which, if their gestures were rightly interpreted, came from the north. Disregarding, therefore, the most earnest advice of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, he directed the ships to meet him at a harbor with which the pilot pretended acquaintance; and on the first of May, mustering three hundred men, of whom forty were mounted, he struck into the interior of the country. Then for the first time the floating peninsula, whose low sands, impregnated with lime, just lift themselves above the ocean on foundations laid by the coral worms, a country notched with bays and drenched by morasses, without hills, yet gushing with transparent fountains and watered by unfailing rivers, was traversed by white men.

The wanderers, as they passed along, gazed on trees astonishingly high, some riven from the top by lightning: the pine; the cypress; the sweet gum; the slender, gracefully tall palmetto; the humbler herbaceous palm, with its chaplet of crenated leaves; the majestic magnolia, glittering in the light; live oaks of such growth that, now when they are vanishing under the axe, men hardly believe the tales of their greatness; multitudes of birds of untold varieties; and quadrupeds of many kinds, among them the opossum, wondered at for its pocket to house and to carry its young; the bear; more than one kind of deer; the panther, which was mistaken for the lion; but they found no rich town, nor a high hill, nor gold. When, on rafts and by swimming, they had painfully crossed the strong current of the Withlochoochee, they were so worn away by famine as to give infinite thanks to God for lighting upon a field of unripe maize. Just after the middle of June they encountered the Suwanee, whose wide, deep, and rapid stream delayed them till they could build a large canoe. Wading through swamps, made more terrible by immense trunks of fallen trees, that lay rotting in the water and sheltered the few but skilful native archers, on the day after Saint John's they approached Appalachee, where they had pictured to themselves a populous town, and food, and treasure, and found only a hamlet of forty wretched cabins.

Here they remained for five-and-twenty days, scouring the country round in quest of silver and gold, till, perishing with hunger and weakened by fierce attacks, they abandoned all

hope but of an escape from a region so remote and malign. Amid increasing dangers, they went onward through deep lagoons and the ruinous forest in search of the sea, till in August they came upon a bay, which they called Baia de Caballos, and which now forms the harbor of St. Mark's. No trace could be found of their ships; sustaining life, therefore, by the flesh of their horses and by six or seven hundred bushels of maize plundered from the Indians, they beat their stirrups, spurs, cross-bows, and other implements of iron into saws, axes, and nails; and in sixteen days finished five boats, each of twenty-two cubits, or more than thirty feet in length. In calking their frail craft, films of the palmetto served for oakum, and they payed the seams with pitch from the nearest pines. For rigging, they twisted ropes out of horse-hair and the fibrous bark of the palmetto; their shirts were pieced together for sails, and oars were shaped out of savins; skins flayed from horses served for water-bottles; it was difficult in the deep sand to find large stones for anchors and ballast. Thus equipped, on the twenty-second of September about two hundred and fifty men, all of the party whom famine, autumnal fevers, fatigue, and the arrows of the savage bowmen had spared, embarked for the river Palmas. Former navigators had traced the outline of the coast, but among the voyagers there was not a single expert mariner. One shallop was commanded by Alonso de Castillo and Andres Dorantes, another by Cabeza de Vaca. The gunwales of the crowded vessels rose but a hand-breadth above the water, till, after creeping for seven days through shallow sounds, Cabeza seized five canoes of the natives, out of which the Spaniards made guard-boards for their five boats. During thirty days more they kept on their way, suffering from hunger and thirst, imperilled by a storm, now closely following the shore, now avoiding savage enemies by venturing upon the sea. On the thirtieth of October, at the hour of vespers, Cabeza de Vaca, who happened to lead the van, discovered one of the mouths of the river now known as the Mississippi, and the little fleet was snugly moored among islands at a league from the stream, which brought down such a flood that even at that distance the water was sweet. They would have entered the "very

great river" in search of fuel to parch their corn, but were baffled by the force of the current and a rising north wind. A mile and a half from land they sounded, and with a line of thirty fathoms could find no bottom. In the night following a second day's fruitless struggle to go up the stream, the boats were separated; but the next afternoon Cabeza, overtaking and passing Narvaez, who chose to hug the land, struck boldly out to sea in the wake of Castillo, whom he descried ahead. They had no longer an adverse current, and in that region the prevailing wind is from the east. For four days the halffamished adventurers kept prosperously toward the west, borne along by their rude sails and their labor at the oar. All the fifth of November an easterly storm drove them forward; and, on the morning of the sixth, the boat of Cabeza was thrown by the surf on the sands of an island, which he called the isle of Malhado-that is, of Misfortune. Except as to its length, his description applies to Galveston; his men believed themselves not far from the Panuco. The Indians of the place expressed sympathy for their shipwreck by howls, and gave them food and shelter. Castillo was cast away a little farther to the east; but he and his company were saved alive. Of the other boats, an uncertain story reached Cabeza; that one foundered in the gulf; that the crews of the two others gained the shore; that Narvaez was afterward driven out to sea; that the stranded men began wandering toward the west; and that all of them but one perished from hunger.

Those who were with Cabeza and Castillo gradually wasted away from cold and want and despair; but Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, Castillo, and Estevanico, a blackamoor from Barbary, bore up against every ill, and, though scattered among various tribes, took thought for each other's welfare.

The brave Cabeza de Vaca, as self-possessed a hero as ever graced a fiction, fruitful in resources and never wasting time in complaints of fate or fortune, studied the habits and the languages of the Indians; accustomed himself to their modes of life; peddled little articles of commerce from tribe to tribe in the interior and along the coast for forty or fifty leagues; and won fame in the wilderness as a medicine man of wonderful gifts. In September, 1534, after nearly six years' cap

tivity, the great forerunner among the pathfinders across the continent inspired the three others with his own marvellous fortitude, and, naked and ignorant of the way, without so much as a single bit of iron, they planned their escape. Cabeza has left an artless account of his recollections of the journey; but his memory sometimes called up incidents out of their place, so that his narrative is confused. He pointed his course far inland, partly because the nations away from the sea were more numerous and more mild; partly that, if he should again come among Christians, he might describe the land and its inhabitants. Continuing his pilgrimage through more than twenty months, sheltered from cold first by deerskins, then by buffalo robes, he and his companions passed through Texas as far north as the Canadian river, then along Indian paths crossed the water-shed to the valley of the Rio Grande del Norte; and, borne up by cheerful courage against hunger, want of water on the plains, cold and weariness, perils from beasts and perils from red men, the voyagers went from town to town in New Mexico, westward and still to the west, till in May, 1536, they drew near the Pacific Ocean at the village of San Miguel in Sonora. From that place they were escorted by Spanish soldiers to Compostella; and all the way to the city of Mexico they were entertained as public guests.

In 1530 an Indian slave had told wonders of the seven cities of Cibola, the Land of Buffaloes, that lay at the north between the oceans and beyond the desert, and abounded in silver and gold. The rumor had stimulated Nuño de Guzman, when president of New Spain, to advance colonization as far as Compostella and Guadalaxara: but the Indian story-teller died; Guzman was superseded; and the seven rich cities remained hid.

To the government of New Galicia, Mendoza, the new viceroy of Mexico, had named Francisco Vasquez Coronado. On the arrival of the four pioneers, he hastened to Culiacan, taking with him Estevanico and Franciscan friars, one of whom was Marcus de Niza; and on the seventh of March, 1539, he despatched them under special instructions from Mendoza to find Cibola. The negro, having rapidly hurried on before the party, provoked the natives by insolent demands,

and was killed. On the twenty-second of the following September, Niza was again at Mexico, where he boasted that he had been as far as Cibola, though he had not dared to enter within its walls; that, with its terraced stone houses of many stories, it was larger and richer than Mexico; that his Indian guides gave him accounts of still more opulent towns. The priests promulgated in their sermons his dazzling report; the Spaniards in New Spain, trusting implicitly in its truth, burned to subdue the vaunted provinces; the wise and prudent Coronado, parting from his lovely young wife and vast possessions, took command of the explorers; more young men of the proudest families in Spain rallied under his banner than had ever acted together in America; and the viceroy himself, sending Pedro de Alarcon up the coast with two ships and a tender to aid the land party, early in 1540 went in person to Compostella to review the expedition before its departure; to distinguish the officers by his cheering attention; and to make the troops swear, on a missal containing the gospels, to maintain implicit obedience and never to abandon their chief. The army of three hundred Spaniards, part of whom were mounted, beginning its march with flying colors and boundless expectations, which the more trusty information collected by Melchior Diaz could not repress, was escorted by the viceroy for two days on its way. Never had so chivalrous adventurers gone forth to hunt the wilderness for kingdoms; every one of the officers seemed fitted to lead wherever danger threatened or hope allured. From Culiacan, the general, accompanied by fifty horsemen, a few foot soldiers, and his nearest friends, went in advance to Sonora, and so to the north.

No sooner had the main body, with lance on the shoulder, carrying provisions, and using the chargers for pack-horses, followed Coronado from Sonora, than Melchior Diaz, selecting five-and-twenty men from the garrison left at that place, set off toward the west to meet Alarcon, who in the mean time had discovered the Colorado of the west, or, as he named it, the river of "Our Lady of Good Guidance." Its rapid stream could with difficulty be stemmed; but hauled by ropes, or favored by southerly winds, he ascended the river twice in boats