The History of Florida (6 page)

lina was a land of almonds, olives, and figs—a new Andalucía?—Ayl ón

sought and received a charter to settle the “Land of Chicora,” as he called

it. In 1526 he sailed from La Española in six ships carrying 600 colonists,

24 · Michael Gannon

including women and children, three Dominican friars, African slaves, and

a number of Carolina captives, including Chicora. After pausing for a short

time on the Carolina shore, which, it turned out, bore little resemblance

to Andalucía, Ayllón led the party south to the more inhabitable Georgia

coast, probably to Sapelo Sound, where on 29 September he established a

town named San Miguel de Gualdape (St. Michael of Gualdape, the latter

half of the name being the native appel ation for the site). It was the first

named European settlement in what is now the United States, antedating

Pensacola (1559), Fort Caroline (1564), and St. Augustine (1565), though

the last-named would be the first permanent settlement. San Miguel lasted

fewer than two months, owing to famine, disease, and cold temperatures.

Taking advantage of a mutiny among the Spaniards, black slaves deserted

and some found freedom in nearby native societies. About 150 survivors,

including the Dominican friar Antonio de Montesinos, first priest in the

hemisphere to defend the human rights of America’s indigenous people,

made their way by ship to various ports in the Antil es. Ayl ón was not

among the survivors.

Next in line to test himself against La Florida was the red-bearded, one-

eyed, deep-voiced Pánfilo de Narváez, whose last official mission, in 1520,

was to arrest the rogue conquistador Cortés in México. He failed in that, as

proof

he would also fail in Florida, where he arrived from Spain on 14 April 1528,

near Tampa Bay, with a license to settle and govern a vast principality that

ranged along the Gulf littoral from coastal northern México (Amichel) to

the Florida peninsula and as far inland as he could control. Carlos V had

conferred on him the lofty titles adelantado, governor, and captain gen-

eral, but no mortal could confer on him common good sense. Foolishly, on

landing he dispatched his ships that carried all his food, wine, and supplies,

not to mention ten wives destined never to see their spouses again, with

the order to rendezvous with him at an indeterminately defined harbor to

the north. Though the ships’ masters found a harbor that corresponded to

Narváez’s description, they did not locate the land party, and they cruised

in search of them for nearly a year before, final y, sailing to New Spain

(México) with their (one supposes) grieving women and depleted cargoes.

Meanwhile, Narváez with 300 men and 40 horses marched northward up

the peninsula, toward the chiefdom of Apalachee, around present-day Tal a-

hassee, which, the Tampa Bay natives had assured Narváez, possessed “gold

and plenty of everything we wanted.” These are the words of surely the most

notable member of the party, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, treasurer and

provost marshal. Fourteen years later, as one of only four survivors of this

First European Contacts · 25

ill-starred expedition, he would publish a lengthy account of the adventure,

thus allowing us to know what happened to the doomed procession.5

Cabeza de Vaca’s description of the Florida interior is the first we have.

The land was flat and sandy, he wrote, with numerous lakes and trees fallen

into them. Together with tall stands of pine, there were cypress, oaks, ce-

dars, and other varieties of trees. Animals sighted included deer, bears, and

panthers. Wildfowl were abundant. In Apalachee, which the army reached

after fifty-six days of marching, there was native-planted maize in the fields

ready for harvest.

Although the army encountered Timucua speakers at various points

along their route, and were sometimes trailed by them at a distance, it was

in Apalachee that they had their first prolonged contacts, most of them vio-

lent. The hostility of the Apalachee should not have surprised the Spaniards

since Narváez had seized a principal vil age with its maize stores and held

their chief hostage. Cabeza de Vaca paid tribute to their warrior skil s, par-

ticularly in archery. The men were wonderful y built, he recorded: “Tall and

naked, at a distance they appear giants”—an understandable observation

since the Spaniards were a good three to four inches shorter in stature—but

skeletal remains indicate that six-footers were rare. “Their bows,” he wrote,

“are as thick as an arm, seven feet long, shooting an arrow at 200 paces with

proof

unerring aim.” After a day of battle with the Apalachee, some of the soldiers

“swore they had seen two oak trees, each as thick as the calf of a leg, shot

through and through by arrows, which is not surprising if we consider the

force and dexterity with which they shoot. I myself saw an arrow that had

penetrated the base of a [hardwood] tree for half a foot in length.”6

After a month in the region, despairing of finding their ships, enfeebled by

illness, down to the last food rations, and continual y harried by Apalachee

archers, Narváez’s men followed their leader to a bay on the Gulf (probably

in the vicinity of present-day St. Marks) where they began construction of

barges in which to effect an escape by following the coast to refuge in the

Spanish settlement at Río Pánuco in México. Although no one among them

knew anything about ship construction, desperation lent invention. Killing

a horse every third day for food, they fashioned the flayed and tanned leg

hides into freshwater bags and used deerskins and hollowed logs to make

a bellows with which they operated a forge for melting down their swords,

stirrups, spurs, and crossbow iron into saws, axes, and nails. The horses’

manes and tails became ropes. Yellow pine trees were split into planks, and

pitch for caulking them was drawn from longleaf pine and mixed with pal-

metto oakum. The men sewed their shirts together to make patchwork sails

26 · Michael Gannon

and shaped cypress logs into oars. On 22 September, after six weeks of work,

242 survivors of the original land party of 300 boarded five rough-hewn

thirty-foot-long craft and set out to sea. As a final gesture they christened

their embarkation site Bahía de Caballos, Bay of the Horses.

Cabeza de Vaca related the sad consequences. After passing the coasts of

Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana, the barges capsized in a vio-

lent storm in November and eighty survivors were cast up on an island, ei-

ther Galveston, Fol et’s, or Matagorda, off the coast of Texas. As they learned

later, Narváez perished in a separate incident. By the following spring, their

number was reduced by illness, exposure, and starvation to fifteen. Even-

tual y, there were only four, who managed to eke out an existence as heal-

ers, traders, and slaves among the tribes indigenous to southern Texas. In

September 1534, those four set out on foot across Texas toward the Sonora

Valley. Their two-year-long convoluted trek, in which they crossed the con-

tinent from the Gulf to the Pacific, brought them eventual y to Mexico City

on 24 June 1536, where Cabeza de Vaca related his incredible story to the

Spanish viceroy. His three companions were Alonso del Castil o Maldo-

nado, Andrés Dorantes, and the latter’s black Moorish servant, Estévan. Be-

hind them the wilderness of La Florida had returned to the private use of its

original inhabitants nearly eight years before.

proof

Next to Ponce de León’s, the name most closely associated in the public’s

mind with Florida’s early contact period is that of Hernando de Soto. He

arrived on Florida’s Gulf coast in 1539 and set out on an overland reconnais-

sance that would penetrate Florida and nine other states of the American

South, covering nearly 4,000 miles over four years’ time. Nothing about de

Soto, from his landing site, to his treatment of the natives, to his route of

march, has escaped controversy, down to and including the present.

Born in the barren Spanish province of Extremadura, whence many New

World conquistadors came, de Soto went to Central America in 1513–14

under the ruthless Pedro Arias de Ávila (Pedrárias Dávila). He received

further schooling in the grim arts of subjugation as a lieutenant to his fel-

low Extremaduran Francisco Pizarro during the looting of Incan Peru in

1532–35. Returning to Spain in 1536, immensely rich, he married Isabel de

Bobadil a, third daughter of Pedrárias Dávila, and sought permission from

Carlos V to become a conquistador in his own right. As for territory, his

preferences were for what later became Ecuador and Guatemala. Instead,

Carlos V awarded him La Florida, the vast geographical region previously

awarded Narváez and Ayllón, with the titles of adelantado, captain general,

and governor over any 200 leagues of coast he could “conquer, pacify and

First European Contacts · 27

Hernando de

Soto (1497?–1542).

An engraving

from
Retratos

proof
de
los
Españoles

Ilustres
con
un

Epitome
de
sus

Vidas
(Madrid:

Imprenta real,

1791).

populate.” At the same time, the king made him governor of Cuba, where

he would establish a base, requisition additional supplies, and organize his

expedition. In the elaborate terms of his asiento, dated 20 April 1537, de Soto

was enjoined to recruit, arm, supply, and transport the Florida army entirely

at his own cost, which he did so well that, by his departure from Seville on

7 April 1538, he had spent his entire fortune and was heavily in debt. But no

matter: the gold he was certain to find in Florida would replenish the chests.

De Soto spent half a year at Havana in prudent preparation for the Flor-

ida campaign, determined to avoid the mistakes of Narváez about which

he had learned from Cabeza de Vaca. Thus, he insisted on adequate pro-

visioning and reliable intelligence. In pursuit of the latter, he sent a trusted

aide, Juan de Añasco, with fifty men in three small ships to reconnoiter the

28 · Michael Gannon

Florida Gulf coast. A guide for navigators, compiled by Alonso de Chaves

at Seville probably in 1537, indicated that there were two favorable harbors,

Bahía de Juan Ponce to the south, and Bahía Honda (Deep Harbor) to the

north.7 When de Soto made his landing it would be at Bahía Honda, accord-

ing to one of the expedition’s chroniclers. Añasco returned with four native

captives to serve as guides and interpreters.

The expedition set out from Havana on 18 May 1539 in five large and four

smaller vessels. On board were more than 600 soldiers, twelve priests, two

women, servants and slaves, 223 horses, numerous mules and war dogs, and

a herd of swine. About half the force was from Extremadura; fifteen were

Portuguese. The ships made landfall on 25 May and five days later disem-

barked all of their horses and most of their men. Where was this done? Of

al the questions raised by students of the Florida discovery period, none has

been more argued for the past half century than this one. In 1939, a U.S. De

Soto Expedition Commission chaired by Dr. John R. Swanton determined

that the de Soto landing site was Tampa Bay.8 Numerous other studies since

have concluded that the descriptions given in the documents, as wel as

de Soto’s route of march, favored either Charlotte Harbor9 or Pine Island

Sound–Caloosahatchee River, or San Carlos Bay, all to the south. In 1989, a

State of Florida de Soto Trail Committee, relying on the recently republished

proof

Chaves guide, on the accounts given by the original de Soto chroniclers, and

on correlations of the expedition narratives with an archaeological list of

known native encampments greatly expanded since 1939, decided that a

Tampa Bay landing best fit the evidence.10

According to this last view, which remains provisional, de Soto made

his initial landing at Piney Point and final y made camp at a native vil age,

Uzita, which the 1989 findings place at the northern side of the mouth of the