SOURCE: "The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History," in The William and Mary Quarterly, third series, Vol. XLIX, No. 2, April, 1992, pp. 210–28.

Adorno is a Professor of Romance Languages at Princeton University. In the following excerpt, she describes Las Casas's use of Alvar Núñez Cabeza De Vaca's account of the 1527 Spanish expedition to Florida as a source of information for his own Apologética historia sumaria.

The eyewitness account, Cabeza de Vaca's relación of the 1527 expedition to Florida, was published twice during the reign of Charles V. It appeared before royal attempts to control publications on the Indies and again during the time when the rights to the rewards of the conquests became a topic of heated controversy. The success of Cabeza de Vaca's writing can be explained by the fact that it took a counter-conquest position...