Hernando de Soto's army left no ruins on Tampa Bay. Everything known about the day it came ashore, and about the captive Juan Ortiz it found here, survives because a handful of men wrote it down. They are the chroniclers of the entrada, four voices that do not always agree, and reading them against one another is the closest anyone can come to standing on the shore in 1539.
The expedition that landed on the bay in 1539 built nothing permanent and vanished into the interior, and the people it met kept no written records. The only history of the landing is therefore a written one, and it comes down through four narratives, three by men who were there and one assembled later from the memories of survivors. Where they agree, historians trust them; where they diverge, the disagreements themselves become evidence, and much of the long argument over exactly where de Soto came ashore is in truth an argument over how to read these four texts against the geography of the bay.
The fullest account is by a Portuguese soldier of the expedition known only as the Gentleman of Elvas, whose narrative was printed at Évora in 1557. Spare and soldierly, it is the backbone of what is known. The shortest is the official report of Luys Hernández de Biedma, the king's factor, or royal financial officer, on the expedition, who delivered his summary to the Crown in 1544; its value is that it was written for the government, by an official with no story to sell. The third, and in some ways the richest, is the day-by-day account kept by Rodrigo Ranjel, de Soto's private secretary, which does not survive on its own but was copied into the great Historia general of the royal chronicler Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. Together these three are the eyewitness record.
The fourth voice is different in kind. Garcilaso de la Vega, called “El Inca” for his mixed Spanish and Inca parentage, never set foot in Florida. He wrote La Florida del Inca, published in 1605, decades after the events, working from the recollections of aging survivors. It is by far the most literary of the four, full of speeches and grand scenes, and by far the least reliable; historians mine it with care, taking its color while distrusting its detail. The contrast among the four, the terse soldier, the dry official, the secretary's daybook, and the Inca's epic, is exactly what makes them useful: no single one could be trusted alone, but laid side by side they triangulate a vanished week on this bay.
For Mullet Key and the mouth of Tampa Bay, these four texts are the beginning of the written record. They are the source of the landing, of the burned-alive ordeal of Juan Ortiz and his rescue by the chief's daughter, of the names and acts of the local chiefs Hirrihigua and Mocoso. Every account of those events, including the ones in this archive, ultimately rests on these four men, and on the scholars who have spent four centuries arguing over what they meant.