||Pardo, Juan, 16th cent.
||Account of Florida, 1566-1568
||Hudson, Charles M. (editor) and Herbert E. Ketcham (translator). The Juan Pardo Expeditions: Spanish Explorers and the Indians of the Carolinas and Tennessee, 1566-1568. With Documents Relating to the Pardo Expeditions. (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990). Pages 254-296.
||44 / 0
Almost nothing is known about Juan de la Bandera, the Spanish
notary who compilied these records. He went along with Juan
Pardo, a military officer who led Spanish explorations into
Georgia and South Carolina in the 1560s, with explicit
instructions to record everything he witnessed. Pardo may have
come to America with Pedro Menendez de Aviles in 1565 to help
eject the French from Florida (see AJ-141). Beyond that, little
about either of them can be ascertained.
Expeditions of 1566-1568
Having ousted the French from Florida, Spanish officials
tried to discover what lay between their their new outpost on
the Atlantic and their claims in Mexico. With little information
about the interior, they suspected that descriptions they heard
of the southern Appalachians might refer to the eastern side of
the Sierra Madre Oriental, in Mexico. They hoped that a
reconnaissance from the east might verify that supposition and
also discover silver or gold mines.
Pardo was chosen in 1566 to lead this investigation. He left
the Spanish fort near modern Beaufort, South Carolina, November
1, 1566, with 125 soldiers and spent eight weeks reconnoitering
along the modern Georgia and South Carolina border. In September
1567, on the expedition described here, he pushed further
northwest to the Tennessee River in northern Alabama and perhaps
as far southwest as the Coosa River. Although he left small
detachments of soldiers at garrisons along the route, his
failure to find either riches or a route to Mexico gave the
Spanish no reason to support them indefinitely, and the soldiers
were eventually killed or absorbed into neighboring Indian
This manuscript of this document is preserved in the Spanish
Archivo General de Indias. It occupies seventy-one hand-written pages and
is dated March 31, 1569. In it Bandera recorded in great detail
everything that the expedition saw or did, but he wrote as a
legal secretary rather than a literary master. It is translated
and printed for the first time in the source presented here.
Other Internet and Reference Sources
Pardo’s movements are traced in depth and his career analyzed
in Charles Hudson’s The Juan Pardo Expeditions, from
which this excerpt is given.
Three other primary documents from the Pardo expeditions were
published in “Three Sixteenth-century Spanish Chronicles
Relating to Georgia” by Herbert E. Ketcham in the Georgia
Historical Quarterly vol. 38 (1954): 66-82.
Maps and photographs of archaeological remains from the Pardo
expeditions can be found at the Warren Wilson college’s
“Sixteenth-Cnetury Catawba Valley” Web site:
The Florida Heritage Collection at
http://palmm.fcla.edu/fh/outline/1492spa1.html places Pardo
in the context of Spanish exploration of Florida generally, with
a helpful timeline and discussions of other explorers.