Cartas sobre la Florida (1555-1574)

Pedro Menéndez de Avilés is best known as the founder of St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continuously inhabited European town in what is now the United States. But in his time he was better known as an unusually energetic, entrepreneurial mariner and commander of various flotas and the Armada de la Guardia de la Carrera de las Indias. That fleet, originally of twelve- but soon of nine-galleyed galleons of his own design (based on prototypes already in existence), was built in 1567 for the purpose of escorting the convoys to their Caribbean destinations and then patrolling the coasts of Spain’s colonies—there to intercept smugglers and raiders. For a time in the 1560s, Menéndez was Philip II’s principal naval commander in the Atlantic and Caribbean theaters, although he lacked the noble title that was increasingly necessary for high command.Prominent as he was, Menéndez has no scholarly biography. The late Albert Manucy’s Florida’s Menéndez: Captain General of the Ocean Sea (1965, 1983) is an unannotated sketch. Accounts of the conquest of Florida written at the time by Gonzalo Solís de Merás, Bartolomé Barrientos, and Fr. Francisco López de Grajales focus on just that part of his life. Eugene Lyon’s The Enterprise of Florida: Pedro Menéndez de Avilés and the Spanish Conquest of 1565–1568 (1976) is likewise limited in scope, although exhaustive of archival documentation. Lyon’s work shows Menéndez in full entrepreneurial cry. My own The Spanish Crown and the Defense of the Caribbean, 1535–1585 (1980) provides some additional perspectives but has a different focus than Menéndez’s biography. Only the letters here reprinted from Eugenio Ruidiaz y Caravía’s La Florida: Su conquista y colonización por Pedro Menéndez de Avilés (2 vols., 1893–94), 2:1–292, provide an overview of Menéndez’s remarkable rise from Asturian commerce raider to adelantado of Florida and commander of a royal fleet. They are introduced by a summary biography (pp. 13–43) primarily based on them and materials in Solís de Merás. A useful bibliography, time line, and set of illustrations complete the introductory materials.The balance of the book publishes 59 letters that Menéndez de Avilés wrote between 1555 and his death in 1574. Each is thoroughly annotated to explain unfamiliar words and personal and place names. Mercado’s editorial method was to compare Ruidiaz’s text with at least some of the original documents, to modernize the spellings and use of capital letters (a largely harmless practice), to introduce paragraphing where it does not exist in the original text, and to not give the source citations that Ruidiaz does. Of these editorial practices, the last must be decried. Moreover, since some of Ruidiaz’s copies came from copies in the Museo Naval and not the original documents, Mercado ought to have sought out the originals and compared them to the Ruidiaz text, indicating the location of both the Ruidiaz and the original materials. Providing this essential scholarly apparatus would not have made the work any less accessible to the lay reader (for whom it is evidently intended) and would have given it value for scholars.In sum, this volume can provide an entry point into the life and times of one of the mid–sixteenth century’s most interesting personalities, but its scholarly value is limited by the choices its editor made. That is regrettable

Ancient history · Art · CONQUEST · Geography · Humanities · Early Modern Spanish Literature · History · Literary and Cultural Studies · Literary and Philosophical Studies