In these excerpts from a memoir, dated October 24, 1610, at Potosí in present-day Bolivia, Bartolomé Martínez recounts the story of the Virginia Indian Don Luís de Velasco (Paquiquineo). Martínez was a minor Spanish official married to a niece of the wife of Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, the adelantado, or governor, of the Spanish province of La Florida. While living at Santa Elena, near present-day Parris Island, South Carolina, from 1571 to 1579, Martínez heard the story of the Jesuit missionaries killed by Don Luís in February 1571. The memoir’s full title reads: The Martyrdom of the Fathers and Brothers of the Company of Jesus whom the Indians of Ajacán, in the Land of Florida, martyred, about which Father Pedro de Ribadeneyra has written briefly in the third book, chapter six, of the Life of the Blessed Father Francis Borgia. The translation from Spanish to English was done by Father Aloysius J. Owens in 1935.
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