Five years before his Florida expedition he had been appointed, with a large naval and land force under his command, by Velasquez, governor of Cuba, to supersede Cortez, the conqueror of Mexico, and to send him in chains to Havana, to answer charges of insubordination to the authority of Velasquez. But Cortez was not the man to be thus superseded. Never did his genius for great enterprises make a more striking display than by the measures he adopted and executed in this emergency. By them he converted that threatening expedition into one of succor for himself, embracing every supply, soldiers included, he required to complete his conquests. Of this great achievement the defeat of the incompetent Narvaez was only an incident.
No labored comparison of conqueror and vanquished could present a more striking contrast between them than that suggested by their first interview. “Esteem it,” said Narvaez, “great good fortune that you have taken me captive.” “It is the least of the things I have done in Mexico,” replied Cortez, a sarcasm aimed at the incapacity of Narvaez, apart from the gains of the victor.
The fruits of the expedition to Narvaez were the loss of his left eye, shackles, imprisonment, banishment, and the humiliation of kneeling to his conqueror and attempting to kiss his hand. To the Aztec the result was the introduction of a scourge that no surrender could placate, no submission, however absolute and abject, could stay, and, therefore, more pitiless than the sword of Cortez—the small-pox.
After leaving Mexico, Narvaez appeared before the Emperor Charles V., to accuse Cortez of treason, and to petition for a redress of his own wrongs, but the dazzling success of Cortez, to say nothing of his large remittances to the royal treasury, was an effectual answer to every charge. The emperor, however, healed the wounded pride, and silenced the complaints of the prosecutor by a commission with the aforementioned sonorous titles to organize an expedition for a new conquest, by which he might compensate himself for the loss of the treasures and empire of Montezuma, which he had so disastrously failed to snatch from the iron grasp of Cortez.
The preparations to execute this commission having been made by providing a fleet, a land force, consisting of men-at-arms and cavalry, as well as the necessary supplies, Narvaez, in April, 1528, sailed for the Florida coast, and landed at or near Tampa bay.
Having resolved on a westward movement, he ordered his fleet to sail along the coast, whilst he, by rather a circuitous march, would advance in the same direction. This parting was at once final and fatal. He again reached the Gulf, somewhere in the neighborhood of St. Marks, with his command woefully wasted and diminished by toil, battle and disease; and, as can well be imagined, with his dreams of avarice and dominion rudely dispelled.
No tidings of the fleet from which he had so lucklessly parted being obtainable, despair improvised that fleet with motley sails which we have seen mooring off the island of Santa Rosa in the early days of October, its destination being Mexico—a destination, however, which was but another delusion that the winds and the waves were to dispel.
Narvaez found a grave in the maw of the sea, as did most of the remnant of his followers. Famine swept off others, leaving only four to reach Mexico after a land journey requiring years, marked by perils and sufferings incident to such a journey through a vast forest bounded only by the sea, intersected by great rivers, inhabited by savages, and infested by wild beasts. One of the survivors was Cabeça de Vaca, the treasurer and historian of the expedition.
Twelve years elapsed after Narvaez discovered Pensacola Bay before the shadow of the white man’s sail again fell upon its waters. In January, 1540, Capitano Maldonado, who was the commander of the fleet which brought Fernando de Soto to the Florida coast, entered the harbor, gave it a careful examination, and bestowed upon it the name of Puerta d’ Anchusi, a name probably suggested by Ochus,[[1]] which it bore at the time of his visit. In entering Ochus he ended a voyage westward, made in search of a good harbor, under the orders of Soto, who was at that time somewhere on the Florida coast to the westward of Apalachee.
Having returned to Soto, Maldonado made so favorable a report—the first official report—of the advantages of Puerta d’ Anchusi that Soto determined to make it his base of supply. He accordingly ordered Maldonado to proceed to Havana, and after having procured the required succors to sail to Puerta d’ Anchusi, where he intended to go himself, and there to await Maldonado’s return before he ventured into the interior; a prudent resolve, suggested possibly by the sight of the bones of Narvaez’s horses, which had been slain to furnish cordage and water-vessels for his fleet.