which are found along the Red river and its tributaries. Near the Mississippi he came upon the country of Nilco, which was well peopled. The river was there larger than the Guadalquivir at Seville. In the middle of April he arrived at the province where the Washita, already united with the Red river, enters the Mississippi. The province was called Guachoya. Soto anxiously inquired the distance to the sea; the chieftain of Guachoya could not tell. Were there settlements extending along the river to its mouth? It was answered that its lower banks were an uninhabited waste. Unwilling to believe so disheartening a tale, Soto sent one of his men, with eight horsemen, to descend the banks of the Mississippi, and explore the country. They travelled eight days, and were able to advance not much more than thirty miles, they were so delayed by the frequent bayous, impassable canebrakes, and the dense woods. The governor received the intelligence with gloom. His horses and men were dying around him; the natives were becoming dangerous enemies. He attempted to overawe a tribe of Indians near Natchez by claiming a supernatural birth, and demanding obedience and tribute. "You say you are the child of the sun," replied the undaunted chief; "dry up the river and I will believe you. Do you desire to see me? Visit the town where I dwell. If you come in peace, I will receive you with special good-will; if in war, I will not shrink one foot back." But Soto was no longer able to abate the confidence or punish the temerity of the natives. His stubborn pride was changed by long disappointments into a wasting melancholy. A malignant fever ensued, during which he had little comfort, and was neither visited nor attended as the last hours of life demand. Believing his death near at hand, on the twentieth of May he held a last interview with his followers; and, yielding to the wishes of his companions, who obeyed him to the end, he named a successor. the next day he died. Thus perished Ferdinand de Soto, the governor of Cuba, the successful associate of Pizarro. His miserable end was the more observed from the greatness of his former prosperity. His soldiers pronounced his eulogy by grieving for their loss; the priests chanted over his body the first requiems that were ever heard on the waters of the Mis

On

sissippi. To conceal his death, his body was wrapped in a mantle, and in the stillness of midnight was sunk in the middle of the stream.

No longer guided by the energy and pride of Soto, the company resolved on reaching New Spain without delay. To do this they must either descend the river in such frail boats as they could put together, or attempt the long pathway to Mexico through the forests. They were unanimous in the opinion that it was less dangerous to go by land; the hope was still cherished that some wealthy state, some opulent city, might yet be discovered, and all fatigues be forgotten in the midst of victory and spoils. Again they penetrated the western wilderness; in July they found themselves in the country of the Natchitoches; but the Red river was so swollen that it could not be crossed by them. The Indian guides purposely led them astray; "they went up and down through very great woods," without making any progress. The wilderness, into which they had at last wandered, was sterile and scarcely inhabited; they had now reached the great buffalo prairies of the west, the hunting-grounds of the Pawnees and Comanches, the migratory tribes on the confines of Mexico. The Spaniards believed themselves to be at least one hundred and fifty leagues west of the Mississippi. Desperate as the resolution seemed, it was determined to return once more to its banks, and follow its current to the sea. There were not wanting men, whose hopes and whose courage were not yet exhausted, who wished rather to die in the wilderness than to leave it in poverty; but Moscoso, the new governor, had long "desired to see himself in a place where he might sleep his full sleep."

In December they came upon the Mississippi at Minoya, a few leagues above the mouth of Red river, often wading through deep waters, and grateful to God if at night they could find a dry resting-place. The Indians whom they had enslaved died in great numbers; in Minoya the Christians were attacked by a dangerous epidemic, and many died.

Nor was their labor yet at an end; it took the first five months of 1543 for men in their condition to build brigantines. Erecting a forge, they struck off the fetters from the slaves; and, gathering every scrap of iron in the camp, they wrought

it into nails. Timber was sawed by hand with a large saw, which they had always carried with them. They calked their vessels with a weed like hemp; barrels, capable of holding water, were with difficulty made; to obtain supplies of provision, all the hogs and even the horses were killed, and their flesh preserved by drying; and the neighboring townships of Indians were so plundered of their food that the miserable inhabitants would come about the Spaniards begging for a few kernels of their own maize, and often died from weakness and want of food. The rising of the Mississippi assisted the launching of the seven brigantines; they were frail barks, which had no decks; and as, from the want of iron, the nails were of necessity short, they were constructed of very thin planks, so that any severe shock would have broken them in pieces. Thus provided, after a passage of seventeen days, the fugitives, on the eighteenth of July, reached the Gulf of Mexico; the distance seemed to them two hundred and fifty leagues, and was not much less than five hundred miles. Like Cabeza, they observed that for some distance from the mouth of the Mississippi the sea is not salt, so great is the volume of fresh water which the river discharges. Following for the most part the coast, it was more than fifty days before the men who finally escaped, now no more than three hundred and eleven in number, on the tenth of September entered the river Pa

nuco.

CHAPTER IV.

THE SPANIARDS HOLD FLORIDA.

SUCH is the history of the first voyage of Europeans on the Mississippi; the honor of the discovery belongs to the Spaniards. There were not wanting adventurers who, in 1544, desired to make one more attempt to possess the country by force of arms; their request was refused. Religious zeal was more persevering; in December, 1547, Louis Cancello, a missionary of the Dominican order, gained through Philip, then heir apparent in Spain, permission to visit Florida and attempt the peaceful conversion of the natives. Christianity was to conquer the land against which so many experienced warriors had failed. The Spanish governors were directed to favor the design; all slaves that had been taken from the northern shore of the Gulf of Mexico were to be manumitted and restored to their country. In 1549 a ship was fitted out with much solemnity; but the priests, who sought the first interview with the natives, were feared as enemies, and, being immediately attacked, Louis and two others fell martyrs to their zeal.

Death seemed to guard the approaches to that land. While the Castilians were everywhere else victorious, they were driven for a time to abandon the soil of Florida, after it was wet with their blood. But under that name they continued to claim all North America, even as far as Canada and Newfoundland. No history exists of their early exploration of the coast, nor is even the name of the Spanish navigator ascertained who, between the years 1524 and 1540, discovered the Chesapeake, and made it known as "the bay of St. Mary." Under that appellation the historian Oviedo, writing a little after 1540, describes it as opening to the sea in the latitude of

thirty-six degrees and forty minutes, and as including islands; of two rivers which it receives, he calls the north-eastern one Salt river, the other the river of the Holy Ghost; the cape to the north of it, which he places in the latitude of thirty-seven. degrees, he names Cape St. John. The bay of St. Mary is marked on all Spanish maps, after the year 1549. But as yet not a Spanish fort was erected on the Atlantic coast, not a harbor was occupied, not one settlement was begun. The first permanent establishment of the Spaniards in Florida was the result of jealous bigotry.

For France had begun to settle the region with a colony of Protestants; and Calvinism, which, with the special co-operation of Calvin himself, had for a short season occupied the coasts of Brazil and the harbor of Rio Janeiro, was now to be planted on the borders of Florida. Coligny had long desired to establish a refuge for the Huguenots and a Protestant French empire in America. Disappointed in his first effort by the apostasy and faithlessness of his agent, Villegagnon, he still persevered, moved alike by religious zeal and by a passion for the honor of France. The expedition which he now planned was intrusted to the command of John Ribault, of Dieppe, a brave man, of maritime experience, and a firm Protestant; and was attended by some of the best of the young French nobility, as well as by veteran troops. The feeble Charles IX. conceded an ample commission, and in February, 1562, the squadron set sail for the shores of North America. Land was first made by the voyagers in the latitude of St. Augustine; the noble river which we call the St. John's was named the river of May, from the month in which it was discovered. The land seemed rich in gold, silver, and pearls, and its caterpillars were taken for "fairer and better silkworms" than those of Europe. As they sailed toward the north, three streams were named the Seine, the Loire, and the Garonne. In searching for the Jordan, they came "athwart a mightie river," which they called Port Royal. Casting anchor at ten fathom of water, Ribault landed with a party at Hilton Head, where they saw "high oaks and an infinite store of cedars," and heard "the voices of stags and divers other sorts of beasts." Some who threw nets wondered at the num