Abstract
In 1980 the diary of Henry Prince, a military topographer from the Second Seminole War, surfaced in a Minnesota attic. Prince mapped the sites where Osceola led a resistance against the United States in the Cove of the Withaloochee, a swampy stretch of river in west central Florida, and his diary allowed archeologists to reconstruct the region’s early history. Scholars concluded that the Withlacoochee served as a boundary between coastal Safety Harbor and more agricultural Alachuan cultures to the North. The manuscript also provided compelling evidence about maroon communities from the early nineteenth century. After disease decimated Florida’s first people, escaped blacks from the British colonies sequestered themselves here, first farming freely along the river then moving deeper into this watery maze of hardwood hammocks, cypress, and middens. The maroons taught later arriving Seminoles how to negotiate the swamp. Osceola adopted the mounds for ceremonial purposes, which explains why the Prince map would become an important source on precontact groups.2
This swamp, which lay three leagues from the town, was broad and very troublesome to cross, for besides being a league in width and very deep at its banks, it contained great amounts of cieno or slime (from which it takes the name ciénaga or swamp). Two-thirds of its area, along the edges, was mud, and the other third, which was the center, consisted of water that was too deep to be forded. Notwithstanding these obstacles, the guides found a passage and at the close of eight days returned to announce that they had done so and that the passage was very good.
El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, The Florida of the Inca 1
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Notes
El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, The Florida of the Inca, trans. John Grier Varner and Jeannette Johnson Varner (Austin: U of Texas P, 1980). The title comes from an unofficial historical marker (ca. 1970) at Weeki Wachee Springs, Florida. This essay was written in the tranquil University of Oslo library. I am indebted to Jessica Haars, Jim Udenberg, and Lara Udenberg for their extended hospitality during my stay in Norway. Paul and Lucy Jones helped me coordinate archeological and modern-day topographical maps. Jerald T. Milanich and Brent Weisman generously allowed me access to their materials on modern-day reconstructions of the De Soto trail. Julie Armstrong tolerated several swamp trips and read the essay. Tim Sweet and James Kessenides offered useful suggestions for revision.
Jeffrey M. Mitchem and Brent R. Weisman, “The Cove of the Withlacoochee: A First Look at the Archeology of an Interior Florida Wetland,” The Florida Anthropologist 39:1–2 (March–June 1986): 4–8.
Jerald T. Milanich and Charles Hudson, Hernando de Soto and the Indians of Florida (Gainesville: UP of Florida and the Florida Museum of Natural History, 1993), 101–06; Mitchem and Weisman, 15.
Rodrigo Rangel, “Account of the Northern Conquest and Discovery of Hernando de Soto,” The De Soto Chronicles: The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539–1543, ed. Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon James Knight, Jr., and Edward C. Moore (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1993), 1:261.
The discoveries in the Cove of the Withlacoochee, and conclusions that followed, set into motion a formidable publicity campaign engineered by archeologists and historians at the University of Florida, who lobbied at the state and national levels for a De Soto trail, and who met fierce resistance from proponents at the now excluded regions. As lead archeologist Jerald T. Milanich explained to the press (in a typical letter, also forwarded to then Governor Bob Graham and Senator George Kirkpatrick), De Soto “makes good copy” (Milanich to Norm Swetman [Citrus County Chronicle] , February 7, 1985); the Charlotte Harbor contingent went so far as to hire a publicity firm to commemorate a “possible” landing at the now disproven site (Bette Seigerman to Milanich, August 22, 1985).
José Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and the Legacy of Conguest (Durham: Duke UP, 2000), 3–4, 22, 9–10.
Elder’s meditation on Frost works because Frost himself used the mountains as his muse; see Reading the Mountains of Home (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998), 217. Lawrence Buell poses that nature provides more than background in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995). Cheryll Glotfely, while suggesting ecocriticism as a form of subaltern studies, observes that “[s]ome critics find it worthwhile to visit the places an author lived and wrote about, literally retracing the footsteps of John Muir in the Sierra, for example, to experience his mountain raptures personally, or paddling down the Merrimac River to apprehend better the physical context of Thoreau’s meandering prose”: see her “Introduction” to The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996), xiii-iv. Ian Marshall likewise emphasizes “interconnectedness,” maintaining that narrative writing provides the ecocritic with a medium that is not “outside” the world but “part of it”: see Story Line: Exploring the Literature of the Appalachian Trail (Charlottesville: U of Virginia P, 1998), 8. John Tallmadge calls for a “disciplined subjectivity” that brings scholarly diligence to “extratextual realities” in order to open “new possibilities” for understanding a culture’s relationship to its environs: see “Toward a Natural History of Reading,” reprinted in The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993–2003, ed. Michael P. Branch and Scott Slovic (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2003), 282, 285.
See Anne E. Rowe, The Idea of Florida in the American Literary Imagination (Gainesville: UP of Florida). A bit of local context: a fetishing of “real” defines popular and scholarly writing about Florida, as a cottage industry seeks to counter the “artificial” or touristic place through “nature.” The motto for the state parks, predictably, is “the real Florida.” A more playful work of nature writing, Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (New York: Ballantine, 2000), is often dismissed by Floridians on the basis of minor factual details (whether park rangers carry guns), while sentimental appreciations of “place,” such as Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s Cross Creek (New York: Scribners, 1942), are canonized because they advance down-home authenticity. For a revisionist reading that inverts categories of the natural and artificial in a Florida icon, the plastic flamingo, see Jennifer Price, Flight Maps: Adventures with Nature in Modern America (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 111–65; Greg Garrard maps the conflation of real and natural that often sustains ideas of “dwelling”: see Ecocriticism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 108; Kent C. Ryden brilliantly historicizes the “nature” of a regional identifier, leaf season in New England: see Landscape with Figures: Nature & Culture in New England (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2001), 264.
And at the end [of the fifteen days] we came to a river that we crossed by swimming and on rafts with very great difficulty. It took us an entire day to cross it because it had a very strong current. Having crossed to the other side, nearly two hundred Indians, more or less, confronted us. The governor went out to them, and after having spoken to them by means of signs, they gestured to us in such a way that we had to turn on them. And we captured five or six of them, and these Indians took us to their houses, which were a half league from there, where we found great quantities of maize ready to be harvested. And we gave infinite thanks to our Lord for having aided us in so great a need, because since we were most certainly new to these hardships, beyond the fatigue we suffered, we became very worn out from hunger. And on the third day after having arrived there, we—the comptroller, the inspector, the commissary, and I—met together, and we begged the governor to send scouts to look for the sea to see if we could find a port, because the Indians said that the sea was not very far from there. He replied that we should not trouble ourselves with talking about that, because it was very far from there. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narvaez, ed. Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1999), 1:46–47.
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, 3:55, 1:395–402; Rolena Adorno, “Discourses on Colonialism: Bernal Diáz, Las Casas, and the Twentieth-Century Reader,” Modern Language Notes 103:2 (March 1988): 255.
Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 91–92; Bartolomé de las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account, trans. Herma Briffault (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), 108–09; Beatriz Bodmer Pastor, The Armature of Conquest: Spanish Accounts of the Discovery of America, 1492–1589, trans. Lydia Longstreth Hunt (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992). Amy Turner Bushnell, “A Requiem for Lesser Conquerors: Honor and Oblivion on a Maritime Periphery,” Beyond Books and Borders: Garcilaso de la Vega and La Florida del Inca, ed. Raquel Chang-Rodríguez (Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2006), 66. For an anthology that chronicles Spanish and French perspectives of the Hugeonot settlement and founding of St. Augustine, see Laudonniére and Fort Caroline: History and Documents, ed. Charles E. Bennett (Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2001).
The four narratives are collected in the two volume De Soto Chronicles. Biedma is quoted in “The Relation of the Island of Florida,” 246; Rangel is quoted in the “Account by the Gentleman of Elvas,” 167. The standard edition of El Inca Garcilaso is La Florida del Inca, ed. Emma Susana Speratti-Piñero (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1956); John Grier and Jeannette Johnson Varner’s The Florida of the Inca, sadly out of print, is the most fluid of the English translations.
Raquel Chang-Ródriguez, “Introduction,” Beyond Books and Borders: Garcilaso de la Vega and La Florida del Inca, 15; John Grier Varner, El Inca: The Life and Times of Garcilaso de la Vega (Austin: U of Texas P, 1968), 5. Bernard Lavelle describes the author as a “symbol of the New World and of the new society into which he had been born”: see “El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega,” Historia de la Literatura Hispanoamericana (Madrid: Catedra, 1992), 1:135.
Aurelio Miró Quesada describes the 1561 meeting with Silvestre as the “motor” and “initial impulse” in “Creación y Elaboración de La Florida del Inca,” Cuadernos Americanos 18, Nueva Epoca 3:6 (November–December 1989): 163. On the link between Diálogos and La Florida, see Susan Jákfalvi-Leiva, who argues that the act of translation opened a “freedom to reflect and question” in Traducción, escritura y violencia colonizadora: un estudio de la obra del Garcilaso. Foreign and Comparative Studies. Latin American Series 7 (Syracuse: Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, 1984), 33.
Varner and Varner, xxxvii, xl. All further references will be cited internally. On the implication of the title, and the observation that the “rhetorical filter” makes this book “‘of the Inca,’” see David Henige: “‘So Unbelievable It Has to be True’: Inca Garcilaso in Two Worlds,” History, Historiography, and “Discovery” in the Southeast, ed. Patricia Galloway (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997), 159.
Enrique Pupo-Walker, Historia, Creación y Profecía en los Textos del Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (Madrid: Ediciones José Porrúa Turanzas, 1982), 47, 63, 57–58; Rabasa, 213. Both Pupo-Walker and Rabasa are in dialogue with Jákfalvi-Leiva, who notes that the Proemio establishes the tasks of “writer, translator, interpreter, and commentator” as interlocking projects in Traducción, escritura y violencia colonizadora, 42. Rabasa in particular contrasts Garcilaso’s blurring of genre, and more modest literary assertions, to Oviedo’s grand historical narrative, which functions through binaries. Pupo-Walker elaborates further upon El Inca Garcilaso’s historiography in “La Florida del Inca Garcilaso: notas sobre la problematización del discurso histórico en los siglos XVI y XVII,” Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 417 (March 1985): in contrast to the crónica, the author “reinscribed” historical experience through multivalent forms, transforming “objective reality” into a “virtual space” of the historical imagination (105–06). Walter D. Mignolo discusses the “ambiguity between truth de dicto and de rey” in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century historiography, noting that the genre during this period was poised history between fact and persuasion, usually pointing toward a “moral truth” see “El Metatexto Historiografico y la Historiografia Indiana,” Modern Language Notes 96 (1981): 369, 71.
Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991), 60; Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper Perennial, 1982), 17; Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from The Tempest to Tarzan (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1997). Sueellen Campbell offers a compelling discussion of the problems posed by “post-sructuralist theory and ecologically minded nature writing” in “The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet” The Ecocriticism Reader, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, 126.
Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (New York: Routledge, 1986), 12.
Maragarita Zamora, Language, Authority, and Indigenous History in the Commenarios reales de los Incas (New York: Cambridge UP, 1988), 3. José Rabasa provides the consensus position, that different modes of writing history involved the “deployment of specific rhetorics that dictate the nature of historical ‘truth,’ rather than just providing form to an actual set of facts”; see Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier, 168. An indicator of the difference between de Soto scholars and Latin Americanists lies in the footnotes. The standard U.S. edition of “The Account by a Gentleman from Elvas” has 336 footnotes, with roughly half of them treating issues of geography. A chapter on El Inca Garcilaso by Latin Americanist Raquel Chang-Rodriguez, by contrast, describes Spanish “Florida” in footnote 21 (Violencia y subversion en la prosa colonial hispanoamericana, siglos xvi y xvii [Madrid: Studia Humanitatis, 1982], 29n). Lee Dowling offers one of the few attempts to bring these two camps into dialogue in “La Florida del Inca: Garcilaso’s Literary Sources”: see The Hernando de Soto Expedition, 99–154.
My assertion that representation leads back to convention, rather than recording the experience of newness, varies slightly from Michael P. Branch, who maintains that “we should enjoy the lovely strangeness” of the unfamiliar early literature “even as we work together to develop a critical language by which to understand it”: see his anthology, which should serve as a starting point for any ecocritics interested in the “early stuff”: Reading the Roots: American Nature Writing before Walden (Athens: U of Georgia P, 2004), xv–vii.
The Florida Division of Recreation and Parks published a“De Soto Trail” pamphlet (now out of print), erected signs, and installed kiosks. The route was never intended to follow the physical path, but as then director of Recreation and Parks Ney Landrum explained, it was meant to consist of “roadside exhibits with convenient pull-offs”: Landrum to Michael V. Gannon, February 23, 1984. On the “general corridor,” see Keith Morelli, “Graham Dedicates De Soto Marker,” Ocala Star Ledger (May 4, 1985); Charles Hudson to Wink Hastings (Southeast Regional Office, National Parks Service), October 28, 1988.
Henry David Thoreau writes, “[I]f it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp”: see Nature/Walking (Boston: Beacon P, 1991), 99; see also Rod Giblett, Postmodern Wetlands: Culture, History, Ecology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1996).
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© 2008 Thomas Hallock, Ivo Kamps, and Karen L. Raber
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Hallock, T. (2008). “The Archeologists Made Observations That Conjured Up Interesting Mental Pictures”: De Soto, Narrative Scholarship, and Place. In: Hallock, T., Kamps, I., Raber, K.L. (eds) Early Modern Ecostudies. Early Modern Cultural Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617940_14
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