Showing posts with label ancient. Show all posts

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 1: How Dogma Trumped Science

6/13/14

The discovery and examination of the ancient Mexican skeleton, Naia, has led scientists to once again rethink the origins of American Indians. While there has been a rancorous debate over some details regarding who the first peoples of the Americas might have been, the broader context is usually the Bering Strait Theory, the idea that Paleoindians walked from Asia over an ancient land bridge approximately 15,000 years ago. Among scientists, this theory appears unshakable, despite the lack of scientific evidence to support it. Indeed, a host of scientific evidence, from linguistics to genetics, does not support the theory.
RELATED: New Discovery Confirms Native American Views on Their Ancestry
RELATED: How Linguists Are Pulling Apart the Bering Strait Theory
As recent scientific discoveries have undercut the Bering Strait Theory, a new hypothesis has emerged, the “Beringian Standstill Theory.” The Standstill hypothesis, which proposes that Paleoindians lived isolated in the land bridge area for almost 20,000 years before migrating to the Americas, is also a controversial conjecture that has questionable scientific merit.
The reason for the insistence by scientists in the primacy of the Bering Strait Theory is not because of science, but because of dogma. This is well known among the scientists, many of whom have chafed under its strictures. So in 1998, Dennis Stanford, director of the Paleoindian program at the Smithsonian Institution, coined the term “Clovis Police” to refer to those “die-hard archaeologists who insist upon Clovis as representing the earliest culture in the New World.” James Adovasio, known for his excavations of the Meadowcroft Rockshelter in Pennsylvania, devoted an entire chapter of his 2002 book, The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology’s Greatest Mystery, to the “Paleo-police” who have frustrated his attempts to gain recognition for the antiquity of the site.
When genetic studies that proposed an ancient contact between Polynesians and American Indians – not in conformity with the Bering Strait Theory – were published by University of Hawaii geneticist Rebecca Cann, they were met with a swift and fierce rebuttal. Cann is a pioneer among geneticists, her research having developed the concept of the “Mitochondrial Eve” and the currently accepted “Out of Africa” theory of modern human origins. She was not someone to be trifled with, and she shot back in a letter in the American Journal of Human Genetics, dismissing much of her critics’ data, interpretations, and point of view; “Rather than make dogmatic statements, we feel that it is better to encourage the open exploration of this debate, with more genetic markers and the use of data already in the literature.”
But open exploration of the debate is not going to happen, because the debate itself is moderated by ideologues, who determine the evidence that may be used, and ignore the evidence that does not fit the theory. In order to understand why this is, one must look at the history of the Bering Strait Theory, which will only shed a little light on the development of science, but offers important lessons on how and why a dogma is created.
The Birth of a Theory
When Columbus stumbled upon the Americas in 1492, he set off an endless round of speculation in Europe regarding the lands and its people. By 1797, Benjamin Smith Barton could write in his book New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations of America that the “opinions of writers concerning the origin, or parental countries, of the Americans are as numerous as the tribes and nations who inhabit this vast portion of the earth.
In those days, the study of science was still a subset of theology so virtually all of the early theories of Indian origins were based on the Bible. Typical of these early scientists was the keen-eyed Jesuit observer Friar Joseph de Acosta, whose book The Natural and Moral History of the Indies (as America was then known), published in 1590, is among the first in the nascent field of anthropology. For Acosta, the evidence was clear.
The reason why we are forced to admit that the men of the Indies came from Europe or Asia is so as not to contradict the sacred Scriptures, which clearly teaches that all men descend from Adam; and thus we cannot assign any other origin for the men of the Indies.
Similarly, the colonization was believed to have taken place only in the past few thousand years. The scientific consensus at that time, held by the foremost chronologists of the Bible, such as Jesuit philosopher Benedict Pereira, Irish archbishop James Ussher, the astronomer Johannes Kepler and the physicist Isaac Newton, was that humans were created around 4,000 BC and the Flood unleashed around 2,400 BC.
Although it would be another 138 years before European explorers would find the Bering Strait, Acosta and many other 16th-century scientists had already assumed that Asia and the Americas were connected. They reasoned that since all of the animals in the world were descended from those saved by Noah from the Flood, the animals that were in the New World had to have walked over by some as yet undiscovered passageway. Acosta argued similarly “that the race of men arrived by traveling little by little until they reached the New World, and the continuity or nearness of the lands helped in this.”
Not everyone agreed with Acosta. The 16th-century Swiss scientist and father of chemistry, Paracelsus, believed the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas were a separate creation of God and not descended from Adam and Eve. His theory, however, met with little support, as there was no evidence of a separate creation in the Bible.
In 1681, Diego Andrés Rocha proposed in his book, A Unique and Singular Treatise on the Origins of the Indians of Peru, Mexico, Santa Fe, and Chile that Indians were the descendants of Noah’s son Japheth and had come to the Americas by way of Atlantis. Since Rocha believed the Spanish were also descended from Japheth, and thus related to Indians, the colonization of the Americas by Spain was to him a fulfillment of divine providence.
Not to be outdone, British writers such as Richard Hakluyt and George Bruder argued that ancient Indians were Welsh and thus justified the British explorations of North America. The Dutch legal philosopher, Hugo Grotius, believed they were northern Europeans who had sailed across the Atlantic, since had they come from Asia they would have surely brought their horses. Many believed Indians were descended from Canaan, the grandson of Noah who was cursed by God, or Ophir, a descendant of Noah’s son Shem who settled in a land rich with gold.
The most enduring origin theory based on the Bible was that Indians were the descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, a belief still held today by devout Mormons. It was proposed in 1567 by both French Benedictine scholar Gilbert Genebrard in Chronicle in Two Volumes and Dutch priest Joannes Fredericus Lumnius in his book De Extremo dei Judicio et Indorum Vocatione. As evidence they produced the apocryphal Second Book of Esdras, which tells the story of how the Lost Tribes escaped their Assyrian captors and fled “to a far away country where mankind had never lived,” a region called Arsareth, or in their view, America.
Irish anthropologist James Adair popularized this notion in his book published in 1775, The History of the American Indians, bringing a wealth of (what at that time was considered to be) scientific evidence to back up the Lost Tribes theory. Adair also argued that the early migrants had crossed the Bering Strait.
The Russians, after several dangerous attempts, have clearly convinced the world that [Asia and America] are now divided and have close communication by a narrow strait, in which several islands are situated, through which there is an easy passage from the north-east of Asia to the north-west of America. … By this passage, supposing the main continents were separated, it was very practical for the inhabitants to go to this extensive new world, and afterwards have proceeded in quest of suitable climes.
Although Adair’s ideas about the Lost Tribes would largely fall out of favor, his theory about the Bering Strait would not.
Science Takes Over
On September 6, 1856, a small article appeared in the local newspaper in Elberfeld, Germany.
In the neighboring Neander Valley … a surprising discovery was made in recent days. During the breaking away of limestone cliffs … a cave was uncovered, which over the course of centuries had been filled with clay sediment. Upon digging out this clay, a human rib was found …
The news caught the attention of the distinguished naturalist and professor of anatomy at the University of Bonn, Hermann Schaaffhausen, who at first speculated that the ancient skeleton uncovered was nothing less than an ancestor of American Indians. Upon actual examination of the fossil, what he reported sent shock waves through the Western world.
Neanderthal Man, as he was dubbed, was human, but an entirely different species of human. The concept was not easy to grasp at that time. The idea that there might have existed other forms of humans had rarely been contemplated, much less fit into any existing theory of human origins. Schaaffhausen’s conclusions met with a swift rejection from most other German scientists, who argued that despite the extreme mineralization, the unusual skeleton was not old, he was either a ”poor wretch” who had been deformed by disease, or a Russian Cossack.
But others were ready to accept the possibility that ancient humans existed even if there was no mention of them in the Bible. Geologists, beginning with James Hutton in the 18th-century, had already begun to challenge the notion that the Flood had deposited the many differing layers of soils, rock, and sediments, and argued convincingly that the earth was much, much older than previously thought. In 1837 the Swiss botanist and geologist Louis Agassiz proposed his then extremely controversial theory that the earth had been subject in the ancient past to an ice age.
William Pengelly’s systematic excavations at Brixham Cave in England in 1858, where he found stone tools located alongside extinct ice age animals, was therefore seen as convincing proof of the antiquity of humans. The next year the excavations in the Somme Valley by French archaeologist Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, who as early as 1847 proposed that men had lived during the ice age, were examined and confirmed, and the findings presented before a stellar assemblage of scientists at London’s prestigious Royal Society, where they were accepted.
With the discoveries of Neanderthal Man, Brixham Cave, and the Somme, antiquarians (as those who studied the human past were then called) were forced to make a choice, and out of that choice a new science, paleoanthropology, was born. The same year that the antiquity of man was confirmed and accepted by the scientists of the Royal Society, Charles Darwin published his famous work, On the Origin of Species, leading to a lasting break with long-held Biblical theories of the natural world.
Paleoanthropology, the study of ancient humans, began as (and still is) a mixture of many sciences and its founding members were composed of academics from practically every discipline: geology, anthropology, biology, archeology, anatomy, and chemistry, to name a few. They were joined by a host of amateurs: businessmen, doctors, bankers, and schoolteachers, who would search for fossils in their spare time.
In Europe dramatic discoveries rapidly followed one after another, and in America the new science was also taking off dramatically–but unfortunately, dramatically on the wrong foot.
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 2: Racism, Eugenics and When Natives Came to America
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 3: The Theory Becomes a Religious Crusade
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 4: The Indisputable Facts in the Artifacts
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 5: The Theory Comes Crashing Down
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 6: DNA, Blood Types and Stereotypes

You need to be logged in in order to post comments
Please use the log in option at the bottom of this page

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 2: Racism, Eugenics and When Natives Came to America

Alex Ewen

6/20/14

In Part 1 of our exclusive series we examined how the discovery and examination of the ancient Mexican skeleton, Naia, has led scientists to once again rethink the origins of American Indians.
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 1: How Dogma Trumped Science
Since the early 16th-century, questions about the origins of American Indians spurred a lively theological debate. By the mid-19th-century, science was taking over, but that did not end the debate, indeed, it only made it more contentious than ever.
Skullduggery
On July 18, 1866 the distinguished geologist and scion of a prominent and intellectual Massachusetts family, Josiah Whitney, wrote to his younger brother, the linguist and philologist William Dwight Whitney, of a stunning find at the bottom of a gold mine in Calaveras County, California.
The great excitement now at the office is the discovery of a human skull at a depth 153 feet below a series of volcanic beds with intercalated gravels. I have just returned from the locality, and we have the skull in the office. It is a bony fide find of the greatest interest.
Whitney, a professor at Harvard, was the first “State Geologist” of California. For his scientific achievements, the highest mountain in the continental United States, Mt. Whitney, and a glacier, Whitney Glacier, would be named after him. Whitney examined the skull, which was still partially encrusted in gravel and volcanic ash and covered with a thin sheen of calcium carbonate. Although it was anatomically similar to modern humans, the skull was almost completely fossilized, strong evidence it was probably very old.
The only way to know how old, in those days, was to determine the age of the stratum in which it was buried, but Whitney had not discovered the skull. The skull was apparently found by the mine operator who then gave it to a Wells Fargo agent, who than passed it on to a doctor in San Francisco, who then contacted Whitney. Whitney visited the site, but it was now five months after the discovery and the shaft where it was found had been abandoned and become filled with water. Despite not being able to confirm the exact stratigraphic position of the skull, and therefore its age, Whitney went ahead and announced his preliminary results in a short paper before the California Academy of Sciences.
The news hit the world like a thunderclap. If the skull had indeed been found beneath four separate layers of lava, each layer between 9 and 40 feet thick, that meant that Calaveras Man was, under the reckoning of the day, around 10 million years old.
Whitney’s discovery was met with stunned disbelief from most scientists. Although the antiquity of man had just been recently accepted, 10 million years was a big, big leap. Given the new state of the science many still held an open mind. French anthropologist Jean-François-Albert du Pouget was willing to give Whitney the benefit of the doubt, although he found it odd that the skull was indistinguishable from a modern man; “it is difficult to admit the perpetuation of a type without appreciable modifications during the incalculable ages in which all nature has undergone so complete a transformation.”
But for many scientists, the idea that American Indians could be more ancient than Europeans was impossible. At the same time the theories of evolution for natural organisms were being developed in Europe, culminating in Darwin’s work, theories of social evolution had also been percolating, finding its synthesis in the works of British philosopher Herbert Spencer, who argued that societies increase in complexity over time.
Lewis Henry Morgan, in his influential work Ancient Society, proposed that humans went through various stages of development, beginning with the “Older Period of Savagery” progressing through middle and later periods into the “Older Period of Barbarism,” which also had other stages until finally the “Status of Civilization” was reached.
Thus Canadian geologist Sir John William Dawson could state in his book, Fossil Men, published in 1880, that, “existing humanity, as it appears in the Native American, is little else than the survival of primeval man in Europe.” Dawson led the charge of those scientists who fought against the antiquity of the Calaveras Skull, calling Whitney’s discovery “fanciful and improbable.”
Nor were scientists Whitney’s only detractors; there were those who still held firmly to Biblical ideas of time and creation. “The religious papers,” paleontologist John C. Merriam wrote, “in particular investigated the case and pronounced it a hoax originating with some mischievous miners.” The stories that Whitney was the victim of a practical joke spread, becoming more and more elaborate with each telling, with more and more participants claiming to have been in on it, and making the new science a source of popular ridicule. To make matters worse, Whitney took his time defending his discovery, writing a detailed report about the skull only in 1879, a full 13 years later, which allowed the controversy to fester and grow.
With the release of his report, dissenting scientists were finally able to take a crack at dismantling Whitney’s discovery and the attacks were swift and withering. The geologist William Phipps Blake, who visited the site, argued that the calcareous sheen on the skull was not typical of a fossil washed into a gravel bed, and the skull should have been more damaged and abraded. Alphonse Pinart, a champion of the Bering Strait Theory who had actually kayaked through it, contended that the site was not pristine and so there was no way of knowing where the skull came from, all of which created “the most serious doubts regarding the antiquity of this specimen.”
Whitney replied that it didn’t really matter where the skull had been found, the gravels found encrusted with it were clearly of an ancient epoch, an argument dismissed by the prominent archaeologist William Henry Holmes, who countered that the Indians could have simply buried the person in those ancient deposits. A host of distinguished scientists rose to defend Whitney. Many, such as the paleontologist William Healey Dall and geologist George Ferdinand Becker, actually examined the skull. But the lack of proof that it had come from such a deep location made it difficult to defend its great age, and there were strong grounds to believe that even if Whitney was not the victim of some prank, the skull did not come from the bottom of the mine shaft.
With Whitney’s death in 1896 the gloves came off and the Calaveras skull was systematically debunked and pronounced a hoax. Unfortunately it would be another 70 years before the skull could be dated independently of the stratum it might have come from. Because it was almost completely fossilized, the skull could not be radiocarbon dated, but a fluorine test conducted by the archaeologist Kenneth Oakley of the British Museum (Natural History) found it to be approximately 5,000 years old, ancient yes, but by no means 10 million years old.
The Paleolithic War
The highly publicized battle over the Calaveras skull was just the opening salvo of a rancorous war among American paleoanthropologists that raged across the hemisphere over the next half-century. The battle lines became drawn between those who believed, or were willing to accept, that Indians in America were ancient, that is present in this hemisphere at least 10,000 years ago or even 100,000 years ago (the Paleolithic era), and those who insisted that Indians had migrated here only within the past 5,000 years.
As Anthony T. Boldurian and John L. Cotter observed in their history of the early excavations in the Southwest, Clovis Revisited, the conflict was due “in part to heated arguments over what exactly constituted acceptable evidence.” The new science was still working out its methodology for determining how old artifacts might be. But a larger problem was that, “a few of anthropology’s influential elite seemed firmly opposed to an American Paleolithic.”
Thus any archaeological site that might betray a hint of antiquity became a bloody battleground fought between competing camps of scientists. From the suburbs in New Jersey to beaches in Florida, the wilderness of Canada to the Mississippi Delta, from the Pampas of Argentina to the valleys of Mexico, the war raged without mercy. To make things worse, amateurs and dilettantes scoured the land looking for fossils, often making outlandish claims. Among the professionals there were dozens of theories as to how old Indians were and where they came from, with some even proposing an American genesis.
In Europe, spectacular finds piled up one after another: the discovery of Cro-Magnon man in southern France in 1868; the cave art of Altamira, Spain, discovered in 1879; the discovery of extensive Neanderthal tools in 1880. But in America, paleoanthropology was completely paralyzed by the infighting. By 1900, the new science did not have a single discovery that had any consensus among its members.
Paleoanthropology needed a leader, someone who could end the chaos and put it on the path to respectability. It found it in a most unlikely person, a Czech-born anthropologist by the name of Aleš Hrdlička. His impact on American paleoanthropology in the coming century would be difficult to overstate.
The Rise of an Orthodoxy
Although only 34 years old in 1903, Hrdlička was chosen to head the new physical anthropology department at the National Museum (now the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History) in Washington D.C. Physical anthropology, the biological study of humans, was at that time largely concerned with “racial classification,” often through the study of human skulls, and Hrdlička was by then one of its leading experts. Over the previous four years, Hrdlička had toured the Americas examining people and collecting skulls for the American Museum of Natural History and his skills had brought him to the attention of the curator of anthropology at the National Museum, William Henry Holmes.
Holmes, one of the most prominent critics of the Calaveras skull, was a veteran in the war among paleoanthropologists and the leading debunker of ancient archaeological finds. In Hrdlička, Holmes found a person who was an even more strident advocate of the modernity of American Indians and an unswerving devotee of the Bering Strait Theory, believing that Indians had originated in Central Europe and then reached the Americas no earlier than 3,000 BC. As the anthropologist Adolph H. Schultz wrote in 1944 in his memorial to Hrdlička,
In regard to his own conclusions, Hrdlička seems to have been rarely plagued by doubts … Thus, once having become convinced that man’s arrival in America was of comparatively recent date, he steadfastly clung to and passionately fought for this conclusion to the end of his life, even in view of evidence demanding a reconsideration of the problem of the antiquity of man in the New World.
These views were by no means a consensus among scientists then. Even conservatives like Sir John William Dawson, who was among the first to challenge the Calaveras skull and who believed that American Indians were relatively recent migrants, also believed that they had migrated through multiple routes, from Asia, the North Atlantic, and the islands of Polynesia. A host of others, like Frederic Ward Putnam, curator of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and considered the “father of American archaeology,” were firmly convinced that Indians were here in the Paleolithic, at least 10,000 years ago or more.
Hrdlička subscribed to the pseudo-scientific “eugenics” theories that were in vogue at the time. Eugenics, essentially scientific racism, was based on the work of Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, who had proposed that the perceived superiority of the white race was due to a superior genetic makeup, a theory highly controversial even then. Hrdlička worked with and was influenced by America’s leading eugenicist, Charles B. Davenport, and he received funding to conduct research and launch his magazine, The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, from Madison Grant, author of one of the most infamous works of scientific racism, The Passing of the Great Race.
Hrdlička’s theory of the Bering Strait migration was identical to that of James Adair, who had proposed it more than a century before, except for the Lost Tribes part. They were both based not on scientific evidence, but on a presumption born in religion that then migrated to science–the antiquity and preeminence of Western culture over all others.
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 3: The Theory Becomes a Religious Crusade
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 4: The Indisputable Facts in the Artifacts
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 5: The Theory Comes Crashing Down
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 6: DNA, Blood Types and Stereotypes

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 4: The Indisputable Facts in the Artifacts

Alex Ewen

7/4/14

In Part 3 of our exclusive series we looked at how the new science of paleoanthropology was being used in Europe while infighting paralyzed it in America when Aleš Hrdlička, stepped forward to end the disputations and promote professionalism and respectability.
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 3: The Theory Becomes a Religious Crusade
By the 1920s, the Bering Strait Theory, and in particular the idea that American Indians had settled in the New World less than 5,000 years ago, had become a rigid dogma that no scientist who valued their career would dare to challenge.
In the end, it was a group of amateurs who exposed the charade. In 1908 George McJunkin, an African-American cowboy born the son of former slaves, was tending cattle at the Crowfoot Ranch near Folsom, New Mexico, when he discovered the remains of an animal that had been uncovered after a recent flood. He recognized the bones as a bison, and surmised that it was of some ancient type.

McJunkin informed a local blacksmith and amateur naturalist, Carl Schachheim, who then informed his friend and fossil hunting companion, Fred Howarth, a banker. After visiting the site, they tried repeatedly to interest paleontologists into excavating it without success. Finally, their persistence paid off in 1926, when Harold J. Cook and Jesse Dade Figgins of the Denver Museum of Natural History agreed to take a look. They quickly found, not only extinct bison, but spear points. This was a “kill site,” the results of a hunt. Since the established dogma insisted that kill sites of extinct animals did not exist, they worked very, very carefully, hoping to find something–anything–that might be conclusive.

On August 29, 1927, an ancient stone spear point was found embedded between the ribs of an extinct bison. This was clearly no accident. Recognizing the importance of the discovery, the find was left intact in the ground to be witnessed by as many eminent archaeologists as they could muster. Although he tried, Hrdlička could not reject this. The indisputable evidence had surfaced, and one glass floor had been shattered.
With the acceptance of the Folsom point, it became clear that humans were in the Americas more than 5,000 years ago. No longer hamstrung by the need to overturn dogma, a flurry of sites were discovered in the next few years which began to change the picture of ancient America. In 1932, near Clovis, New Mexico, a site was uncovered that featured the same type of spear point found at Folsom, and then digging deeper, a different and older set of spear points were found. Humans had been in America at least 10,000 years or more. It had been 68 years since the Europeans accepted the antiquity of humans, but finally, the American paleoanthropologists had joined the club.
It is important to note that it was not the discovery of human remains, so emphasized by Hrdlička, but of human tools in the right context, that changed the perceptions of the past. This was also the case in 1859 in Europe, when the stone tools of Brixham and the Somme led to the acceptance of human antiquity. The value to science of human remains in certain cases may be important, but it has not been decisive.

But if the time frame for human antiquity in the Americas had changed, the story had not. The Bering Strait Theory remained the unchallenged assumption. The line was drawn hard and fast once again, this time at 10,000 BC.

“Clovis First,” the new version of the Bering Strait Theory, was based on the presumption that the Paleoindian culture that had produced the spear points found at the Clovis site were the first settlers. In part, this was because of the Clovis site itself, which had in layer after layer revealed thousands of years of settlement history, but nothing was found in the layer beneath the Clovis culture. The other factor was the growing awareness among paleoanthropologists that the presumed pathway between Asia and the Americas, the Bering Strait, may not have always been open, but may at times have been impassable.
By 1932, geology had progressed to the point that an accurate map of the giant ice sheet could be drawn with reasonable certainty. A general consensus had developed among geologists that the glaciers were impassible approximately 30,000 years ago and very likely through to 10,000 years ago, about the time when the Clovis culture was beginning. The Clovis First Theory naturally dismissed the idea that Paleoindians might have arrived before 30,000 years ago (before the Last Glacial Maximum or LGM).

In 1933, the Canadian geologist William Alfred Johnston proposed that when the glaciers began melting, they broke into two massive sheets, one centered on the Pacific Coast and Rocky Mountains (later named the Cordilleran ice sheet), and the other, now known as the Laurentide ice sheet, covering the rest of Canada all the way to the Atlantic Ocean. In between these two massive ice caps, people might have been able to walk from Alaska down into the United States. Two years later, the Swedish-American geologist Ernst Antevs dubbed this route, the “ice-free corridor.”
The date when the melting of the ice sheets opened the ice-free corridor, believed to be around 13,000 BC, seemed to give just enough time for the Clovis culture to walk from Alaska and spread all across the Americas.

Retiring in 1942 as head of the anthropology department of the National Museum, a position he had held for almost 33 years since replacing William Henry Holmes in 1909, Hrdlička died the following year. His legacy, however, continued. The Bering Strait Theory, now in its new incarnation, Clovis First, was upheld with equal dogmatism by a new generation of paleoanthropologists who had grown up with no other perspective.
Bend it like Beckham
As new scientific methods began to play an important role in the examination of artifacts, new battles began almost immediately. Radiocarbon dating, developed in 1949 by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Willard Libby, revolutionized archaeology. By measuring the decay of a radioactive isotope of carbon, carbon 14, in any dead organic matter such as bones, wood, or plants, Libby found an approximate way to date when it had died.

During the construction of a dam in Lewisville, Texas the remains of a bison were uncovered in 1949, leading to a series of excavations that continued until the dam was finished and the site inundated in 1957. The excavations, as archaeologists Wilson W. Crook, Jr., and R.K. Harris wrote in the journal American Antiquity, “yielded remains of more than 21 hearths of an ancient campsite of early man. An extensive Upper Pleistocene fauna has been recovered, much of it actually burned within the hearths themselves, and the remainder closely associated with camp refuse, along with certain distinctive artifacts.” What created a stir was that two of the hearths were radiocarbon dated at more than 37,000 years old.
Since this flew in the face of the Clovis First Theory, the findings were instantly attacked. But given the indisputable (at that time) radiocarbon dating, that was not going to be easy to do. The archaeologists Robert F. Heizer and Richard A. Brooks (both of whom did not visit the site) responded in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology in a manner that would have made Aleš Hrdlička proud.
The evidence for association of stone tools with the hearths is insufficient to provide a valid case for arguing that the hearths are the result of human agency. If we are to accept the proposition that man has been in the New World for more than 37,000 years, the least we can demand is that the evidence for the belief be unambiguous.
They then proposed that the hearths were actually ancient nests of wood rats, an idea so absurd on its face (presumably the wood rats also cooked the extinct animals found burned in the hearths), that the whole matter was dropped and ignored. Since it could not be disputed, the Lewisville site was consigned to the academic dustbin.
Twenty-five years later, as archaeologists gained experience with radiocarbon dating and learned that a contamination of samples or other factors could influence the dates given, the geologist D. L. Johnson proposed that maybe the Lewisville site had been contaminated by lignite (brown coal) from nearby outcroppings of the Woodbine Formation, which was around 70 million years old. A dry spell in 1979 had allowed for a new excavation and so material from the Lewisville site was sent for reanalysis.
Unfortunately for the Clovis First Theory, a report produced in 1985 by a team from the Illinois State Geological Survey headed by Richard H. Shiley, entitled “Moessbauer Analysis of Lewisville, Texas, Archaeological Site Lignite and Hearth Samples” found that whatever was burned in the hearths, it was not Woodbine lignite.
The rare earth composition of Woodbine Formation lignite and its corresponding ash are very similar to one another, but are not similar to the soil or hearth samples. The rare earth composition of the surrounding soil follows the same pattern as that of the hearth. From this data, it is reasonable to provisionally conclude that the Woodbine Formation lignite was not burned in the hearths.
A second test then found that, “pyrite combustion products were not detected using X-ray diffraction.” Pyrite, found in lignite, when burned should generate a byproduct, but none were found. Whatever was burned in the hearths was not lignite.
A third test, now using Moessbauer spectroscopy, also did not find pyrite byproducts in the charcoal of the hearths tested, but did find trace amounts of hematite, a pyrite byproduct, in the sediment lining of one of the hearths, hearth 22, a hearth that had been excavated in 1979, after the site had been submerged by the reservoir. The Moessbauer test did not find traces of lignite in the hearths excavated in the 1950s by Crook and Harris. By all rights, the radiocarbon dates of more than 37,000 years still stood.
The team, clearly disappointed it had not come up with the expected result, put the best face it could on its findings.
The use of the Moessbauer spectroscopy, on the other hand, produced positive results. Hematite, a pyrite combustion product, was found in hearth 22. We concluded that there is some support for the hypothesis that Woodbine Formation lignite was burned in this hearth, thus increasing the apparent age (radiocarbon date) of the hearth material.
Thankfully the tepid “some support for the hypothesis” was all that was needed. Few were going to bother to read the actual report and nobody wanted to dispute its conclusions. Lewisville was pronounced as having been contaminated by lignite and was no longer a problem for the Clovis First Theory.
The orthodoxy was stronger than ever. No longer under Hrdlička’s iron grip, it was now self-policing. Whatever the scientific data might say, the conclusions would somehow support the theory. Any site that promised to be earlier than Clovis was going to be subject to unrelenting scrutiny until something was found wrong with it. New evidence would be “bent” towards upholding the Bering Strait Theory.
The established dogma could still only be overturned by “indisputable proof,” the nature of this proof being defined by the dogmatists themselves. Despite the discovery of the Folsom point in 1929, the same intellectual stubbornness that Hrdlička had fostered continued to stunt paleoanthropology.
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 1: How Dogma Trumped Science
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 2: Racism, Eugenics and When Natives Came to America
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 5: The Theory Comes Crashing Down
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 6: DNA, Blood Types and Stereotypes

You need to be logged in in order to post comments
Please use the log in option at the bottom of this page

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 5: The Theory Comes Crashing Down

Courtesy world-mysteries.com

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 5: The Theory Comes Crashing Down

Alex Ewen

7/11/14

In Part 4 of our exclusive series we looked at how the Bering Strait Theory by the 1920s had become a rigid dogma that no scientist who valued their career would dare to challenge.
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 4: The Indisputable Facts in the Artifacts
For most of the 20th century, new discoveries of American Indian origins that cast doubt on the Bering Strait Theory were either dismissed or ignored. But as the technology of science marched on, the cracks grew deeper and deeper.
An unintended consequence of the atmospheric testing of atomic weapons during the Cold War was that by the 1960s it had doubled the amount of radioactive carbon 14 in the environment, and this “bomb pulse” was showing up on the instruments that were used for radiocarbon dating. This led scientists to suspect that the amount of carbon 14 that is found in the environment might not have always been constant, possibly leading to wrong dates.
By the mid-1980s, dendrochronologists, those that study and date tree-rings, had manage to piece together–by matching the tree-rings of long-living species such as the bristlecone pine with those of ancient trees–an unbroken string of tree-rings over 7,000 years old. Since dendochronology can give extremely accurate dates, often to the year, matching the two dating systems found exactly that, that the amount of C14 fluctuated and that many radiocarbon dates had to be adjusted.
For Clovis First advocates, this presented a real problem, for the new calibrated radiocarbon dates pushed back the Clovis culture almost 2,000 years. It meant that the oldest reliably dated Clovis site, in Aubrey, Texas, which was radiocarbon dated at 11,590 years ago, was now approximately 13,490 years old. The Paleoindians would have had to race through the Ice-free Corridor to get to Texas in time.
But the new radiocarbon dates would give even more bad news. Geologists, also recalibrating their radiocarbon data, began to refine their estimates for when the massive ice sheets began to melt, and found them adjusting their dates between 500 and 2,000 years earlier. The Ice-free Corridor was now certainly impassable 13,000 years ago and possibly as late as 12,000 years ago. This meant that there was no way the Paleoindians could have walked over from Asia–or if they had, they would have had to done so 20,000 years earlier, a non-starter for the theory’s advocates. A central thesis of the Bering Strait Theory was now toppled, for if the Clovis culture was indeed the first peoples in the Americas, they had to have come by boat.
A Polynesian Interlude
The use of boats had always been rejected by the Bering Strait advocates, because it opened up other possible routes of migration, such as Europe or Polynesia. Thus they had dismissed any contacts between Polynesians and American Indians (and many continue to dismiss evidence of prehistoric contacts), because it would undercut the contention that “primitive people” could not cross the oceans, and that walking across the Bering Strait was the only possible way that Paleoindians could have come to the Americas.
But the presumption that primitive people cannot sail the ocean is a belief born out of the social evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and Lewis Henry Morgan–that societies inexorably evolve to greater complexity and skill. Since the Europeans were unable to cross the oceans until the 16th-century, no one else should have been able to do so earlier.
Yet the evidence for pre-Columbian contact between Polynesians and American Indians has always been strong. Before the Bering Strait Theory assumed its dogmatic status, many scientists believed it and few rejected it out of hand. As early as 1837, scientists such as John Dunmore Lang, a prominent Presbyterian minister and Australian politician, proposed Polynesian voyages to America. In his book, Origins and Migrations of the Polynesian Nation, Lang dismissed the Asian-American connection, stating that “there is no evidence, and not the slightest probability, of any emigration having ever taken place from Asia to America by the Behring’s [sic] Straits.”
Ever since the first proposer of this particular route for the discovery and settlement of America announced his great idea to the world, the learned of all nations, including such names as Humboldt and Dr. Robertson, have caught and adopted that idea and followed in his wake–as blindly, indeed, and as unintelligently as a flock of sheep follows its leader.
Lang, who traveled throughout the Pacific and into the Americas, argued, in a large part through linguistic evidence, that the Polynesians originated in Malaysia and spread across the ocean in a pattern largely confirmed 150 years later by genetic evidence.
Many of Lang’s ideas were fanciful, but no more so than any one else’s at the time. He believed the Polynesians landed near Copiapo in Chile in some distant past and from there colonized the Americas. The historian George Bancroft (whose dubious accomplishments include instigating the Mexican War as acting Secretary of War under President James Polk), wrote about Lang’s theory in 1841 in his influential book, History of the Colonization of the United States, “It would not be safe to reject the possibility of an early communication between South America and the Polynesia world.” The distinguished French naturalist Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages also considered American voyages likely in his 1866 work, The Polynesians and Their Migrations.
There was little doubt in those days that the Polynesians could have made a trans-Pacific voyage. The early settlement of Hawaii, more than 2,500 miles from the northernmost islands of French Polynesia and over 3,000 miles from Tahiti, required a tremendous feat of sailing and navigation. European explorers often recorded meeting Polynesian sailors in the open ocean, including an encounter in 1615 by the Dutch navigator, Willem Cornelisz Schouten, who came across a party of Polynesians in a double-hulled ship more than 3,000 miles from their home in the Marianas.
Lang noted physical and cultural similarities between the two peoples, many of which today would be seen as the result of simple prejudice, but others, such as similar types of fishhooks, canoes, and harpoons used by Indians in California, Chile, and among the Polynesians, were not to be dismissed lightly.
The most important evidence was biological. As early as 1770, Spanish explorers wrote that maize, manioc, and white potatoes, all indigenous to the Americas, had been grown on Easter Island. Similar varieties of coconuts, bottle gourd (calabash), bananas, and chickens, were all seen as evidence of voyages back and forth. Most significantly, the sweet potato, clearly indigenous to the Americas, was found across Polynesia, including Hawaii and New Zealand. In 1866, in the journal Botany, the German botanist Berthold Carl Seemann wrote that the Polynesian name for sweet potato, “Kumara or umara, of the South-Sea Islanders, is identical with cumar, the Quichua name for sweet potato in the highlands of Ecuador.”
As if that evidence was not indisputable enough, in 1841, while digging through an ancient Inca temple in Cuzco, Peru, the director of the National Museum of Lima, Mariano Eduardo de Rivero, and the Swiss explorer, Johann Jakob von Tschudi, discovered a distinctive “green amphibole stone ax,” that was soon identified as a Maori patu-pounamu, or jade war club, from New Zealand. But as the Bering Strait Theory became predominant in the late 19th-century, the idea of Polynesian-American contact began to lose favor.
By the early 20th-century, only a few anthropologists, such as Roland Dixon, were willing to accept, and even then only half-heartedly, that trans-Pacific voyages by Polynesians might have occurred. Thor Heyerdahl’s highly celebrated voyage from South America to Polynesia in the light raft Kon-Tiki in 1947, along with his equally celebrated but extremely doubtful ideas of Polynesian origins, created a huge scientific backlash that basically killed any lingering discussion of trans-oceanic contact.
But the Polynesians did sail to the Americas. Recent DNA studies of sweet potatoes and chickens now confirm that they were traded before contact with Europeans. A flurry of recent articles, including “The Polynesian Gene Pool: an Early Contribution by Amerindians to Easter Island,” published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2012; a 2013 article from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “Identification of Polynesian mtDNA Haplogroups in Remains of Botocudo Amerindians from Brazil;” and a 2010 article in Current Geonomics, “The Origin of Amerindians and the Peopling of the Americas According to HLA Genes: Admixture with Asian and Pacific Peoples” have pretty much settled the debate for everyone except the most dogmatic Bering Strait advocates.
The new version of the Bering Strait Theory, what is now known as the “Coastal Migration,” has the first Americans using boats, presumably small primitive craft that then skirted the massive ice-sheets along the coast on their way to Aubrey, Texas. But that assumption completely dismisses the reality of the region of the Bering Strait.
As it is presently, even without being surrounded by the massive ice-sheets that would have reached out well into the open ocean back then, the seas around the Bering Strait are among the most treacherous on the planet. European explorers had, for 200 years after they had already circumnavigated the globe, attempted to reach the area without success, failing time and time again because their ships were not capable of even coming close to it, much less crossing it. Navigating those seas requires tremendous technological skill, every bit as daunting as crossing the open ocean.
One could argue, using the example of European or Polynesian voyages, that it would have been just as easy for Paleoindians to have crossed the Pacific or Atlantic, than to try to sail or paddle the seas around the Bering Strait. The presumption had been that Paleoindians walked across a land bridge into the Americas because they were incapable of doing anything else, but if Paleoindians did indeed use boats 15,000 years ago, then they could have come from anywhere.
Time Waits for No One
Now that it became evident that the land passageway to the Americas was effectively blocked, even during the Clovis period, the Bering Strait Theory should have died a natural death, but being a dogma and not a scientific theory, its advocates would simply not let go. After Aleš Hrdlička’s retirement in 1942 from the National Museum, a number of sites potentially older than Clovis had been excavated, but all had been vigorously challenged by a new generation of archaeologists, and all had been dismissed. The demand for “indisputable proof,” whatever that might entail, was simply too great an obstacle to overcome. But one man had figured out the game, and in doing so, brought down the Clovis First version of the Bering Strait Theory.
In 1976, Tom Dillehay, an American anthropologist who at that time was working at the Universidad Austral de Chile, began excavating an ancient site in southern Chile. Quickly recognizing the antiquity of this site, his excavation became arguably the most meticulous ever undertaken. It had to be, for when he first announced his findings in 1988, and claimed that the samples of wood from houses, charcoal from hearths, and other artifacts that he had excavated had been radiocarbon dated to be almost 15,000 years old, it sent a massive shock wave through the archaeological community. It meant that this site in South America was more than 1,000 years older than any accepted site in North America. Dillehay’s findings were immediately and bitterly attacked by the Clovis First advocates, but he had expected it, and the detail and quality of his work made his conclusions virtually irrefutable. Despite this, it took almost 10 years for the archaeological community to–extremely grudgingly–accept the Monte Verde site.
The fact that the oldest site in the Americas was located almost 8,000 miles from the presumed gateway did not go unnoticed. One might have assumed that if the Bering Strait Theory were correct, and Paleoindians migrated from Asia, then the sites in South America would be much younger than those in North America, and the further north one excavated, the older the sites would be. But that had never been the case, as the accepted sites in Canada were even younger than those in the U.S. Indeed the archaeological evidence was pointed towards a migration, but a migration the other way.
With Clovis First now dead and with it the Ice-Free Corridor, Coastal Migration was now the only alternative. The new dates from Monte Verde had pushed back human occupation of the Americas to 14,800 years ago, but geologists had already determined that 17,000 years ago the coastal route was completely blocked by ice from Russia all the way to Seattle. The Paleoindians would have had to have sailed a distance of almost 3,000 miles alongside the massive ice sheets without being able to land. Even 16,000 years ago the coastal route would have been largely clogged with ice. Once again the Paleoindians would have had to race, this time in tiny boats through treacherous waters, if they were to reach Monte Verde in time to leave traces of their occupation.
The line was drawn once again by the Bering Strait advocates at 15,000 years ago, and it could not go back much further than that without the collapse of the whole theory. So this meant that according to the newest version of the Bering Strait Theory, the Paleoindians essentially sailed down the coast directly to Monte Verde, Chile, before later deciding to settle in the Americas. But as absurd as that idea was, new evidence was making even that far-fetched concept impossible.
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 1: How Dogma Trumped Science
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 2: Racism, Eugenics and When Natives Came to America
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 3: The Theory Becomes a Religious Crusade
RELATED: Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 6: DNA, Blood Types and Stereotypes

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Angkor, the greatest medieval city on Earth.

22 September 2014 Last updated at 20:14 ET

Beyond Angkor: How lasers revealed a lost city

By Ben Lawrie Documentary film-maker

Deep in the Cambodian jungle lie the remains of a vast medieval city, which was hidden for centuries. New archaeological techniques are now revealing its secrets - including an elaborate network of temples and boulevards, and sophisticated engineering.

In April 1858 a young French explorer, Henri Mouhot, sailed from London to south-east Asia. For the next three years he travelled widely, discovering exotic jungle insects that still bear his name.
Today he would be all but forgotten were it not for his journal, published in 1863, two years after he died of fever in Laos, aged just 35.
Mouhot's account captured the public imagination, but not because of the beetles and spiders he found.
Readers were gripped by his vivid descriptions of vast temples consumed by the jungle: Mouhot introduced the world to the lost medieval city of Angkor in Cambodia and its romantic, awe-inspiring splendour.
"One of these temples, a rival to that of Solomon, and erected by some ancient Michelangelo, might take an honourable place beside our most beautiful buildings. It is grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome," he wrote.

His descriptions firmly established in popular culture the beguiling fantasy of swashbuckling explorers finding forgotten temples.

Today Cambodia is famous for these buildings. The largest, Angkor Wat, constructed around 1150, remains the biggest religious complex on Earth, covering an area four times larger than Vatican City.
It attracts two million tourists a year and takes pride of place on Cambodia's flag.

Find out more

Dr Dan Penny finds medieval carvings under a stone bridge in the Cambodian jungle

Follow the archaeological team in Cambodia as they uncover the mysteries of Angkor Wat. Watch Jungle Atlantis on Thursday 25 September at 20:00 BST on BBC Two or catch it later on the BBC iPlayer.

Jungle Atlantis

But back in the 1860s Angkor Wat was virtually unheard of beyond local monks and villagers. The notion that this great temple was once surrounded by a city of nearly a million people was entirely unknown.

It took over a century of gruelling archaeological fieldwork to fill in the map. The lost city of Angkor slowly began to reappear, street by street. But even then significant blanks remained.
Then, last year, archaeologists announced a series of new discoveries - about Angkor, and an even older city hidden deep in the jungle beyond.
An international team, led by the University of Sydney's Dr Damian Evans, had mapped 370 sq km around Angkor in unprecedented detail - no mean feat given the density of the jungle and the prevalence of landmines from Cambodia's civil war. Yet the entire survey took less than two weeks.
Their secret?
Lidar - a sophisticated remote sensing technology that is revolutionising archaeology, especially in the tropics.
Mounted on a helicopter criss-crossing the countryside, the team's lidar device fired a million laser beams every four seconds through the jungle canopy, recording minute variations in ground surface topography.
The findings were staggering.

Lidar technology has revealed the original city of Angkor - red lines indicate modern features including roads and canals

Image showing what is beneath the ground at Angkor

The archaeologists found undocumented cityscapes etched on to the forest floor, with temples, highways and elaborate waterways spreading across the landscape.
"You have this kind of sudden eureka moment where you bring the data up on screen the first time and there it is - this ancient city very clearly in front of you," says Dr Evans.
These new discoveries have profoundly transformed our understanding of Angkor, the greatest medieval city on Earth.

Phra Sav Ling Povn, palace of the leprous king, near the great temple of Angkor Wat, circa 1930

Phra Sav Ling Povn, palace of the leprous king, near Angkor Wat, circa 1930

At its peak, in the late 12th Century, Angkor was a bustling metropolis covering 1,000 sq km. (It would be another 700 years before London reached a similar size.)
Angkor was once the capital of the mighty Khmer empire which, ruled by warrior kings, dominated the region for centuries - covering all of present-day Cambodia and much of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. But its origins and birthplace have long been shrouded in mystery.
A few meagre inscriptions suggested the empire was founded in the early 9th Century by a great king, Jayavarman II, and that his original capital, Mahendraparvata, was somewhere in the Kulen hills, a forested plateau north-east of the site on which Angkor would later be built.
But no-one knew for sure - until the lidar team arrived.
The lidar survey of the hills revealed ghostly outlines on the forest floor of unknown temples and an elaborate and utterly unexpected grid of ceremonial boulevards, dykes and man-made ponds - a lost city, found.

Most striking of all was evidence of large-scale hydraulic engineering, the defining signature of the Khmer empire.
By the time the royal capital moved south to Angkor around the end of the 9th Century, Khmer engineers were storing and distributing vast quantities of precious seasonal monsoon water using a complex network of huge canals and reservoirs.
Harnessing the monsoon provided food security - and made the ruling elite fantastically rich. For the next three centuries they channelled their wealth into the greatest concentration of temples on Earth.
One temple, Preah Khan, constructed in 1191, contained 60t of gold. Its value today would be about £2bn ($3.3bn).
But despite the city's immense wealth, trouble was brewing.
At the same time that Angkor's temple-building programme peaked, its vital hydraulic network was falling into disrepair - at the worst possible moment.
The end of the medieval period saw dramatic shifts in climate across south-east Asia.
Tree ring samples record sudden fluctuations between extreme dry and wet conditions - and the lidar map reveals catastrophic flood damage to the city's vital water network.
With this lifeline in tatters, Angkor entered a spiral of decline from which it never recovered.
In the 15th Century, the Khmer kings abandoned their city and moved to the coast. They built a new city, Phnom Penh, the present-day capital of Cambodia.
Life in Angkor slowly ebbed away.

When Mouhot arrived he found only the great stone temples, many of them in a perilous state of disrepair.
Nearly everything else - from common houses to royal palaces, all of which were constructed of wood - had rotted away.

The vast metropolis that once surrounded the temples had been all but devoured by the jungle.

Watch the first episode of Jungle Atlantis on Thursday 25 September at 20:00 BST on BBC Two, or catch it later on the BBC iPlayer. The programme was made in association with The Smithsonian Channel, which will be transmitting both episodes in the US on 5 October under the title Angkor Revealed.

Saturday, March 22, 2014

Luys Hernandez de Biedma with the Hernando de Soto Expedition

Biedma's Original DeSoto Writings

Luys Hernandez (or Fernandez) de Biedma, the King's Agent with Hernando de Soto, wrote the only account of his expedition which still exists today. This recent translation was made by John E. Worth and Published in the Univ. of Alabama's DeSoto Chronicles.
A different translation of Biedma, by Buckingham Smith
INDEXED BY STATE: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee,
Alabama, Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Texas, Etc
GLOSSARY TABLE OF INDIAN PLACE NAMES USED BY VARIOUS CHRONICLERS
1 LEAGUE = 2.6 STATUATE MILES

RELATION OF THE ISLAND OF FLORIDA
by Luys Hernandez de Biedma with the Hernando de Soto Expedition

DESOTO's FLORIDA LANDING
We arrived at the port of Baya Honda and disembarked six hundred and twenty men and two hundred and twenty-three horses. As soon as we disembarked, we found out from some Indians that were captured that there was a Christian there in the land [Juan Ortiz] who was one of those who had gone with [those in search of] Panfilo de Narvaez, and we went in search of him; a cacique [an Indian chief] who was about eight leagues (21 miles) from the port had him. We came upon him on the road; he was already coming toward us, for when the cacique (the chief) found out that we had disembarked there, he asked the Christian if he wished to come where we were.
He told him yes, and the cacique sent nine Indians with him. He was naked like them, with a bow and some arrows in his hand, his body decorated like an Indian. As the Christians came upon them, they thought that they were Indians who came to spy on them; they went toward them, and they fled to a small forest that was nearby. The horses reached them, and they gave a lance-blow to an Indian and easily might have killed the Christian, because he knew little of our language, since he had forgotten it. He remembered how to call to Our Lady, and by this he was recognized to be a Christian.
We brought him with much joy to where the Governor was. He had been among those Indians for twelve years, and he knew their language; he had been speaking it for so long that he was among us more than four days before he could join one word with another, since upon saying one word in Spanish, he would say another four or five in the language of the Indians, until finally he was again able to speak our language well. He knew little of the land and had neither seen nor heard of things only twenty leagues away.
He told us upon seeing us that there was not a bit of gold in the land.

DESOTO INTO FLORIDA

All of us who had disembarked departed from the port of Baya Honda in order to penetrate the interior, except twenty-six on horseback and sixty foot soldiers that remained to guard the port until the Governor responded or sent for them. We went west and then turned northwest. We had news of a cacique that the Indians told us everyone paid tribute to; he was named Hurripacuxi (Paracoxi), and he was up to twenty leagues from the coast [NOT from the seashore - a coast is a shipping lane]. We went from (t)here, crossing some swamps and rivers, another fifteen or twenty leagues from there to a town that the Indians made out to us to be very large, so much so that they told us that its people, shouting, made flying birds fall. We arrived at this town, which was called Etocale [the others called it Ocale, Cale and Acuera]. It was a small town; we found some corn and beans and little dogs to eat, which was no small relief for the people, who were dying of hunger.
We stayed here seven or eight days, during which some excursions were made to capture some Indians who might guide us to the province of Apalache, which was widely known in all the land. They captured three or four Indians, but the one who knew the most did not know two leagues farther on from that town. We left from here traveling ever toward New Spain [Mexico], at a distance of ten or twelve leagues from the coast [NOT the seashore]. We passed some towns in the five or six days that we traveled, until we arrived at a fair-sized village called Aguacalecuen. We found all the Indians gone, having fled for the woods; here we halted another six or seven days in order to look for some Indians who might guide us. Going to look for some Indians, ten or twelve women were captured, among whom, they told us, one was a daughter of the cacique; for this reason the cacique came to us in peace and said that he would give us interpreters and guides for farther on, but he never gave them to us.
We had to take him with us, and at the end of six or seven days that we traveled, about three hundred and fifty Indians came forth to attack us with bows and arrows, intending to take the cacique away from us. We killed some of them and apprehended all the rest. Among them there were some Indians [one named Perico, who was taken captive] who knew of the interior, andthere they told us many great lies.
We crossed another river, which was in a province called Veachile, and we found some towns on the other bank, all abandoned, although we did not fail to find in them what we had need of, which was some food. We departed from here for another town, which is called Aguile. This [town] borders on that province of Apalache; a river divides the one province from the other. On this river we made a bridge of many pines tied to one another, and we crossed with great danger, because on the other side there were Indians who defended the crossing against us. When the Indians saw that we had crossed the river, they went away to the nearest town, which is called Yvitachuco, and waited there until we arrived in view of the town. Upon seeing us appear, they set fire to all the town and fled.
In this province of Apalache there are many towns, and it is a land of plentiful food; they call all this other land that we traveled through the province of Yustaga. We went to another town which is called Yniahyco, and here it seemed to us that it was time to find out about those who remained at the port, and that they should know about us, because we intended to plunge so far into the interior that we might not be able to have more news of them. We had already walked one hundred and ten leagues from where we left them up to there, and the Governor sent them a message to come where we were.
Here we went to look for the sea, which was about nine leagues from this town, and we found on the shore the place where Panfilo de Narviez made the boats, because we found the site of the forge and many bones of the horses, and the Indians told us through the interpreter how the other Christians had made those boats there. Juan de Anasco made certain signs in some trees that were on the shore of the sea, because the Governor ordered him to call the people who had remained at the port, and to send them by land the way we had come, and to come back by sea in two brigantines and a small vessel [bate!] that was there, and to bring them to that province of Apalache; meanwhile we remained waiting there.
Juan de Anasco sent the people by land, and he came back by sea as the Governor commanded him, where he endured much hardship and danger, because he did not find that coast; he did not find a trace of what he had seen by land before he went there by sea, because the inlets were shallow, and at high tide they had water but at low tide they were dry. We made a piragua that each day went out two leagues into the sea to see if the brigantines were coming, in order to show them where they were to stop. Thanks to God they came to them by sea and the other people by land.
The brigantines having come, the Governor commanded that they go west, to see if they could find some port that might be near there, in order to know the coast, if they [the army] should find something in the interior. Francisco Maldonado, a nobleman from Salamanca, went in the brigantines, cruising the coast and entering all the coves and inlets and rivers that he saw, until he arrived at a river where he found a good entrance, and a good port and a town of Indians on the seacoast. Some came to barter with him, and he captured one of those Indians and came back for where we were.
He spent two months on this journey, yet to all of us it became a thousand years through detaining us there so long, since we had news of the interior. When Maldonado came, the Governor told him that since we were going in search of the land that Indian told us was on another sea, he should return in those brigantines to the island of Cuba, where Dona Isabel de Bobadilla, the wife of the Governor, was, and that if within six months he had no news of us, he should come back in those brigantines and cruise the coast as far as the river of Espiritu Santo [the Mississippi], because we would have to return there.
The brigantines went to Cuba, and we headed north, in order to see what the Indians told us. We traveled five days through an uninhabited region [despoblado] until we arrived at a large and very swift [muy corriente] river. We could not make a bridge because of the strength with which it flowed, but we made a piragua in which we crossed...

DESOTO INTO GEORGIA

...On the other bank we found a province, which is called Acapachiqui, very abundant in food of that which the Indians ate. We saw some towns of the province, and others we could not see because it was a land of very great swamps. Here we found a difference in the houses of the Indians; we found them as caves below the ground, while up to there they were covered with palms and straw.
We went onward and came upon two other rivers. We had to make bridges of tied pines on them, as we were accustomed to make them. We arrived at another province, which is called Otoa. We found a fair-sized town, larger than any we had found up to there. From there we went to other towns of another province, which was about two days from there, where we captured some people unawares, who had not heard about us. They agreed to come to serve us in peace so that we would return the people that we had taken from them. The Governor returned them, and the only ones they did not take from him were some interpreter guides for farther on. We spent five or six days in passing through this province, which is called Chisi, where we were well served by the Indians, from the little that they had.
From here we traveled another three days without seeing a village, until we came to another province, which is called Altapaha. Here we found a river that did not flow to the south like the others that we had crossed. It flowed east, to the sea, where the licenciado [lawyer] Lucas de Ayllon had come; because of this we gave much more credit to what the Indian told us and believed all the lies that he had told us to be true.
This province was well populated with Indians, and they all served us. The Governor questioned them about that province that we were searching for, which was called Cofitachique, and they told us that it was not possible to go there; there was neither a road nor anything to eat on the road, and we would all die of hunger.
We went onward to other caciques, who were named Ocute and Cofaqui, and they gave us some of the foods they had and told us that if we wished to go to make war on the lady of Cofitachique, they would give us all that we might want for the journey. They told us that there was no road by which to go, since they had no dealings with one another because they were at war; sometimes when they came to make war on one another, they passed through hidden and secret places where they would not be detected, and they spent twenty or twenty-two days on the road and ate only herbs and some toasted corn that they brought.

DESOTO INTO SOUTH CAROLINA

Having seen our determination, they gave us eight hundred Indians to carry our food and clothes, and other Indians to guide us; they headed straight to the east and traveled for three days. The Indian who had deceived us told us that in three days he would get us there. At the end of the three days we were already beginning to see the lie of the Indian. The Governor did not stop following the road that he had started on because of that, and he commanded that all should save as much food as they could, because he suspected what afterward happened, that we would be in great hardship and necessity. We traveled through this uninhabited region thirteen days, and at the end of them we arrived at some cabins. The Indians had already lost their bearings, and they did not know where to go or what road to give us.
The Governor went out to look for it and returned despairing of being able to find it; he made the people return about half a league from there to a large river, and there he began to give a pound of pork to each Christian as rations from some pigs that we were taking with us, and we ate it boiled in water without salt or anything else. And from here the Governor sent people in two directions to look for a road; one he sent upriver, north and northeast, and the other he sent downriver, south and southeast, and he gave to each one a limit of ten days to go and come back, to see if they found some road or saw a trace of a town.
He who went south and southeast came back in four days with news that he had come upon a little village with some food, and he brought from it three or four Indians who spoke with that Indian who deceived us, and they also understood the interpreter. This was no little thing for us because of the great necessity for interpreters that there is in the land. And he again affirmed the lies that he had told us, and we believed him through seeing the interpreter speak with those Indians.
We all then departed to go to that little village and await there those who had gone in other directions to look for a road, and we were here four or five days, until all the people gathered. We found about fifty fanegas of corn and some flour of toasted corn, and many mulberry trees loaded with mulberries, and some other small fruit.
We departed from here for the town of Cofitachique, which was two days' journey from this little village. It was on the bank of a river that we believe was the river of Santa Elena, where the licenciado Ayllon was. Having arrived at this river, the lady of the town sent us a niece of hers, and some Indians brought her on a litter with much prestige. And she sent a message to us that she was delighted that we had come to her land, and that she would give us whatever she could and had, and she sent a string of pearls of five or six strands to the Governor. She gave us canoes in which we crossed that river and divided with us half of the town. She was with us three or four days and then went away to the woods.
The Governor sent people to look for her, and when she could not be found, he opened a temple that was there, where the important people of that land were buried, and we gathered from there a quantity of pearls; there must have been up to six and a half or seven arrobas of them, although they were not good because they were damaged through being below the ground and placed amidst the adipose tissue of the Indians. Here we found buried two Castilian axes for cutting wood, and a rosary of beads of jet and some margaritas of the kind that they carry from here [Spain] to barter with the Indians. All this we believed they had obtained from barter with those who went with the licgnciado Ayllon.
According to the information that we had from the* Indians, the sea was up to thirty leagues from there. We found out that the people that went with Ayllon scarcely went inland at all but rather stayed always on the seacoast, until Ayllon became sick and died. Afterward the people killed one another, each one intent on taking command, and many others [died] of hunger; one who had found himself there told us that of six hundred men that Ayllon had settled in that land, not more than fifty-seven had escaped, largely because of losing a large ship loaded with provisions.
We were in the town of this lady for about ten or eleven days, and then it was advisable for us to leave from there in search of land where there was food, because here there was none, except a very limited amount for the Indians to eat, and we, with the horses and the people, used it up very quickly. We turned again north and traveled eight days through land poor and lacking in food until we arrived at a land that they call Xuala, and here we found little population, because of the land being rugged, but still we found some Indian houses...

DESOTO INTO NORTH CAROLINA

...In these mountains (between Tryon and Asheville) we found the source of the great river by which we left (North America, via the Mississippi River), and we believed it to be the river of Espiritu Santo. We went onward to a town that is called Guasuli (Asheville), where they gave us a quantity of dogs and some corn, of which they had little.
From here we traveled four days and arrived at a town that is called Chyha, which is very abundant in food. It is situated on an island (covered by today's Fontana Reservoir) in this river of Espiritu Santo (the Little Tennessee River, which drains into the Mississippi River, the Spanish Espiritu Santo), which from its source makes very large islands. In this province we began to find the towns palisaded, and here the Indians extract a great quantity of oil from nuts. We stayed here twenty-six or twenty-seven days, in order to give some relief to the horses, because they were very fatigued from little to eat and much labor. We departed from here, along the bank of the river (the Little Tennessee River)...

DESOTO INTO TENNESSEE

...and arrived at another province that is called Costehe, where the towns are likewise on islands in the river. (Hiwassee Island, at the Tennessee-Hiwassee River confluence)
DeSoto into Western Tennessee

DESOTO INTO NORTH GEORGIA THEN ALABAMA

From here we went to the province of Coca, which is one of the best lands that we came upon in Florida. Its cacique came forth to receive us on a litter with great festivity and many people, because he has many subject towns. The next day in the morning all the Indians fled. We captured the cacique, so that he would give us Indians to carry our burdens, but he detained us several days before he gave them to us. We found in this province plums like those from here in Castille, and a great quantity of wild vines, on which there were very good grapes. We departed from here toward the west and southwest, and went through towns of this cacique for five or six days, until we arrived at another province that is called Italisi. We found the people gone and went to look for them. Some Indians came to us, whom the Governor sent to call the cacique; he came to us and brought us as present twenty-six or twenty-seven women and hides of deer and whatever they had.
From here we headed south, drawing near the coast of New Spain, and we passed several towns until we arrived at another province that was called Tascaluza, of which the cacique was an Indian so large that, to the opinion of all, he was a giant. He awaited us in peace in his town. We made much festivity for him when we arrived and jousted and had many horse races, although he appeared to think little of all this. Afterward we asked him to give us Indians to carry the burdens, and he responded that he was not accustomed to serving anyone, rather that all served him before. The Governor commanded that he not be allowed to go to his house, but rather that he should be detained there; as a result he felt that he was detained among us, and because of this he committed the ruin that afterward he inflicted on us.
Because he said that he could not give us anything there, that we should go to another town of his, which was called Mavila, and that there he would give us what we requested of him, we headed for there, arriving at a large river [rio caudal], which we believe is the river that flows into the bay of Chuse. Here we had news of how the boats of Narvaez had arrived in need of water, and that here among these Indians remained a Christian who was called Don Teodoro, and a black man with him. They showed us a dagger that the Christian had. We were here two days making rafts to cross this river, during which the Indians killed a Christian who was one of the Governor's guard. In a fit of anger, he [the Governor] treated the cacique badly and told him that he was going to burn him unless he gave him the Indians that had killed the Christian. He said that in his town of Mavila he would give them to us.
This cacique was an Indian who brought along many other Indians who served him, and he always walked with a very large fly-flap [moscador] made of feathers, which an Indian carried behind him in order to block the sun...

DESOTO INTO MABILA

...We arrived at Mavila one day at nine in the morning. It was a small and very strongly palisaded town and was situated on a plain. There were some Indian houses on the outside of the palisade, but we found that the Indians had demolished all of them to the ground in order to have the field more clear. Some important Indians came forth to us upon seeing us and asked the Governor, through the interpreter, whether he wished to spend the night there on that plain or if he wished to enter within the town and said that in the afternoon they would give us the Indians for the burdens. It seemed to the Governor that it was better to enter in the town with them, and he commanded us all to enter in there, and so we did it.
Having entered within, we were walking with the Indians, chatting, as if we had them in peace, because only three hundred or four hundred appeared there, but there were a good five thousand Indians in the town, hidden in the houses. We did not see them, nor did the Indians appear. As they made festivity for us, they began to do their dances and songs. In order to dissemble, they had fifteen or twenty women dance in front of us. After they had danced a little while, the cacique arose and entered one of those houses. The Governor sent a message for him to come outside, and he said that he did not wish to. The Captain of the Governor's guard entered to bring him out, and he saw so many people within, and so ready for war, that he thought it a good idea to go out and leave him, and he said to the Governor that those houses were full of Indians, all with bows and arrows, ready to do some treachery.
The Governor called to another Indian who was passing by there, who likewise refused to come. A nobleman who found himself alongside him seized him by the arm in order to bring him, and then he [the Indian] gave a pull that set himself free. Then he [the nobleman] put hand to his sword and gave him a slash that cut off an arm. Upon wounding this Indian, all began to shoot arrows at us, some from within the houses, through many loopholes that they had made, and others from outside. As we were so unprepared because we thought that we had met them in peace, we suffered so much damage that we were forced to leave, fleeing from the town, and all that the Indians brought us in our loads remained within, as they had unloaded it there. When the Indians saw us outside, they closed the gates of the town and began to beat their drums and to raise banners with a great yell, and to open our trunks and bundles and display from the top of the wall all that we had brought, since they had it in their possession.
As soon as we left the town, we mounted our horses and encircled the entire town, so that the Indians might not get away from us on any side, and the Governor decided that sixty or eighty of us should dismount, those of us who were best armed, and that we should form ourselves in four squads and assault the town on four sides, and that the first to enter should set fire to the houses, so that they might not do us more damage from within, and that we should give the horses to other soldiers who were not armed, so that if some Indians should come forth from the town in order to flee, they might overtake them. We entered within the town and set fire, where a quantity of Indians were burned, and all our supplies were burned, so that not one thing remained.
We fought that day until it was night, without one Indian surrendering to us, rather they fought like fierce lions. Of those who came out, we killed them all, some with the fire, others with the swords, others with the lances.
Later, near nightfall, only three Indians remained, and they took those twenty women that they had brought to dance and placed them in front of themselves. The women crossed their hands, making signs to the Christians that they should take them. The Christians came to take them, and they turned aside, and the three Indians who were behind them shot arrows at the Christians. We killed two of the Indians, and one who remained alone, in order not to surrender to us, climbed a tree that was in the wall itself, and removed the cord from the bow and attached it to his neck and to a branch of the tree and hanged himself.
This day the Indians killed more than twenty of our men, and two hundred and fifty of us escaped with wounds, for we had seven hundred and sixty arrow wounds. We treated ourselves that night with the adipose tissue of the dead Indians themselves, since we had no other medicine, because all had burned that day. We stayed here treating ourselves twenty-seven or twenty-eight days, and thank God we all healed. We took the women and divided them among the most seriously wounded, in order that they might serve them.
We heard through news from the Indians that we were up to forty leagues from the sea. Many wished that the Governor would go to the sea, because they (the Indians) gave us news of the brigantines, but he did not dare, for the month of November was already half over and it was very cold, and he felt it advisable to look for a land where he might find provisions in order to be able to winter. In this (land) there were none, because it was a land of little food.
We turned again north and walked ten or twelve days' journey, with great hardship from cold and from waters that we crossed on foot, until...

DESOTO INTO TENNESSEE

...we arrived at a province, well-provisioned and with plenty of food, where we could halt while the fury of the winter passed, because more snows fell there than in Castille.
Having arrived at this province of Chicasa, the Indian warriors came forth to defend a crossing of a river that we had to cross, and they detained us there three days. In the end we crossed in a piragua that we made, and all the Indians fled to the woods. After seven or eight days, messengers from the cacique came to the Governor, saying that he and all his people wanted to come to serve us. The Governor received him well and sent a message for him to come in any case, and that he would give them many of the things he had brought.
The cacique came and brought many Indians, who carried him on their shoulders. He brought us some little dogs and hides of deer. The cacique remained with us, and the other Indians went away again. Each day Indians went and came and brought many rabbits and whatever they could have in the land, and also at night some Indians were captured, who, under the pretense of being at peace, came to see the manner in which we slept and how we guarded ourselves.
Unaware of the treachery that they had intended, we told the cacique that we wished to depart the next day in order to continue our journey. He went away, and that night he came upon us, and as they already knew where we had placed our sentries, more than three hundred Indians entered in the town without the sentries detecting them, two by two and four by four, with some little jars [ollillasj in which they brought fire, in order not to be noticed or seen. At the time that the other Indians were arriving, the sentries de- tected the throng of people, and they sounded the call to arms; already these others had set fire to one [house] in the town. They did us very great damage and killed that night fifty-seven horses and more than three hundred hogs and thirteen or fourteen men, and it was a great mystery of God why, without our resisting them or doing a thing, the Indians turned to flee and left us, because if they had pursued us, not a man of all of us would have escaped.
We then moved from there to a cabin, which was about one league from there. We found out that the Indians had decided to return that night upon us, except that thanks to God it rained a little, so that because of the water they abandoned their plan. We were so poorly supplied that although we still had some horses, we had neither saddle, nor lance, nor shield, because all had burned. Here we hurried to make shields and lances and saddles, as best we could and knew how. After five days the Indians, their squadrons formed with much order, turned again upon us and came to strike on three sides. As we were now more watchful, we detected them and came forth to them and routed them and did them some damage, so that thanks to God they did not return any more. We were here about two months, making what we had need of in the way of saddles and lances and shields, and then we departed toward the northwest for another province that is called Alibamo.
Here something happened to us that they say has never happened in the Indies, which was that in the middle of the road where we were to pass, without having food to defend nor women to guard there, but rather only to prove themselves against us, they made a very strong barricadelr of poles in the middle of the road, and about three hundred Indians placed themselves there, with determination to die before they relinquished it.
As they saw us appear, some Indians came forth from the barricade to shoot arrows at us and threaten us that no man would remain alive. From this we considered that barricade differently, and with the people that defended it, we believed they had some food there or something that they were guarding, of which we had much need, because we were expecting to cross an uninhabited region of twelve days' duration, in all of which there was not one thing to eat, except what we carried there. About forty of us dismounted and placed ourselves on two sides, so that at the sound of a trumpet we would charge the barricade all at once. We did it thus and entered, although we suffered some damage, for they killed seven or eight men and wounded twenty-five or twenty-six of us. We captured some Indians and others we killed, and we found out from them that they had done that only with the intent of proving themselves against us, and for no other purpose.
We looked for food there, although with difficulty, in order to enter into our uninhabited region. We walked through it for twelve days with great labor, because of the wounded and sick that we were carrying.

DESOTO INTO KENTUCKY

We arrived one day at midday at a town that is called Quizquiz, so unexpectedly that they had no news of us. The Indian men were gone to do their labors at their cornfields. We captured more than three hundred women who were in the town and the pittance of hides and blankets that they had in their houses.
Here we found the first little walnuts of the land, which are much better than those from here in Spain. This town was near the river of Espiritu Santo. They told us that this and other towns there pay tribute to a lord of Pacaha, who was well known in all the land.
When they found out that we had taken those women, they came to us in peace and asked the Governor to give them back. The Governor did so and asked them to give us some canoes in order to cross that large river, and they said that they would give them to us, but they never did it. Rather, they gathered together in order to make war on us and came within view of the town where we were, but in the end they did not dare to assault us and turned back. We left that town and went to make camp on the bank of the river in order to organize how to cross it. We saw that on the other side was a great number of people ready to defend the crossing against us, and they had many canoes. We decided to make four large piraguas, so that each one of them would be able to carry sixty or seventy men and five or six horses. It took us twenty-seven or twenty-eight days to make these piraguas.
During this time the Indians each day at the hour of three in the afternoon placed themselves in two hundred and fifty canoes that they had there, very large and well shielded [muy empavesadas], and drew near the other shore where we were with a great yell. They shot all the arrows that they could and returned to the other bank. When they saw that we already had our boats ready to cross, they all fled and left the crossing undefended. In good order, we crossed the river, which was almost a league wide and nineteen or twenty brazas deep...

[DES: This was Biedma's last statement of distance measure, in leagues or any other unit, in his account. It's interesting to note that this occured at the Ohio River crossing.]

DESOTO INTO INDIANA

...On the other bank we found some good towns. We went up the river, because in order to go to that province of Pacaha we had to turn upriver.
Before we got to it, we arrived at another province of another lord, who was named Ycasqui, with whom he [Pacaha] was always at war. This cacique came forth in peace, telling us that he had been hearing of us for a long time, and that he knew that we were men from heaven and that their arrows could not do us harm, and that therefore they wanted no war with us, but rather wanted to serve us. The Governor received them very well and refused to let any soldiers enter in his town, so that they might not do it any damage, and we made camp on a plain in view of the town of the cacique. We were there two days.
The day that we arrived, the cacique spoke with the Governor, telling him that he knew that he was a man from heaven, and since he had to continue onward, he should leave a sign indicating whom he could ask for help for his wars, and whom his people could ask for water for their fields, because they were in great need of it, since their children were dying of hunger. The Governor commanded that they should make a cross of two very tall pines, and he told him that he should return the next day, that he would give him the sign of heaven that he asked him for, and that he should believe that he would lack nothing if he had true faith in it. The next day the cacique returned to us, saying many things because we delayed so much in giving him the sign that he had asked for, since he was so willing to serve us and follow us, and he made there such a great lament because they did not give it so quickly that he made us all weep from seeing the devotion and insistence with which he requested it. The Governor commanded that he and all his Indians should return in the afternoon and told him that we would go to his town and bring him the sign that he had requested.
He came in the afternoon with all his people. We went in procession up to the town, and they came after us. Having arrived at the town, we found that the caciques there were accustomed to have, next to the houses where they live, some very high mounds [cerros), made by hand, and that others have their houses on the mounds themselves. On the summit of that mound we drove in the cross, and we all went with much devotion, kneeling to kiss the foot of the cross. The Indians did as they saw us do, neither more nor less. They brought a great quantity of canes [canizos] and made a wall around it. We returned to our camp that night.
The next day in the morning we traveled toward Pacaha, which was upriver. We walked two days, and then we saw the town on a plain, well palisaded and with a moat of water around it, dug by hand. We drew as near to the town as we could. When we were near, we halted, because we dared not enter in it, and walking around on one side and another, we saw that on one side many people were fleeing. Then we assailed the town and entered without any defense. Very few people were taken, because all had already fled.
They were unable to keep the pittance that they had in a safe place, and all of it remained in the town. While we were halted in view of the town, because we dared not enter, we saw coming at our back a large squadron of Indians.
We thought that it was people who were coming to the aid of the town, and we went toward them and found that it was the cacique we had left behind, where We had placed the cross. They were coming after us to aid us if we should need it.
We led him to the town, and he began to give so many thanks to the Governor for the cross that he had left him, saying that it had rained a great deal in his land the day before, and that all his people were so content that they did not wish to leave us but rather to go away with us. The Governor placed him in the town and gave him all that we found in it, which is much wealth for them, including some beads that there are of snail shells from the sea and some small hides of cats and buckskin, and some corn that there was in the town, with which he sent him away happy to his land.

SCOUTS TO LAKE MICHIGAN at CHICAGO

We were in this town twenty-seven or twenty-eight days to see if we could have a road north in order to traverse to the South Sea [the Pacific Ocean]. From here some excursions were made to capture Indians who might inform us. One expedition in particular was made to the northwest, because they told us that there were large villages through which we could go. But we traveled eight days through an uninhabited land of very great swampy lakes, where we did not even find trees, but rather some great plains, where was grass so tall and so strong that even with the horses we could not force our way through it. At the end of this time, we arrived at some Indian settlements [ranchos] that were covered with sewn reeds [enea cosidal. When they wish to carry them away, they roll up the reeds of the covering and an Indian man carries it, and the woman carries the framework of poles over which it is placed, and it is set up and taken down so easily that even if they moved every hour they could carry their houses with them.
We found out from these Indians that there were some little settlements [ranchuelosl of that sort across the land, and all they did was set up their house where there were many deer, or on a swamp where there were many f ish, and when they had frightened away the game and could not catch fish as easily as at first, they moved from there with their houses and all that and went away to another place where they could find fresh game. This province was called Caluci; they were people that paid little attention to sowing, because they maintained themselves on this fish and meat.
We returned to this town of Pacaha, where the Governor remained, and we found that the cacique had now come in peace. He was there in the town with him, and at this time the other cacique came from back where we had placed the cross. It was something to see, seeing both the caciques together, who were enemies. The Governor commanded each one of them to sit at his side. It was a marvelous thing what each one went through to win the right hand from the other.
Having seen that there was no road to traverse to the other sea, we turned south and returned with the cacique to where we had placed the cross, and from there we headed southwest...
(this writer mentions DeSoto's search for this "sea" one more time)

DESOTO INTO SOUTHERN ILLINOIS

...to another province which is called Quiguate. This was the largest town that we found in Florida; it was on a branch of the great river. Here we tarried eight or nine days to look for interpreters and guides, still with the intention, if we were able, to traverse to the other sea, because the Indians told us that eleven days from there was a province where they killed some cows, and that from there we would learn of interpreters in order to cross to the other sea.
We departed with these guides for that province, which is called Coligua, without any road, but rather they led us each night straight to some swamps of water from which we might drink, where we found a quantity of fish. We traveled over much flat land and other land of rugged mountains, and we struck pointblank at the town of Coligua, as if they led us by royal road, seeing that in all their life no man had passed through there. We found much food in this land and a great quantity of tanned cow tails and others for tanning. We inquired about a road in the direction we were heading and whether there was any village in that district, far or near. They were never able to tell us anything except that if we wished to travel where there might be a village, we had to turn west-southwest.

DESOTO INTO MISSOURI

We turned again to where the Indians guided us, and we went to some scattered villages that were called Tatilcoya. Here we found a large river, and afterward we saw that it flowed into the great river [the Mississippi]. We had information that on this river upstream was a great province called Cayas. We went to it and found that it was all scattered population, though heavy, and several excursions were made. The land is very rugged with mountains.
An excursion was made in which the cacique and many people were apprehended. When we asked for news of the land, they told us that if we went upriver, we would come upon a well-provisioned province that was called Tula. The governor wished to go see if it was a place where the people could winter, and he went with twenty on horseback. He left all the rest in this province of Cayas.
Before arriving at the province of Tula, we crossed some rugged mountains and arrived at the town without their having heard anything of us. We began to apprehend some Indians, and they began to call to arms and make war on us. They wounded that day nine or ten horses and seven or eight Spaniards, and such was their ferocity that they joined together, eight by eight and ten by ten, and came at us like wounded dogs. We killed about thirty or forty Indians. It seemed to the Governor that it was not good to halt there that night, because he led very few people, and he returned by the road on which we had come to a clearing in a lowland that the river made, having crossed a bad pass of the mountain range because there was fear that the Indians might take us at that pass.
The next day he arrived where his people were, and there were none of those Indians we had brought, nor did he find in that province Indians who could understand the interpreter. He commanded that all should prepare to travel to that province [of Tula]. We then went there. The day after we arrived, three very large squadrons of Indians came upon us at dawn, on three sides. We came forth to them and routed them and did them some damage, as a result of which they attacked us no more.
After two or three days, they sent the messengers as if in peace. Although we did not understand one thing for lack of the interpreter, through signs we told them that they should bring us interpreters for those [Indians] behind us, and they brought us five or six Indians who understood the interpreters that we brought. They asked us what people we were and what we were looking for. We asked them about some large provinces where there would be much food, because already the cold of the winter was greatly menacing us. They told us that the way that we were going, they knew of not one large village. They pointed out to us that if we wanted to turn east and southeast or northwest that we would find large villages.

DESOTO INTO ARKANSAS

Having seen that we did not have any other choice, we turned again southeast and went to a province called Quipana, which is at the foot of some very rugged mountains, and here we went east and traversed these mountains and descended to some plains, where we found a village suited for our purpose, because there was a town nearby that had much food, and it was on a large river that ended at the great river by which we left.
This province was called Viranque. Here we spent the winter. There were such great snows and cold weather that we thought we were dead men. In this town died the Christian who had been one of Narvaez's men, whom we had found in the land and taken along as interpreter. We left from here at the beginning of March, since it appeared to us that the fury of the cold weather had abated, and we traveled downstream along that river...

DESOTO INTO SOUTHERN ARKANSAS

...where we found other well-populated provinces with a quantity of supplies, until we arrived at a province that seemed to us to be one of the best that we had come upon in all the land, which is called Anicoyanque.
Here another cacique, who was named Guachoyanque, came to us in peace. He has his village on the large river and wages much war with this other [province] where we were. The Governor departed then for this other town of Guachoyanque and took the cacique with him. It was a good town, well palisaded and strong. It had little food, because the Indians had hidden it all.
Here the Governor was already determined, if he were to find the sea, to make brigantines in order to send word to Cuba that we were alive, so that they might provide us with some horses and the things that we had need of. He sent the captain south to see if he could discover some road to go to look for the sea, because from the account of the Indians nothing could be found out about what there might be, and he returned saying that he did not find a road nor a way to cross the large swamps along the great river. The Governor, from seeing himself cut off and seeing that not one thing could be done according to his purpose, was afflicted with sickness and died.
The Governor dead, he left Luis de Moscoso appointed as Governor. We decided that since we could not find a road to the sea, we should head west, and that it could be that we might be able to get out by land to Mexico, if we did not find anything else in the land or any place to halt...
Army Returns to Arkansas

DESOTO's ARMY INTO LOUISIANA

...We walked seventeen days' journey until we arrived at a province of Chavete, where the Indians made much salt; we did not find out anything about the west. From here we went to another province that is called Aguacay. We spent another three days' journey getting there (to Aguacay), still going straight west.
From here the Indians told us that we could not find more villages, but rather that we should descend southwest and south, because there we would find villages and food, and that going the way that we asked about there were some great stretches of sand [arenales grandes], and neither villages nor any food.
Army Returns to Louisiana

DESOTO'S ARMY INTO TEXAS

We had to return where the Indians guided us, and we went to a province that is called Nisione, and another that is called Nandacao, and another that is called Lacame, and across land more and more sterile and with less food. We went along asking about a province that they told us was large, which was called Xuacatino. This cacique of Nondacao gave us an Indian to guide us, with the intent of placing us where we could never get out, and so he guided us across rugged land and off road, until finally he told us that he no longer knew where he was leading us, and that his lord had commanded him to lead us where we would die of hunger..
We took another guide who led us to a province that is called Hais, where cows are in the habit of gathering at times, and as the Indians saw us enter through their land, they began to cry out that they should kill the cows that were coming; they came forth to shoot arrows at us and did us some dam- age. We departed from here and arrived at the province of Xacatin, which was among some dense forests and lacked food. From here the Indians guided us east to other towns, which were small and had little food, saying that they were leading us to where there were other Christians like us. It seemed afterward to be a lie and that they could not have news of any others but us; since we had made so many turns, in some of these they must have heard of our passing.
We turned south again, with purpose of living or dying or traversing to New Spain, and we walked about six days' journey south and southwest. There we halted and sent ten men on swift horses to travel eight or nine days, or as many as they were able, to see if they could find some town in order to replenish the corn so we could - continue on our way, and they traveled as far as they could and came upon some poor people who did not have houses, but rather some miserable little settlements where they situated themselves, and they neither sowed nor gathered anything but rather maintained themselves only on fish and meat.
They brought three or four of these Indians. We found no one who could understand the interpreter...
Army's Escape Along Coastal Texas

ARMY RETREATS FROM TEXAS BACK TO ARKANSAS

...Having seen that we had lost the interpreter and that we found nothing to eat, that we were now lacking the corn that we had carried on our backs, and that it was [impossible] for so many people to traverse so miserable a land, we decided to return to the town where Governor Soto had died, because there it seemed to us that it was possible to fashion vessels to leave the land. We returned along that same road that we had followed until we arrived at the town where the Governor had died.
Having arrived here, we did not find as good provisions as we thought, because we did not find food in the town, since the Indians had hidden it. We had to look for another town in order to be able to winter and fashion the ships. Thank God we discovered two towns much to our purpose that were on the great river and had a great quantity of corn and were palisaded, and there we halted and built our ships with much labor. We made seven brigantines and spent six months in finishing them...

DESOTO'S ARMY ESCAPES DOWNSTREAM

...We cast off the brigantines in the river, and it was a thing of mystery that even though they were caulked only with the bark of those mulberry trees and without any pitch, we found them watertight and very good. We towed some canoes downriver with us in which we carried twenty-six horses, so that if at the seacoast we should find some village that could sustain us with food, from there we would send a pair of brigantines to give a message to the Viceroy of New Spain, so that he might provide us ships in which we could leave the land.
The second day that we were going downriver, there came forth to us about forty or fifty very large and swift canoes of Indians, among which there was a canoe that carried eighty Indian warriors, and they began to shoot arrows at us and pursue us, shooting more arrows at us. It seemed to some of those in our ships that it was cowardly not to attack them, and they took four or five small canoes of those that we were towing and went toward the canoes of the Indians, who, as soon as they saw them, encircled them as best they could and would not let them leave from among them. They upset the canoes in the water, and thus they killed this day twelve very honorable men, because we could not aid them, since the current of the river was so great and we had few oars in our ships. With this victory, the Indians came following us downriver, until we arrived at the sea, which took nineteen days' journey. They did us much damage and wounded many people, because since they saw that we did not have arms with which to do them damage from a distance, for we no longer had either arquebus or crossbow but only some swords and shields, they now had lost their fear and drew very near to shoot arrows at us.

DESOTO'S ARMY AT THE MOUTH OF THE MISSISSIPPI RIVER

We came forth to the sea through the mouth of the river and went across a bay that the river makes, so large that we navigated three days and three nights with reasonable weather, and in all that time we did not see land. It seemed to us that we were far out at sea, and at the end of these three days and three nights we gathered water as fresh as from the river, which was good to drink. We saw some little islets toward the southwest side, and we went to them, and from there we went along the coast, gathering shellfish and looking for things to eat, until we entered the river of Panuco, where we were very well received by the Christians.

LUYS HERNANDEZ DE BIEDMA

Thursday, February 5, 2015

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 1: How Dogma Trumped Science

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 2: Racism, Eugenics and When Natives Came to America

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 4: The Indisputable Facts in the Artifacts

Bering Strait Theory, Pt. 5: The Theory Comes Crashing Down

Read more

Related Stories

Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Beyond Angkor: How lasers revealed a lost city

Find out more

Saturday, March 22, 2014

1 LEAGUE = 2.6 STATUATE MILES

RELATION OF THE ISLAND OF FLORIDAby Luys Hernandez de Biedma with the Hernando de Soto Expedition

SCOUTS TO LAKE MICHIGAN at CHICAGO

Search This Blog

RELATION OF THE ISLAND OF FLORIDA
by Luys Hernandez de Biedma with the Hernando de Soto Expedition