Hernando de Soto

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Hernando de Soto in a portrait from 1881

Hernando de Soto (* approx. 1496 or 1500 in Barcarrota or Jerez de los Caballeros , Extremadura ; † May 21, 1542 probably on the Mississippi River a few kilometers downstream from present-day Memphis ) was a Spanish navigator and conquistador . He participated in the conquest of Panama and Nicaragua , conquered Peru together with Francisco Pizarro and later led the largest expedition of the 16th and 17th centuries through the southeastern part of what is now the USA .

Childhood and youth

De Soto's date of birth is not certain. He described himself in 1535 as “about 35 years old”, but as early as 1536 as “around 40.” The fact that de Soto set off for the “New World” in 1514 according to reliable sources speaks in favor of the date of birth 1500, and that it was 14- In what was then Spain, it was common to leave the parental home. De Soto was the second son of a total of four children of the poor country gentleman Francisco Méndez de Soto and Leonor Arias Tinoco and could not hope to inherit any of his father's small fortune. His ancestors consisted of hidalgos and small Spanish nobles; the most famous of these was Pedro Ruiz de Soto, who recaptured Seville from the Moors during the Reconquista . De Soto grew up in the barren, poor and formerly contested border region to the Muslim kingdom of Granada , the Extremadura, which is described in Spanish vernacular as "nine months of winter, three months of hell". Many Spanish conquistadors such as Hernán Cortés , Francisco Pizarro or Vasco Núñez de Balboa also come from this province.

Journey to the new world and career

In 1514, de Soto Pedrarias accompanied Dávila to the Spanish overseas colonies and ended up in Panama with nothing but a sword and a shield. In 1516 he became the commander of a cavalry unit and in this role accompanied Francisco Hernández de Córdoba on his journey of discovery and colonization through Nicaragua and Honduras . During this time, De Soto acquired a reputation as an excellent tactician, fighter and rider, who used the greatest brutality and ruthlessness in contact with the locals. In the dispute for rule in Nicaragua de Soto fought for Dávila against Gil González Dávila . González, a former officer of Dávila, had tried to break away from him. De Soto reported the treason to Dávila and defeated an army of González, with the result that Dávila was able to secure the rule and de Soto rose in his favor. In 1528 he single-handedly led an expedition up the coast of Yucatán in the hope of finding a sea connection between the Atlantic and the Pacific .

He gained his wealth mainly in the slave trade . At that time he already owned large estates in the Spanish colonies, gold mines, merchant ships and numerous slaves. But he himself had apparently set himself the goal of achieving a success like Hernán Cortés in his conquest of the Aztec empire .

In 1532 he accompanied Francisco Pizarro as his direct representative in the operation against Peru and scouted the country. De Soto discovered the city of Cajas , where his men raped the Inca virgins of the Sun Temple. With a group of 50 men he later discovered the road to the capital of the Inca empire Cuzco and was the first European to speak to the Inca king Atahualpa . After he was defeated and imprisoned at the Battle of Cajamarca , he visited him several times in custody and a friendship developed. De Soto was annoyed at the news of Atahualpa's execution and finally fell out with Pizarro over the redivision of the Andean Empire between the conquistadors. In 1536 he returned to Spain with around 100,000 gold pesos in his luggage , his share from the conquest of the Inca Empire. De Soto was famous and considered a hero. He settled in Seville. There he married Dávila's daughter Inés de Bobadilla in 1537, from one of the most respected families in Castile with good connections to the Spanish royal court. De Soto was a respected and well-known man in Spain at the height of his reputation and wealth.

De Soto, who had seen the fabulous riches in Peru, suspected something similar from Florida based on the report by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca . Cabeza de Vaca was a participant in the failed expedition from Pánfilo de Narváez to Florida. Narváez's attempt at conquest, carried out with the utmost ruthlessness, ended in disaster, with only four of 400 men surviving. De Soto saw his chance to do the same as Pizarro and Cortés. He was inspired by Charles V to the governor of Cuba and Adelantado of La Florida (in the former parlance: all the land north of Mexico ) Order, sold all his property and paid with the proceeds of an expedition to the unexplored land. His mission was to "conquer, populate and pacify the as yet unknown region within four years ."

Expedition to Florida 1538–1542

Itinerary

De Soto's expedition in Florida, after Charles Hudson, 1997

The exact course of the expedition de Sotos is the subject of historical and local political discussions. The main source is the journals left by the Spaniards. In addition to the usual criticism of sources , which must be applied in such cases, further problems arise in de Soto's case. The Spaniards were ignorant in the country, communication with the locals often went through a chain of interpreters , so there is a high risk that place names and personal names were transmitted incorrectly. In addition, numerous guides and contact persons had a self-interest in leading the expedition astray. The most widespread version, which is also taught in the form in American schools, goes back to a report of the US Congress under the leadership of the anthropologist John R. Swanton from 1939.

While the first part of the route up to the battle at Mabila is only disputed in terms of details, the stretches that the Spaniards perceive as wrong turns are becoming more unclear, especially since at that time they hardly had any equipment that could have provided archaeologically usable traces today . The traditionally assumed De Soto Trail runs west-northwest over today's US states Mississippi , Arkansas and Oklahoma to Texas .

Much of Swanton's data is now considered obsolete. In 1990, the US National Park Administration announced a design for a new De Soto Trail , based on research by anthropologist Charles M. Hudson, which is now widely recognized as the Hudson Route . This redefinition led to a storm of protest in many counties and parishes, which attributed a large part of their local patriotic self- image to the conquistador. While Florida and Alabama adapted the route markings to the new findings, other states continue to stick to Swanton's route.

Other theories assume an even more northerly route via Kentucky and Indiana to the Great Lakes .

1538 - On the way / Cuba

De Soto headed for Cuba first after a stopover in the Canary Islands . The city of Havana was looted and burned by French pirates shortly before his arrival . De Soto had his men rebuild it while he himself continued to gather supplies, horses and men for his expedition to Florida. He landed with about 600 to 700 men (including 24 priests), nine ships and 220 horses in May 1539 on the west coast of Florida in Tampa Bay , called by de Soto Espiritu Santo . He intended to colonize the area, preferably from a city like Cuzco or Mexico City . He therefore brought tons of equipment, tools, weapons, cannons, dogs and pigs with him. The dogs in particular, mostly Irish wolfhounds , became feared weapons and punitive instruments of the army in the course of the campaign. In addition to the seamen, priests, blacksmiths, craftsmen, engineers, farmers and traders accompanied the entourage . Many of them had hardly left their home village before the expedition, let alone seen anything outside of Spain.

At the same time, the Mexican viceroy Antonio de Mendoza sent an expedition under Francisco Vásquez de Coronado up the Pacific coast to what is now California . De Soto saw his claim to La Florida in danger. During his entire trip he was under pressure to discover the fabulous treasures and suitable settlement areas in front of Coronado.

1539 - landing in Florida

From the "Espiritu Santo" began the exploration of Florida and a large part of today's southern states. His misfortune began in Florida itself. The land was not full of gold , but mostly swampy , full of mosquitoes and extremely humid. The Indian labor slaves they brought with them aroused the anger of the local tribes .

The locals had already had bad experiences with the earlier Pánfilo de Narváez ' expedition . De Soto's troops were brutal towards the locals and tried to capture Indians as workers and leaders, raped women and abused children and always robbed the villages in search of food for people and animals. He often had the villages burned down or put a Christian cross on the holy places of the Indians as a sign of farewell. In addition to working slaves and leaders, the Spaniards often kidnapped the tribal chiefs in order to ensure safe conduct.

The most important helper of the troops was Juan Ortiz , who had come into the country with the Narváez expedition and was captured by the Uzica . He was the only one of four Spanish prisoners who had survived his stay with the Uzica, which involved severe torture. Ortiz joined the new Spanish expedition at the earliest opportunity he could. He was knowledgeable about the area and served as an interpreter. Another important guide was Perico, a boy of around 17, from what is now Georgia , who spoke several languages ​​of the local tribes and was also able to communicate with Ortiz. Perico was hired as a leader in 1540 and apparently treated a little better than the rest of the slaves because of his value to the Spaniards. After a march north, the expedition set up their first winter camp in Anheica, the capital of the Apalachee . It was near what is now Tallahassee . The point at Tallahassee is the only one on the entire route that archaeologists are certain that de Soto's expedition was actually exactly here.

1540 - To the north, the Battle of Mauvila

The expedition traveled north along the eastern Appalachian Mountains , leaving a trail of devastation in the process. With some tribes they exchanged food for some specimens from their herd of pigs, with others they tried to use force to get what they needed. They crossed what is now Georgia , South Carolina and North Carolina . In response to the stories of the Cofitachequi's great gold treasure and accompanied by the Ocute from Georgia, who were enemies of the Cofitachequi , the expedition headed north. In mid-May, after weeks of hunger and thirst marches, during which it turned out that neither Perico nor the Ocute knew their way around the tribal area of ​​the Cofitachequi, the expedition finally found the capital of the tribe near present-day Camden , South Carolina, in mid-May . The Spaniards received a relatively friendly welcome, even though they had pillaged and sacked several Cofitachequi villages on the way, and they immediately asked to see the gold. On closer inspection, the “gold” turns out to be copper . The Spaniards found pearls and weapons in the city, took the young and, according to the sources, extremely charismatic leader of the tribe hostage, and moved on in search of wealth through what is now the Carolinas, Georgia and Alabama .

On these largely aimless migrations, they drove false promises of huge gold reserves eastwards. In northern Alabama they encountered the city of Mauvila (according to other sources: Mabila , Mavila , Mavilla , Mauvilla ). The Choctaw under Chief Tascalusa lured them into an ambush in the main square of the heavily fortified city. The Spaniards fought their way free and then attacked the city again and again. In a nine-hour battle , almost all Spaniards were injured, 20 of them killed, and another 20 died of their injuries in the next few days. All of the Chocktaw warriors in the area, between 2000 and 6000, died in battle, in fire, as a result of Spanish executions or by suicide ; Mauvila burned down. The Spanish won in the end, but they had also lost most of their property and 40 horses. They stood injured, sick and almost without equipment in the middle of an unknown land, surrounded by enemies. After the skirmish in Mauvila, the locals' respect for the expedition decreased noticeably, and the Spaniards were increasingly victims of attacks and guerrilla actions . Although his men had lost heart by this point and wanted to go to the coast to meet the expected ships from Cuba, de Soto still had the urge to discover. The expedition wintered in Chicasa in what is now Mississippi .

Discovery of the Mississippi - A romanticizing painting by George William Powell from 1847 hanging in the Capitol rotunda

1541 - Demoralized to the west

The expedition turned north again inland, where they soon met the Chickasaw tribe . De Soto asked the Chickasaw to carry 200 men to carry the equipment for the expedition. They refused the request and attacked the sleeping Spanish camp that night. Again they suffered heavy losses. About 40 Spaniards were killed, this time the remains of the equipment were also lost. According to the Spaniards involved, their expedition could have been destroyed. Fortunately for the entourage, the Chickasaw had let him go. On May 8, 1541, De Soto's decimated troops met the Mississippi . It is unclear whether De Soto was really the first European to see the great river, as has been handed down, but he is the first to document this in official journals. De Soto, however, showed less interest in the river and its discovery, but saw it primarily as an obstacle that hindered him in his pursuit of success. He had to bring about 400 men over a wide, turbulent river, along which Indians were constantly patrolling in search of him. After spending a month on the bank to build several rafts, they crossed the Mississippi westward and roamed the area west of the river in what is now Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. They set up their winter camp in Autiamque on the Arkansas River.

1542 - De Soto's death

After a harsh winter, in which, unusual for the area, it even snowed, the Spanish troop set out and moved on aimlessly. Meanwhile, the only Spaniard who was halfway familiar with the area, Juan Ortiz, had died. The Spaniards returned to the Mississippi defeated and demoralized. De Soto died on May 21, 1542 of a febrile illness on the bank of the river. Since he had spread among the local people that Christians were immortal, his men felt compelled to hide his death. They hid the body in blankets weighed down with sand and sank it in the river. While Spain and Portugal could be crossed by an experienced hiker in less than a month, de Soto's expedition traveled through La Florida for four years without finding the treasures they were looking for or a starting point for a successful colonization. The men broke off the expedition. After more than a year of further wrong turns, they finally came back to Mexico on Spanish territory via the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico . On the way back on the Mississippi, they were violently attacked by the Natchez and other tribes that had now united against the Spaniards. Of the original 700 participants in the expedition, 311 arrived in Mexico.

Aftermath

Monument in Barcarrota ( Badajoz Province ), Spain

De Soto's trip to Florida was a fatal disaster. They had earned neither gold nor riches, established no colonies, and the expedition's reputation at the time was closer to Don Quixote's than that of Hernán Cortés. Still, it had numerous aftereffects.

On the one hand, the de Soto expedition left its mark on the area traveled. Some of the conquerors' runaway and stolen horses formed part of the basis of the later North American herds of Mustangs . The expedition contributed significantly to the fact that the relationship between Indians and Europeans in this area was marked by violence and mutual distrust from the start. Even more devastating than the bloody battles were the diseases that the expedition brought with it and that downright depopulated parts of the area in the decades that followed. As early as the decade after his expedition, the locals left many of the disease-ridden cities and fled to nearby hills or swamps, which fundamentally changed the structure of society there. According to Jared Diamond , however, these processes began before de Soto's arrival, who repeatedly encountered abandoned settlements: the pathogens of the Spaniards had traveled faster than they did themselves.

The records handed down from the expedition also contributed a lot to the geographical, biological and ethnological knowledge of the area in Europe at the time. In particular, the descriptions by the Indians are the earliest written source of the living conditions in the south-east of today's USA. It is in fact the only European description of the way of life there before meeting other Europeans. De Soto's men were both the first and the last Europeans to see the flowering of the Mississippi culture . In addition, the expedition, together with the Coronados, also made a significant contribution to redefining Spain's attitude towards its colonies north of Mexico. De Soto created a de jure claim to large areas of land for the Spanish Crown, but in fact their missions concentrated primarily on today's state of Florida and the Pacific coast.

Today's DeSoto County in Mississippi and DeSoto Counties and Hernando Counties in Florida are named after him. He landed in Hernando County, but he probably died in DeSoto County, Mississippi. The De Soto National Memorial near Saint Petersburg , Florida, has existed since 1948 . Numerous cities in the USA and the former DeSoto automobile brand are also named after the discoverer. For this see De Soto .

literature

  • Lawrence A. Clayton, Vernon J. Knight, Edward C. Moore (Eds.): The de Soto Chronicles. The Expedition of Hernando de Soto to North America in 1539-1543. University of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa 1996. ISBN 0-8173-0824-5
    (Complete edition of the collected records of the expedition).
  • David Ewing Duncan: Hernando de Soto: A Savage Quest in the Americas. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman 1997. ISBN 0-8061-2977-8
    (A literary, but nonetheless scientific, methodological biography with a focus on Florida)
  • Tony Horwitz : It wasn't Columbus: The true explorers of the New World. marebuchverlag 2008, ISBN 3-86648-093-8 . Alternative Title: The True Explorers of the New World: From the Vikings to the Pilgrim Fathers . Piper Paperback 2010, ISBN 3-492-25462-4
  • Vitus Huber: The Conquistadors. Cortés, Pizarro and the conquest of America . CH Beck, Munich 2019 ISBN 978-3-406-73429-8
  • Charles M. Hudson: Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun: Hernando De Soto and the South's Ancient Chiefdoms . University of Georgia Press, 1997. ISBN 0-8203-1888-4
  • Hans-Otto Meissner : The Kaiser is giving me Florida. The adventures of Hernando de Soto (= The adventures of world discovery, Vol. 7). Cotta, Stuttgart 1967, 1970, 1982. ISBN 3-12-920012-6 .
  • Jeralt T. Milanich, Charles R. Ewen, John H. Hann: Hernando de Soto Among the Apalachee. The Archeology of the First Winter Encampment. University Press of Florida, Gainesville 1998. ISBN 0-8130-1557-X
  • John Swanton: Final Report of the United States. De Soto Expedition Commission. USGPO, Washington DC 1939, Prentice Hall & IBD, Washington DC 1987 (repr.). ISBN 0-87474-893-3
    (The report of the US Congress, which to this day serves as the basis for interpreting de Soto's stay in Florida).
  • Garcilaso de la Vega : La Florida del Inca. Historia del adelantado Hernando de Soto. Impresso por P. Crasbeeck, Lisbona 1605, Madrid 1723, Fondo de Cultura Económica, México 1956.
  • Gloria A. Young, Michael Hoffmann (Eds.): The Expedition of Hernando de Soto West of the Mississippi, 1541-1543, Proceedings of the de Soto Symposia, 1988 and 1990. Univ. of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville 1999. ISBN 1-55728-580-2

Various biographies in series such as "Great Explorers", "The Spanish in American History" etc. have also appeared.

Web links

Commons : Hernando de Soto  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Tony Horwitz: The True Discoverers of the New World, p. 290
  2. ^ Donald E. Sheppard: Hernando de Soto's American Conquest.Retrieved July 19, 2013.
  3. Jared Diamond: Rich and poor. The fates of human societies . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1998, p. 252 f.


This article was added to the list of excellent articles on June 5, 2004 in this version .