Daniel Brinton - Notes on the Floridian Peninsula; its Literary History, Indian Tribes and Antiquities

As little is recorded about this author pioneer, I may perhaps be excused for turning aside to recall a few personal recollections. It had long been my desire to visit and converse with him about the early days of the state, and with this object, on the 9th of November, 1856, I stopped at the little town of Picolati, near which he lived. A sad surprise awaited me; he had died on the 7th of the month and had been buried the day before my arrival. I walked through the woods to his house. It was a rotten, ruinous, frame tenement on the banks of the St. Johns, about half a mile below the town, fronted by a row of noble live oaks and surrounded by the forest. Here the old man—he was over eighty at the time of his death—had lived for twenty years almost entirely alone, and much of the time in abject poverty. A trader happened to be with him during his last illness, who told me some incidents of his history. His mind retained its vigor to the last, and within a week of his death he was actively employed in various literary avocations, among which was the preparation of an improved edition of his History, which he had very nearly completed. At the very moment the paralytic stroke, from which he died, seized him, he had the pen in his hand writing a novel, the scene of which was laid in China! His disposition was uncommonly aimable and engaging, and so much was he beloved by the Indians, that throughout the horrible atrocities of the Seminole war, when all the planters had fled or been butchered, when neither sex nor age was a protection, when Picolati was burned and St. Augustine threatened, he continued to live unharmed in his old house, though a companion was shot dead on the threshold. What the savage respected and loved, the civilized man thought weakness and despised; this very goodness of heart made him the object of innumerable petty impositions from the low whites, his neighbors. In the words of my informant, “he was too good for the people of these parts.” During his lonely old age he solaced himself with botany and horticulture, priding himself on keeping the best garden in the vicinity. “Come, and I will show you his grave,” said the trader, and added with a touch of feeling I hardly expected, “he left no directions about it, so I made it in the spot he used to love the best of all.” He took me to the south-eastern corner of the neat garden plot. A heap of fresh earth with rough, round, pine sticks at head and foot, marked the spot. It was a solemn and impressive moment. The lengthening shadows of the forest crept over us, the wind moaned in the pines and whistled drearily through the sere grass, and the ripples of the river broke monotonously on the shore. All trace of the grave will soon be obliterated, the very spot forgotten, and the garden lie a waste, but the results of his long and toilsome life “in books recorded” will live when the marbles and monumental brasses of many of his cotemporaries shall be no more.

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Sommation à faire aux Habitants des Contrees et Provinces qui s’étendent depuis la Riviére des Palmes et le cap de la Floride. Extrait du livre des copies des Provinces de la Floride, Seville Chambre du Commerce, 1527. It is the first piece in Ternaux-Compans’ Recueil des Pièces sur la Floride .

Naufragios de Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca en la Florida, Valladolid, 1555; republished by Barcia, in the Historiadores Primitivos de las Indias Occidentales, Tomo II., Madrid, 1749; translated by Ramusio, Viaggi, Tom. III., Venetia, 1556, from which Purchas made his abbreviated translation, Vol. IV., London, 1624; translated entire, with valuable notes and maps by Buckingham Smith, Washington, 1851. French translation by Ternaux-Compans, Paris, 1837.

Asiento y capitulacion hecho por el capitan Hernando de Soto, con el Emperador Carlos V., para la Conquista y Poblacion de la Provincia de la Florida, y encomienda de la Gobernacion de la Isla de Cuba, 1537. Printed in 1844, in the preface to the Portuguese Gentleman’s Narrative, by the Lisbon Academy of Sciences, from the manuscript in the Hydrographical Bureau of Madrid.

Lettre écrite par l’Adelantade Soto, au Corps Municipal de la Ville de Santiago, de l’Isle de Cuba. In Ternaux-Compans’ Recueil des Pieces sur la Floride.

Relation de ce que arriva pendant le Voyage du Capitaine Soto, et Details sur la Nature des pays qu’il parcourut, par Luis Hernandez de Biedma; first printed in Ternaux-Compan’s Recueil ; Eng. trans. by Rye, appended to the Hackluyt Society’s edition of the Portuguese Gentleman’s Narrative, London, 1852.

Relacão Verdadeira dos Trabalhos q̄ ho Gouernador dō Fernādo d’ Souto y certos Fidalgos Portugueses passarom no d’ scobrimēto da provincia da Frolida. Agora nouamēte feita per hū Fidalgo Deluas, 8vo., Evora, 1557; reprinted, 8vo., Lisboa, 1844, by the Academia Real das Sciencias, with a valuable preface. It was “contracted” by Purchas, vol. IV., London, 1624; translated entire by Hackluyt, under the title, “Virginia richly valued by the Description of Florida, her next Neighbor,” published both separately and in his Collections, vol. V., and subsequently by Peter Force, Washington, 1846, and by the Hackluyt Society, with a valuable introduction by J. T. Rye, London, 1852; another “very inferior” translation from the French, London, 1686. French trans. by M. D. C. (M. de Citri de la Guette), 12mo., Paris, 1685, and again in two parts, 1707-9. Dutch trans. in Van der Aa’s Collection, 8vo., 1706, with “schoone kopere Platen,” and a map.

Buckingham Smith, Translation of Cabeza de Vaca, p. 126.

Herrera, Dec. VII., cap. x., p. 16.

Ticknor, in his History of Spanish Literature, says 1540; the Biographie Universelle, 1530; errors that may be corrected from the Inca’a own words: “Yo nasci el año mil y quinientes y treinta y nueve.” Commentarios Reales, Parte Segunda, Lib. II., cap. xxv.

La Florida del Inca; Historia del Adelantado Hernando de Soto, Governador y Capitan General del Reino de la Florida, y de otros Heroicos Caballeros, Españoles y Indios; 4to, Lisbona, 1605; folio, Madrid, 1723; 12mo., Madrid, 1803. French trans. by St. Pierre Richelet, Paris, 1670, and 1709; Leyde, 1731; La Haye, 1735; by J. Badouin, Amsterdam, 1737. German trans. from the French, by H. S. Meier, Zelle, 1753; Nordhausen, 1785. Fray Pedro Abiles in the Censura to the second Spanish edition, speaks of a garbled Dutch translation or imitation, under the title (I retain his curious orthography), Der West Indis che Spiegel Durch Athanasium Inga, Peruan von Cusco, T. Amsterdam, by Broer Jansen, 1624 .

The Conquest of Florida by Hernando de Soto, 2 vols. 8vo., Philadelphia, 1835; revised edition, 1 vol., 8vo., New York, 1851, with a map of De Soto’s route.