This absence of administrative documentation is not unusual for this period, when colonial expeditions were poorly documented even by the standards of a documentary-minded Renaissance bureaucracy, and when what happened to specific individuals aboard such expeditions was rarely considered worthy of formal record.

But it does mean that historians working with this story must work with literary sources that have their own biases and agendas, and that must be read critically rather than taken at face value.

The absence also means that some questions about Marguerite de la Rocque’s story will probably never be answered — not because the answers are unknowable in principle, but because the documents that would contain them were never created, or were created and have not survived, or survive in archives that have not been fully explored.

This is the condition of much historical work with people and events from the margins of the official record: you work with what survived, you acknowledge what you don’t know, and you resist the temptation to fill the gaps with speculation that masquerades as fact.