He went prepared to settle, carrying clergymen for the colonists, friars to found Indian missions, and horses, cattle, sheep, and swine. Where precisely he made the Florida coast we do not know; but it is stated that on attempting to erect dwellings for his colonists he was attacked by the natives, who showed great hostility. Ponce himself, while leading his men against his assailants, received so dangerous an arrow wound, that, after losing many of his settlers by sickness and at the hands of the Indians, he abandoned the attempt to plant a colony in Florida, which had so long been the object of his hopes; and taking all on board his vessels, he sailed to Cuba. There he lingered in pain, and died of his wound.[807]
John Ponce de Leon closed his long and gallant career without solving the problem whether Florida was an island or part of the northern continent. Meanwhile others, following in the path he had opened, were contributing to a more definite knowledge. Thus Diego Miruelo, a pilot, sailed from Cuba in 1516 on a trading cruise; and running up the western shore of the Floridian peninsula, discovered a bay which long bore his name on Spanish maps, and was apparently Pensacola. Here he found the Indians friendly, and exchanged his store of glass and steel trinkets for silver and gold. Then, satisfied with his cruise, and without making any attempt to explore the coast, he returned to Cuba.[808]
The next year Francis Hernandez de Cordova[809] sent from Cuba on the 8th of February two ships and a brigantine, carrying one hundred and ten men, with a less humane motive than Miruelo’s; for Oviedo assures us that his object was to capture on the Lucayos, or Bahama Islands, a cargo of Indians to sell as slaves. His object was defeated by storms; and the vessels, driven from their course, reached Yucatan, near Cape Catoche, which he named. The Indians here were as hostile as the elements; and Hernandez, after several sharp engagements with the natives, in which almost every man was wounded, was sailing back, when storms again drove his vessels from their course. Unable to make the Island of Cuba, Alaminos, the pilot of the expedition, ran into a bay on the Florida coast, where he had been with Ponce de Leon on his first expedition. While a party which had landed were procuring water, they were attacked with the utmost fury by the Indians, who, swarming down in crowds, assailed those still in the boats. In this engagement twenty-two of the Indians were killed, six of the Spaniards in the landing party were wounded,—including Bernal Diaz, who records the event in his History,—and four of those in the boats, among the number Anton de Alaminos, the pilot. The only man in the expedition who had come away from Yucatan unwounded, a soldier named Berrio, was acting as sentry on shore, and fell into the hands of the Indians. The commander himself, Hernandez de Cordova, reached Cuba only to die of his wounds.
This ill-starred expedition led to two other projects of settlement and conquest. Diego Velasquez, governor of Cuba, the friend and host of Hernandez, obtained a grant, which was referred to by Ponce de Leon in his final letter to the King, and which resulted in the conquest of Mexico;[810] and Francis de Garay, governor of Jamaica, persuaded by Alaminos to enter upon an exploration of the mainland, obtained permission in due form from the priors of the Order of St. Jerome, then governors of the Indies, and in 1519 despatched four caravels, well equipped, with a good number of men, and directed by good pilots, to discover some strait in the mainland,—then the great object of search.
Alonzo Alvarez de Pineda, the commander of the expedition, reached the coast within the limits of the grant of Ponce de Leon, and endeavored to sail eastward so as to pass beyond and continue the exploration. Unable, from headwinds, to turn the Cape of Florida, he sailed westward as far as the River Pánuco, which owes its name to him. Here he encountered Cortés and his forces, who claimed the country by actual possession.
The voyage lasted eight or nine months, and possession was duly taken for the King at various points on the coast. Sailing eastward again, Garay’s lieutenant discovered a river of very great volume, evidently the Mississippi.[811] Here he found a considerable Indian town, and remained forty days trading with the natives and careening his vessels. He ran up the river, and found it so thickly inhabited that in a space of six leagues he counted no fewer than forty Indian hamlets on the two banks.
According to their report, the land abounded in gold, as the natives wore gold ornaments in their noses and ears and on other parts of the body. The adventurers told, too, of tribes of giants and of pigmies; but declared the natives to have been friendly, and well disposed to receive the Christian Faith.
Wild as these statements of Pineda’s followers were, the voyage settled conclusively the geography of the northern shore of the Gulf, as it proved that there was no strait there by which ships could reach Asia. Florida was no longer to be regarded as an island, but part of a vast continent. The province discovered for Garay received the name of Amichel.
Garay applied for a patent authorizing him to conquer and settle the new territory, and one was issued at Burgos in 1521. By its tenor Christopher de Tapia, who had been appointed governor of the territory discovered by Velasquez, was commissioned to fix limits between Amichel and the discoveries of Velasquez on the west and those of Ponce de Leon on the east. On the map given in Navarrete,[812] Amichel extends apparently from Cape Roxo to Pensacola Bay.