Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, January 26, 1999

Survivors of De Soto expedition may have camped here

by Jim Bradshaw

He had been delayed for six months in Mexico. The ship he was supposed to take home to Spain capsized at Veracruz. Then storms delayed further passage. By the time Cabeza de Vaca got back to Spain, another man, Hernando De Soto, had been given command of the next exploratory trip along the northern Gulf shore.

De Soto tried to hire Cabeza de Vaca as his second in command. But, after his experience under the incompetent Panfilo Narváez, Cabeza de Vaca steadfastly refused to go back as any man's underling.

The main reason that he wanted to go back was that he had become convinced that there was a fabulous aboriginal nation just to the north of where he had been, and that if he found this nation he would also find gold, silver, emeralds, and turquoise. His accounts of his journey convinced others of the same thing. Many of these others, in fact, connected his unseen nation with the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, which were supposed to be fabulously wealthy places that had been founded somewhere in the west by seven bishops who were driven out of Portugal by the Moors in the eighth century.

It was also widely believed that Cabeza de Vaca did not tell all when he wrote his account of his journey. A man identified only as a "Gentleman of Elvas" who accompanied De Soto, wrote that Cabeza de Vaca, "generally ... described the poverty of the country and spoke of the hardships he had undergone," but also that Cabeza de Vaca "had sworn not to divulge certain things which they had seen, lest someone might beg the government in advance of them" for the rights to the territory. Cabeza de Vaca's tale, according to the Gentleman, gave planners of the De Soto expedition reason "to understand that it was the richest country in the world."

In support of this theory, Alonso Alvarez de Pineda, who sailed before Cabeza de Vaca, made a map of the coastline of the northern Gulf, including the shores of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, as far as Cape Roxo in Mexico. He claimed that many rivers contained gold, and that the natives wore gold ornaments. We can judge his credence by the fact that he also reported finding two races of men, one of giants, one of pygmies.

De Soto was already a millionaire. He had become wealthy during the Spanish conquest of Peru, and he believed that there was more gold and silver to be found on the continent, and he wanted it.

At his own expense, he outfitted an expedition of nearly 1,000 men. Sailing from Cuba, where he had been made governor in 1538, he landed at Tampa Bay in June 1539 and set off across the Gulf South--most of his four-year search taking him far from Acadiana.

His group moved north to the Apalachee Indian village, and then some of the explorers went west from there to discover Pensacola Bay. The explorers then crossed Georgia to the Savannah River and followed the river to the Blue Ridge mountains. Crossing these mountains, De Soto descended the Alabama River to a place called Malvilla, where he defeated an Indian tribe but suffered heavy losses himself.

Unwilling to abandon his search for gold, De Soto turned northwest. In May 1541, he sighted the Mississippi River probably somewhere near where Memphis is today. He crossed into Arkansas, explored the Ozark Mountains, then returned to the Mississippi River, where he died of a fever somewhere on the banks of the great river in the summer of 1542.

His men weighted De Soto's body and dropped it into the river. Then, weary from the fruitless search for gold, they decided to head for Mexico, and then home. The explorers, now led by Luis de Moscoso, headed west from the Mississippi, eventually reaching a territory so poor they decided it had to be the land described by Cabeza de Vaca as the place "where the Indians wandered like Arabs... living on prickly pears, the roots of plants, and games."

Because Moscoso had come to North America in search of pearls, not prickly pears, he decided to go back to the Mississippi River. When they got to the river, he built ships and sailed down to the Gulf, setting off toward Mexico on July 18, 1543.

On the evening of the second day out of the Mississippi River, Moscoso was surprised, "For they were very distant from the shore, and so great was the strength of the current of the river, the coast so shallow and gentle, that the fresh water entered far into the sea." That fresh water probably came from the Atchafalaya River, and Moscoso probably camped on Acadiana's shores, because "that afternoon, on the starboard bow, they saw some keys, wither they went, and where they reposed for the night."

After failing in a try to cross the Gulf directly, Moscoso's expedition returned to the shore four days later. They were out of fresh water and "with mattocks (picks)... they dug holes there, into which the water flowed, (and) they thence filled their pipkins (earthen pots)."

Again sailing toward the west, the explorers were caught in a storm. Two of the ships took shelter in a bay or river's mouth. The other five remained along an exposed beach, fighting to stay afloat. The Gentleman of Elvas tells us, "while thus engaged, in great fear of being lost, from midnight forward they suffered the intolerable torment of myriad mosquitoes.

It sounds familiar when we read, "The sails, which were white, appeared black (with mosquitoes) ... at daylight ... (and) the men could not pull at the oars without assistance to drive away the insects."

Despite De Soto's failure to find gold, Spain continued to send expeditions to explore, conquer, and convert the northern Gulf Coast. But La Florida, as the whole coast was then called, held none of the quick riches that other Spanish expeditions were uncovering in Peru and Mexico. In March 1562, King Phillip II decided to leave the northern gulf coast alone and to concentrate on the places where he knew that wealth could be gained. Besides, he thought that nobody else in Europe was particularly keen on the place.

That was a mistake. Other Europeans decided that maybe they could find gold where the Spanish had not. They decided that they would let the Spaniards mine it, then they would look for it in the holds of Spanish ships. For British and French pirates, Florida was the perfect spot to wait for the Spanish fleets hauling treasure back from New Spain to the Old World.

Winds and tides were such that the best way for the Spanish treasure ships to sail home was to Havana, then through the Bahama Channel, then eastward from the Florida coast to Europe. Whoever controlled Florida controlled, quite literally, the road to riches.