The Survivors Of The De Soto Expedition


de Soto. Although excluding the names of some of the most
important persons of the Florida expedition, like de Soto, his wife,
and their entourage, this is still quite a comprehensive roster. Its
limitation is that it includes only the persons who left Spain, and
not those that finally embarked from Havana for Florida. During
the year that it took for this expedition to be readied in Cuba, many
of the original recruits were lost and others added.

 There are four known chronicles of de Soto's adventure,
written by Luis Hernandez de Biedma, Rodrigo Rangel, the
Gentleman of Elvas, and by Garcilaso de la Vega, all considered
here. However, since John R. Swanton in his Final Report of the
United States De Soto Expedition Commission, has already
identified and annotated the men mentioned by all these
chroniclers, I am using Swanton's work as a reference for all those
sources.

 Much of the information for this study comes from the superb
collection of unpublished documents gathered from various
Spanish archives and preserved on microfilm and photostats at the
P. K. Yonge Library of Florida History at the University of
Florida. The holdings of Jeannette Thurber Connor papers, the
Woodbury Lowery transcripts, the Buckingham Smith papers, the
John B. Stetson collection, and the recently acquired Counts of
Revillagigedo archives, have been complemented in the past years
with copies of additional Florida documents from the Archivo
General de Indias in Spain. To date there are few sixteenth century
Florida documents contained in the Archivo General de Indias that
are not found in the P. K. Yonge Library. These materials allowed
an increase of John R. Swanton's list of 194 survivors to 257, and
to add previously unknown details about their lives. Using these
sources I have listed the known survivors of Hernando de Soto's
expedition and included their biographical data.

 This work also briefly analyzes the prosopographical
characteristics of the survivors. Their places of origin, ages and
education are compared with the findings in Mario G6ngora's
brilliant work, Los Grupos de conquistadores en Tierra Firme