The service over, De Soto asked for instructions as to the best route to follow in his untiring quest for gold; and, acting in accordance with the answers he received, he seems to have turned away from the Mississippi, and, in August, 1541, to have reached the highlands of the south-west of Missouri, near the White River, crossing which, he journeyed southward through Arkansas, and set up his camp for the winter about the site of the present Little Rock (N. lat. 34° 45′, W. long. 92° 13′). Bent on resuming his researches in the ensuing spring, though worn out by continual wanderings and warfare, and deprived by death of his chief helper, Juan Ortiz, the indomitable explorer now endeavored to win over the Indians by claiming supernatural powers, and declaring himself immortal; but it was too late to inaugurate a new policy. The spot chosen for encampment turned out to be unhealthy; the white men began to succumb to disease; scouts sent out to explore the neighborhood for a more favorable situation brought back rumors of howling wildernesses, impenetrable woods, and, worst of all, of stealthy bands of Indians creeping up from every side to hem in and destroy the little knot of white men.
Thus driven to bay, De Soto, who was now himself either attacked by disease or broken down by all he had undergone, determined at least to die like a man; and, calling the survivors of his once gallant company about him, he asked pardon for the evils he had brought upon those who had trusted in him, and named Luis Moscoso de Alvarado as his successor.
On the following day, May 21, 1542, the unfortunate hero breathed his last, and was almost immediately buried secretly without the gates of the camp, Alvarado fearing an immediate onslaught from the natives should the death of the hero who had claimed immortality be discovered. The newly-made grave, however, excited suspicion, and, finding it impossible to prevent it from being rifled by the inquisitive savages, Alvarado had the corpse of his predecessor removed from it in the night, wrapped in cloths made heavy with sand, and dropped from a boat into the Mississippi.
The midnight funeral over, all further queries from the natives, as to what had become of the Child of the Sun, were answered by an assurance that he had gone to heaven for a time, but would soon return. Then, while the expected return was still waited for, the camp was broken up as quietly as possible, and Alvarado led his people westward, hoping, as Cabeca had done before him, to reach the Pacific coast.
But long months of wandering in pathless prairies bringing him apparently no nearer to the sea, and dreading to be overtaken in the wilderness by the winter, he turned back and retraced his steps to the Mississippi, where he once more pitched his camp, and spent six months in building boats, in which he hoped to go down the river to its outlet in the Gulf of Mexico. In this bold scheme he was successful. The embarkation into seven roughly-constructed brigantines took place on the 2d July, 1543, and a voyage of seventeen days, between banks lined with hostile Indians, who plied them unceasingly with their poisoned arrows, brought a few haggard, half-naked survivors to the longed-for gulf. Fifty days later, after a weary cruise along the rugged coast of what is now Louisiana and Texas, a party, still further reduced, landed at the Spanish settlement of Panuco, in Mexico, where they were received as men risen from the dead.
In spite of the disastrous conclusion of so many expeditions to the ill-fated “Land of Flowers,” there were not wanting many adventurers still eager to try their fortunes in the newly-discovered districts. The first hero of note to succeed De Soto was a Dominican priest named Louis Cancello, who, with a number of his brethren, determined to endeavor to convert the natives to Christianity, and, as an earnest of their peaceful intentions, took with them to Florida a number of natives who had been carried off as slaves by their predecessors. Martyrdom was, however, their only reward. The Indians, who had been taught in a long series of severe lessons to look upon white men as their natural enemies, fell upon the missionaries, who were the first to land, and put them to death. With the fate of their leaders before them, the minor members of the party lost no time in effecting their escape, and the freed slaves alone reaped any profit from the trip. Not more successful was an imposing expedition headed by Don Tristan de Luna in 1559. Although provided with an army of 1,500 men, and accompanied by a large body of missionaries eager to convert the natives; the weapons, alike temporal and spiritual, of the new adventurers were powerless against the prejudices of the Indians and the ravages of fever. Those of the explorers who escaped the evil effects of the climate fell victims to the vengeance of the sons of the soil, and but few survived to tell the tale of the failure of the most carefully organized of all Spanish attempts at colonization north of the Gulf of Mexico.
We shall meet yet again, however, with the Spanish in Florida; but it was now the turn of the French to gain a footing in the New World, and before we complete the tale of Spanish discovery in the North, we must give a brief account of the adventures of the Gauls in the great exodus of the Western nations, in which they bore so important—though so fitful—a part.
