In adapting a variety of printed forms to convey their faith in untried sources of imperial wealth, colonial writers, reformers, and projectors shaped the malleable possibilities of copper into creative narrative mediums. As they told and retold stories, their own and others’, such writers build an iterative archive of maps, reports, and “true relations” that redefined the meaning of experience, eyewitness testimony, and knowledge of metals in the colonial Americas. This chapter opens the section on copper by analyzing Hernando de Soto’s search for copperworks in La Florida, as inspired by Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, narrated by Portuguese footsoldier o Fidalgo de Elvas, and translated by English polymath Richard Hakluyt.