tion could esteem immeasurably rich, since its interior was unknown.

The government of Florida was the reward which Ponce received from the king of Spain; but the dignity was accompanied with the onerous condition that he should colonize the country. Preparations in Spain, and an expedition against the Caribbee Indians, delayed his return. When, in 1521, after a long interval, he proceeded with two ships to select a site for a colony, his company was attacked by the Indians with implacable fury. Many Spaniards were killed; the survivors were forced to hurry to their ships; Ponce de Leon himself, wounded by an arrow, returned to Cuba to die. So ended the adventurer, who had gone in quest of immeasurable wealth and perpetual youth.

The expedition of Francisco Fernandez, of Cordova, leaving the port of Havana, and sailing west by south, discovered in 1517 the province of Yucatan and the bay of Campeachy. He then turned his prow to the north; but, at a place where he had landed for supplies of water, his company was suddenly assailed, and he himself mortally wounded.

In 1518 the pilot whom Fernandez had employed conducted another squadron to the same shores; and Grijalva, the commander of the fleet, explored the coast from Yucatan toward Panuco. The masses of gold which he brought back, the rumors of the empire of Montezuma, its magnificence and its extent, heedlessly confirmed by the costly presents of the unsuspecting natives, excited the ardent genius of Cortes. The voyage did not reach beyond the bounds of Mexico.

At that time Francisco de Garay, a companion of Columbus on his second voyage, and now famed for his opulence, was the governor of Jamaica. In the year 1519, after having heard of the richness and beauty of Yucatan, he at his own charge sent out four ships well equipped, and with good pilots, under the command of Alvarez Alonso de Pineda. His professed object was the search for some strait, west of Florida, which was not yet certainly known to form a part of the continent. The strait having been sought for in vain, his ships turned toward the west, attentively examining the ports, rivers, inhabitants, and everything else that seemed worthy of

remark; and especially noticing the vast volume of water brought down by one very large stream. At last they came upon the track of Cortes near Vera Cruz. Between that harbor and Tampico they set up a pillar as the landmark of the discoveries of Garay. More than eight months were employed in thus exploring three hundred leagues of the coast, and taking possession of the country for the crown of Castile. The carefully drawn map of the pilots showed distinctly the Mississippi, which, in this earliest authentic trace of its outlet, bears the name of the Espiritu Santo. The account of the expedition having been laid before Charles V., a royal edict in 1521 granted to Garay the privilege of colonizing at his own cost the region which he had made known, from a point south of Tampico to the limit of Ponce de Leon, near the coast of Alabama. But Garay thought not of the Mississippi and its valley: he coveted access to the wealth of Mexico; and, in 1523, lost fortune and life ingloriously in a dispute with Cortes for the government of the country on the river Panuco.

A voyage for slaves brought the Spaniards in 1520 still farther to the north. A company of seven, of whom the most distinguished was Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, fitted out two slave ships from St. Domingo, in quest of laborers for their plantations and mines. From the Bahama islands they passed to the coast of South Carolina, which was called Chicora. The Combahee river received the name of the Jordan; the name of St. Helena, whose day is the eighteenth of August, was given to a cape, but now belongs to the sound. Gifts were interchanged with the natives, and the strangers received with confidence and hospitality: When at length the natives returned the visit of their guests, and covered the decks with cheerful throngs, the ships were got under way and steered for San Domingo. The crime was unprofitable: in one of them, many of the captives sickened and died; the other foundered

at sea.

Repairing to Spain, Vasquez boasted of his expeditions, as a title to reward; and the emperor, Charles V., acknowledged his claim. In those days the Spanish monarch conferred a kind of appointment which had its parallel in Roman history. Countries were distributed to be subdued; and Lucas Vasquez

VOL. I.-4

de Ayllon, after long entreaty, was appointed to the conquest of Chicora.

For this bolder enterprise the undertaker wasted his fortune in preparations; in 1525 his largest ship was stranded in the river Jordan; many of his men were killed by the natives; and he himself escaped only to suffer from the consciousness of having done nothing worthy of honor. Yet it may be that ships, sailing under his authority, made the discovery of the Chesapeake and named it the bay of St. Mary; and perhaps even entered the bay of Delaware, which, in Spanish geography, was called St. Christopher's.

In 1524, when Cortes was able to pause from his success in Mexico, he proposed to solve the problem of a north-west passage, of which he deemed the existence unquestionable. But his project of simultaneous voyages along the Pacific and the Atlantic coast was never executed.

In the same year, Stephen Gomez, an able Portuguese seafarer, who had deserted Magellan in the very gate of the Pacific to return to Spain by way of Africa, solicited the council of the Indies to send him in search of a strait at the north, between the land of the Bacallaog and Florida. Peter Martyr said at once that that region had been sufficiently explored, and derided his imaginings as frivolous and vain; but a majority of the suffrages directed the search. In January, 1525, as we now reckon, Gomez sailed from Corunna with a single ship, fitted out at the cost of Charles V., under instructions to seek out the northern passage to Cathay. On the southern side of the Bacallaos he came upon a continent, trending to the west. He carefully examined some of the bays of New England; on an old Spanish map, that portion of our territory is marked as the Land of Gomez. He discovered the Hudson, probably on the thirteenth of June, for that is the day of Saint Antony, whose name he gave to the river. When he became convinced that the land was continuous, he freighted his caravel in part with furs, in part with Indians for the slavemarket; and brought it back within ten months from his embarkation, having found neither the promised strait nor Cathay. In November he repaired to Toledo, where he rendered his report to the youthful emperor-king. The document is lost,

but we know from the Summary of Oviedo, which was published in the second February after his return, that his examination of the coast reached but a little to the south of forty degrees of latitude. If this limit is to be interpreted strictly, he could not have entered the bay of the Chesapeake, or the Delaware. The Spaniards scorned to repeat their voyages to the frozen north; in the south, and in the south only, they looked for "great and exceeding riches."

But neither the fondness of the Spanish monarch for extending his domains, nor the desire of the nobility for new governments, nor the passion of adventurers to go in search. of wealth, would suffer the abandonment of Florida; and, in 1526, Pamphilo de Narvaez, a man of no great virtue or reputation, obtained from Charles V. the contract to explore and reduce all the territory from the Atlantic to the river Palmas. This is he who had been sent by the jealous governor of Cuba to take Cortes prisoner, and had himself been easily defeated, losing an eye, and deserted by his own troops. "Esteem it great good fortune that you have taken me captive," said he to the man whom he had declared an outlaw; and Cortes replied: "It is the least of the things I have done in Mexico."

Narvaez, who was both rich and covetous, hazarded all his treasure on the conquest of his province; and sons of Spanish nobles and men of good condition flocked to his standard. In June, 1527, his expedition, in which Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca held the second place as treasurer, left the Guadalquivir, touched at the island of San Domingo, and during the following winter, amid storms and losses, passed from port to port on the southern side of Cuba, where the experienced Miruelo was engaged as his pilot. In the spring of 1528 he doubled Cape San Antonio, and was standing in for Havana, when a strong south wind drove his fleet upon the American coast, and on the fourteenth of April, the day before Good Friday, he anchored in or near the outlet of the bay of the Cross, now Tampa bay.

On the day before Easter the governor landed, and in the name of Spain took possession of Florida. The natives kept aloof, or, if they drew near, marked by signs their impatience for his departure. But they had shown him samples of gold,

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