SHREVEPORT – When district judge Gayle Hamilton donated his collection of 4,000 volumes to the James Smith Noel Collection five years ago, the LSUS repository gained a wealth of information and resources about the history of Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi.
But one manuscript needed further investigation.
A handwritten version of “La Florida del Inca” details Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto’s trek into Florida and what is now the southeastern United States in the 1530s and 1540s.
The manuscript with its animal skin cover describes the first European expedition deep into modern-day America.
Could this be the original version of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega’s manuscript, the first “mestizo” writer and historian?
“Judge Hamilton had some knowledge of this manuscript, but he wasn’t exactly sure of the provenance of it,” said Dr. Alexandria Mikaberidze, curator of the Noel Collection as the Ruth Herring Noel Endowed Chair. “We investigated the manuscript, and it’s an early handwritten copy of Vega’s work, which was published in 1605.
“We’ve determined that this specific manuscript was copied in 1616. It remains a highly valuable document because only two copies of the printed book have been sold in the past 75 years, and no other handwritten copy is known to exist.”
De La Vega is of Incan royalty and Spanish conquistador descent, growing up with the Incan side of his family before moving to Spain at the age of 21, where he received a more formal education.
His most famous work is the “Comentarios Reales de los Incas” based mostly on stories and oral histories passed down by his Incan relatives.
But “La Florida del Inca” is De La Vega’s first work, his trial run before he wrote down the first account Incan history and of the Spanish conquest from an indigenous perspective.
Mikaberidze explained that the printing press was still pretty new in the early 1600s, which necessitated hand-written copies of the book, complete with the doodles and smudges of the scribe.
Hamilton’s wife Gloria and son Herbie were on hand to officially transfer stewardship of the manuscript to the LSUS Noel Collection on Wednesday.
LSUS history students looked on as Mikaberidze showed off the manuscript, which LSUS Chancellor Dr. Robert Smith said will be “studied and enjoyed by generations of students and scholars.”
“The Hamilton family picked the right place to keep this document because of the judge’s rich history right here in Shreveport,” Smith said.
A 1942 graduate of C.E. Byrd High, Hamilton enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corp during World War II and was stationed in the Pacific Theater at Guadalcanal and Okinawa and later in Beijing. Hamilton was part of the invasion force at Okinawa.
After returning to the States and graduating with a psychology degree from Southern Methodist, he studied the law on his own when he wasn’t working as an oil scout and landman.
Hamilton passed the bar exam without attending law school, practicing law for 20 years before serving three successive terms as a state district judge in Caddo Parish.
“Judge Hamilton was a bibliophile who had a great love of books and knowledge, and today is a celebration of that love,” Mikaberidze said.
The Noel Collection, one of the largest private collections of antiquarian books in the U.S., is housed on the third floor of the Noel Memorial Library on LSUS’s campus.