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ARKANSAS HISTORICAL QUARTERLY, Volume LI (Spring 1992), p. 1
The Expedition of Hernando De Soto: A Post-Mortem Report
By David Sloan
IN THE late spring of 1539, the largest, best organized, most carefully planned of all the sixteenth- century Spanish expeditions, under the command of a man whose experience in this business could be matched by no other, landed on the Florida coast. Over three years later, the survivors-half starved, recognizable as Europeans only by their speech-wandered into a small Spanish settlement on the Rio Panuco, sixteen hundred miles away on a direct land course, which was hardly the way they had come. Their commander was no longer among them. Wrapped in shrouds and stuffed in a tree trunk, he was going down the Mississippi River on his own, pulled along the bottom by the currents.
The de Soto entrada stands as an extraordinary episode, even in an age when a prudent person expected the bizarre and often got no less. It left a large body of documentation, relative to other Spanish expeditions, and it was a preoccupation of the generation of historians nearest in time to the event itself. Yet after four and a half centuries, even the most basic of questions have either remained unanswered, or have been answered in disputed ways. What was its purpose? Why did it go where it did? Where did it go?
Why do so many questions remain? One way of approaching this problem is to review the literature on the expedition, which this paper proposes to do. The reader is forewarned that much will remain obscure, but is promised a journey only slightly less
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David Sloan is associate professor of history at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. This article is the first of a two-part study to be published in the Arkansas Historical Quarterly.