Mining Language by Allison Margaret Bigelow

Author:Allison Margaret Bigelow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Omohundro Institute and University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Copper Fictions: Iberian Exploits in La Florida

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca opens and closes the report of o Fidalgo de Elvas, bookending the Portuguese account with Spanish precedents. In 1542, Cabeza de Vaca reduced his eleven years of shipwreck and wandering into thirty-nine slim sections that composed the Relacion que dio Aluar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca de lo acaescido en las Indias. Thirteen years later, he standardized the text into thirty-eight formal chapters with names and numbers, and he appended it to eighty-four chapters of commentary as well as the relation of Hernando de Ribera on the province of Argentina. This work was published as La relación y comentarios del Governador Alvar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca, de lo acaescido en las dos jornadas que hizo a las Indias.15

According to Fidalgo de Elvas’s Relaçam verdadeira, Cabeza de Vaca was called to speak before a royal audience. There, he affirmed the veracity of what he had written, which more or less relayed what Elvas called “the misery of the land” (“miseria da terra”); at the same time, Cabeza de Vaca insisted that his men wanted to return to La Florida, where they had seen signs of wealth in the “rich land” (“terra rica”). Elvas added that the explorer wanted to say more, but he had promised his companion, Andrés Dorantes, who stayed in Mexico awaiting permission for a second expedition, that he would not share too many details of their plan.16

In exploiting the gap between written report and spoken intimation—and conveying the sense of what he could not say—Cabeza de Vaca encouraged his audience, including writer-soldiers like Fidalgo de Elvas, to imagine rich possibilities in the Americas, even amid excruciating tales of death and despair. Elvas writes that, after Cabeza de Vaca recounted his story to Holy Roman Emperor Carlos V, Pedro Álvarez Osorio, marques of Astorga, sent several of his relatives to march with Soto, including Antonio, Francisco, and García Osorio. Deep into their failed mission, the men tried to square their experiences with Cabeza de Vaca’s report of finding cotton clothing (“roupa dalgodā”), a sign of civilization, alongside deposits of gold, silver, and precious stones where “ainda nam avia chegado” (no one had yet arrived). When the expectation of wealth did not cohere with the reality of struggle, Elvas looked to his source to account for the difference between literary fashioning and lived experience. Curiously, even as Fidalgo de Elvas omitted evidence from his own relation, he took Cabeza de Vaca at his word.17

In truth, what Soto’s men experienced was not all that different from what Cabeza de Vaca described; it was different from what they said he wrote. There are notable similarities between Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación y comentarios (1555), which describes events from 1527 to 1537 in San Lúcar, Cuba, La Florida, Lisbon, and Castile, and Elvas’s Relaçam verdadeira (1557), which describes events from 1539 to 1543 in Seville, Cuba, La Florida, and Mexico. These similarities, such as their insistence on the possibility of finding copper wealth, even,

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