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.

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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, 05, the rumors of the empire of Montezuma, its magnificence and gle 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

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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

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 sca; 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