BOOKS OF THE WEEK
Spaniards and Incas
The Florida of the Inca. By Garcilaso de la Vega. Translated from the Spanish and edited by John Varner and Jeannette Varner. (Nelson. 30s.) This charming book, beautiful in format and execution, is at once a credit to the publisher and the translators, and a fitting tribute to the splendour of the theme. It is the first complete version in English of Garcilaso de la Vega's immortal tale of the adventures of Hernando de Soto and his gallant band of caballeros in the vast, vaguely defined region lying between the Florida of today and the confines of Mexico, which Ponce de Leon, its first discoverer, had named La Florida—the land of flowers. All who cherish famous books, or who desire to enter into the mind and spirit of Renaissance Spain, when the romances of chivalry were still struggling for survival against the caustic, ironic wit of Cervantes, and when fact and fiction, the natural and supernatural, were still intermingled in the minds of historiographers, will be enchanted by this fine specimen of sixteenth-century literary art. The ghosts of Amadis of Gaul, Palmerin and Roland seem to stalk through its pages, or gallop across the landscape in search of fame and riches excelling those of Cortez and Pizarro—" crusaders for God, the Crown, and Mammon."
What Garcilaso purveyed to his generation was not history in our sense of the word, but something that might be called " history in aspic "—a gorgeous collection of heroic deeds floating in the semi-transparent, savoury jelly of his own lively and powerful imagination. I would, he says, " that I might attain the classic eloquence of the greatest Caesar so as to be able to pass my entire life relating and commemorating their magnificent deeds." Prescott was of the same opinion when he wrote his well-known Conquest of Peru, and plundered Garcilaso 's other and perhaps better-known work—the Comentarios Reales—for information about the Incas.
The reader will observe at once the felicitous ease and fluency of the translation, which carries him forward from adventure to adven- ture as if he were sailing down the Rio Grande, with a favourable wind, on tiptoe of expectation for what the next bend of the river will reveal. Garcilaso is a weaver of tales of the first rank—never prolix, never in a hurry, always anxious to hold the attention of his reader, quick to apologise for his fascinating digressions, but relent- 'less in his pursuit of the ill-fated expedition as it ploughed its way through swamp, forest and savannah to the banks of the Mississippi and beyond. There are graphic descriptions of battles with the Indians: for example, the bloody struggle at Mauvile (Mobile), when the Spaniaids fought for their lives against the 'Cacique Tasea- luza, amid the smoke and flame of the burning village, and Indian women joined in the carnage ; or the twelve-day running-fight on the Mississippi between Spanish caravels and Indian canoes, when the expedition, or what remained of it, was carving its way to the Caribbean and safety.
There are also humorous episodes, like the chase of the creeping Cacique, Capafi, of Apalache, who broke prison and "crept on hands and knees into the brush." But the prevailing note throughout the tale is one of disillusionment, of privation, of suffering and of tragic failure. The culminating point is reached when de Soto, broken-hearted by his disappointments, and fearing the bitter recep- tion he would receive on his return to Spain, contracted a fever and died, and was buried secretly in the middle of the night in the bed of the Mississippi. Bancroft writes his epitaph with a strange nonchalance : " The discoverer of the Mississippi had crossed a large part of the continent in search of gold, and found nothing so remarkable as his burial-place ! "
Garcilaso de la Vega was a mestizo—the son of an Inca princess and a Spanish father. The blood of two races coursed through his veins, and he tries to do justice to both, remembering his debt to each. In this conflict between a civilised and a savage people he makes no distinction between the valour of the Indian " brave" and that of the Spanish cavalier ; indeed, he seems to believe that the laurels might have gone to the Indian, were it not for the advantage the Spaniard had in horses and armour. But the sober purpose behind the narrative is to convince the Spanish Government that its duty was to conquer, civilise and christianise the Floridans, and to establish atolony. For this reason he comments upon the fertility of the soil, the maize-fields, the mulberry-trees, the grapes, the nuts, the acorns, the flowing streams—and the possibility of auriferous ore.
But the intelligent reader will no doubt ask himself : How much of this wonderful tale is to be received as authentic history ? The answer—according to modern critics—is equivocal : quite a lot but not too much. The reason is that Garcilaso 's rhetoric lacks the geographical detail necessary for tracing the movements of the Spaniards with any degree of accuracy. Directions are vague ; latitude and longitude are missing ; distances are often fanciful and always subject to distrust ; and the speeches of Spaniards and Indians are the creation of the author's own fertile brain, like the speeches in Thucydides, even although, in one instance at least, Garcilaso vouches its authenticity. " All these," he says, " are the actual words of the Indian himself, and I have added nothing to them other than to translate them into Spanish or Castilian." He parries the charge of vagueness when describing the march of the Spanish force by saying : " He who gave me the account was neither a cosmo- grapher nor a mariner," and, again, "The army carried no instru- ments to take the elevation (i.e. latitude) of the land, and had no one to obtain or consider it."
The kernel of the matter is that the story told by the Inca was almost entirely built up on oral evidence supplied to him by Don Gonzalo Silvestre, who accompanied de Soto and spoke from memory after the lapse of many years. As the translators say in their excellent introduction, the evidence was twice " processed" —first when it passed through the mind of the original narrator, and secondly when it was transformed by the alchemy of the Inca's vivid imagination. To get at the truth the reader is advised to consult the Final Report of the United States De Soto Expedition Commission, published in Washington in 1939. This supplies the analysis and
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