The magazine of history with notes and queries (Vol. I, No. 5, May 1905)

Transcriber’s Note:
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From the original painting by Birch THE MOONLIGHT BATTLE THE “ BON HOMME RICHARD ” AND THE “ SERAPIS ” SEPT. 23, 1779
THE MAGAZINE OF HISTORY
WITH NOTES AND QUERIES
In 1519 Alonso Alvarez de Pineda (or Pinedo) was sent as commander of an expedition of three or four sailing vessels to explore the coast of Florida and the northern half of the Gulf of Mexico, under a commission from Garay, the governor of the Spanish settlements in Jamaica. The resulting map, transmitted by Garay to Spain, gives a somewhat correctly proportioned outline of the entire gulf, with Florida, Cuba, and Yucatan inclosing it on the east; and the Mississippi is named Rio del Espiritu Santo (River of the Holy Spirit). In Harrisse’s Discovery of North America (1892, p. 168), a translation from the contemporary Spanish account of this expedition says, concerning the Mississippi, that the ships “entered a river which was found to be very large and very deep, at the mouth of which they say they found an extensive town, where they remained forty days and careened their vessels. The natives treated our men in a friendly manner, trading with them, and giving what they possessed. The Spaniards ascended a distance of six leagues up the river, and saw on its banks, right and left, forty villages.”
Pineda’s map shows the Mississippi as if it had a wide mouth, growing wider like a bay in going inland, and it has no representation of the delta; but this river and the several others tributary to the gulf are all mapped only at their mouths. What he meant for the Mississippi is more clearly indicated by the map sent to Spain by Cortes and published there in 1524, which shows the Rio del Espiritu Santo flowing through two lakes close to its mouth, evidently intended to represent Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne. The same delineation of the Lower Mississippi is given also by the Turin map, of about the year 1523. Both these maps, doubtless based on information supplied by Pineda, display the course of the Mississippi above Lake Pontchartrain to a distance of apparently at least a hundred miles, where it is represented as formed by three confluent streams. Through questioning the Indians, he probably learned of the Red river, and of its northern tributary, the Black, which would be the two inflowing streams at nearly the distance mentioned from Pontchartrain.