A Better Plan, A Bloodier Road

An Army Without a Voice

Last time, Hernando de Soto landed on the west coast of Florida with one of the most formidable European armies yet carried into North America, to begin an expedition that would eventually lead the survivors into what is now Texas.

He had more than six hundred men, around two hundred horses, experienced officers, weapons, tools, priests, servants, enslaved laborers, war dogs, and a herd of pigs.

What he did not have was a reliable way to speak to the people whose country he intended to conquer.

The problem became obvious almost immediately.

As soon as some of the horses came ashore, Vasco Porcallo, Juan de Añasco, and Francisco Osorio rode out to inspect the country. Porcallo was not an ordinary cavalryman. He was De Soto’s lieutenant general, an aging conquistador and one of the wealthiest colonists in Cuba. He supplied the expedition with men, horses, cassava bread, and the herd of pigs intended to serve as its mobile food supply. The Gentleman of Elvas says his principal reason for coming to Florida was to capture Native people for his Cuban estates and mines.

They met ten Native men carrying bows and arrows. The encounter ended with two horses wounded, two Native men killed, and the rest driven away.

On June 1, the army moved toward the town the chronicles call Ucita. Four captured men were supposed to guide them. Instead, the Spaniards lost their bearings, exhausted horses in streams and swamps, and finished the day scattered across unfamiliar ground.

Two days later, De Soto formally claimed the country for the Spanish Crown. The ceremony was precise. His knowledge of the country was not.

Two of the remaining guides escaped that night.

De Soto had ships in the bay and hundreds of armed men on land, but he still could not reliably ask where he was, where the next town stood, or which path led through the wetlands.

Juan Ortiz

Then, on June 4, Captain Baltasar de Gallegos led another patrol inland.

Near sunset, the Spaniards saw a group of Native men painted red, wearing feathers, and carrying bows. The patrol charged, and the men scattered toward the trees.

One of them stepped into the path and shouted words the horsemen understood.

Rodrigo Ranjel records the cry this way: ‘Sirs, for the love of God and of Holy Mary, do not kill me. I am a Christian like yourselves.’

The man was naked and darkened by years under the Florida sun. The Gentleman of Elvas says his arms bore markings like those of the people around him and that, at first glance, he looked no different from them. His name was Juan Ortiz, and he was from Seville.

Elvas adds another part to his plea. Ortiz asked the Spaniards not to kill the Native men with him, because they had saved his life.

The patrol carried Ortiz and several of his companions back to camp on horseback. The Spaniards celebrated as though they had found treasure.

And in a sense, they had.

Luis Hernández de Biedma wrote that Ortiz had almost forgotten how to speak Spanish, but had learned to speak the languages used around Ucita and Mocoso. De Soto gave him clothing, armor, and a horse, then asked the question that governed nearly every important decision of the expedition.

Did he know where to find gold or silver?

Ortiz said no.

He had lived in Florida for about eleven years, but he had never traveled far from the communities around the bay. He knew the people nearest the Spanish camp. He did not know the continent waiting beyond them.

Eleven Years in Florida

His survival had begun with the expedition De Soto was trying not to repeat.

In 1528, Ortiz had come to Florida with Pánfilo de Narváez and Cabeza de Vaca. He returned to the ships before Narváez led the main army inland. Later, according to Elvas, Ortiz joined a brigantine sent back to the coast searching for news.

The crew saw what appeared to be a letter placed inside a split cane on shore. Ortiz and another man went to retrieve it. Native men rushed out from the nearby town. Ortiz’s companion was killed, and Ortiz was taken alive to the leader Elvas calls Ucita, while the Spaniards aboard the brigantine seeing that they were vastly outnumbered, put up sail and fled.

In Garcilaso de la Vega’s later account, this leader is called Hirrihigua, and his hatred of the Spaniards was deeply personal. During Narváez’s earlier visit, the Spaniards had seized the chief, beaten him, and cut off his nose. The account also says they killed his mother with their war dogs. Ortiz had done none of those things, but he had come with Narváez. To Hirrihigua, he was another Spaniard, and the only one within reach.

It is said that every time the chief went to blow his nose he would remember that Ortiz was his captive. Ortiz was forced to perform the most degrading and menial tasks such as carrying water and firewood without end. When the chief was in a bad mood he would make Ortiz run back and forth across the plaza of the town for long periods of time and if he stopped running the chief’s men would shoot arrows at him.

The account says eventually Chief Ucita-Hirrihigua ordered that Ortiz be burned alive, but when he began to scream Ucita’s wife and daughter persuaded him to spare him. They argued that a single captive Spaniard could do little harm and that keeping him alive would bring more honor than killing him.

Still, Ortiz had been so badly burned that one entire side of his body became a solid scar. After the women had nursed him back to health, Ucita assigned him to guard the building Elvas describes as a temple, where bodies were kept, with the threat that if even a limb went missing Ortiz would be executed, since animals sometimes carried the dead away at night. One night an animal, either a wolf or a big cat, came into the temple and began dragging away a body when Ortiz fell asleep on watch. He followed it and killed it with a lucky javelin throw in the dark. After his execution had been ordered when the body was found missing, the trail of the animal was followed and the body recovered. Further on they found the body of the animal, dead from the javelin wound. Ortiz narrowly escaped death again and the chief was so impressed that his standing was briefly raised for a time, and he was treated with respect.

Years later, his position became dangerous again. Mocoso, a rival leader living roughly two days away, attacked Ucita’s town. Ucita’s daughter warned Ortiz that her father now intended to have him sacrificed. She led him part of the way out of the town at night and pointed him toward Mocoso.

Ortiz escaped one danger and walked directly into another language barrier.

When he reached Mocoso’s territory, local men could not understand him. They surrounded him with bows. Ortiz shouted from behind trees until someone who knew Ucita’s language arrived and translated his explanation.

Mocoso received him. According to Elvas, the two men exchanged oaths: Ortiz promised not to run away to another chief, and Mocoso promised to release him if Christians ever returned.

For years, none did.

When ships were reported off the coast, Mocoso honored his promise. He offered Ortiz the choice to leave and sent him toward the Spanish camp with a group of leading men. That is the party Gallegos’s patrol nearly rode down.

Promises and Violence

Ranjel called Ortiz a ‘tongue and a guide.’ The phrase captures both his value and the way the Spaniards intended to use him. As the army moved farther away, however, messages would have to pass through new Native interpreters from one language to the next before Ortiz could render them into Spanish.

Every additional voice created another chance for a warning, demand, rumor, or threat to change meaning.

Ortiz could help De Soto speak. He could not make the people listening trust him.

Mocoso met De Soto openly and asked for protection from neighboring leaders who threatened him for cooperating with the newcomers. De Soto promised friendship and protection. That exchange made sense to both men, but probably not in the same way. Mocoso could use the strangers against local rivals. De Soto could use Mocoso for information, food, guides, and a road inland.

The new alliance did not slow the violence around it.

On the same day De Soto met Mocoso, another Spanish patrol seized Native women from nearby dwellings. Native fighters followed the patrol for miles. The accounts differ on the number of captives and wounded, but they agree that one Spaniard was killed and several were injured. Garcilaso says De Soto tried to repair the breach by sending Hirrihigua gifts and offering compensation for the abuses committed by Narváez, but the mutilated chief refused even to hear the Spaniards’ proposal.

Garcilaso says Hirrihigua repeatedly sent messengers telling Porcallo that pursuing him was useless. That the marshes and difficult ground would protect him. Porcallo heard the message as a challenge, laughed at it, and urged his men forward.

His horse soon went down in the marsh, trapping the armored lieutenant general beneath it where his soldiers could barely reach him. Porcallo survived, but his dignity fared worse. He realized he had bet a small fortune on a very unsure outcome, and that he was no longer the man he had once been.

On the ride back, he stewed aloud, repeating and mangling the names Hirrihigua and Urriparacoxi, a powerful leader whose territory lay farther inland, along with Spanish curse words: “Hari, Harri, Siri, Burracoxa, Huri… may the devil take the land where the first and most continuously spoken names I have heard are so vile and infamous”. Burracoxa being a reference to a lame donkey. Florida had defeated one of Spain’s wealthiest conquistadors without bothering to fight him.

Ranjel’s version is shorter and darker. Porcallo found Ucita abandoned, burned the town, and ordered a captured guide killed by dogs for leading him badly. Elvas adds that Porcallo had failed to capture the Native people he hoped to enslave on his Cuban estates and in his mines. After an unexplained quarrel with De Soto, he abandoned the campaign and returned home.

This death by war hounds was used by the Spaniards to intimidate the natives so they would produce information and is mentioned a handful of times throughout the accounts. It is one of the gorier details recounted and with the dogs being carnivores and there being little in the way of game in the area, we can speculate this probably happened more often than was recorded simply to keep the dogs fed.

Oviedo’s history, drawing on Ranjel, described De Soto as ‘much given to the sport of slaying Indians.’ That is not a modern judgment imposed on a silent record. It is condemnation preserved inside one of the expedition’s own narrative traditions. Natives were even sometimes burned alive for failure to produce information.

The method was already becoming clear. De Soto demanded guides, food, and cooperation. If a community fled, resisted, or misdirected him, the answer could be captivity, burning, or death. Each punishment then gave the next community a stronger reason to flee, resist, or misdirect him.

Ortiz could translate the governor’s promises. He could not make those promises credible.

The News De Soto Wanted

De Soto next sent Gallegos toward Urriparacoxi: the inland leader whose name Porcallo had been cursing on his ride back. The scouting party heard stories about a province called Cale, or Ocale, where enemies supposedly wore golden hats into battle.

That sounds exactly like the kind of report a treasure expedition wanted to hear, which is one reason to be careful with it.

Ranjel preserves an even more revealing detail. De Soto had ordered Gallegos to send encouraging news even if the country was poor. Gallegos reportedly wrote two letters: one truthful and another filled with carefully ambiguous falsehoods. De Soto kept the truthful letter private and showed the encouraging version to the army.

The men then asked to march inland, which was precisely what De Soto wanted.

Leaving the Coast

By mid-July, the decision was made. The ocean-going ships had been sent back to Cuba. About one hundred men remained under Captain Pedro Calderón to guard the harbor, supplies, boats, and a temporary base. The surviving accounts divide the horsemen and infantry differently, but the total is roughly the same.

On July 15, De Soto led the main army away from Espíritu Santo. Ortiz rode with it. So did the pigs.

The first creature to put De Soto’s cavalry into headlong flight was not an enemy army. It was a rabbit.

At a place Ranjel calls the Lake of the Rabbit, the animal burst from cover and startled the horses. The herd ran more than a league while the Spaniards scattered after them. Ranjel observed that even a small Native force could have ended the expedition at that moment while the horses were being recovered.

The march continued through punishing heat. On one open plain, the governor’s steward Prado died of thirst, and other foot soldiers survived only because mounted men helped them. When the army reached fields of green corn, the soldiers pulled it before it had fully ripened and ate it anyway.

This was what living off the land meant. The army’s food did not come from empty wilderness. It came from fields planted by people who now had to decide whether to feed the invaders, hide the harvest, or fight for it.

Urriparacoxi never appeared. Reports of wealth drew De Soto toward Ocale instead. When he saw broad roads leading north, he treated the roads themselves as evidence that treasure waited ahead.

The Road to Apalachee

The country answered with water.

At the river or swamp of Cale, men waded with clothing and saddles held above their heads. In places, the water reached their necks. Ropes were used to pull horses across, and at least one animal drowned in the current.

By the end of July, the advance reached the first village of Ocale province, called Uqueten in Ranjel’s account, where they found corn. De Soto sent loaded animals back toward the exhausted soldiers behind him, some of whom had been surviving on roasted or boiled roots and plants they could not identify.

The army finally entered Ocale and found enough food to continue. Elvas claimed the surrounding fields could supply it for three months. Spanish parties began gathering corn from Ocale and neighboring Acuera. Native attacks killed several soldiers and a horse during the collection.

There were no golden hats.

There was something more useful: another report.

A captive told the Spaniards that a large and fertile province called Apalachee lay about seven days away.

It was the same name that had drawn Narváez away from his ships eleven years earlier.

That is how this expedition will eventually reach Texas. It does not follow a reliable map toward a known destination. It moves from one captive, rumor, food supply, and promised province to the next, always convinced that wealth must be somewhere beyond the horizon.

By August 10, De Soto had advanced into central Florida. He had gained an interpreter, abandoned the security of his fleet, begun feeding his army from Native fields, and found the road to Apalachee.

He had also taught the people ahead of him exactly what his arrival could mean.

Next time, De Soto drives north toward Apalachee, his army begins fighting for every mile and every meal, and a chief named Vitachuco prepares an answer to Spanish conquest.

Would De Soto’s cavalry carry him through another trap, or had Florida finally found the battlefield that could break his army?