Soto. A rather skeptical account of Eastern ‘roads’ by Jack Elliott is correct in its assessment of the poor state of current knowledge, but he goes too far in classifying these phenomena as cases that ‘can be neither proved nor falsified’ (p. 253). For example, archaeological research in the Southwest has delineated ‘roads’ with far less impact on the landscape than many ‘traces’ in the East. To find archaeological evidence for paths in the forested East, it is really first necessary to look for them. Research on historical trails shows that it is not impossible to do so. The section ends with an important paper by A. Ramenofsky and the editor on the possible role of the expedition in introducing Old World diseases to the East.

The third section deals with the impact on Native American groups. Although details of Galloway’s treatment of the ‘Direct Historical Approach’ in the paper opening the section might be debated, she usefully draws attention to problems in using sources naively, in either the Direct Historical or the Annales approaches. J. Johnson’s paper follows the traditional interpretation that the aftermath of the de Soto expedition was devolution of political forms from ‘chiefdoms’ to ‘tribes.’ I have challenged this argument in Mississippian Political Economy (Plenum, 1997), so I will merely note that there is a contrary view that sees historical Native American formation of ‘secondary states’ under European military pressure. The section closes with C. Hudson’s paper detailing recent efforts to redefine the route followed by the expedition.

The last section of essays concerns the expedition as European history. These begin with the issues of justice and cruelty in Spanish exploration, go on to the legal struggle over Soto’s will, to a discussion of Oviedo, the representation of violence in the accounts, and finally to a closing essay by the editor on commemorative history.

The 1991 conference from which this volume emerged provided the basis for a volume that contains a diverse range of opinion and scholarship. It truly does, as the editor hoped in her preface, provide a useful ‘jumping off place for the next round of Soto scholarship.’ Even though it is not yet an ‘archaeology’ of the sources, it is a necessary step toward that kind of deeper and more critical investigation of what really happened in the mid-16th century Southeast.