by Lisa Alther
De Soto’s route has been hotly debated by southern towns wanting to erect commemorative plaques that will draw tourists. But most historians agree in sending him through what is now western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee.
His four-year expedition started out with 200 mounted knights, 300 foot soldiers, 100 artisans and slaves, and 300 hogs. Like all conquistadors worthy of the name, they murdered, raped, and pillaged everywhere they went. They cut the noses and ears off Indians who objected, or they threw them to the war dogs for supper. They also seized native men as porters and native women as concubines and servants, chaining them together and forcing them onward.
By the time they reached the Mississippi River, they’d accumulated 500 native slaves, some no doubt pregnant, others toddlers sired by the soldiers. The Spaniards boarded rafts to descend the Mississippi to Mexico, abandoning most of these Indians and their half-Spanish progeny to the wilderness. An expedition that had departed from Spain as a sixteenth-century version of Star Trek degenerated into a Hispanic-American Brady Bunch.
En route to the Mississippi, some tried to escape from this dysfunctional caravan. As I read, I count ten deserters, half African slaves and half soldiers. Two were hunted down and dragged back. The motive for desertion in one case was depression; in another, illness. The rest were in love with native women.
Contrary to their bad press, natives often didn’t mutilate and kill strangers. If the tribe needed a captive’s skills, or if a family had lost a member and wanted a replacement, a captive could be adopted into a tribe with full rights.
Or a captive might be enslaved, as was a Spaniard named Cabeza de Vaca, who was seized by Indians on the Texas coast when his exploring fleet sank. He escaped, and it took him seven years to hike to Mexico, during which time he collected an escort of several hundred Indians who revered him for the Catholic rituals he performed for them like an itinerant magician.
Another Spaniard named Juan Ortiz was captured by a tribe in what’s now the Florida Panhandle when he was separated from a party that was searching for de Vaca’s expedition. In what may have been the original for the fable of Pocahontas rescuing Captain John Smith from death at the hands of her tribe, Ortiz was being barbecued over a welcome fire when the chief’s daughter pleaded successfully for his release. After twelve years, part slave and part free, Ortiz joined de Soto as a translator when the Spaniards passed near his village.
Around eight soldiers and slaves who escaped from de Soto’s expedition weren’t caught. It’s possible some fathered children with the Indian women for whom they’d deserted. In addition, the swath cut through the southeast by de Soto’s marauding troops would have been crawling with half-Spanish babies. To say nothing of the five hundred natives and their half-breed babies abandoned on the banks of the Mississippi.
Would the tribes have accepted these mixed children and their defiled mothers, or driven them out, or killed them? Would some of these children have survived to gang together and form their own tribe, either because they were outcasts (like the children with Vietnamese mothers and American soldier fathers) or because they’d inherited their Spanish fathers’ sense of racial superiority?
Who can say? Not me, that’s for sure. Historians of the Southeast have called the period from 1570 to 1670 both the Silent Century and the Great Black Hole because almost no written records exist of what was going on then. In any case, I can see no conclusive way to link de Soto’s depredations to the Melungeons, whose historical stomping grounds were some sixty miles northwest of his nearest possible approach.
A requirement of my new teaching job is that I give four public lectures on topics of my choosing. One concerns the Melungeons. I go to get my hair done the afternoon before the evening lecture.
Diane shows me her new Chinese fighting fish, which is a vivid scarlet. He lives in a glass vase on her counter amid some floating greenery. She warms the side of the vase with her hairdryer to show me how he rubs up against the glass to feel the warmth. Then she holds a hand mirror up to the fish to show me how he bashes himself against the glass, trying to fight his own reflection. Although this seems an apt metaphor, I decide not to pursue it.
Once she settles down to her trimming, Diane starts complaining about her weight.
“You look fine to me,” I tell her. And she does. She’s tall and lean with long legs.
“I used to be as big around as Twiggy,” she moans. “Now when I’m sitting, I look down and I think, ‘What’s all this crap in my lap?’“
I suggest the Pizza Diet. I explain that you follow a standard diet like Atkins or Scarsdale, but you substitute a slice of pizza for any item on the recommended menus.
“Does it really work?” Diane asks hopefully.
“No. But neither do the others, and at least you’re happy as the pounds accumulate.”
I tell her about my upcoming talk on the Melungeons, and she says her ancestors in southwest Virginia claimed Indian heritage. She wonders if they were Melungeons. She’s about the fiftieth person in town to respond like this to my mentioning Melungeons.
Brent Kennedy also gives talks on the Melungeons around the area, and the venues are always jammed. He has a Ph.D. in mass communications from the University of Tennessee and is a charismatic and entertaining speaker. If he wanted, he could probably start a cult. Instead, he begs his audiences to do their own research and draw their own conclusions and add them to his, in hopes that synergy can yield some answers to this Melungeon mystery. He’s assembled an academic advisory committee of archaeologists, linguists, historians, etc., who are researching related topics.
When I arrive at the Kingsport library for my talk, I’m flabbergasted. All the seats in the auditorium are taken. People are standing in back and sitting up front on the floor. After my remarks, people pose many questions, most of which I can’t answer. I do my best to clarify the issues, but I’m the blind leading the blind.
The endless discussion is conducted with the urgency of a lynch mob. Many of these people have been told by their elders that their ancestors were fugitive cavaliers seeking safe haven in Virginia after the beheading of Charles I by Oliver Cromwell’s cohorts. The notion that they might have been gypsies jailed for vagrancy or indentured Armenian textile workers instead is both titillating and unsettling. But for all I know, the latter could be as far-fetched as the former.
One warm weekend I drive down to Beaufort, South Carolina, and head out to the marine training base on Parris Island. (This was before 9/11. Now, a potential terrorist such as myself can’t get anywhere near the marines.)
Alongside the eighth fairway of the course on which marines are trained to play golf, an archaeological dig is underway. Spoonful by spoonful, the dirt that has buried the Spanish town of Santa Elena is being removed. At this rate, it will take as many years to unbury the town as it did for the silt to cover it.
Built in 1566, twenty-three years after the conclusion of de Soto’s expedition, Santa Elena was intended to be the Spanish capital of La Florida. At its height, it hosted close to four hundred soldiers and settlers, who lived in sixty houses with thatched roofs and walls of wattle and daub. Following repeated Indian attacks, the town was abandoned in 1587. Some citizens withdrew to St. Augustine. Others may have headed north into the wilderness in search of farmland.
I stroll out onto a point that protrudes into a marsh. A blue heron is flapping away, a struggling fish hanging from his beak. Spanish moss drapes everywhere like the hair of a hag. I feel as though I’m in a Halloween house of horrors.
As hooked and spliced golf balls whiz past me to plunk into the marsh, I read on a plaque that I’m standing on the site of Charlesfort. In 1562, four years before Santa Elena was built, some French Huguenots, fleeing Catholic persecution, built Charlesfort. But the soil was poor, so their crops didn’t grow. Their captain returned to France in their only ship for more settlers and supplies.
Back at Charlesfort a hurricane blew down their huts. A fire destroyed their sto
rehouse and their remaining supplies. Their acting leader hanged one disobedient soldier and marooned a second without food on a remote island.
Since the Charlesforters were soldiers, they had no idea how to hunt or fish, so they relied on the local Indians to provide them with game and corn. The Indians, eventually exhausted by the soldiers’ unrelenting needs and faced with survival problems of their own, adopted a policy of tough love. The soldiers were soon reduced to collecting shellfish and wild greens — an early and unwelcome version of the South Beach Diet.
The hungry soldiers mutinied and killed their cruel commander. Somehow they managed to build a watertight boat, caulking it with Spanish moss and tar. Then they stitched their linen shirts and sheets into sails and embarked for France.
Becalmed in the middle of the ocean for three weeks, these bad-luck boys again ran out of food. So they cast lots to determine who would be sacrificed for supper. The unfortunate fellow who’d been marooned on the island lost. Finally, an English patrol ship picked up the survivors.
Meanwhile, back on the Carolina coast, the Spaniards marched north from St. Augustine and slaughtered several hundred other Huguenots at a second fort called Fort Caroline. Then they continued to Charlesfort where, like dogs peeing to mark their territory, they constructed Santa Elena atop the ruins of the abandoned Huguenot fort.
Following an Indian attack, the Spaniards temporarily quit Santa Elena. While they were gone, yet another shipload of hapless Huguenot settlers ran aground in the Santa Elena sound. Since the Indians had as much trouble differentiating among the various European tribes as the Europeans did among the native tribes, they mistook these Frenchmen for Spaniards and attacked them. But once the French established their true identity, the Indians escorted them to their villages and insisted they remain as guests, illustrating the different receptions the various European tribes inspired in indigenous people.
When Spaniards colonized, they first read the natives an official requerimiento, which stated that the natives were now obliged to give obedience to the emperor and king of Castile and to the supreme pontiff and vicar of God in Rome. Should they refuse, the commander in charge would continue, “I will seize your wives and children, and I will make them slaves, and I will sell them or dispose of them as His Highness might command. And I will seize you and your goods and do you all the hurt and harm which I can. And I declare that the deaths and damage which might grow out of it will be your fault, not that of His Highness, nor mine, nor of these cavalrymen who accompany me.”
This must have seemed insane to people who didn’t speak Spanish and knew nothing about Christianity. Yet any who objected were branded on the forehead with the Spanish king’s seal to indicate that they were now legally enslaved. The un-branded were often illegally enslaved as well and were forced to serve as porters and concubines. Or they were shipped as laborers to mines and plantations in the Caribbean.
In contrast, the French, upon encountering a new tribe, gave the headmen shirts embroidered with fleurs-de-lis and organized parades that showcased the native leaders. Amid carefully orchestrated pageants, they planted decorative stone posts, claiming the land for the French king. They donned native outfits and learned their languages. They ate the local cuisine and charmed the women with kind words in their own tongue. They fought shoulder to shoulder with the warriors against their enemies.
The English, meanwhile, tried their best to set up replicas of the green and pleasant land they’d left behind — hence, New England, New York, New Jersey, New Hampshire, New London, and so on. When they couldn’t resist contact with the native women, they pretended it hadn’t occurred and regarded any children that resulted as inexplicably pale natives.
In other words, the Spaniards raped, the French seduced, and the English denied. The results are mestizos in Latin and South America, metis in Canada — and, perhaps, Melungeons and related groups in the United States. Forty percent of French Canadians now claim méti ancestry. Latin and South America count 40 million Indians and 60 million mestizos. But few outside the Appalachians have ever even heard of the Melungeons, and by 1900 only 250,000 Americans were willing to identify themselves as Indian on the U.S. census.
I drive north from Santa Elena, crawling along roads that more or less trace the estimated route of Captain Juan Pardo. Pardo was sent north from Santa Elena in 1567 with around 120 troops to establish a series of six forts along a pathway meant eventually to extend to the Spanish silver mines in Mexico. (At that time no one had a clear idea of just how broad our continent really is. Explorers in eastern Canada kept thinking they’d found a passage to the Pacific.)
Pardo’s route followed Indian paths, which in turn followed animal trails. The buffalo and deer had eons earlier located the least steep passages through the mountains, the driest paths through the swamps, the most direct routes to the salt licks and springs, and the most fordable spots along the rivers.
After several hours of wandering through the tidal swamps and sandy coastal plains of South Carolina, the road begins its rise to the Piedmont. I pass through some sand hills left by an ancient ocean and arrive at the Mulberry archaeological site on the Wateree River near Camden, South Carolina. It’s thought to be the location of Talimeco, the main town of the chiefdom of Cofitachequi, through which both de Soto and Pardo passed. When de Soto arrived here from the southwest, he was greeted by a young woman (the niece of the queen) wearing a robe made from the hide of an albino deer and riding in a litter shaded by the wings of white swans. She hung three strands of river pearls around de Soto’s neck in welcome.
Her aunt’s sway extended over an area the size of the Netherlands. Because many of their warriors had recently died of smallpox brought from the coast by natives who’d traded with Spaniards, this queen and her subjects had little choice but to feign hospitality and wait for the Spaniards to leave. After receiving reports about the conquistadors in action, the queen decided to remain in hiding. When de Soto tried to force a young warrior to guide him to her, the warrior impaled himself on an arrow and died rather than betray her.
De Soto insisted the queen’s courageous niece accompany him, correctly believing that her people wouldn’t attack him so long as she was his captive. This woman and an attendant, aided by an African slave and several soldiers, managed to escape and vanish near present-day Asheville.
The University of South Carolina is excavating this town, which is located on private property. The local people conceal its whereabouts from me as diligently as the Indians did that of their queen, several assuring me that you can’t get there from here, etc. I finally locate the road into the site, but I decide that death by gunshot is too high a price to pay simply to view a field surrounded by pine forests. I know from photos and from correspondence with the head archaeologist that only two of the ten mounds found here in the nineteenth century still remain, the others having been leveled by farmers’ plows and by natural erosion. One of these two is now crumbling into the river, and the other is only two feet high.
I cross the river and station myself opposite the site. All I can see is a tangle of vegetation reminiscent of The African Queen. I try to picture the town with its five hundred lodges spread out before me. In de Soto’s day, a temple sat atop the highest mound. It was roofed with conch shells, and its sides were covered with painted mats. Six pairs of armed wooden warriors with grimacing faces guarded the entrance. Inside, de Soto’s troops found several boxes of river pearls, but none of the promised gold and silver that had lured them into signing on for this grueling expedition. Nearby were four longhouses full of native corpses, victims of the smallpox epidemic. The entire town would likely have been surrounded by a high palisade of tree trunks plastered with clay.
Twenty-six years later, Captain Pardo arrived from the southeast at a much smaller and less prosperous Talimeco, where he met with area, caciques (Spanish for “chiefs”). His soldiers constructed his second garrison here — Fort Santo Tomas.
The road continues to ri
se as it winds through endless pine forests across the state line into North Carolina. When I first began reading road maps as a child, I believed that whenever we drove uphill, we were headed north. But on this particular trip this misapprehension is quite accurate: As you drive north from Parris Island through the coastal swamps, the road does rise continuously until you reach the piney forests of the Piedmont. This ascent continues into the foothills of the Smokies, and from there to the mountain passes.
Reaching the foothills, I enter stands of oak and hickory trees with leaves tinged gold and rust. Hazy blue mountains scallop the western horizon. In Pardo’s day, chestnut trees would also have been common, but a blight decimated them early in the twentieth century. The journals of the southeastern explorers marvel over the height and girth of the trees. Vast herds of deer grazed on grassy hillsides, burned over for that purpose by the Indians, as though the deer had been semidomesticated.
Each of Pardo’s forts was manned by ten to thirty soldiers. These men took a formal pledge to hold the fort for their king until instructed otherwise. They swore to do so “under pain of perjury and of infamy and of falling into less value.” After further Indian attacks, the Spaniards finally departed from Santa Elena for good, withdrawing to St. Augustine and abandoning these soldiers in their wilderness forts. They were never heard from again. One Spanish record suggests that the forts were destroyed by the local Indians soon after they were built.
At the base of the Blue Ridge escarpment, I stop at an archaeological dig called the Berry site, which sits along a peaceful creek that flows into the upper Catawba River. A town that Pardo knew as Joara, and de Soto as Xuala, was located here, as was Pardo’s Fort San Juan. Burned beams notched by metal axes and pottery shattered by fallen timbers indicate to archaeologists that this fort was destroyed in some catastrophic way. But no skeletons have been found.
I bend over to pick up a chunk of quartz lying amid the excavations. One side is smooth and the other jagged. Holding it in my palm, I reflect that it was a silent witness to whatever happened here. If only it could speak, it could tell me whether Indians burned the fort and killed the soldiers. Or did they enslave the soldiers? Did they adopt them? Did the soldiers, realizing they’d been abandoned by their commanders and no longer had to honor their pledges, burn the fort themselves and join a native tribe? Did they abduct native wives and start their own tribe? Did they meet up with those settlers thought to have headed north from the deserted Santa Elena? I study the crystalline spikes expectantly, but they aren’t talking.
