The Coronado Expedition, 1540-1542.: Excerpted from the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1892-1893, Part 1.Winship, George Parker
History
The Coronado Expedition, 1540-1542.: Excerpted from the Fourteenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1892-1893, Part 1.
Winship, George Parker
Coronado, Francisco Vásquez de, 1510-1554; Southwest, New -- Description and travel
A perusal of the narratives of the expeditions of Coronado and of
Friar Marcos of Nice, which were translated by Henri Ternaux-Compans
for the ninth volume of his Collection de Voyages, convinced me
that the style and the language of these narratives were much
more characteristic of the French translator than of the Spanish
conquistadores. A comparison of Ternaux’s translations with some
of the Spanish texts which he had rendered into French, which were
available in the printed collections of Spanish documents in the
Harvard University library, showed me that Ternaux had not only
rendered the language of the original accounts with great freedom,
but that in several cases he had entirely failed to understand what
the original writer endeavored to relate. On consulting Justin
Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of America, in the second
edition, I found that the Spanish manuscript of the Castañeda
narrative, from which most of our knowledge of Coronado’s expedition
is derived, was in the Lenox Library in New York City. The trustees
of this library readily granted my request, made through Dr Winsor,
for permission to copy the manuscript. The Lenox manuscript is not
the original one written by Castañeda, but a copy made toward the end
of the sixteenth century. It contains a number of apparent mistakes,
and the meaning of many passages is obscure, probably due to the
fact that the Spanish copyist knew nothing about the North American
Indians and their mode of living. These places I have pointed
out in the notes to my translation of the narrative, and I have
called attention also to the important errors and misconceptions in
Ternaux’s version. Diligent inquiry among the custodians of the large
Spanish libraries at Simancas, Madrid, and at Seville where the Lenox
manuscript was copied in 1596, has failed to bring me any information
in regard to the original manuscript. The Lenox copy is the one used
by Ternaux.
The Spanish text of the Relación Postrera de Sívola is printed now
for the first time, through the kindness of the late Señor Joaquin
García Icazbalceta, who copied it for me from a collection of papers
in his possession, which formerly belonged to the Father Motolinia,
the author of a very valuable description of the Indians of New
Spain. In the preface to this work, dated 1541, Motolinia says that
he was in communication with the brethren who had gone with Coronado.
The Relación Postrera appears to be a copy made from a letter written
to some of the Franciscans in New Spain by one of the friars who
accompanied Coronado. [p414]
In the bibliography are the references to the exact location of the
Spanish texts from which I have translated the other narratives. I am
not aware that any of these have been translated entire, although Mr
Bandelier has quoted from them extensively in his Documentary History
of Zuñi.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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