TRANSLATION OF THE REPORT OF HERNANDO DE ALVARADO
Account of what Hernando de Alvarado and Friar Juan de Padilla Discovered going in Search of the South Sea.[1]
We set out from Granada on Sunday, the day of the beheading of Saint John the Baptist, the 29th of August, in the year 1540, on the way to Coco.[2] After ^ye had gone 2 leagues, we came to an ancient building like a fortress, and a league beyond this we found another, and yet another a little farther on, and beyond these we found an ancient city, very large, entirely destroyed, although a large part of the wall was standing, which was six times as tall as a man, the wall well made of good worked stone, with gates and gutters like a city in Castile. Half a league or more beyond this, we found another ruined city, the walls of which must have been very fine, built of very large granite blocks, as high as a man and from there up of very good quarried stone. Here two roads separate, one to Chia and the other to Coco; we took this latter, and reached that place, which is one of the strongest places that we have seen, because the city is on a very high rock, with such a rough ascent that we repented having gone up to the place. The houses have three or four stories; the people are the same sort as those of the province of Cibola; they have plenty of food, of corn and beans and fowls like those of New Spain. From here we went to a very good lake or marsh, where there are trees like those of Castile, and from there we went to a river, which we named Our Lady (Nuestra Señora), because we reached it the evening before her day in the month of September.[3] We sent the cross by a guide to the villages in advance, and the next day people came from twelve villages, the chief men and the people in order, those of one village behind those of another, and they approached the tent to the sound of a pipe, and with an old man for spokesman. In this fashion they came into the tent and gave me the food and clothes and skins they had brought, and I gave them some trinkets, and with this they went off.
This river of Our Lady flows through a very wide open plain sowed with corn plants; there are several groves, and there are twelve vil-
- ↑ The text of this report is printed in Buckingham Smith's Florida, p. 65, from the Muñoz copy, and in Pacheco y Cardenas, Documentos de Indias, vol. iii. p. 511, See note on page 391. A translation of this document was printed in the Boston Transcript for October 14, 1893.
- ↑ Acuco or Acoma. The route taken by Alvarado was not the same as that followed by Coronado, who went by way of Matsaki. Alvarado's course was the old Acoma trail which led directly eastward from Hawikuh or Ojo Caliente.
- ↑ Day of the nativity of the Blessed Virgin, September 8. This was the Tiguex or present Rio Grande.
