A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  Torture, slaughter, and the terrorizing of natives were familiar tactics of Spanish conquest. But few conquistadors deployed them as routinely and as unapologetically as De Soto. Other men, such as Coronado, acted under the faint constraint of Spanish law and custom, and tried to justify their ruthlessness. Coronado was also a young bureaucrat whose entrada was linked by land to Spanish-held Mexico, allowing his superiors to keep distant watch on his actions and progress.

  De Soto had no such oversight. He quickly severed contact with his base in Cuba, and seems even to have dispensed with the Requerimiento, the official “summons” to Indians. There is no record of its being read before battle in Florida. The friars on his expedition were evidently too cowed or acquiescent to raise objections.

  Nor did De Soto pay much heed to his officers. “After he had voiced his own opinion,” one of his men wrote, “he did not like to be contradicted and always did what seemed best to him.” Let loose in the wilds of La Florida, De Soto could be as mobile and deadly as his war dogs.

  AT THE END of the history fest, I bade adiós to the conquistadors and shalom to Father Rogel, then drove north to follow De Soto’s path through present-day Florida. Reaching Bradenton, I immediately became lost in a maze of interstate spurs and access roads clotted with big-box malls. Walking wasn’t an option: the sun-struck, car-spaced sprawl of modern Florida is as inhospitable to foot traffic as the state’s swamps had been to the Spanish. Development hadn’t been kind to Florida’s history, either. At Bradenton’s museum, I learned that most of the mounds and shell middens that once marked Indian settlements had been bulldozed for use as road fill.

  Beside the museum stood the De Soto Historical Society, housed in a handsome Spanish-style manor. De Soto’s coat of arms decorated the entrance and a statue of him stood nearby. Fittingly, though, given Florida’s habit of burying its history, the De Soto Historical Society had little connection to the real De Soto. It was a civic and charitable group that held Spanish-themed parades, elected an honorary “Hernando” and De Soto “Queen,” and celebrated the anniversary of the conquistador’s landing with a monthlong bash.

  When I asked the society’s director what she thought of the group’s namesake, she seemed caught off guard. “I guess you could say he had a lot of tenacity and took risks. Is that any different from a businessman who goes out to ruthlessly make a fortune today?” Before I could reply, she walked me to a wall lined with photos of former De Soto Queens. “Aren’t they lovely girls?”

  The reigning Queen and the society’s honorary Hernando were scheduled to appear at Bradenton’s upcoming Veterans’ Day parade a few days later. I went to meet them at the parade staging ground by the De Soto Bridge. The society’s float was easy to spot: an enormous mock caravel built onto the frame of a school bus. The motorized vessel had a tall mast, captain’s wheel, and portholes, as well as “Crewe of Hernando de Soto” emblazoned on the side.

  “Come aboard!” the driver shouted, lowering a gangplank. Revelers crowded the deck, mostly bearded men wearing tights, bright pantaloons, and chrome-plated helmets. At the wheel stood Hernando, or “Hern” as the others called him, a white-bearded man in a brass helmet and breastplate. “She’s a smooth sailer,” he joked, gazing up the mast, “but I think we’ll run on engine power today.”

  His cell phone rang. The Queen was stuck in traffic on the De Soto Bridge. At the last minute she sprinted aboard, a well-coiffed brunette in a tiara, miniskirt, and tight black top. I asked why she didn’t wear faux-Spanish attire like the others.

  “For a girl, it’s nothing special to wear tights and ruffles and high boots,” she said. “But the boys really get into it.”

  As the caravel lurched forward to join the parade, the Queen waved while the Crewe cracked beers and hurled strings of plastic beads and brass doubloons at onlookers in lawn chairs. Hern cranked up the boat’s sound system, blaring “The Boys Are Back in Town.” What this Mardi Gras–style cavalcade had to do with De Soto, or Veterans’ Day, wasn’t clear.

  “De Soto was a rowdy guy who came through Florida giving out a lot of beads to natives,” opined one Crewe member.

  “The guy was a butcher, a fucking cutlass,” his rail-mate interjected. “But it wasn’t us doing the killing. We’re just here to party in his name. No harm given, or intended.”

  Not everyone agreed. In the 1990s, protestors from the American Indian Movement had pelted the Crewe with fish guts. They also disrupted the annual reenactment of De Soto’s landing, at which historical society members clad as Spaniards rushed onto the beach and slaughtered “Indians,” mostly members’ children, wearing loincloths and face paint. The demonstrators shouted “Go home!” and “Genocide!” and burned De Soto in effigy. The reenactment had since been abandoned and the name of the anniversary changed from the De Soto Celebration to the Florida Heritage Festival.

  “You’ve got to be sensitive, I guess,” Hern said, as the caravel reached the end of the parade route. “But we’re not trying to rewrite history. De Soto was a conqueror. That was his job. This is ours.” He threw a last string of beads at an elderly couple in motorized carts. “What’s wrong with a little fun?”

  DE SOTO’S PITILESS methods would have been devastating anywhere in America, but they were particularly so in the territory he traversed. In contrast to the Southwest and the Plains, where natives lived nomadically or dispersed across dozens of pueblos, the Southeast’s population was dense and concentrated in large city-states. Rather than steer around these powerful centers, De Soto headed straight for them, hoping to find huge stores of gold and silver like those discovered in the capitals of Mexico and Peru. Failing that, he could seize food, clothing, and porters for the onward journey.

  These tactics inevitably provoked bloody conflict. But the many Indians killed by Spanish arms were only the first and most obvious casualties of De Soto’s march. The arrival of his army, which often camped for weeks amid large and settled populations, turned the South into a breeding ground for epidemic disease. De Soto compounded this danger by dragooning thousands of Indians as guides, cooks, concubines, and porters, who were forced to live among the Spanish for long periods. Natives who survived this ordeal and straggled home became traveling agents of infection.

  Grim evidence of both Spanish germs and Spanish steel turned up in the 1980s at an Indian site along De Soto’s path, northeast of Bradenton. Archaeologists found armor and glass trade beads like those the Spanish carried. More telling, though, were human arm bones, severed cleanly at the shoulder by a sharp metal weapon: a wound consistent with a downward sword blow. Other bodies lay piled in a mass grave, probably the aftermath of a sudden outbreak of disease. Soon after De Soto’s passage, all signs of habitation at the settlement abruptly ceased.

  The site wasn’t marked on road maps, but at a small museum in the town of Inverness I got directions, which sent me winding along a country lane that ended at the Withlacoochee River. Beside the wide, tea-colored river was a fishing camp decorated with rebel flags, and a bar with a sign warning, “Unattended Children and Dogs Will Be Used For Gator Bait.”

  Inside, I found men in duckbill caps drinking cans of beer and talking about bass and crappie. A wall menu offered fried okra, boiled peanuts, and honey BBQ wings. Somewhere in the hundred or so miles since leaving Bradenton, I’d crossed from retiree and snowbird Florida to the state’s Southern heartland.

  When I asked whether anyone knew of an Indian site nearby, a drinker directed me to a wooded trail, which led to an ancient mound. “I reckon those Spaniards in their armor must’ve rusted up fast around here,” he said. “They didn’t have WD-40 back then.” As I reached the door, another man called after me, “Watch for water moccasins, and don’t put your hand anyplace you can’t see.”

  This was undoubtedly sound advice, but almost impossible to follow. The trail turned out to be a narrow path through man-high saw palmettos. I could barely see the ground for all the underbrush, and quickly felt my feet sinking into mu
ck. Groping to keep my balance, I stuck my hand into a three-foot-tall anthill. Overhead, arching live oaks, draped in Spanish moss, blotted out the sky. This shade would have been welcome on a sunny day, but on an overcast and oppressively humid afternoon, the canopy of trees closed over me like a coffin lid. Mosquitoes swarmed every inch of exposed flesh.

  After a mile or so, I slumped on a rotted log and tried to imagine how alien and claustrophobic this landscape must have seemed to De Soto’s men, most of them natives of Spain’s arid, open backcountry. Even in autumn, dressed in a T-shirt and khakis, I was soaked in sweat and half-mad from insects. To have trudged through this in summer, in fifty pounds of armor, with Indians raining down arrows from the jungle on all sides, seemed even more unimaginable than to have been among Coronado’s men crossing the baked Sonoran Desert and the endless Plains.

  I forced myself to soldier on until I reached a barbed-wire fence enclosing a hillock, apparently all that remained of the Indian settlement. Pushing aside huge, fanlike palm leaves, I went in for a closer look, and instantly sank knee-deep in stagnant black water. Invisible creatures rustled in the dense brush. Wretched and uneasy, I fled the mire and retreated to the fishing camp as fast as I could. No conquistador, I.

  MUCH EASIER TO reach is the town that De Soto seized, in late 1539, for his winter encampment: Anhaica, capital of the bellicose Apalachee nation. Rather than confront Spanish horsemen in open battle, the Apalachee retreated to hideouts from which they staged guerrilla attacks. De Soto’s army occupied Anhaica’s clay and palm homes, looted its stores of food, and settled in for an uneasy stay of five months.

  Almost 450 years later, in Tallahassee, a veteran Florida archaeologist, Calvin Jones, was taking his lunch break when he noticed bulldozers clearing a site for development. Jones took a shovel from the back of his truck and dug a few test holes, unearthing a piece of Spanish olive jar. Returning with a metal detector, he turned up nails and chain mail.

  The developers halted work while archaeologists excavated the site. They found a large Indian settlement and hundreds of Spanish artifacts, including beads, buckles, gaming pieces, and sixteenth-century coins. But the discovery that confirmed the presence of De Soto’s army was the jawbone of a pig—a creature unknown on the continent before De Soto brought a small herd as emergency provisions for his expedition.

  I went to see the pig mandible in a basement repository near Florida’s capitol, a towering shaft flanked by gonadlike domes and known to locals as “the Big Dick.” Down the road, behind a Motel 6, I found the small office park that now occupies the archaeological site. Except for a plaque in the parking lot, and a patch of scrub preserved by the state, nothing marked the site as the onetime Apalachee capital and the only confirmed De Soto encampment in the United States.

  The conquistador’s swine had left a more enduring mark. Some ran off or were traded to Indians; fast-breeding, intelligent, and adaptable, the species Sus scrofa thrived in the wild, becoming a major player in the region’s ecology and a staple of its diet. Millions of feral hogs still roam the South, wreaking havoc on crops, golf courses, and the food and habitat of other wild animals. Moving in packs of ten or twenty, the long-snouted omnivores can strip an acre of land a day.

  “They make it look like a cottonpickin’ dozer has been through,” said Danny Joyner, a state ranger at the Anhaica site. “Anything that’s edible, and a lot that’s not, they’ll just chew and root it up.”

  Weighing up to five hundred pounds, not counting tusks, mature hogs also charge humans when wounded or threatened. “If you corner them, they can be fierce, yes sir,” Danny said. “They’ll rip you from asshole to appetite. And slobber all over you, too. Not real attractive creatures, when you get right down to it.”

  But Danny liked the taste of their meat, which he described as musky. “This isn’t a beer belly, it’s a pork belly,” he said, slapping his ample waist. “I reckon most Southerners don’t realize we have the Spanish to thank for barbecue.”

  The Apalachee Indians had less to be thankful for. Estimates of their sixteenth-century population range as high as thirty thousand. Despite their early battles with the Spanish, the Apalachee later asked that friars be sent to their towns, perhaps hoping this would offer protection from both the Spanish and Indian enemies. The Spanish established a large agricultural mission in Tallahassee, soldiers intermarried with the Apalachee, and thousands of Indians were baptized.

  Christianity brought an end to native rituals, including a game that was akin to soccer and basketball. Teams scored points by kicking deerskin balls against goal posts, or into nets atop the poles. The game, dedicated to the rain gods, was preceded by fasting, free love, and consumption of a highly caffeinated purgative made from the leaves of a holly, Ilex vomitoria. Spanish missionaries, appalled by the “devilish” game and its rituals, ordered the goal posts torn down and crosses erected in their stead.

  But Christianity was no defense against epidemic disease, or attacks by English colonists and their Creek allies in the Carolinas. These led to the mission’s burning in 1704, and the dispersal and enslavement of the surviving Indians. The once-mighty Apalachee nation vanished—except in name. Early European mapmakers had believed the Florida tribe so large and powerful that they drew its domain to include a distant mountain range, known ever since as the Appalachians.

  WHEN DE SOTO arrived at Anhaica late in 1539, he brought a chain gang of native baggage carriers he’d captured while marching through Florida. By the time the army decamped five months later, the Spanish had to carry their gear themselves. “Most of the Indians whom they had to serve them,” wrote one of De Soto’s men, “being naked and in chains, died because of the hard life they suffered during that winter.”

  Among the survivors was an Indian youth who had come to Florida from a distant land. He told the Spanish it was ruled by a woman and rich in gold and other goods. The youth’s story bedazzled De Soto, much as El Turco’s tales of Quivira entranced Coronado. Originally having planned to follow the Gulf coast, so he could meet supply ships from Cuba, De Soto changed course. On leaving Anhaica in March 1540, he swung his army inland, toward the land the youth had told of. It would be three years before his men saw the sea again.

  Entering present-day Georgia, they negotiated an obstacle course of deep woods and wide, swift rivers. To cross these, the Spanish built bridges and rafts, once even linking the chains they’d brought to shackle Indians so they could pull boats across. At other times, they formed a chain of men and beasts, with soldiers clutching the tails or lances of horses and men ahead of them.

  They also fashioned a cumbersome linguistic chain to communicate with Georgia tribes. First, the Spanish had to find natives who understood the youth guiding De Soto. The guide then translated the locals’ words into the language of Florida Indians, which Juan Ortiz understood. Ortiz then relayed the message in Spanish, to De Soto.

  As recorded by expedition scribes, these dialogues seem to have lost something in all the translation. One chief, receiving the gift of a feather, allegedly gushed: “This your feather that you give me, I can eat with it; I will go forth to war with it; I will sleep with my wife with it.”

  De Soto’s own words were rarely recorded, but his actions spoke clearly enough. During a typical encounter, he announced his arrival at an Indian settlement by seizing hostages and informing the local chief that he “was going through this land and seeking the greatest lord and the richest province in it.” The chief claimed that a “great lord lived on ahead,” and provided a guide and interpreter in exchange for De Soto’s captives. Chiefs of the next two settlements were even more obliging, giving the Spanish food, clothing, and hundreds of porters.

  These transactions weren’t entirely one-sided. Though Georgia chiefs undoubtedly aided De Soto so as to rid themselves of his rapacious army, they also did so with the expressed wish that he make war on the natives’ great enemy, the female ruler of the rich province the Spanish sought.

  Nor w
as De Soto’s army an altogether awesome presence, despite its guns and horses. Spaniards lacked the mobility and know-how to track the region’s abundant game, and marveled at Indians’ skill at hunting deer, rabbits, and birds. Desperate for meat, soldiers fell hungrily on the one source they could catch: Indian dogs.

  When even those were lacking, De Soto tapped his pig supply, which had swelled to three hundred from an original herd of only thirteen. He issued each soldier a pound of pork. This first recorded pig feast in the American South, in April 1540, sounds distinctly unappetizing. “We ate it,” a Spaniard wrote, “boiled in water without salt or anything else.”

  THE MODERN TRAVELER runs little risk of starving in the land De Soto crossed. Following small roads through southwest Georgia, I passed pine woods and pecan orchards and fields of soggy cotton bolls the pickers had missed. Machines did most of the farmwork now, leaving derelict towns with shuttered shops and sagging verandas: the economic roadkill of the rural South. Even so, most crossroads still sustained diners, with names such as Kountry Fokes and Krispy Chik, serving meals hearty enough to fuel an entire day of field labor.

  Stopping at one, I paid six dollars to load my tray from a buffet of fried chicken, fried catfish, cornbread, green beans, black-eyed peas, turnip greens, butter beans, and mashed potatoes, washed down with a pitcher of sweet iced tea. From my window seat, I faced the town’s Confederate monument, its lean Johnny Reb staring back at me reproachfully as I finished off a piece of red velvet cake. Waddling back to my car, I passed a church sign that said, “Sinners Wanted!” and another shouting, “Repent!” Gluttony and guilt: constant bedfellows in the Bible Belt South.