The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 8, July 1904 - April, 1905 Page: 217
xiii, 358 p. : ill., maps ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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De Len's Expedition of 1689. 217
books were recovered and their titles committed to memory. The
Indians had done this damage not only to the furnishings, but also
to the arms; for we found more than a hundred stocks (cavezas)
of flintlock arquebuses, without locks or barrels. They must have
carried these off, as was proved by an [arquebus] barrel found at
some distance from the houses. We found three dead bodies scat-
tered over the plain. One of these, from the dress that still clung
to the bones, appeared to be that of a woman. We took the bodies
up, chanted mass with the bodies present (con misa cantada de
cuerpo presente, and buried them. We looked for the other dead
bodies, but could not find them; whence we supposed that they had
been thrown into the creek and had been eaten by alligators, of
which there are many.' The principal house of this settlement is in
the form of a fort, made of ship's timber, with a second story, also
made of ship's timber, and with a slope to turn off water. Next to
it, without any partition, is another apartment, not so strong,
which must have served as a chapel where mass was said. The
other five houses are of stakes, covered with mud inside and out;2
their roofs are covered with buffalo-hides. All are quite useless
for any defence." In and about the fort and the houses (junto al
fuerte y casas) were eight pieces of artillery, iron, of medium bore,
-four or five-pounders,-and three very old swivels (pedreros)
whose chambers were lacking. Some iron bars4 were also found,
1This sentence is transferred from its place in the text, because this is
its logical place. (See p. 218, note 2.) The Letter says: "We found
two hundred unburied bodies, which I interred, setting up a cross over
the grave."
""Por dentro y fuerza." Fuerza is no doubt a copyist's error for fuera.
"We . . . found six houses, not very large, built with poles plastered
with mud, and roofed over with buffalo hides, another large house where
pigs were kept, and a wooden fort made from the hulk of a wrecked vessel.
The fort had one lower room which was used as a chapel for saying mass,
and three other rooms below; above the three rooms was an upper story
serving for a store-house." (Letter.)
4Bergajones. The Diccionario Extractado del Diccionario Enciclopidico
defines vergajon as "an iron bar two inches thick and four or five varas
long, with an eye in each end, through which pass the cables by which,
under certain circumstances, sunken ships are drawn up from the bottom."
The Letter mentions the finding of some large iron bars, which it calls
barejones.
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Texas State Historical Association. The Quarterly of the Texas State Historical Association, Volume 8, July 1904 - April, 1905, periodical, 1905; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101033/m1/224/: accessed March 28, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.