Primary sources: Cultural Interactions Between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans

Remembered encounter · Spanish and translated English

Aguilar comes ashore at Cozumel: two editions of Díaz

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, recalling events he witnessed on Cozumel · March 1519

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: I · Yo Soy

English translation (1908 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

Cortés sought Spaniards held on the Yucatán mainland. Aguilar arrived at Cozumel looking so much like his Maya companions that the soldiers and then Cortés did not identify him.

Intended audience

Readers of a conquest memoir, including royal officials and fellow veterans; the 1519 questions are addressed to Tapia and answered by Aguilar.

Purpose

To recount the veteran's part in the conquest and preserve episodes and people neglected in rival histories.

Point of view

Díaz was an eyewitness on Cozumel but wrote decades later. He was not present at Guerrero's house. The arrival scene is remembered dialogue, not a transcript. Kneeling, tears, and the soldiers' raised weapons are reconstructed staging, not established by this passage. The adapted label covers the multi-edition presentation and conversion of the Spanish question to direct speech; the cry and answer follow the cited Spanish text.

Díaz, Verdadera historia de los sucesos de la conquista de la Nueva-España, vol. I (Madrid: Imprenta de Tejado, 1862), ch. XXIX, pp. 118–119 (Spanish cry and answer; Gutenberg 64945). English subtitles and description: A. P. Maudslay, trans., The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, vol. I (Hakluyt Society, 1908), ch. XXIX, pp. 100–102. Maudslay prints Dios y Santa Maria de Sevilla. Cortés's Spanish question makes indirect speech direct; its English subtitle is Maudslay's actual wording.

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Reported household exchange · Maudslay 1908

Guerrero refuses the summons; his Maya wife sends Aguilar away

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, reporting Aguilar's account; English by A. P. Maudslay · 1519 encounter

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: I · Yo Soy

In the Exam Room: Question 19

English translation by A. P. Maudslay, 1908

Sourcing

Historical situation

Before Aguilar rejoined Cortés on Cozumel, he visited Guerrero in another Maya town and read the summons. Guerrero had a wife and three children and held a position as war captain.

Intended audience

Aguilar in the remembered encounter; later, the Spanish readers of Díaz's memoir.

Purpose

Díaz contrasts Aguilar's return with Guerrero's decision to stay with his family and describes the wife's refusal of Aguilar's intervention.

Point of view

Two stages of mediation: the wife spoke in her language to Aguilar; Aguilar told the story; Díaz wrote it decades later. Díaz did not witness the household exchange. The wife's name is unrecorded in this account, and her motives beyond the reported words should not be invented. The English excerpt is the edition's words; the in-scene presentation is reported speech and performed with marked cuts and normalized punctuation. Maudslay renders the Spanish oath ‘por vida vuestra’ as ‘for God’s sake’; this is the translator’s wording, not a recovered English utterance.

Díaz, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, trans. A. P. Maudslay, vol. I (London: Hakluyt Society, 1908), ch. XXVII, p. 95; p. 96 identifies Guerrero as a sailor and native of Palos. The excerpt and performance retain the printed spelling tatooed. Marked cuts omit intervening words; capitalization at the start of a cut and punctuation are editorial. The scene performs a reported exchange, not an eyewitness transcript of the household.

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Sermon reported later · Spanish

Montesinos: the mortal-sin charge

Antonio de Montesinos, as reported by Bartolomé de las Casas · Advent 1511

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: II · Are These Not Men?

Sourcing

Historical situation

Santo Domingo's main church, Advent 1511. The Dominican community agreed and signed a sermon condemning coercion and violence toward the Taíno. Diego Colón and the royal officials were invited.

Intended audience

The colonists in the church.

Purpose

To name their treatment of the Indians as mortal sin.

Point of view

A Dominican indictment of colonial violence, preserved by Las Casas decades later. He does not claim to have heard this sermon himself. It asserts Native humanity and obligations of Christian love; it is not a trial to decide whether Native people have souls. No exact December day is asserted: Las Casas's fourth-Sunday description and his Gospel reading produce a dating problem.

Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, lib. III, cap. IV, vol. III, ed. Marqués de la Fuensanta del Valle and José Sancho Rayón (Madrid, 1875), pp. 366–367; Gutenberg 53171. The subtitle is explicitly our English gloss. Excerpt is verbatim Spanish; status records the staged reported-speech presentation.

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Sermon reported later · Henríquez Ureña / Hanke

Montesinos asks the colonists: Are these not men?

Antonio de Montesinos, reported by Las Casas; English by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, reprinted in Lewis Hanke · Advent 1511

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: II · Are These Not Men?; V · The Fifteenth Judge

English translation by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, 1945

Sourcing

Historical situation

Santo Domingo's main church, Advent 1511. The Dominican community agreed and signed a sermon condemning coercion and violence toward the Taíno. Diego Colón and the royal officials were invited.

Intended audience

The assembled colonists and officials.

Purpose

To demand that Christian settlers recognize their obligations toward the people they exploit.

Point of view

A Dominican indictment of colonial violence, preserved by Las Casas decades later. He does not claim to have heard this sermon himself. It asserts Native humanity and obligations of Christian love; it is not a trial to decide whether Native people have souls. No exact December day is asserted: Las Casas's fourth-Sunday description and his Gospel reading produce a dating problem.

Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, lib. III, cap. IV; Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Literary Currents in Hispanic America (1945), pp. 15–16, as printed in Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949), p. 17. All three English questions match this printing. Status adapted identifies the historical staging of reported speech; the excerpt itself is verbatim. Our relative Sunday-before-Christmas wording follows Las Casas’s reported fourth Sunday of Advent (Historia III.4); no exact December calendar date is asserted, and the Gospel-reading dating problem remains noted above.

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Sermon reported later · Henríquez Ureña / Hanke

The charge: cruelty and tyranny

Antonio de Montesinos, reported by Las Casas; English by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, reprinted in Lewis Hanke · Advent 1511

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: II · Are These Not Men?

In the Exam Room: Question 1

English translation by Pedro Henríquez Ureña, 1945

Sourcing

Historical situation

Santo Domingo's main church, Advent 1511. The Dominican community agreed and signed a sermon condemning coercion and violence toward the Taíno. Diego Colón and the royal officials were invited.

Intended audience

Colonial officials and settlers.

Purpose

To indict the colonists' conduct, not Native beliefs.

Point of view

A Dominican indictment of colonial violence, preserved by Las Casas decades later. He does not claim to have heard this sermon himself. It asserts Native humanity and obligations of Christian love; it is not a trial to decide whether Native people have souls. No exact December day is asserted: Las Casas's fourth-Sunday description and his Gospel reading produce a dating problem.

Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, lib. III, cap. IV; Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Literary Currents in Hispanic America (1945), pp. 15–16, as printed in Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949), p. 17. All three English questions match this printing. Status adapted identifies the historical staging of reported speech; the excerpt itself is verbatim.

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Renewed sermon reported later · Spanish

The expected retraction becomes a renewed charge

Antonio de Montesinos, as reported by Bartolomé de las Casas · The following Sunday, December 1511

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: II · Are These Not Men?

English translation

Sourcing

Historical situation

The congregation returned expecting Montesinos to retract. Las Casas instead reports a renewed sermon, with more reasons and authorities, condemning their oppression.

Intended audience

The same colonial congregation, expecting submission to its demand.

Purpose

To reaffirm the truth of the first sermon and insist that the colonists change their conduct.

Point of view

A Dominican indictment of colonial violence, preserved by Las Casas decades later. He does not claim to have heard this sermon himself. It asserts Native humanity and obligations of Christian love; it is not a trial to decide whether Native people have souls. No exact December day is asserted: Las Casas's fourth-Sunday description and his Gospel reading produce a dating problem.

Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, lib. III, cap. V, vol. III (Madrid, 1875), p. 370; Gutenberg 53171. Spanish overlay begins y aquellas. English speech is our labeled translation, not Hanke's translation. The Spanish is the edition's wording; status marks its presentation as reported speech. The continuation says the friars would refuse confession to those oppressors.

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Reported demand · composite dramatization

The officials demand a retraction

Bartolomé de las Casas, reporting the colonial delegation · December 1511

Dramatization. Dramatized, based on the record.

On screen: II · Are These Not Men?

Sourcing

Historical situation

After the first sermon, officials confronted the Dominican vicar and Montesinos and demanded a public retreat the following Sunday.

Intended audience

Pedro de Córdoba and the Dominican community in the reported encounter; readers of Las Casas's history.

Purpose

The officials sought to defend the colonial labor regime and force the friars to withdraw their condemnation.

Point of view

Las Casas reports the group's demand critically. One explicitly fictional composite face carries the recorded collective position. Rain, the threshold and individual gestures are staging.

Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, lib. III, cap. IV, vol. III (Madrid, 1875), pp. 368–369; Gutenberg 53171. The Spanish excerpt is the printed narrative. The composite official's English line, Next Sunday, take back what you preached, dramatizes this collective demand; it is not a quotation or a newly attributed sentence from Diego Colón.

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Native speech reported by Las Casas · MacNutt 1909

Hatuey names the Christians' god and throws away the gold

Bartolomé de las Casas, reporting Hatuey and his people; translated by Francis Augustus MacNutt · 1511

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: II · Are These Not Men?

In the Exam Room: Question 3

English translation by Francis Augustus MacNutt, 1909

Sourcing

Historical situation

A lord from Hispaniola fled with followers to Cuba and heard that the Christians would cross. Having experienced their violence and pursuit of gold, he assembled his people before a basket of valuables.

Intended audience

Hatuey's people in the reported story; Prince Philip and Spanish readers in Las Casas's published appeal.

Purpose

Hatuey's reported proposal sought protection from the invaders. Las Casas used the story to expose conquest driven by greed beneath a Christian claim.

Point of view

A Native interpretation preserved through a Spanish reformer about thirty years later. Las Casas did not witness this meeting; he says Native informants related it afterward. He was a secular priest and encomendero when he later participated in the Cuba campaign, not yet a Dominican and not the friar at the stake. The gold is thrown into a river; throwing away the basket is not established. The words quoted here are MacNutt's English of Las Casas's report, not a surviving Taíno-language transcript.

Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias, De la isla de Cuba, §§2–4 (Seville, 1552; composed 1542), translated in F. A. MacNutt, Bartholomew de Las Casas: His Life, Apostolate, and Writings (Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1909), pp. 329–330; Project Gutenberg 23466, not 20321. The performed excerpts are exact cuts of this English. Historical staging is reported speech, hence adapted status. Palm basket, all-night dancing and the report by Indians: Las Casas, Historia III.21, 1875 vol. III, pp. 465–466, Gutenberg 53171. That later history explicitly says ésto fué despues por los indios dicho, y entre nosotros publicado. The opened Gutenberg title page identifies Cleveland: The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1909.

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Indirect speech · adapted for the two speakers

Hatuey and the Franciscan: the qualified answer

Bartolomé de las Casas, reporting an unnamed Franciscan and Hatuey · Cuba, conventionally 1512

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: II · Are These Not Men?

Sourcing

Historical situation

Captured after resisting the invaders, Hatuey was tied to a stake. An unnamed Franciscan offered Christian belief and heaven in the brief time allowed before his execution.

Intended audience

Hatuey and the friar in the reported encounter; Prince Philip and Spanish readers in Las Casas's appeal.

Purpose

Las Casas uses the refusal to condemn the reputation for cruelty created by Christians in the Indies.

Point of view

Reported indirect speech composed about thirty years later, published forty years after the conventional event date. The friar says yes, but those who are good. The question concerns Christians, not Spaniards. MacNutt adds Spaniards in Hatuey's refusal where the Spanish uses a pronoun; the script follows the Spanish. The source offers belief, not an explicit baptism sentence. No exact execution day, Yara location or Guahaba origin is established in this passage. Las Casas was not the unnamed Franciscan.

Las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552), Cuba §6. Excerpt follows the modernized Spanish transcription at Archivos de la Agenda Latinoamericana, El cacic Hatuey prefereix l’infern, inspected 2026-10-04. Original-spelling Spanish in the primary-source dossier, quoting Moreno Mengíbar ed. (1991), pp. 17–18: preguntó al religioso si yvan christianos al cielo, El religioso le respondió que sí, pero que yvan los que eran buenos. Dixo luego el cacique sin más pensar, que no quería él yr allá, sino al infierno por no estar donde estuviessen y por no ver tanta cruel gente. English comparison: MacNutt (1909), p. 330, Gutenberg 23466. All four English performance lines are adaptations of indirect speech, not quotations; no line.quote fields are used.

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Woodcut title page, Seville, 1552

Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias

Bartolomé de las Casas; English by Francis Augustus MacNutt · 8 December 1542

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: II · Are These Not Men?

In the Exam Room: Question 2

English translation by Francis Augustus MacNutt, 1909

Sourcing

Historical situation

Finished in December 1542, while the New Laws were being framed, and printed in 1552 to force the court to face what conquest had done.

Intended audience

Prince Philip, and any reader who could be moved to restrain the conquerors.

Purpose

To shock the court into reform by a short account of killing and enslavement. Las Casas says he is leaving out most of what he saw.

Point of view

A bishop and former encomendero, writing as a witness and as an advocate. His numbers are his own, and historians still argue about them. The Hatuey scene is his telling, years later.

Bartolomé de las Casas, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (Seville, 1552), English by Francis Augustus MacNutt, The Spanish Colonie / A Brief Account. The Hatuey sentence was read in the Stetson PDF of that English. 'I saw all the above things and numberless others' was read on constitution.org's copy of the same translation. Gutenberg ebook 20321 is MacNutt's English of the same book. Other translators word both sentences differently.

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Retrospective account; translated

Malhado: compassion, prejudice and the islanders’ censure

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · 1542

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: III · Children of the Sun

In the Exam Room: Question 4

English translation by Buckingham Smith (1871 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

The surviving officer of the Narváez expedition describes the years 1528–1536 after returning to Spanish society.

Intended audience

The Spanish Crown and readers of the printed Relación.

Purpose

Account for the failed expedition, establish service and credibility, and recommend how to bring Native peoples under Christianity and imperial rule.

Point of view

The rescuer’s humanity and the Spanish writer’s contempt occupy the same paragraph. Our short quotation is a fragment of his description, not an islander’s speech. Ch. 14 reports cannibalism and Native censure. Smith says “ate their dead”; the Spanish says they ate one another. The narration does not claim that they killed one another, and no consumption is shown.

Cabeza de Vaca, Relación (Zamora, 1542), chs. 12 and 14, pp. 47 and 49–50; trans. Buckingham Smith (1871), in F. W. Hodge, Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543 (1907). Opening overland-party count: the same narrative, ch. 5, p. 25 (Gutenberg 42841); this is the inland force, not the fleet total or an ethnic census.

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Retrospective account; translated

An island healer’s challenge — reported speech adapted

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · 1542

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: III · Children of the Sun

English translation by Buckingham Smith (1871 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

The surviving officer of the Narváez expedition describes the years 1528–1536 after returning to Spanish society.

Intended audience

The Spanish Crown and readers of the printed Relación.

Purpose

Account for the failed expedition, establish service and credibility, and recommend how to bring Native peoples under Christianity and imperial rule.

Point of view

The unnamed speaker is known only through Cabeza de Vaca. We make his indirect argument direct: stones and plants have virtue, so men can have healing power. Smith’s added “extraordinary” is omitted rather than claimed as the Native speaker’s description. Food withholding, breathing and the Christian cross are narrated from this chapter. No independent wording or Native-language sentence survives here.

Cabeza de Vaca, Relación (Zamora, 1542), ch. 15, pp. 52–54; trans. Buckingham Smith (1871), in F. W. Hodge, Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543 (1907).

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Retrospective account; translated

The healers and their essential negotiator

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · 1542

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: III · Children of the Sun

In the Exam Room: Question 5

English translation by Buckingham Smith (1871 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

The surviving officer of the Narváez expedition describes the years 1528–1536 after returning to Spanish society.

Intended audience

The Spanish Crown and readers of the printed Relación.

Purpose

Account for the failed expedition, establish service and credibility, and recommend how to bring Native peoples under Christianity and imperial rule.

Point of view

Estevanico performs the constant conversation while the other men preserve authority by speaking little. This division, dependence on Native guides, and the “children of the sun” report support the map. Successful cures and authority are the memoir’s claims. Its self-praise cannot be treated as clinical proof or a shared Native theology; the peoples on the road were distinct.

Cabeza de Vaca, Relación (Zamora, 1542), chs. 22 and 31, pp. 78 and 106; trans. Buckingham Smith (1871), in F. W. Hodge, Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543 (1907).

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Retrospective account; translated

Near Culiacán: healers and slave hunters — reported exchange

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · 1542

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: III · Children of the Sun

In the Exam Room: Question 6

English translation by Buckingham Smith (1871 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

The surviving officer of the Narváez expedition describes the years 1528–1536 after returning to Spanish society.

Intended audience

The Spanish Crown and readers of the printed Relación.

Purpose

Account for the failed expedition, establish service and credibility, and recommend how to bring Native peoples under Christianity and imperial rule.

Point of view

The unnamed interpreter voices the horsemen’s claims; the elder represents the group response, not an individually documented elder. The reply reached the writer through interpreters. “We are lords here” belongs to the slavers’ asserted authority, not to the interpreter personally. The adaptation changes pronouns and “sound” to “healthy”; the source excerpt keeps the original grammar. The phrase “our people” means claimed common identity. Near Culiacán is a regional location, not an exact camp coordinate.

Cabeza de Vaca, Relación (Zamora, 1542), ch. 34, pp. 113–115; trans. Buckingham Smith (1871), in F. W. Hodge, Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543 (1907).

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Retrospective account; translated

The coastal years: captivity, trading and an uncertain route

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · 1542

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: III · Children of the Sun

English translation by Buckingham Smith (1871 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

The surviving officer of the Narváez expedition describes the years 1528–1536 after returning to Spanish society.

Intended audience

The Spanish Crown and readers of the printed Relación.

Purpose

Account for the failed expedition, establish service and credibility, and recommend how to bring Native peoples under Christianity and imperial rule.

Point of view

The liberty claim belongs specifically to Cabeza de Vaca’s trading interval. It is not Estevanico’s emancipation, and trading is not a uniform stage all four entered after Mariame captivity. Chapter chronology and modern route reconstructions disagree; the map represents regions and episodes, not a precise itinerary. Hodge’s introductory itinerary is editorial and is not adopted as a settled route.

Cabeza de Vaca, Relación (Zamora, 1542), chs. 16–20, pp. 55–74; trans. Buckingham Smith (1871), in F. W. Hodge, Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543 (1907).

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Official report; translated

Mendoza retains Estevanico for the next expedition

Antonio de Mendoza · 1539

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: III · Children of the Sun

English translation (1890 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

Spanish authorities sought intelligence for further northern expeditions after the four travellers returned in 1536.

Intended audience

Viceroy Mendoza and the Spanish Crown.

Purpose

Report discoveries and justify further exploration and the author’s conduct.

Point of view

The narrator uses the narrower “retains” and “remains enslaved.” This fragment establishes retention; it does not settle a sale, loan or gift. A separate 1537 letter quoted in the same article uses purchase language, so the notes flag the conflicting record rather than silently resolving the transaction. No auction or specific transfer ceremony is staged. The source is reached through scholarship quoting the letter, not an original manuscript.

Mendoza, letter to the king, 1539, in Hammond and Rey (1940), pp. 51–52, quoted in “Following Estevanico: The Influential Presence of an African Slave in Sixteenth-century New World Historiography,” Colonial Latin American Review 15.2 (2006), note 4, DOI 10.1080/10609160600958645. Only the ten-word clause is excerpted. Direct corroboration of retention and dispatch, in a different English translation: Mendoza’s letter preceding Marcos, Goldsmid, Principal Navigations XIV (Edinburgh, 1890), p. 65, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40803/40803-h/40803-h.htm . This does not establish the precise legal mechanism of transfer or authenticate the separate Hammond/Rey translation wording.

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Official report; translated

The cross-size signal on Marcos’s northern expedition

Fray Marcos de Niza · 1539

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: III · Children of the Sun

Sourcing

Historical situation

Spanish authorities sought intelligence for further northern expeditions after the four travellers returned in 1536.

Intended audience

Viceroy Mendoza and the Spanish Crown.

Purpose

Report discoveries and justify further exploration and the author’s conduct.

Point of view

Marcos describes an agreed signal, then reports a cross as high as a man returning. It was news about claimed size and wealth, not proof of a golden city.

Marcos de Niza, relation to Mendoza, 1539, in Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (1600), ed. Edmund Goldsmid, vol. XIV (Edinburgh: E. & G. Goldsmid, 1890), pp. 70–71; Gutenberg 40803.

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Official report; translated

The refused gourd and Estevanico’s answer — twice-mediated report

Fray Marcos de Niza, reporting an unnamed companion · 1539

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: III · Children of the Sun

Sourcing

Historical situation

Spanish authorities sought intelligence for further northern expeditions after the four travellers returned in 1536.

Intended audience

Viceroy Mendoza and the Spanish Crown.

Purpose

Report discoveries and justify further exploration and the author’s conduct.

Point of view

Marcos says a companion told him what messengers told Estevanico. The exact printed clause is “who answered them, that it made no great matter”. Our present-tense “It makes no great matter” is an explicitly labelled adaptation, not a verbatim quotation or an independently surviving African voice. The official’s threat is also made direct from indirect speech. Marcos names Cíbola; Hawikuh is the conventional later identification. The official and Estevanico never meet in this staging. The gourd lies at its earlier refusal site, not a proven death site. Marcos did not witness the killing; accounts disagree about motives and events.

Marcos de Niza, relation of 1539, in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (1600), ed. Edmund Goldsmid, vol. XIV (Edinburgh: E. & G. Goldsmid, 1890), pp. 79–80; Gutenberg 40803. Passage beginning “the next day met an Indian of the company of Stephan”.

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Official report; translated

The mortality message relayed to Mendoza

Antonio de Mendoza, quoting Melchior Díaz’s report · April 17, 1540

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: III · Children of the Sun

In the Exam Room: Question 7

English translation by George Parker Winship (1896 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

Spanish authorities sought intelligence for further northern expeditions after the four travellers returned in 1536.

Intended audience

Viceroy Mendoza and the Spanish Crown.

Purpose

Report discoveries and justify further exploration and the author’s conduct.

Point of view

This is not a Zuni document. The reported message passes from Cíbola to neighbouring people, then Melchior Díaz, then Mendoza’s letter. Narration makes Mendoza’s act of relaying visible and does not claim a known motive for killing. Hawikuh’s exact events and the date within 1539 remain uncertain. The letter is 1540 evidence about the 1539 death, not an extension of the walk to 1540.

Mendoza to Charles V, Jacona, 17 April 1540, trans. George Parker Winship, The Coronado Expedition, 1540–1542 (1896), pp. 547–551, passage “The death of Esteban the negro…”; also The Journey of Coronado (1904), pp. 156–157. Opened Wikisource transcription and 1904 digitized printing agree on the quoted clause.

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Voyage account · translated 1924

The first voyage, 1534

Jacques Cartier; the relation is anonymous in the manuscript and is his voyage's account · 1534

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: IV · Of No Value

In the Exam Room: Question 8, Question 9

English translation by H. P. Biggar (1924 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

The official account of Cartier's first voyage, sailing from Saint-Malo on 20 April 1534, written for the French court after the ships came home.

Intended audience

Francis I and the French readers of the voyage narrative.

Purpose

To report a route, a cross planted for the king, and trade, and to make the seizure of two sons sound like a friendly agreement.

Point of view

The French voyage account, translated by Biggar. The chief is unnamed in the 1534 passage. His land-and-permission protest is Cartier’s inference from gestures (as if he wished to say), not preserved Indigenous speech. Chaleur traders, probably Mi’kmaq, are distinct from the Stadaconan fishers encountered at Gaspé. Both comparison paintings are modern reconstructions of this single account, not independent evidence.

Jacques Cartier, first-voyage relation (1534), in H. P. Biggar, ed. and trans., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1924), pp. 49–53 (Chaleur), 60–67 (Gaspé).

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Voyage account · reported speech

The brothers disagree about the journey to Hochelaga

Jacques Cartier’s voyage account; H. P. Biggar, editor and translator · 1535–1536

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: IV · Of No Value

English translation, 1924

Sourcing

Historical situation

French voyages among the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, 1535–1536; winter at Sainte-Croix near Stadacona.

Intended audience

The French crown and readers of the voyage relation.

Purpose

Report the expedition and justify the captain’s conduct.

Point of view

The excerpt and full text preserve Biggar’s reported wording. Domagaya’s performed line changes third person to first person and is explicitly labelled as reported by Cartier; it is not a verbatim transcript. Taignoagny’s resistance to guiding the French and Domagaya’s willingness are documented. Both brothers later bargain together.

H. P. Biggar, ed. and trans., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1924), pp. 131–134. The excerpts retain the 1924 edition’s wording, with page breaks and footnote markers removed.

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Encyclopedia entry

Donnacona

Marcel Trudel, Dictionary of Canadian Biography · 1966

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: IV · Of No Value

In the Exam Room: Question 20

Sourcing

Historical situation

A modern biography of Donnacona, chief of Stadacona, drawn from Cartier's voyages.

Intended audience

Readers of the Dictionary of Canadian Biography.

Purpose

To summarize what the French narrative implies about the sons' return in 1535: they had learned French prices and said the trade was unfair.

Point of view

Marcel Trudel, a historian of New France, paraphrasing the voyage. The sentence is his, not Cartier's. The lower third uses Cartier's 'Dom Agaya'; the biography uses 'Domagaya'.

Marcel Trudel, 'Donnacona', Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 1 (University of Toronto / Université Laval, 1966–).

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Voyage account · translated 1924

Cartier calls the two interpreters rogues

Jacques Cartier’s voyage account; H. P. Biggar, editor and translator · 1535–1536

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: IV · Of No Value

English translation, 1924

Sourcing

Historical situation

French voyages among the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, 1535–1536; winter at Sainte-Croix near Stadacona.

Intended audience

The French crown and readers of the voyage relation.

Purpose

Record trading relations while condemning the brothers’ intervention in the prices offered.

Point of view

An edited excerpt of Biggar’s translation, with two internal omissions identified in the citation. It is delivered as a retrospective reading of the voyage account, not a newly invented direct reply during bargaining. Both brothers are the targets of this insult.

H. P. Biggar, ed. and trans., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1924), pp. 186–187. The excerpts retain the 1924 edition’s wording, with page breaks and footnote markers removed.

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Voyage account · reported speech

Domagaya and two Stadaconan women share the annedda treatment

Jacques Cartier’s voyage account; H. P. Biggar, editor and translator · 1535–1536

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: IV · Of No Value

English translation, 1924

Sourcing

Historical situation

French voyages among the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, 1535–1536; winter at Sainte-Croix near Stadacona.

Intended audience

The French crown and readers of the voyage relation.

Purpose

Describe the expedition’s illness and the Indigenous knowledge used in its recovery. Cartier concealed the scale of French sickness while seeking help.

Point of view

The excerpt preserves Biggar’s wording. The short performed question and answer adapt the reported speech. The French text says deulx femmes. The account reports twenty-five French deaths and more than fifty deaths at Stadacona. Annedda’s botanical identity is uncertain: later identifications differ, including white cedar and hemlock. We claim no certain species and don't repeat the account’s claim of a universal cure.

H. P. Biggar, ed. and trans., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1924), pp. 204–215. The excerpts retain the 1924 edition’s wording, with page breaks and footnote markers removed.

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Voyage account · translated 1924

Cartier acknowledges the recovery

Jacques Cartier’s voyage account; H. P. Biggar, editor and translator · 1535–1536

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: IV · Of No Value

English translation, 1924

Sourcing

Historical situation

French voyages among the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, 1535–1536; winter at Sainte-Croix near Stadacona.

Intended audience

The French crown and readers of the voyage relation.

Purpose

Praise the treatment on which the expedition depended, while presenting the recovery as providential.

Point of view

We quote only the recovery clause, retaining Biggar’s comma. It is Cartier’s report, not a modern medical claim; the broader narrative’s claims that the tree cured every illness are not endorsed.

H. P. Biggar, ed. and trans., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1924), pp. 214–215. The excerpts retain the 1924 edition’s wording, with page breaks and footnote markers removed. The doctors comparison is on p. 215 (continuing p. 214) and says “eight days”; the French textual variants note “six.”

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Voyage accounts · seizure and later report

Seizure of Donnacona and the brothers; the surviving girl

Cartier voyage narratives; 1541 account in Richard Hakluyt’s English (1600), reprinted by H. P. Biggar (1924) · 1536 and the 1541 voyage preface

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: IV · Of No Value

English translation (1924 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

Donnacona and his sons were seized during the 1536 departure; the 1541 expedition’s preface reports the captives’ deaths with an explicit exception.

Intended audience

The French crown and readers of the voyage relation.

Purpose

Report the outcome of the captives’ removal before a further French expedition.

Point of view

The chapter narrates the seizure of Donnacona and both sons on 3 May 1536 and their departure on 6 May. It does not say all ten people were seized together: children were already in French custody. The quoted third-voyage preface explicitly excepts one girl from the reported deaths; her subsequent fate is untraced. Marcel Trudel, Dictionary of Canadian Biography, Donnacona (1966), corroborates the exception: https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/donnacona_1F.html .

H. P. Biggar, ed. and trans., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1924), pp. 227–231, 249. The excerpts retain the 1924 edition’s wording, with page breaks and footnote markers removed. The 1541 “great Lords” answer to Agona is Hakluyt’s English reprinted in Biggar (1924), p. 252, independently present in Gutenberg 25645.

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Royal law

The New Laws of the Indies

Charles V (the laws were issued in his name) · November 20, 1542, Barcelona

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

In the Exam Room: Question 11

English translation by Henry Stevens (1893 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

Issued at Barcelona on 20 November 1542, after years of Dominican pressure and after the Crown had decided to curb the encomenderos.

Intended audience

Viceroys, audiencias and colonists in the Indies.

Purpose

To ban any new enslavement of Native people, and to end the inheritance of encomiendas. The inheritance rule was the one colonists broke the viceroy over.

Point of view

The Crown, writing in Spain. The ban served Native people and also served a king who did not want powerful encomenderos. Native people did not write the law.

The New Laws, Barcelona, 20 November 1542, trans. Henry Stevens (London, 1893), as reproduced from Fordham University by Saylor.org. Both highlights are inside this sentence. The inheritance clause was revoked at Mechelen on 20 October 1545, before Blasco Núñez Vela was killed near Quito in January 1546. The slavery ban stayed in the statute.

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Treatise

Democrates secundus (On the Just Causes for War against the Indians)

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda · about 1544–1547

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

In the Exam Room: Question 12, Question 24

English translation (1960 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written in Spain, as a Latin dialogue, before the 1550 hearings. Sepúlveda had not been to the Indies. The king had blocked printing the book.

Intended audience

Courtiers and theologians who would judge whether the wars were just. At Valladolid, a panel of judges.

Purpose

To argue that Spanish rule over Native peoples followed from Aristotle's idea of natural slavery, and from Spanish superiority as he described it.

Point of view

A court scholar arguing from books and other men's reports. The people he calls inferior are not in the room.

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Democrates secundus. The masters sentence is the English of a course handout, 'On the Reasons for the Just War among the Indians (1547)': 'Those who surpass the rest in prudence and intelligence, although not in physical strength, are by nature the masters.' The children-to-adults sentence and the spiders sentence are John-Charles Duffy's edition of the Columbia University Press translation (Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, 3rd ed., 1960, 1:523–529), read in the Miami University PDF. That PDF does not print the masters sentence. The handout rewords the children sentence ('wisdom, intelligence… infants to adults'). We use each printing for the sentence it actually has.

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Philosophical dialogue

Democrates secundus: defense of innocents and compulsory hearing

Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda; Spanish translation by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo · c. 1544–1547

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

English translation by Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, 1892

Sourcing

Historical situation

A written Latin dialogue whose arguments Sepúlveda summarized for the Valladolid junta; this is the 1892 Spanish translation, not a verbatim transcript of the hearing.

Intended audience

Royal advisers and learned theologians assessing the grounds for Spanish rule.

Purpose

To justify subjection by force as protection of innocents and as preparation for evangelization.

Point of view

A royal scholar who had not visited the Indies. His fictional Democrates states his case; the same work defends a hierarchy of natural rulers and subjects. It distinguishes compelled hearing from forced baptism.

Menéndez y Pelayo, ed./trans., Boletín de la Real Academia de la Historia XXI (1892), Spanish pp. 331 and 337, opposite Latin pp. 330 and 336. English overlays are our translations, identified as translations. The second excerpt starts at “creo”; no claim that the precise words were uttered at the junta.

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Written defense for the junta

Apología: war and the innocent

Bartolomé de las Casas; English translation by Stafford Poole · 1550–1551

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

English translation by Stafford Poole, 1974

Sourcing

Historical situation

Las Casas’s written defense against conquest to prevent human sacrifice; he argues that the war could kill far more innocent people.

Intended audience

The Valladolid theologians and royal jurists.

Purpose

To show that war undertaken to prevent harm may inflict far greater harm and turn its supposed beneficiaries against Christianity.

Point of view

A Dominican advocate for Native peoples, reasoning within Christian theology. He defends voluntary reception of faith, not religious pluralism in the modern sense.

Las Casas, In Defense of the Indians, translated by Stafford Poole (Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), chapter 28 bis, p. 190. The selected words are reproduced in the primary-text selection in Susana Nuccetelli and Ofelia Schutte, eds., Other Voices: Readings in Spanish Philosophy (2007), pp. 212–213. Page 190 in Poole is independently identified by Cary J. Nederman, Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 4 (2016), p. 14, note 42. We cut the sentence with ellipses; our preceding narration summarizes the argument.

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Written defense; English quotation reproduced in scholarship

Apología: preaching and armed force

Bartolomé de las Casas; English wording as quoted by Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey · Apología, 1550–1551

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

English translation by Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey (2023 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

Las Casas challenges the use of armed force to spread Christianity in his written defense against Sepúlveda.

Intended audience

Theologians and jurists considering conquest and preaching.

Purpose

To distinguish religious persuasion from armed coercion.

Point of view

A Dominican argument for voluntary acceptance of Christianity. We perform written words; we don't present a transcript of the historical hearings.

Las Casas, Apología, question reproduced in English by Janet Burke and Ted Humphrey, “The New Black Legend of Bartolomé de Las Casas,” Church Life Journal, University of Notre Dame, 13 October 2023, paragraph beginning “One of Las Casas’s main tenets.” Their parenthetical page 117 is retained as their reference, not asserted here to be page 117 of Stafford Poole’s translation. We don't attribute this wording to Poole or Peter Casarella.

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Written defense for the junta

Apología: the closing appeal

Bartolomé de las Casas; English translation by Stafford Poole · 1550–1551

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

In the Exam Room: Question 21

English translation by Stafford Poole, 1974

Sourcing

Historical situation

The closing of the defense Las Casas read over five days during the Valladolid hearings.

Intended audience

Theologians and royal councillors.

Purpose

To make shared Christian obligations weigh against conquest and persecution.

Point of view

An advocate with decades of experience in the Indies. This is his Apología, not the later Apologética historia statement about all peoples being men.

Las Casas, Apología, translated by Stafford Poole, In Defense of the Indians (Northern Illinois University Press, 1974; reprinted 1992), closing appeal. The exact English is corroborated in Tom G. Palmer, “Madison and Multiculturalism,” in James Madison and the Future of Limited Government, ed. John Samples (Cato Institute, 2002), p. 113, note 62, which identifies the 1992 edition, p. 362.

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Controversy and historical context

Aquí se contiene una disputa: the record and its limits

Domingo de Soto; Bartolomé de las Casas, publisher; contextual analysis by Lewis Hanke · Hearings 1550–1551

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

Sourcing

Historical situation

Soto summarizes the separate presentations for an advisory junta. Another session follows in April–May 1551.

Intended audience

The councillors and the readers of Las Casas’s 1552 printed controversy.

Purpose

To present the opposing arguments. Later historians use the surviving records to reconstruct the process and its unresolved outcome.

Point of view

The printed volume was published by one advocate. Separate surviving opinions, including Anaya’s, must not be mistaken for a collective judgment; an imagined viewer seal is not a historical vote.

Domingo de Soto, Sumario, closing, signature c ii, in Las Casas, Aquí se contiene una disputa (Seville, 1552). The excerpt is the Spanish closing fragment. For the hearings and aftermath, see Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949), pp. 128–130, and All Mankind Is One (1974). Anaya’s surviving opinion supported broader grounds for conquest than our limited-protection teaching option. The royal cédula of April 1550 separately names Peru and Lima’s jurisdiction.

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Summary

Lienzo de Tlaxcala: the Tlaxcalans and the viceroy in the Mixtón War

Tlaxcalan painters · about 1550

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

Sourcing

Historical situation

Painted in Tlaxcala around 1550, when Tlaxcalan leaders asked the Crown to reward their service as allies in the conquests.

Intended audience

Spanish officials and the Crown.

Purpose

To record, and claim credit for, Tlaxcala's part in Spain's wars, from the fall of Tenochtitlan to the Mixtón War.

Point of view

Native allies of Spain, proud of their victories over other Native peoples; it is not a Caxcan account.

Lienzo de Tlaxcala (c. 1550), named as an optional source for KC-1.2.III.B in the AP U.S. History Course and Exam Description (Topic 1.6). Army size after Ida Altman, The War for Mexico's West: Indians and Spaniards in New Galicia, 1524–1550 (University of New Mexico Press, 2010). Summary by us.

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Legal petition

Tenamaztle’s petition: flight called rebellion

Francisco Tenamaztle, petition prepared with Bartolomé de las Casas · Council receipt: 1 June 1555

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

In the Exam Room: Question 14

English translation (2022 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

A Caxcan leader of the Mixtón War, deported to Spain in 1552, asks the Council of the Indies in Valladolid to remedy violence, dispossession and exile.

Intended audience

The Council of the Indies and the Crown.

Purpose

To recover freedom and authority and challenge the treatment of flight and self-defense as rebellion.

Point of view

A petition in Tenamaztle’s name prepared with Las Casas: an Indigenous legal claim mediated through Spanish legal language, not a stenographic record of oral testimony.

Spanish displayed by Alfonso Hernández Barrón, “Tenamaxtli y la lucha por los derechos,” Universidad de Guadalajara, slide 15 (PDF p. 15). The transcript has the anomalous punctuation “en todas las Indias contra, el rey”. Receipt date and Las Casas’s collaboration: Rubén A. Sánchez-Godoy, “Francisco Tenamaztle, Bartolomé de las Casas and the Role of Translation …,” The Transatlantic Las Casas (Brill, 2022), pp. 88–89, AGI México 205, https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004515918_006 . Study explicitly says June 1; July 1 is a conflicting popular dating. Subsequent inquiry documents run from July 1555. We give 1555 on screen and identify receipt precisely in the timeline/source. The Spanish overlay retains the original words and normalizes the misplaced comma to “en todas las Indias, contra el rey”; the source excerpt above preserves the displayed transcription. The English caption now marks the omission of en todas las Indias with an ellipsis; audio remains the same translated excerpt.

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Book

The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America

Lewis Hanke · 1949

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

Sourcing

Historical situation

A 1949 history of the Spanish argument over the justice of the conquest, written for the American Historical Association.

Intended audience

Historians and general readers in the United States.

Purpose

To show that Spaniards argued, in public and for decades, about whether the conquest was just.

Point of view

Lewis Hanke, a historian who admired that argument and who takes Las Casas's side of it more often than Sepúlveda's. His English of the sermon is one translation among several.

Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1949). The three questions were read in the Internet Archive text of that book. He dates the sermon to the Sunday before Christmas, 1511.

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Royal law

Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias

Philip II · July 13, 1573, Bosque de Segovia

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

Sourcing

Historical situation

Issued on 13 July 1573, after the Valladolid junta had produced no collective verdict and after conquests had continued under the old name.

Intended audience

Viceroys, audiencias and the men who would be licensed to explore and settle.

Purpose

To keep discovery and settlement under royal license, and to stop calling that work conquest, so the word itself would not excuse force.

Point of view

The Crown prescribing the language and conduct of licensed expansion. The title includes pacificación; Ordinance 29 forbids naming discoveries conquistas. Neither is evidence that armed expansion stopped.

Philip II, Ordenanzas de descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias, Bosque de Segovia, 13 July 1573, ordinance 29, as transcribed from the Archivo General de Indias and printed by the Ministerio de la Vivienda (1973). The title and ordinance 29 were read on Historia del Nuevo Mundo's transcription of that text. 'conquistas' is in ordinance 29. 'pacificación' is in the title.

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Chronology with linked primary accounts

The expeditions and the Mixtón War: chronology behind the comparison

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca; expedition narrators; National Park Service; Tenamaztle · 1527–1542

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: V · The Fifteenth Judge

Sourcing

Historical situation

Separate expeditions leave Spain or New Spain under royal commissions during decades of argument over conquest.

Intended audience

Modern learners comparing policy language with dated events.

Purpose

To anchor a sequence without making chronology prove causation.

Point of view

The quoted excerpt is the National Park Service’s modern description of Coronado; the timeline’s other statements are editorial summaries from the named primary and institutional sources.

Coronado excerpt: National Park Service, Coronado National Memorial, History & Culture, https://www.nps.gov/coro/learn/historyculture/index.htm . Coronado’s 1540 campaign also appears in his 3 August 1540 letter, Winship, The Journey of Coronado (1904), https://archive.org/details/journeyofcoronad00wins . Narváez’s 1527 departure/1528 Florida landfall: Cabeza de Vaca, Relación, opening chapters, and Historical Collections of Louisiana and Florida, https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/gdc/gdclccn/11/00/70/11/11007011/11007011.pdf . Soto’s 1539 Florida landing: NPS De Soto National Memorial, https://www.nps.gov/deso/learn/historyculture/index.htm . Mixtón 1540–1542 and Tenamaztle: UdeG tenamaxtli.pdf and Sánchez-Godoy (2022), both specified in p104-tenamaztle-petition-1555. No exact battle casualty totals asserted.

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Translated book and anti-Spanish framing

The Spanish Colonie: testimony republished against Spain

Bartolomé de las Casas; Jacques de Miggrode, French intermediary; M.M.S., English translator · 1552 Spanish

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

English translation

Sourcing

Historical situation

Las Casas’s Brevísima was translated for readers resisting Spanish rule in the Low Countries; its French intermediary then reached London in English.

Intended audience

French-speaking readers in the Low Countries and English readers suspicious of Spanish power.

Purpose

Las Casas denounced colonial atrocities; translators and publishers repurposed his testimony against Spain.

Point of view

A Spanish critic’s testimony selected and reframed by Spain’s rivals. “Black Legend” describes the polemical use; it does not invalidate the violence being described.

Las Casas, The Spanish Colonie (London: Thomas Dawson for William Brome, 1583), title and prefatory matter, STC 4739, EEBO A18098.0001.001. The English version came through Jacques de Miggrode’s French Tyrannies et cruautés des Espagnols (Antwerp, 1579). The excerpt reproduces the English title; our account of its political use is an interpretation, not a printer’s recorded speech.

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Manuscript proposal, chapter heading

Discourse of Western Planting: the anti-Spanish alliance pitch

Richard Hakluyt · 1584 manuscript

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

In the Exam Room: Question 15

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written for Ralegh’s colonial project in 1584, before Amadas and Barlowe returned.

Intended audience

Elizabeth I and the court, in manuscript; not a 1584 printed public book.

Purpose

To win support for settlement, Protestant expansion, commerce and challenges to Spanish power.

Point of view

An advocate predicting that Spanish subjects would support another empire. The source combines the chapter XI heading with chapter XX, reason18; “gentler empire” is our summary, supported by chapter XX, reason 18.

Richard Hakluyt, A Discourse on Western Planting (1584), ch. XI heading; text as reprinted in Principal Navigations, ed. Edmund Goldsmid, vol. XIII, Project Gutenberg 25645. The source retains Goldsmid’s original spelling; speech modernizes it. The window performance is a reconstruction of the written argument, not evidence of a speech at that window. The chapter XI excerpt modernizes spelling; the chapter XX performance also condenses the syntax. The performed promise uses the contiguous clause of chapter XX, reason 18, from “use the naturall people there” through “revolte cleane from the Spaniarde,” with a semicolon after freedom. The chapter XI speech cuts the opening “That”; the original excerpt and full retain their spelling. The performed chapter XX promise is condensed and recast as an imperative, not merely spelling modernization.

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Web page

Manteo and the 1584 voyage, Fort Raleigh

National Park Service, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

Sourcing

Historical situation

A modern park account of the Roanoke voyages, written for visitors to the site of the English forts.

Intended audience

Visitors and students.

Purpose

To identify the Native men who went to England in 1584 and came back.

Point of view

A United States agency telling an English colonial story on Algonquian land. The English records name the two men. Their own account of the year in London does not survive.

National Park Service, Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, pages on Manteo, Wanchese and the 1584 voyage. Summary by us. We don't quote the park.

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Visitor’s diary, translated

Two visitors in brown taffeta

Lupold von Wedel; English translation Gottfried von Bülow · October 18, 1584

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

English translation by Gottfried von Bülow, 1895

Sourcing

Historical situation

A German visitor describes two men brought to England following the 1584 voyage.

Intended audience

His travel record, published later for historical readers.

Purpose

To record the people and sights shown to him in England.

Point of view

A European looking at men whose language he did not understand. He does not name the two, establish their thoughts, or document the exact gallery staged here.

Lupold von Wedel, Journey through England and Scotland, translated by Gottfried von Bülow, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, new series 9 (1895), p. 251. The identification of the two visitors follows the voyage context. The gallery, returned gazes, and precise arrangement are reconstruction; the visitor’s account does not establish their thoughts.

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Anonymous voyage journal

A silver cup, a town and its corn

Anonymous journal of Richard Grenville’s voyage · July 16, 1585

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

Sourcing

Historical situation

Grenville’s expedition was exploring the Carolina sounds after returning with Manteo and Wanchese.

Intended audience

English patrons and later Hakluyt’s readers.

Purpose

To record the expedition’s itinerary and conduct.

Point of view

An English participant alleges a theft and reports punitive burning. We call the cup missing and don't identify a thief; we don't place either Native visitor at the burning as a witnessed fact.

Journal of the second voyage to Virginia, 16 July 1585, Hakluyt 1600, III:253; Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645. The burning follows the unmet demand. Nobody is recorded dying in this particular passage.

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Written account

Account of the Englishmen left in Virginia, 17 August 1585 to 18 June 1586

Ralph Lane · 1586

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

Sourcing

Historical situation

Lane's report of the 1585–86 colony, written after Drake took the colonists off Roanoke in June 1586, and sent to Raleigh.

Intended audience

Walter Raleigh, and then Hakluyt's readers.

Purpose

To explain how close the colony came to starving, and to justify Lane's attack on Wingina (Pemisapan) on 1 June 1586.

Point of view

The colony's governor, writing his own defense. The food shortage is his admission.

Ralph Lane, account of the 1585–86 colony, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (1598–1600). Our clause matches those words.

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Native informants through an English narrative

Wanchese in the company of Wingina’s surviving men

John White, reporting Croatoan informants · 1587

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

Sourcing

Historical situation

The 1587 expedition sent Stafford and Manteo to Croatoan, then raided Dasamonquepeuc on 9 August and christened Manteo on 13 August.

Intended audience

English patrons and Hakluyt’s readers.

Purpose

To recount the expedition, its diplomacy, retaliatory raid and honors, from the governor’s side.

Point of view

White’s expedition narrative includes reports from Stafford’s party and Croatoan informants. Its distinction between friends and enemies and its excuses are the English account, not an independent Native record. The information about Wanchese comes from Croatoan informants as the expedition narrates it. It identifies his company, not his words, a personal killing, or his eventual fate. No speech by Wanchese survives.

White, fourth voyage, following the 30 July parley, Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645. The source retains the full location clause. We don't use Lane’s disputed “great enemies” wording. The reed departure and final distant group are explicit visual reconstructions of the contrast in recorded alignments, not witnessed meetings or proof of Wanchese’s intentions.

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Printed voyage narrative

Harriot describes illness and competing interpretations

Thomas Harriot · 1588 report

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

In the Exam Room: Question 17

Sourcing

Historical situation

Harriot visited Carolina Algonquian communities with the 1585–86 colony, then published a defense of colonization in 1588.

Intended audience

Prospective backers, settlers and supporters of Ralegh’s venture.

Purpose

To describe the country and its inhabitants and answer hostile reports about the settlement.

Point of view

An English observer, language learner and colonial promoter interpreting others’ explanations of illness. Different views are attributed to some people, never established as a single Native belief. The disease is not identified here.

Harriot, A briefe and true report (1588), final section, reprinted in Hakluyt 1600, then Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645. Exact selected edition reads “tell” and “thinke”; the DocSouth 1590 edition’s “tel” and “think” are not silently mixed into this quote. No assertion of general Native worship or proof that no English person died. The original paragraph is retained here.

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Reported Native opinions · performed adaptation

Native explanations of illness, through Harriot

Unnamed Carolina Algonquian speakers, as reported by Thomas Harriot · Experiences 1585–86

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

In the Exam Room: Question 16

Sourcing

Historical situation

Harriot visited Carolina Algonquian communities with the 1585–86 colony, then published a defense of colonization in 1588.

Intended audience

Prospective backers, settlers and supporters of Ralegh’s venture.

Purpose

To describe the country and its inhabitants and answer hostile reports about the settlement.

Point of view

An English observer, language learner and colonial promoter interpreting others’ explanations of illness. Different views are attributed to some people, never established as a single Native belief. The disease is not identified here. Two first-person English adaptations are given to one composite speaker. “Our generation / theirs” becomes “your people / ours”; invisible successors, bullets, killing and replacement all come from the report. No Native-language sentences or private thoughts are invented.

Harriot, final section of A briefe and true report, Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645. The source excerpt remains verbatim English reporting; performed lines are marked “as reported by Harriot” and are not assigned quote fields. The first line compresses the invisible successors’ supposed agency; the second adapts the reported prediction. Multiple opinions remain multiple, not a single tribal creed.

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Hostile governor’s report · performed adaptation

Pemisapan’s food strategy and his people’s argument

Ralph Lane, reporting Pemisapan’s people · Spring 1586

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

In the Exam Room: Question 18

Sourcing

Historical situation

The 1585–86 English settlement depended on Native food. Lane wrote after its evacuation, describing encounters, hostile plans and his killing of Pemisapan.

Intended audience

Ralegh and later readers of Hakluyt’s collection.

Purpose

To explain the colony’s failure and justify Lane’s decisions and violence.

Point of view

The armed colonial governor defending his own conduct. Reported Native intentions and speech survive through his English, including Manteo’s interpretation. The religious challenge is reported group speech. Its pronouns change from English “our / us” to the Native speaker’s “your / you.” Rumors of English deaths informed this challenge; we don't certify those rumors.

Lane, account of the first colony, second part, Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645. Extracts preserve the words of the report; performed Native sentence is an adaptation. Harriot’s account of Wingina seeking prayers is separately retained in p104-harriot-illness-1588-goldsmid.full. We compress changes over 1585–86; we don't claim a single council produced both statements.

View original

Governor’s account of his own attack

Christ our victory: Lane’s signal and Wingina’s killing

Ralph Lane · June 1, 1586

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

Sourcing

Historical situation

The 1585–86 English settlement depended on Native food. Lane wrote after its evacuation, describing encounters, hostile plans and his killing of Pemisapan.

Intended audience

Ralegh and later readers of Hakluyt’s collection.

Purpose

To explain the colony’s failure and justify Lane’s decisions and violence.

Point of view

The armed colonial governor defending his own conduct. Reported Native intentions and speech survive through his English, including Manteo’s interpretation.

Lane, second part of his Virginia account, concluding attack, Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645; Hakluyt 1600, III:263. Shooting, escape and eventual beheading are compressed into narration, all off-screen. This reprint explicitly states “the first of Iune 1586”; it is not necessary to infer the date in this selected edition. The full account distinguishes different attackers; the narration says only “Lane’s men.”

View original

Reported collective dialogue · performed adaptations

Spare the corn; recognize us as friends

Croatoan people and Stafford’s English party, as reported by John White · July 30, 1587

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

In the Exam Room: Question 22

Sourcing

Historical situation

The 1587 expedition sent Stafford and Manteo to Croatoan, then raided Dasamonquepeuc on 9 August and christened Manteo on 13 August.

Intended audience

English patrons and Hakluyt’s readers.

Purpose

To recount the expedition, its diplomacy, retaliatory raid and honors, from the governor’s side.

Point of view

White’s expedition narrative includes reports from Stafford’s party and Croatoan informants. Its distinction between friends and enemies and its excuses are the English account, not an independent Native record. White is the account’s author, not placed in Stafford’s landing party. The unnamed elder condenses the reported collective voice; the unnamed English visitor condenses the party’s recorded reply. No specific words are invented for Stafford.

White, fourth voyage narrative, 30 July 1587, Hakluyt 1600, III:282–283; Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645. Pronouns are shifted into direct address. Corn scarcity, the assurance that nothing would be diminished, earlier English injuries, and the badge request are all in the report. The source does not establish a badge was granted. The injured man seen in the shot represents the man they showed the English.

View original

Printed voyage narrative

The mistaken attack on Croatoan friends

John White · August 9, 1587

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

Sourcing

Historical situation

The 1587 expedition sent Stafford and Manteo to Croatoan, then raided Dasamonquepeuc on 9 August and christened Manteo on 13 August.

Intended audience

English patrons and Hakluyt’s readers.

Purpose

To recount the expedition, its diplomacy, retaliatory raid and honors, from the governor’s side.

Point of view

White’s expedition narrative includes reports from Stafford’s party and Croatoan informants. Its distinction between friends and enemies and its excuses are the English account, not an independent Native record.

White, fourth voyage narrative, 8–9 August, Hakluyt 1600, III:283–284; Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645. “deceiued” and “Sauages” follow this edition exactly. The Virtual Jamestown transcription independently gives 9 August and the same recognition with modernized u/v. One person is reported shot through the body; this passage does not explicitly state that person died. No raid victim dies on screen.

View original

English account of christening and title

Manteo christened and given an English lordship

John White · August 13, 1587

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory

Sourcing

Historical situation

The 1587 expedition sent Stafford and Manteo to Croatoan, then raided Dasamonquepeuc on 9 August and christened Manteo on 13 August.

Intended audience

English patrons and Hakluyt’s readers.

Purpose

To recount the expedition, its diplomacy, retaliatory raid and honors, from the governor’s side.

Point of view

White’s expedition narrative includes reports from Stafford’s party and Croatoan informants. Its distinction between friends and enemies and its excuses are the English account, not an independent Native record.

White, fourth voyage narrative, 13 August 1587, Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645. This edition reads “seruices” (plural); the actor’s exact six-word extract follows it. Other editions print “service.” “Thereof” is Roanoke; the other place is Dasamonguepeuk, modernized in overlays as Dasamonquepeuc. Ralegh’s command authorizes an English title, not an Algonquian office. The explicitly dated raid on 9 August precedes it by four days, not five.

View original

Voyage narrative

The fifth voyage of John White: return to Roanoke

John White; spelling and punctuation modernized by the National Humanities Center · 1590

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

On screen: VI · Christ Our Victory; VII · CROATOAN

In the Exam Room: Question 23

Sourcing

Historical situation

White searched the abandoned settlement on 18 August 1590, after returning to the coast three years after leaving his daughter and granddaughter.

Intended audience

Hakluyt’s readers and English patrons of colonization.

Purpose

To recount his efforts to find the colonists and explain how he interpreted the signs he found.

Point of view

White was an eyewitness to carvings and damaged objects, not to the colonists’ departure or subsequent lives. His confidence in their safe arrival and his accusation against enemies at Dasamongwepeuk are inferences.

John White, “The fift voyage … in the yeere 1590,” Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (London, 1600), III:292–293; National Humanities Center extract, pp. 3–4. Every c06 quotation uses this modern-spelling extract, including “armor,” “tunes of songs,” and “we had no answer.” Its source footnote misdates the Hakluyt printing to 1590; the volume is 1600. The extract’s explanatory gloss of flankers is not used. Original-page transcription corroboration: https://encyclopediavirginia.org/primary-documents/john-white-returns-to-roanoke-an-excerpt-from-the-fift-voyage-of-master-john-white-into-the-west-indies-and-parts-of-america-called-virginia-in-the-yeere-1590-1600/ . The approach occurs on the night of 17–18 August; dawn landing and settlement search are 18 August. Storm and failed attempted onward voyage follow. Original spelling of the signal and completed friends sentence is appended from Goldsmid vol. XIII, pp. 383–384 (Gutenberg 25645); compare Hakluyt (1600), III:292–293 and NHC extract pp. 3–4. The NHC p. 4 sentence confirms “and the savages of the island our friends.” The completed friends sentence modernizes spelling only. The narrator’s lifelong separation is historical synthesis, not a quotation from the 1590 account or evidence that his family died.

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Voyage narrative

The second voyage, winter 1535–36, and the tree called Annedda

Jacques Cartier; English by H. P. Biggar, 1924 · 1535–36

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

In the Exam Room: Question 10

English translation by H. P. Biggar, 1924

Sourcing

Historical situation

The second voyage's account of the winter at Stadacona, when scurvy killed Frenchmen and Stadaconan people, and Dom Agaya showed a cure.

Intended audience

The French court.

Purpose

To record the sickness, the losses, and the cure, without letting Donnacona see how many Frenchmen were ill.

Point of view

The French account. Biggar writes 'squaws'; the French manuscript says 'deulx femmes'. We say 'women'.

H. P. Biggar, The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (1924), second voyage, as reprinted in Ramsay Cook, ed., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (1993), which reads 'two women' where Biggar printed 'squaws' (Cartier's French: 'deulx femmes'). Separately, the February 1536 sickness among the French ('more than fifty' whose case seemed hopeless; chapter heading that twenty-five of the French died) and the Annedda passage.

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Speech

Apología, the defense read at Valladolid

Bartolomé de las Casas; English by Stafford Poole · 1550–51

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

In the Exam Room: Question 13

English translation by Stafford Poole

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written for the junta at Valladolid in 1550 and read aloud over five days. Las Casas was about sixty-five if he was born in 1484, a date that is itself disputed.

Intended audience

The fourteen judges, theologians and lawyers of the royal councils, and through them Charles V.

Purpose

To answer Sepúlveda and to argue that Native peoples already had states, laws and religion, so war was not the way to preach.

Point of view

A Dominican who had been an encomendero and then spent decades in the Indies. He is arguing a case, not writing a neutral description.

Bartolomé de las Casas, Apología (1550), trans. Stafford Poole, In Defense of the Indians, as printed in the OhioLINK HIST 1151 reader and in the UCSB History 4B packet: 'Rather, long before they had heard the word Spaniard they had properly organized states, wisely ordered by excellent laws, religion, and custom.' We drop the leading 'Rather,'. An Australian Year Book reprint has 'customs' plural; our text and Poole's sentence here have 'custom'.

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Act of Parliament

Act of Uniformity

Parliament of England, in the first year of Elizabeth I · 1559

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Passed in 1559, the year after Elizabeth became queen, as part of settling the Church of England after Mary I.

Intended audience

Every person living in England, and the churchwardens who were to collect the fine.

Purpose

To make Sunday and holy-day worship in the parish church a legal duty, and to fine absence.

Point of view

The Crown and Parliament. The card's 'every Sunday' leaves out the holy days the statute also names. The Queen's title Supreme Governor is the Act of Supremacy of the same year, which the card already separates.

Act of Uniformity, 1559 (1 Elizabeth I, c. 2), as printed by the Hanover Historical Texts Project. The card's 'every Sunday' and 'twelve pence' are this clause. The same page prints the holy-days phrase the card leaves out: 'and other days ordained and used to be kept as holy days.'

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Ancient text

Politics, Book I, on slavery by nature

Aristotle · about 330 BCE

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written in Athens in the fourth century BCE, in a city that held enslaved people. A Latin copy lies open on the judges' table in 1550.

Intended audience

Aristotle's students and readers. At Valladolid, the audience is theologians and royal lawyers.

Purpose

To sort kinds of rule, including the rule of master over slave, as part of a theory of the household and the city.

Point of view

A Greek philosopher writing inside a slave society. He is not describing the Americas. Sepúlveda is the one who applies him there.

Aristotle, Politics, Book I. The card is our summary of the 'natural slave' idea as Sepúlveda used it.

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Voyage narrative

The first voyage made to the coasts of America, 1584

Arthur Barlowe (one of the two captains; the report is unsigned in Hakluyt) · 1584

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written after the 1584 reconnaissance of the Outer Banks and sent to Walter Raleigh, who had paid for the voyage and needed backers for a colony.

Intended audience

Raleigh, and then the English readers of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations.

Purpose

To report the landing and the trade, and to make the country sound rich, gentle and easy to settle.

Point of view

An English captain who spent a few weeks on the coast. He prices a tin dish at twenty crowns or twenty nobles and calls the people's life a golden age. He does not describe the work of planting.

Arthur Barlowe, account of the 1584 voyage, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (London, 1598–1600), as transcribed by East Carolina University, Roanoke Colonies Illuminated. The 'first creation' sentence is our text; scholarship often finds it in the 1589 edition and dropped later. The ECU page that matches our spelling carries both the dish lines and the creation sentence.

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Expedition narrative

La relación, the narrative of the Narváez expedition

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · printed 1542

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation by Buckingham Smith, 1851

Sourcing

Historical situation

A report to the king by the ranking survivor of Pánfilo de Narváez's Florida expedition, after eight years (1528–1536) walking to the Spanish frontier.

Intended audience

Charles V, and Spanish readers of the 1542 book.

Purpose

To tell what happened to the expedition and what the survivors learned, and to show that Cabeza de Vaca had served the Crown.

Point of view

A Spanish officer. He calls Estevanico 'the negro' and writes the journey as his own report. Estevanico's words are not in the book. 'Negro' was the Spanish and English word for a Black African; it is quoted as the writers used it.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, La relación (Zamora, 1542), trans. Buckingham Smith (1851), as reprinted in Frederick W. Hodge, ed., Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543 (New York: Scribner's, 1907). The sentence was read on the Perseus text of that printing.

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Book

Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570

Inga Clendinnen · 1987

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

A 1987 study of the Spanish conquest of Yucatán and of the 1546–47 rising in the east of the peninsula.

Intended audience

Historians and students of colonial Mexico.

Purpose

To show the conquest as unfinished and the rising as aimed at Spanish presence, not only at soldiers.

Point of view

A modern historian working from Spanish inquiries and Maya evidence. The Spanish inquiries were taken after the defeat.

Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), on the eastern rising of November 1546. A phrase sometimes quoted from her was removed from the chapter. This URL is the bibliographic record.

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Painted manuscript

Códice de Tlatelolco

Nahua painters of Tlatelolco · about 1560s

Image. An image of the source. The accompanying description is editorial.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Painted in Mexico City in the middle of the sixteenth century, after the fighting, in the Nahua tradition of recorded history.

Intended audience

Nahua readers of the painted year-count, and later Spanish and modern scholars.

Purpose

To keep a Native record of wars, rulers and tribute in those years.

Point of view

Painters in Tlatelolco, a Mexica city that had its own grievances against both the Spanish and other Native states. It is not a Spanish battle report.

Códice de Tlatelolco (mid-sixteenth century), Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico. Summary by us. We don't claim a particular cell shows the peñol.

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Journal abstract

Journal of the first voyage, Sunday 14 October 1492

Christopher Columbus, in the abstract made by Bartolomé de las Casas; English in the Markham tradition · October 14, 1492

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation, 1893

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written on the first voyage, two days after the landfall at Guanahani. The original journal is lost. What survives is Las Casas's abstract, partly in Columbus's words.

Intended audience

Ferdinand and Isabella, who had paid for the voyage.

Purpose

To report the island and the people, and to show that the voyage had reached the Indies he had promised.

Point of view

Columbus, guessing at a language he did not know. 'We understood' is his reading of signs and words. The Taíno side of the question is not in the journal.

Christopher Columbus, journal, Sunday 14 October 1492, in Las Casas's abstract; English as printed in The Journal of Christopher Columbus (the Markham wording), Internet Archive identifier thejournalofchristophercolumbus: 'we understood that they asked us if we had come from heaven.' The same clause is in the University of North Georgia anthology, which credits Clements R. Markham. Cecil Jane's Olson and Bourne text prints a different clause ('they were asking us if we had come from the heavens') and is not the line on screen. p1-02's entry for this id quotes other days of the same journal.

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Letter

Letter to Luis de Santángel on the first voyage (Quaritch translation)

Christopher Columbus · February 1493

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation from Bernard Quaritch, 1893

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written in February 1493, on the way home or just after, to announce the voyage to a Crown official who had backed it.

Intended audience

Luis de Santángel, and through the printed letter the Spanish public.

Purpose

To claim the islands for the Crown, describe the people, and show that force and persuasion had both been used.

Point of view

Columbus, arguing for his titles and his reading of the people. He says they thought he came from heaven. That is his report of their opinion.

Christopher Columbus, letter to Luis de Santángel (February 1493), English from Bernard Quaritch, The Spanish Letter of Columbus (London, 1893), as printed in Julius E. Olson and Edward Gaylord Bourne, eds., The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot (New York: Scribner's, 1906). The book says the translation is Quaritch's. p1-02's columbus-letter-1493 is R. H. Major's different English and is a different source id.

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Letter

Letter of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to the viceroy, 3 August 1540

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado · August 3, 1540

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation by George Parker Winship (1904 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written at Hawikuh or Cíbola on 3 August 1540, weeks after Estevanico had been killed and after Coronado's own fight to enter the town.

Intended audience

Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, who had sent both Fray Marcos and then Coronado.

Purpose

To report that the golden cities were not what the friar had described, and that Estevanico was dead.

Point of view

Coronado, passing on what he says Native people told him about a man who was already dead. We stop at 'a bad man' and don't add the accusations that follow in the letter. 'Negro' was the Spanish and English word for a Black African; it is quoted as the writers used it.

Francisco Vázquez de Coronado to Antonio de Mendoza, 3 August 1540, trans. George Parker Winship, The Journey of Coronado (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1904), in the Bureau of American Ethnology printing. The sentence was read in that scan. The letter continues with accusations we don't put on screen.

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Letter

Second letter to Charles V

Hernán Cortés · October 30, 1520

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation by George Folsom (1843 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written at Segura de la Frontera on 30 October 1520, after the expulsion from Tenochtitlan, describing the meeting of 8 November 1519.

Intended audience

The emperor Charles V, whose grant Cortés needed, because he had sailed against the governor's orders.

Purpose

To turn the meeting into a lawful surrender to the Crown. Moctezuma's speech, as Cortés reports it, recognizes Charles as the awaited lord and denies that Moctezuma himself is a god.

Point of view

Cortés, through his interpreters. He never writes that anyone took him for a god. An earlier highlight used a different English sentence and credited MacNutt; that wording was not found and was replaced.

Hernán Cortés, second letter to Charles V, 30 October 1520, trans. George Folsom, The Despatches of Hernando Cortes (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1843). The highlighted sentence was read on Global Grey's text of Folsom.

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Book

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England

William Cronon · 1983

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

A 1983 history of how English settlement changed the land of New England, read here beside the 1586 Roanoke weirs and the 1629 Winthrop argument.

Intended audience

Students and general readers of early American history.

Purpose

To show that the absence of fences was not the absence of owners.

Point of view

A modern environmental historian, writing about New England, not Roanoke. We use the comparison and don't quote him.

William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983). Named in our research notes. No sentence is quoted.

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History

Historia de la conquista de México

Francisco López de Gómara · 1552

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Published in Zaragoza in 1552, more than thirty years after the fall of Tenochtitlan, while Cortés's reputation was still being argued in Spain.

Intended audience

Spanish readers, and a Europe that had few other full narratives of the conquest.

Purpose

To tell Cortés's conquest as a great Spanish deed, from papers and interviews in Spain.

Point of view

A priest who never saw Mexico, writing the conqueror's story. Nahua memories of 1519 are not his source.

Francisco López de Gómara, Historia de la conquista de México (Zaragoza, 1552). No sentence is quoted. The chart label is a paraphrase.

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Printed report

A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia

Thomas Harriot (the 1590 title page spells him Hariot) · 1588

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written in 1588, two years after the 1585 colony left Roanoke with Drake, to answer colonists who had come home talking the country down.

Intended audience

The 'adventurers, favourers, and well-willers' of the Virginia enterprise, named in the preface.

Purpose

To defend the colony and list commodities, including tobacco, and to explain Algonquian deaths as God's work through the English.

Point of view

Harriot, a young Oxford mathematician in Raleigh's household, writing what he says people around Roanoke made of the English. Their view reaches us only in his English.

Thomas Harriot, A briefe and true report (London, 1588), as printed in English in Theodor de Bry's America, part 1 (Frankfurt, 1590), Documenting the American South. The tobacco sentence, the women sentence, the death counts, 'gods or men' and 'inuisible bullets' were read on that page. p1-01's entry for this id quotes the corn-yield passage, a different part of the same book. Gutenberg 4247 prints 'We ourselues' as one word; DocSouth's 'We our selues' matches our text.

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History

Historia de las Indias, Book III, the cleric's regret

Bartolomé de las Casas; English by John-Charles Duffy · between about 1527 and 1561

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation by John-Charles Duffy

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written late in his life, looking back at the 1510s, when he had urged that enslaved Africans be brought so that Native people might be spared.

Intended audience

Readers of a manuscript he did not publish. He writes of himself as 'the cleric'.

Purpose

To record that the advice was wrong, and that African captivity was as unjust as Native captivity.

Point of view

A man judging his own earlier counsel. The trade he had recommended did not stop.

Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, Book III, chapter 129 in the 1875–76 Madrid edition, trans. John-Charles Duffy, from the Miami University Empire and American Religion PDF. Translation © John-Charles Duffy, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The same passage is p1-03's entry for this id, with a longer excerpt. We narrate the sentence and don't voice it.

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Report

Relación of the journey to Cíbola

Fray Marcos de Niza · 1539

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

A report to Viceroy Mendoza in 1539, after Estevanico's death at Hawikuh and before Coronado's army.

Intended audience

The viceroy, who had to decide whether to fund an expedition.

Purpose

To describe what lay north, in terms that made a further expedition seem worth the cost.

Point of view

A Franciscan who did not enter Hawikuh. What he reports of the town is what others told him after Estevanico was killed.

Fray Marcos de Niza, relación of 1539, known through the copy sent to the viceroy. No sentence is quoted. Coronado's letter of 3 August 1540 is the document we open.

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Encyclopedia entry

Thomas Harriot (ca. 1560–1621)

Michael G. Moran, Encyclopedia Virginia

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

A modern reference article on an Elizabethan mathematician who also served a colonial project.

Intended audience

Students and readers of Virginia history.

Purpose

To summarize Harriot's life, his 1585–86 stay, and his 1588 book.

Point of view

A modern scholar. The article depends on English records. It cannot say what Manteo and Wanchese thought of the lessons.

Michael G. Moran, 'Thomas Harriot (ca. 1560–1621)', Encyclopedia Virginia. Summary by us.

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Woodcut map

Map of Tenochtitlan, Nuremberg, 1524

Published with the Latin edition of Cortés's second letter · 1524

Image. An image of the source. The accompanying description is editorial.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Cut in Nuremberg in 1524, five years after Cortés entered Tenochtitlan and four years after he wrote the letter.

Intended audience

European readers of the Latin letter who had never seen the city.

Purpose

To show the city Cortés described: an island capital, causeways, a market, a great temple.

Point of view

A European woodcut made from a Spanish report. It is evidence of what Europeans printed, not a Mexica map.

Nuremberg map of Tenochtitlan, 1524, issued with the Latin Praeclara Ferdinandi Cortesii de noua maris oceani Hyspania narratio. No inscription is quoted.

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History

Historia general y natural de las Indias

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo · first part printed 1535

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Printed in Seville in 1535 by the official chronicler of the Indies, who had served on Hispaniola.

Intended audience

The emperor, and Spanish readers who wanted a description of the islands.

Purpose

To describe the lands, plants, animals and peoples of the Indies for the Crown, and to defend Spanish rule.

Point of view

A Spanish official who had been there and who did not grant Native societies the standing of European ones. His book is an eyewitness report and a polemic at once.

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, part 1 (Seville, 1535). The evidence card is our summary. No sentence is quoted.

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Voyage account · reported speech

Both brothers challenge French trading terms

Jacques Cartier’s voyage account; H. P. Biggar, editor and translator · 1535–1536

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation, 1924

Sourcing

Historical situation

French voyages among the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, 1535–1536; winter at Sainte-Croix near Stadacona.

Intended audience

The French crown and readers of the voyage relation.

Purpose

Record trading relations and discredit the interpreters who challenged French prices.

Point of view

Cartier attributes the warning to both brothers. Taignoagny speaks a compressed first-person adaptation, visibly labelled as reported; Domagaya participates in the image. Their warning concerns exchange value, not the physical uselessness of iron tools. Cartier’s contempt records opposition to their bargaining power, not an objective description of them.

H. P. Biggar, ed. and trans., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1924), pp. 186–187. The excerpts retain the 1924 edition’s wording, with page breaks and footnote markers removed.

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Voyage account · reported speech

A diplomatic warning and the question about Jesus

Jacques Cartier’s voyage account; H. P. Biggar, editor and translator · 1535–1536

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation, 1924

Sourcing

Historical situation

French voyages among the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, 1535–1536; winter at Sainte-Croix near Stadacona.

Intended audience

The French crown and readers of the voyage relation.

Purpose

Report the expedition and justify the captain’s conduct.

Point of view

The voyage account describes three horned envoys and the brothers trying to prevent the Hochelaga journey on 18 September 1535. The question and reply are compressed from reported speech, with reporting labels on both Native and French lines. The French mockery is part of the record; we give the diplomatic warning seriousness. Later scurvy deaths are not proof of a supernatural prediction.

H. P. Biggar, ed. and trans., The Voyages of Jacques Cartier (Ottawa: Public Archives of Canada, 1924), pp. 136–140. The excerpts retain the 1924 edition’s wording, with page breaks and footnote markers removed. Narration summarizes the description; the exchange remains labeled reported speech.

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Retrospective account; translated

The people refuse the claimed identity

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · 1542

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation by Buckingham Smith (1871 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

The surviving officer of the Narváez expedition describes the years 1528–1536 after returning to Spanish society.

Intended audience

The Spanish Crown and readers of the printed Relación.

Purpose

Account for the failed expedition, establish service and credibility, and recommend how to bring Native peoples under Christianity and imperial rule.

Point of view

We quote only the first clause, ending before the semicolon. This is Cabeza de Vaca’s later account of people refusing to group the healers with the mounted Christians; it is not a word-for-word transcript of a discussion.

Cabeza de Vaca, Relación (Zamora, 1542), ch. 34, p. 115; trans. Buckingham Smith (1871), in F. W. Hodge, Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543 (1907).

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Eyewitness memoir

Aguilar identifies himself to Cortés

Bernal Díaz del Castillo · Event March 1519

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Díaz recalls Aguilar’s return to the Spaniards on Cozumel after years in Maya communities.

Intended audience

Readers of Díaz’s account of the conquest.

Purpose

To recount encounters as he remembered witnessing them.

Point of view

Díaz was at the beach; he was not at Guerrero’s home. The bookend’s family image is therefore a recollection of a reported scene, not Díaz’s eyewitness view of the household.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, chapter XXIX, Spanish text (1862 edition; Project Gutenberg 64945). English context: A. P. Maudslay, The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, vol. I (1908), pp. 100–102. Our closing narration quotes the two Spanish words and returns to our earlier reconstruction of the castaways’ choices.

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Promotional argument beside expedition accounts

English promises and English acts, 1584–1586

Richard Hakluyt; the anonymous Tiger journal; Ralph Lane · 1584–1586

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Hakluyt seeks royal backing for English colonization while presenting Spanish cruelty as an English opportunity; English voyages follow.

Intended audience

Elizabeth I and her advisers; later Hakluyt readers.

Purpose

The promise seeks investment and allies; the voyage accounts explain actions in America.

Point of view

English authors describe their own ambitions and violence. This comparison does not invent Native promises to support England.

Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting (1584), chapter headings, no. 11, modern-spelling NHC extract, https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/exploration/text5/hakluyt.pdf . Aquascogoc: Tiger journal, 16 July 1585, Hakluyt (1600) III:253. All timeline prose is explicitly editorial; only the excerpt here is quoted.

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Retrospective account; translated

Estevanico approaches alone — reported speech adapted

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · 1542

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation by Buckingham Smith (1871 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

The surviving officer of the Narváez expedition describes the years 1528–1536 after returning to Spanish society.

Intended audience

The Spanish Crown and readers of the printed Relación.

Purpose

Account for the failed expedition, establish service and credibility, and recommend how to bring Native peoples under Christianity and imperial rule.

Point of view

The first-person line changes “The negro told him we were seeking…” into direct reported speech, without adding an offer or promise. Cabeza de Vaca does not preserve Estevanico’s own words. Açamor is Azemmour, Morocco. The portrayal uses the attested name Estevanico and identifies enslavement by Dorantes, not a conjectural personal name.

Cabeza de Vaca, Relación (Zamora, 1542), chs. 20 and 38, pp. 73 and 126; trans. Buckingham Smith (1871), in F. W. Hodge, Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543 (1907).

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Historical interpretation

Fort Caroline and Matanzas in 1565

National Park Service · 1565

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

France’s Protestant colony challenged Spain’s imperial claims to Florida; Menéndez established St. Augustine and attacked the French.

Intended audience

Visitors and students.

Purpose

To explain the violent struggle around Fort Caroline and its aftermath at Matanzas.

Point of view

A modern public-history synthesis, distinguished from eyewitness quotation. The timeline compares Christian justifications and force; it does not imply Valladolid caused these killings.

National Park Service, “Florida: Fort Caroline National Memorial,” attack and Matanzas paragraphs; St. Augustine foundation is also described in the same page.

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Retrospective account; translated

Good treatment for a colonial purpose

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · 1542

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation by Buckingham Smith (1871 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

The surviving officer of the Narváez expedition describes the years 1528–1536 after returning to Spanish society.

Intended audience

The Spanish Crown and readers of the printed Relación.

Purpose

Account for the failed expedition, establish service and credibility, and recommend how to bring Native peoples under Christianity and imperial rule.

Point of view

The writer’s stated objective is Christianity and obedience to imperial authority. His changed approach does not make him an opponent of all empire.

Cabeza de Vaca, Relación (Zamora, 1542), ch. 32, p. 110; trans. Buckingham Smith (1871), in F. W. Hodge, Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528–1543 (1907).

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Royal cédula

Royal cédula concerning new conquests in Peru

Charles V · April 16, 1550

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

The Crown seeks a legally justified procedure for further expeditions while the conquest controversy is under discussion.

Intended audience

Officials in the jurisdiction of the Audiencia of Lima.

Purpose

To suspend the conquests and discoveries covered by that jurisdiction pending further instructions.

Point of view

A royal instruction is evidence of prescribed policy and geographical scope, not proof of enforcement or an empire-wide stoppage.

Archivo General de Indias, Patronato, royal cédula of 16 April 1550. The excerpt preserves the instruction’s geographical scope: Peru and the jurisdiction of Lima’s audiencia. A broader account of the controversy must not be substituted for the wording of this particular order.

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Voyage narrative

John White records Virginia Dare’s birth

John White · August 18, 1587

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

White’s daughter gives birth at Roanoke before he returns to England for supplies.

Intended audience

English patrons and readers.

Purpose

To record an event in the settlement’s life.

Point of view

The grandfather’s account supplies the birth date, not information about the child’s subsequent fate.

White, narrative of the 1587 voyage, birth dated 18 August, excerpt reproduced by Fort Raleigh National Historic Site, Brochure. Combined with the 18 August 1590 search date in White’s fifth voyage and Encyclopedia Virginia, this establishes the third-birthday coincidence; it does not establish that White mentioned or remembered it. It follows the 13 August christening entry for Manteo. These support the calendar date without assigning the birthday observation to White’s 1590 words.

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Law code

Recopilación de leyes de los reinos de las Indias

Crown of Spain (a code compiled under Charles II) · 1680

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

A code published in 1680 that gathered laws of the Indies going back more than a century, including Philip II's 1573 ordinances.

Intended audience

Officials who had to apply the law in Spain and in the Americas.

Purpose

To put the scattered royal orders in one book, including the ban on the word conquest.

Point of view

Royal lawyers in Spain, compiling. The code records what the Crown wanted said. It does not record whether officials said it.

Recopilación de leyes de los reinos de las Indias (Madrid, 1680). The explicit 'use pacification instead' sentence was not re-read in the 1680 volume. A page opened for this pass attributes that sentence to the 1624 Recopilación (José Rabasa, citing Gibson). The chapter note names 1680, libro IV, título I, ley VI. No sentence is printed as a quotation.

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Historian's summary

The Christmas rising of enslaved Africans on Hispaniola, 1521

Spanish colonial record, as summarized by later historians · Christmas 1521

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Santo Domingo, Christmas 1521, on the governor's sugar estate, a few years after the first large shipments of enslaved Africans to Hispaniola.

Intended audience

The 1522 ordinances that followed were written for colonists.

Purpose

To mark a rising the records describe as planned, without turning the suffering into a scene the viewer plays.

Point of view

Spanish officials wrote the surviving orders.

The 1522 ordinances, summarized by the City College of New York exhibit 'First Blacks in the Americas,' say a number of enslaved people agreed to rise during the Christmas holiday on Hispaniola. Later scholarship (Lynne Guitar and others, as cited in Ida Altman-era surveys) puts about twenty people, many of them Wolof, on Diego Colón's estate. We don't call it the first revolt.

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Book

The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture

Helen C. Rountree · 1989

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

A 1989 university-press study of Powhatan culture in the Virginia tidewater, used here for the Algonquian division of farm work and the seasonal round.

Intended audience

Scholars and general readers of Virginia Indian history.

Purpose

To describe towns, farming, and the work expected of women and of men, from the written record and later community knowledge.

Point of view

A modern anthropologist. Most of the written evidence was set down by English colonists, so a modern account has to read them against their own aims. We don't quote her.

Helen C. Rountree, The Powhatan Indians of Virginia: Their Traditional Culture (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989). Same book as the p1-05 source of this id. No sentence is quoted here. The season card cites it for women's farming and men's clearing by fire.

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Book

A Map of Virginia

John Smith · 1612

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Printed at Oxford in 1612, from Smith's years in Virginia, about the Powhatan towns along the rivers near Jamestown. We use it beside Roanoke, a different nation and a generation earlier.

Intended audience

English readers of a book meant to describe, and to promote, the colony.

Purpose

To explain who did the farming. Smith treats women's field work as the reason men looked idle to him.

Point of view

An English soldier describing another people's work, and judging it.

John Smith, A Map of Virginia (Oxford, 1612), 'Of the naturall Inhabitants of Virginia,' as transcribed by Encyclopedia Virginia. The card's sentence begins at 'which is the cause.' p1-05 quotes the same book in Tyler's regularized spelling; we keep Encyclopedia Virginia's 1612 spelling.

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Journal article

The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought

James H. Sweet · January 1997

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

A 1997 article on ideas about African difference in Iberia before the American trade.

Intended audience

Historians, in the William and Mary Quarterly.

Purpose

We use it as the scholarly frame for Zurara's curse and for the claim that baptism did not end captivity. The article itself was not re-read here.

Point of view

A modern historian. Not a sixteenth-century witness.

James H. Sweet, 'The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought,' William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 54, no. 1 (January 1997): 143–166.

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Petition

Petition of Francisco Tenamaztle to the Council of the Indies

Francisco Tenamaztle, with Bartolomé de las Casas · June 1, 1555

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Valladolid, 1555. Tenamaztle had been deported from New Spain in 1552, after the Mixtón War, and was held at court.

Intended audience

The Council of the Indies and, through it, the Crown.

Purpose

To seek restoration of his freedom and authority and challenge the justice of the wars and dispossession imposed on his people.

Point of view

A petition in Tenamaztle’s name prepared in Spanish with Las Casas. The relationship between his testimony and the advocate’s legal framing is part of the source’s mediation.

Rubén A. Sánchez-Godoy, 'Francisco Tenamaztle, Bartolomé de las Casas and the Role of Translation,' in The Transatlantic Las Casas (Brill, 2022), pp. 88–89. The study dates the Council’s receipt of Ciertas peticiones to 1 June 1555 and identifies Archivo General de Indias, México, 205, N. 1. This is a receipt date, distinct from later proceedings.

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Journal article

The Tale of the Kettle: Odyssey of an Intercultural Object

Laurier Turgeon · Winter 1997

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

A 1997 ethnohistory of one trade object, built from notarial cargo lists, not from a speech by either side at Chaleur Bay.

Intended audience

Historians and anthropologists.

Purpose

To show a kettle changing meaning as it changed hands.

Point of view

A modern scholar reading European inventories. The people who wore the copper are not the authors.

Laurier Turgeon, 'The Tale of the Kettle: Odyssey of an Intercultural Object,' Ethnohistory 44, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 1–29. The narration was rewritten so it no longer says a kettle became bracelets. No sentence of the article is quoted.

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Summary

The Verapaz experiment

Bartolomé de las Casas and the Dominicans of Guatemala; the pact with Alonso de Maldonado · May 2, 1537

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Guatemala, 1537. A mountainous province the Spanish had failed to conquer, and then renamed as a war.

Intended audience

The governor, the Crown, and the colonists who were to be kept out for five years.

Purpose

Las Casas offered a test: preaching instead of war, with the people left out of encomienda. The card in the debate scene is that test, not a verdict.

Point of view

Spanish friars and a Spanish governor describing their own experiment. Maya accounts of the same years are not the card.

Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (1949), on the Vera Paz experiment of 1537–50: Las Casas offered to go 'without arms or soldiers' into the province Spaniards named Tierra de Guerra. The pact with Alonso de Maldonado is dated 2 May 1537. Hanke's Internet Archive text was searched for this passage.

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Travel journal

Journey through England and Scotland

Lupold von Wedel · 1584–1585

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation by Gottfried von Bülow (1895 edition)

Sourcing

Historical situation

A German visitor's journal of England in 1584 and 1585. He saw Manteo and Wanchese in London after the 1584 voyage, and later the heads on London Bridge.

Intended audience

His own record, published long after, for readers of a German nobleman's travels.

Purpose

To describe what he was shown: two men from overseas, and, on another day, the heads of men executed for treason. He uses the same eye for both.

Point of view

A foreign courtier. 'Childish and wild' is his judgment of men whose language he could not understand. The clothing sentence between these clauses is left out of the excerpt.

Lupold von Wedel, 'Journey through England and Scotland made by Lupold von Wedel in the Years 1584 and 1585,' trans. Gottfried von Bülow, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, n.s. 9 (1895): 223–270. The Manteo and Wanchese passage is p. 251. The heads are p. 267: 'about thirty heads of noble-men and gentlemen were fixed' on 'the gate of London Bridge.' The sentence about clothing is omitted.

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Voyage narrative

John White's account of the 1587 voyage

John White · 1587

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Roanoke, August 1587. White is governor of a colony that has just killed people it then decided were friends, and is about to christen Manteo.

Intended audience

Readers of Hakluyt's Principal Navigations, and Raleigh's circle.

Purpose

To record the dawn attack and the christening as White wanted them remembered: a mistake, then a reward.

Point of view

The English governor. Manteo is 'our Savage' in White's sentence. What Manteo made of the baptism is not in the page.

John White, narrative of the 1587 voyage, in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations, vol. 3 (London, 1600). The sentences were read on the Internet Archive text of that volume: 'we were deceived, for those Savages were our friends,' and 'The 13 of August our Savage Manteo, by the commandement of Sir Walter Ralegh, was christened in Roanoak, and called Lord thereof, and of Dasamonguepeuk, in reward of his faithfull service.' An earlier draft of our text used spellings that are not on that page. They were aligned to it.

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Voyage narrative

The fifth voyage of John White, 1590

John White · 1590

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Roanoke Island, 18 August 1590. White has been away three years. The houses are gone. A post is carved. His chests have been dug up.

Intended audience

Hakluyt's readers, and the backers who had waited out the Armada.

Purpose

To show he found the agreed sign, and no cross of distress, and to name who he thought had spoiled his goods.

Point of view

A father and governor reading a carving as good news, on the day his granddaughter turned three. He does not say he remembered the birthday.

John White, 'The fift voyage of Master John White,' in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations (1600). 'grauen CROATOAN' and '5 foote from the ground' were read in the Project Gutenberg text of the Hakluyt Society printing (ebook 25645). 'my bookes torne from the couers' was read in the 1599 EEBO scan of Hakluyt, allowing for the long s. 'a certaine token of their safe being at Croatoan' is the same page.

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Letter

John White to Richard Hakluyt, 4 February 1593

John White · February 4, 1593

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Ireland, February 1593, more than two years after White failed to reach Croatoan.

Intended audience

Richard Hakluyt, who had asked for the story, and then Hakluyt's readers.

Purpose

To send the narrative of the last voyage. The storm shot uses the voyage narrative, not a line of this cover letter.

Point of view

White, writing to the man who would publish him. No sentence is on screen.

John White to Richard Hakluyt, 4 February 1593, printed with the 1590 narrative in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations. Nothing from it is quoted.

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Watercolour

John White's Virginia watercolors

John White · 1585–1586

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

Drawn on or just after the 1585 voyage, for a record Raleigh's circle could use.

Intended audience

The English who had not seen the coast, including the engravers who later copied the drawings.

Purpose

To show towns, fields, and people as White saw them, in a form that could travel home.

Point of view

An English painter in a colony that was about to need those pictures. The people drawn did not title the sheets.

John White, "A cheife Herowans wyfe of Pomeoc and her daughter of the age of 8 or 10 yeares," watercolour, British Museum 1906,0509.1.13 (dated about 1585–1590). We don't quote the inscription.

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Document

Reasons to be considered for justifying the plantation in New England

John Winthrop · 1629

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

England, 1629, while Winthrop was arguing for the Massachusetts plantation. Roanoke was already forty years behind him. We use his test on an Algonquian coast he had not seen.

Intended audience

English readers who objected that the land was already inhabited.

Purpose

To answer that objection: no fences, no settled homes, no tame cattle, therefore no civil right he felt bound to respect.

Point of view

A lawyer who had not been to New England, defining ownership by English husbandry. The find card says the weirs and fields were the ownership his test could not see.

John Winthrop, 'Reasons to be considered for justifying the undertakers of the intended plantation in New England' (1629), Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Papers, vol. 2, view PWF02p145: 'they inclose noe Land, neither haue any setled habytation, nor any tame Cattle to improue the Land by.' The same sentence is the manuscript view PWF02d079. A different Winthrop copy, often called the Higginson text, words the objection another way. We follow this manuscript.

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Chronicle

The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea

Gomes Eanes de Zurara · about 1453

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

English translation by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage, 1896

Sourcing

Historical situation

Written for the Portuguese court in the 1450s, in the years of the first Atlantic raids and ransoms along the African coast.

Intended audience

Prince Henry's circle, and a chronicle meant to praise the voyages.

Purpose

To explain, as Zurara believed it, why the captives could be held: a biblical curse on one line of Noah's descendants.

Point of view

A court chronicler. He writes Cain. The usual later name for this story is Ham. Our narration says 'a Bible curse on one man's descendants' and names neither.

Gomes Eanes de Zurara, Chronica do descobrimento e conquista de Guiné, translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage, The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, vol. 1 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896), ch. 16, as on Project Gutenberg ebook 35738: 'that his race should be subject to all the other races of the world.' The editors' note says the biblical name is Ham, not Cain. The highlight is Zurara's clause.

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Printed voyage narrative

Barlowe names Wingina and Wingandacoa

Arthur Barlowe (account attributed to him) · Voyage 1584

Verbatim. The original words, unchanged.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

An English reconnaissance encountered Carolina Algonquian communities in summer 1584.

Intended audience

Ralegh and prospective colonial patrons, later Hakluyt’s readers.

Purpose

To report and promote a landfall and the people and resources encountered.

Point of view

An English report making names legible to colonial patrons despite limited initial communication. The reported country-name is evidence of English naming, not proof of a particular Algonquian translation.

Barlowe, account of the first voyage, in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (1600), III:246–251, Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645.

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Naming evidence and provenance limit

Wingandacoa: a recorded name and an uncertain later gloss

Arthur Barlowe; later gloss attributed to Walter Ralegh; editorial provenance note · 1584 report

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

The 1584 English account gives a country-name. Later accounts associate a related form, Wingandacon, with a compliment about clothing.

Intended audience

English colonial readers, then historians of the voyages.

Purpose

We distinguish a recorded naming from a later interpretation of what was said.

Point of view

Neither Barlowe’s first exchange nor an original Algonquian sentence survives as a linguistic transcript. Ralegh’s late explanation cannot confirm the original meaning.

Barlowe’s recorded name is in Hakluyt, Principal Navigations, Goldsmid vol. XIII, Project Gutenberg 25645. For the later explanation, see David Beers Quinn, The Roanoke Voyages (1955), I, “Raleigh on the naming of Wingandacon,” citing History of the World (1614), book I, chapter 8, pp. 175–176. That later attribution does not establish the original Algonquian meaning. We report the clothes explanation as an unconfirmed later interpretation and assign no exact quotation to Ralegh.

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Reported exchange · two performed adaptations

The song Lane welcomed and the warning Manteo gave

Ralph Lane, reporting the party’s interpretation and Manteo · Spring 1586

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

The 1585–86 English settlement depended on Native food. Lane wrote after its evacuation, describing encounters, hostile plans and his killing of Pemisapan.

Intended audience

Ralegh and later readers of Hakluyt’s collection.

Purpose

To explain the colony’s failure and justify Lane’s decisions and violence.

Point of view

The armed colonial governor defending his own conduct. Reported Native intentions and speech survive through his English, including Manteo’s interpretation. Lane’s “as we thought” becomes the labeled line “They sing to welcome us”; Manteo’s “they meant to fight with vs” becomes “They mean to fight with us.” Both are adaptations, not surviving direct dialogue.

Lane, first part of his Virginia account, Moratuc journey, Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645; Hakluyt 1600, III:258–259. “About three” and the subsequent approach of sunset require late afternoon, not VISION’s night. No words or tune of the song survive. No Englishman was hurt by the reported volley.

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Reported Manteo speech · performed adaptation

Manteo’s grief and rebuke, as White reports them

Manteo, as reported by John White · After the 9 August 1587 raid

Adapted. Shortened, or spelled the modern way. Same meaning.

Background: not shown on screen.

Sourcing

Historical situation

The 1587 expedition sent Stafford and Manteo to Croatoan, then raided Dasamonquepeuc on 9 August and christened Manteo on 13 August.

Intended audience

English patrons and Hakluyt’s readers.

Purpose

To recount the expedition, its diplomacy, retaliatory raid and honors, from the governor’s side.

Point of view

White’s expedition narrative includes reports from Stafford’s party and Croatoan informants. Its distinction between friends and enemies and its excuses are the English account, not an independent Native record. White reports both grief and a blame of chiefs’ failure to attend. It cannot establish Manteo’s private motives, approval of the raid or free consent to every English demand.

White, fourth voyage narrative, immediately after 9 August raid, Goldsmid vol. XIII / Gutenberg 25645. Direct adaptation changes “their Wiroances” to “your chiefs,” “they” to “you,” and “knowen that mischance” to “suffered this.” Grief is in the stage direction because White explicitly reports it; we don't endorse the blame.

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