Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Conquest of Florida: A New Manuscript by Gonzalo Solís de Merás (review)

This critical edition of adelantado Pedro Menéndez de Avilés's conquest of La Florida during a formative time in the colony's history, 1565–1567, makes a welcome contribution to sixteenth-century scholarship. Historians of the Native South and New World empires as well as scholars of borderlands and hemispheric studies will be eager to consult David Arbesú's recent translation of Gonzalo Solís de Merás's thirty-four chapter manuscript, recovered from the private archive of the marqués de Ferrera of Asturias, Spain, in 2012. As Arbesú explains in the introduction, the literary record of Menéndez's governorship is scant; the bureaucratic operations of Spain's overseas enterprise are well documented, but few narratives testify to the day-to-day experiences of indigenous and European peoples. Before this publication of Solís de Merás's manuscript, scholars counted Father Francisco López de Mendoza Grajales's diary (1565) and Spanish humanist Bartolomé de Barrientos's secondhand report (1568) as the major primary sources. Another edition of Solís de Merás's work, known as the Revillagigedo manuscript, survives in a private archive and on microfilm, albeit with missing folios, unclear pagination, and corrections made by multiple hands. Modern translations and transcriptions based on the Revillagigedo manuscript and on each other compounded these problems by introducing their own errors.

As such, this edition with its careful annotations offers an important perspective on a contested historical space where indigenous sovereigns, French Protestants, and Spanish Catholics battled and formed alliances for trade, peace, and information. Arbesú admirably renders sixteenth-century Spanish prose into highly readable English. Anyone who has worked with these kinds of documents appreciates the difficult task of historical translation, especially with a text that combines travel writing (chapter 26, "Fourth Voyage to the Country of Chief Carlos"), administrative reports (chapter 33, "Information Regarding the Conquest of Florida"), natural histories (chapter 34, "Description of the Land of Florida, Its Good Qualities, and Its Climate"), and notarial expressions. The source's multiple registers are preserved, as when Solísde Merás mixes expository prose, declarative sentences, and reported speech, including lines in French. The names are handled more curiously; they are de-Hispanicized—for example, chief instead of cacique and Jean Ribault instead of Juan Ribau—which makes the text friendly to Anglophone readers but obscures Spain's history in much of what is now the southeastern United States. Since Arbesú aims, notably, to engage readers in the United States, for whom Menéndez "is seldom studied … as a founding father of the nation," preserving the names of French Huguenots as they were spoken by Spaniards would have been an easy way to remind readers of the complex nature of imperial rivalry in La Florida (p. 3).

The manuscript makes such entanglements clear. For example, Menéndez depended on a Spanish-speaking Frenchman in Guale for information, and a French captive steered Menéndez's vessel from Ais lands through treacherous Bahamian waters to reach Cuba. Menéndez's fight against English and French corsairs was funded with silver that a Spanish captain stole from a Portuguese ship while he was commanding a galleon bound for Mexico. Portuguese sailors joined Menéndez in battling the French, although they began by searching for Christian captives in the land of Calusa chief Carlos, who "knowing how few men the Adelantado brought—came with about three hundred Indian archers" (p. 89).

In sum, this translation makes available an important primary source that alongside recent scholarship by Denise I. Bossy, Anna Brickhouse, Alejandra Dubcovsky, and Michele Currie Navakas shows how the contested waters and unstable grounds of La Florida were an integral part of the early modern world.