A Voyage Long and Strange

by Tony Horwitz

  De Soto, in effect, was wandering blind, deaf, and mute in the middle of the continent. He’d lost more than a third of his men and all but forty of his 220 horses; those that remained were unshod for lack of iron. Unable to keep exploring with such a depleted force, De Soto concocted a desperate scheme. He would return to the Mississippi, build boats, and follow the river to the Gulf of Mexico. Then he would “send word to Cuba that we were alive,” in hopes of resupply. Once equipped with fresh men and provisions, De Soto would resume his march west, into the arid territory where Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow wanderers had picked up vague rumors of riches.

  In early spring of 1542, the Spanish retreated east through icy swamps, sometimes so deep in water they had to swim. Finally making camp by the Mississippi, De Soto felt sure the Gulf was just a short way downriver. But a local chief contradicted him, saying he knew nothing of “the sea,” or of an Indian settlement large enough to sustain the army during the time needed to build boats.

  Convinced the chief was lying to keep the Spanish from his settlements, De Soto sent his best captain and eight riders to scout south along the river. The men returned a week later, reporting that they had seen only “canebrakes and thick woods,” and arms of the great river too broad to cross. There was no way out.

  For the first time, even De Soto lost heart. His “grief was intense on seeing the small prospect he had for reaching the sea,” wrote one of his men. “Worse, according to the way in which his men and horses were diminishing, they could not be maintained in the land without succor.”

  In his despair, the conquistador “fell sick.” The Chronicles give no detail of his illness, only that it was serious. Even so, De Soto kept scheming. A powerful chief ruled the other side of the river; maybe he could be cowed into giving aid. De Soto sent an emissary, telling the chief that the conquistador “was the son of the sun and that wherever he went all obeyed him.” The chief was unimpressed. If De Soto was the son of the sun, he replied, “let him dry up the great river and he would believe him.” As for De Soto’s demand that the chief cross the river to give obeisance, the Indian declared that “he was not accustomed to visit anyone.” Rather, all paid homage to him.

  By the time De Soto received this news, he was confined to his bed, “badly racked by fever.” Enraged at having his authority challenged, he wanted to cross the river and punish the chief for his impudence. But he and his army were too weak, the river ran “deep, and very furious,” and Indians who lived near the Spanish appeared to be preparing an attack.

  From his deathbed, De Soto lashed out one last time. He sent a force to kill every male in a nearby settlement, “in order that by treating them cruelly, neither the one town nor the other should dare to attack him.” His men dutifully butchered a hundred Indians, leaving a few to wander away wounded, “that they might strike terror into those who did not happen to be there.”

  Having committed his final atrocity, De Soto summoned his lieutenants to his bedside. “He asked them to pray to God for him and in His Mercy to pardon him his sins, and place his soul in glory.” He also expressed “the sorrow he felt at leaving them in so great confusion as he was doing in a land in which they did not know where they were.” De Soto anointed a successor, Luis de Moscoso, who had served with him in Peru. A day later the conquistador died, at the age of forty-two, not in battle but in bed, “in a land and at a time when his illness had very little solace.”

  His passing, however, gave comfort to his men. “There were some who rejoiced at the death,” one wrote, since De Soto’s successor, Moscoso, was “fond of leading a gay life,” and “would prefer to be at ease in a land of Christians than to continue the hardships of the war of conquest and discovery, of which they had long ago become awearied.”

  De Soto’s death also posed a danger, since it might embolden the surrounding natives to attack. Moscoso hid the conquistador’s corpse for three days and then buried it at night, telling the Indians that De Soto “had gone to the sky as he had often done before” and would shortly return. But the Indians knew De Soto had been sick, and they noticed a patch of disturbed ground in the Spanish camp. So Moscoso ordered De Soto’s body to be disinterred in the dark.

  “A considerable quantity of sand was placed with the blankets in which he was shrouded,” one member of the army wrote, “and he was taken in a canoe and cast into the middle of the river.”

  According to another chronicler, the Spanish hollowed out an oak tree, placed De Soto’s body inside, and nailed planks over the ends to create a crude coffin. Then they cast De Soto’s casket into the water, “to give him the Rio Grande for a sepulcher,” and watched the log box sink quickly to the bottom.

  THE MORNING AFTER my canoe trip, I awoke with chapped hands, sore shoulders, and a strange itch produced either by splashes of the murky river or by the fleabag motel I’d stayed in. Creaking from the motel bed to my muddy, snack-strewn car, I checked the odometer: three thousand miles since my start point in Naples, Florida, and more biscuits and gravy than I cared to recall.

  I flipped open my coffee-stained road atlas to yet another state—Arkansas, my eighth—and plotted a route to yet another Indian mound. Since Etowah I’d visited dozens of ancient humps, bumps, and hillocks. I was mounded out: “awearied,” like De Soto’s men, of discovery. The conquistador didn’t make it to the end of his army’s trek. Nor, I decided, would I.

  Arcing over the Mississippi on the Hernando De Soto Bridge, I made an abbreviated tour of the army’s path in Arkansas before trying to find the site of De Soto’s demise. Its location, like that of Mavila, was a tantalizing mystery. Of the many clues I’d read about, the most intriguing was a small item in a Masonic publication from the 1950s, telling of an ancient coffin that had washed up in a riverside field, containing a skeleton, sword, and bits of armor. The story said the coffin, allegedly De Soto’s, had been taken to a Masonic hall in Arkansas City. This happened to be the seat of a riverside county that Charles Hudson had since identified as the likeliest site of the conquistador’s last camp.

  So I drove south through the Arkansas Delta, past endless wet fields of rice, and turned onto a small road across Bayou Boggy. The road ended at a decaying town with a sign by the levee: “Welcome to Historic Arkansas City.” Beside this stood plaques displaying grainy photographs of the great Mississippi flood of 1927, which had drowned the river port. Before that catastrophe, Arkansas City had boasted twelve thousand inhabitants and dozens of fine shops and hotels, even a sports arena that had hosted a Jack Dempsey bout. Now its name was a rueful joke. There was no city anymore, just a struggling community of a few hundred people and no commerce apart from a liquor store, Laundromat, and grocery. “History’s all we got left,” said an old man sitting by the levee. “Not much present and no future, not that I’ll live to see it.”

  I was surprised, then, to discover that the dying town still had two Masonic lodges—one for each race, the man explained. The black lodge had opened long after the alleged discovery of De Soto’s coffin, so I tracked down a deacon of the white lodge. Roy McCallie had never heard about the coffin, but took me to see whether it was tucked away in some corner of the rundown former opera house that served as the lodge’s headquarters.

  The first floor had Masonic symbols on the walls, but when I asked their meaning, Roy said, “Not allowed to tell you—it’s secret.” He led me upstairs to the room that had served as the lodge’s meeting hall in the 1950s, when the coffin was found. We searched the hall and an adjoining storeroom, but found only boarded-up windows, broken chairs, and a collapsing ceiling.

  “When you join the lodge, they tell you all the things you got to do, and seems like part of that involved an old coffin.” Roy said. He hadn’t mentioned this before.

  “So the coffin was part of a Masonic initiation?” I prompted.

  “I’m thinking that’s it.” Roy went quiet, collecting his thoughts. “I had a stroke a while back. Things that happened yesterday I can’t remember.” He led me
back downstairs. “If it was some initiation, that’d be secret business. Even if I remembered, I couldn’t tell you.”

  I had no better luck at the town hall or at its cobwebbed museum. My last stop was the home of a very elderly woman named Dorothy Moore, who, Roy told me, was “a real conversive lady.” She greeted me by hissing through her screen door, “I still have a pistol and know how to use it.” Then she invited me in, served rum cake, and shared every memory of her ninety-five years, none of which had to do with the conquistador’s casket.

  “I’m the oldest person in Arkansas City, aboveground, that is,” she said. “Seen plenty of coffins, but not the one you’re after.” She smiled, wrapping the last slice of rum cake for me to take on the road. “Young man, I do believe you’ve been led on. Just like those Spanish, always chasing their gold.”

  AT SUNSET, I bought a Budweiser at the liquor store and climbed the levee. I might not have found a coffin, but Arkansas City seemed a fitting place to toast the end of De Soto’s journey, and my own. The conquistador’s route across La Florida led him to the richest and most populous city-states of sixteenth-century North America. Retracing this path today, I’d crossed countless miles of rural blight and has-been towns that had never been much. Of these many backwaters, from the Black Belt to Appalachia to the Delta, the site of De Soto’s death appeared the most forsaken.

  As boys raced down the levee on dirt bikes, I took out my battered copy of The De Soto Chronicles and reread accounts of the conquistador’s burial, in water that was “nineteen fathoms” deep. Beyond a fringe of trees, I could just make out a channel of the river and tried to imagine De Soto at the bottom, sleeping with the catfish. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas consigned De Soto to an even deeper grave. Calling him “butcher-in-chief,” Las Casas wrote: “There can be no doubt that he is now in the depths of Hell enjoying the wages of his wickedness.”

  Like De Soto’s exhausted soldiers, I couldn’t mourn this monstrous man. But I still felt awed by his doomed quest. At the Florida history fest, Tim Burke had likened De Soto to a drug lord, fatally addicted to risk and riches. After trailing the conquistador for three thousand miles, I’d come to see him differently: as a Spanish Ahab, murderously chasing the unattainable until it devoured him. A victim of fever, both real and figurative, until swallowed in the end by the great river he’d “discovered.”

  De Soto, at least, sank before taking everyone down with him. After his death, the frayed Spanish army marched west, hoping to reach Mexico. In east-central Texas, they ran out of food and realized it was impossible “to traverse so miserable a land.” Retreating to the Mississippi yet again, they made nails from chains, anchors from stirrups, rigging from mulberry bark, and sails from blankets. Then they boarded their makeshift vessels and floated downriver, under attack from Indians wielding bows and clubs studded with fish bone.

  Reaching the Gulf, the Spanish sailed on for fifty-two days until they came to a coast and saw Indians “clad according to the Spanish custom, whom they asked in what land they were.” The astonished natives replied in Spanish that the land was Mexico. At which point the survivors “leaped ashore and kissed the ground.” De Soto’s army, gone for over four years, had long since been given up for dead. Half of its men were.

  DE SOTO’S FAILED march also extinguished the thirty-year dream of conquistadors in La Florida. Ponce de León, Narváez, De Soto, a slew of lesser figures—all had suffered the same fate. The land and its people defeated them. After a hiatus of several decades, others tried to penetrate the land De Soto had probed, only to be driven back again. While the Spanish succeeded in settling coastal Florida, the vast interior De Soto explored was written off as hostile and barren, a graveyard for Europeans.

  It had become one for Indians, too. Even before fleeing La Florida, De Soto’s men saw the scars their march left behind. During their retreat to the Mississippi in 1542, the Spanish couldn’t find food because they had earlier burned towns and fields and “the land was left devastated.” When they returned a year later, natives by the river had no corn to harvest; De Soto’s final attacks the previous spring had left them unable to plant seeds. “Weak and enfeebled” Indians offered themselves as slaves in exchange for ears of corn the Spanish had taken. Many of these natives soon died, as did “almost all the Indians of service”—those the Spanish had seized earlier on their march—who perished from disease and exposure.

  In the 1560s, Spaniards returning to the interior of La Florida, including veterans of De Soto’s march, were stunned to find overgrown fields and vacant towns where before they’d traveled through populous provinces. Of mighty chiefdoms such as Tascalusa’s, nothing but ruins remained.

  After my meeting with Charles Hudson, I’d read everything I could to fill in what he’d called the Dark Age in Indian history that followed De Soto’s march. Though much remained uncertain, the rapid collapse of Indian societies was probably due to multiple traumas, and not just epidemic disease. The thousands of Indians slaughtered and enslaved by De Soto were mostly young men, killed in battle or chained as porters. These losses drained chiefdoms of critical labor and vitality, making them vulnerable to famine and attack. Once rulers and priests could no longer sustain or defend their starving and diseased people, social and religious cohesion may also have unraveled.

  As city-states disintegrated so, too, did the balance of power between native societies. One historian calls the post–De Soto South a “shatter zone,” a Darwinian free-for-all in which Indians preyed on one another. Over time, remnant and incoming groups coalesced into tribes such as the Creek and Choctaw. But, compared with the agricultural empires they replaced, these were loose confederations.

  It was into this radically altered world that English and French traders ventured, in the late 1600s and early 1700s, rediscovering the lands De Soto had marched through long before. A century after them came American pioneers, to whom the interior seemed a virgin wilderness, waiting to be conquered by their axes, plows, and flintlocks. Gone were the Apalachee archers, the massed warriors in stockaded Mavila, the two-hundred-canoe armadas patrolling the Mississippi. While many of the Indians who remained fought stoutly, most were ultimately subdued by guns, trade, alcohol, and forced removal to the West, where the process would repeat itself.

  The famous painting of De Soto in the U.S. Capitol, riding imperiously past Indians, was truer than I’d realized. Not to the conquistador’s arrival at the river in 1541, but to the transformation his march set in motion. De Soto didn’t discover the Mississippi; he did much more. His mad, failed quest blazed a trail to the new world that America was to become.

  PART III

  SETTLEMENT

  French colonists landing in Florida in 1564, from a drawing by an artist on the expedition, Jacques le Moyne de Morgues

  CHAPTER 10

  FLORIDA

  FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH, RIVER OF BLOOD

  Who wants to go to Florida?

  Let him go where I have been,

  Returning gaunt and empty.

  —Nicolas Le Challeux,

  French colonist and poet (1565)

  THE OLDEST KNOWN work by a European artist in North America is a watercolor of a near-naked giant, his arm slung around a tiny fop in tights. The giant is chiseled, like a bodybuilder, and covered in tattoos. He wears bracelets and anklets made of berries; a fringe of beetle wings skirts his muscled thighs. The little man beside him looks dressed for an Elizabethan farce: blue stockings, scarlet garters, slashed doublet, velvet tassels, and a plumed hat as showy as his twirled mustache.

  I discovered this odd couple in an art history book, near the start of my crash course on early America. As startling as the image was, the accompanying text surprised me even more. It said the watercolor depicted the meeting of a Florida chief and a French captain, in 1564. The captain had just landed to found a colony of Huguenots, or French Protestants, who suffered religious persecution at home.

  Hang on, I thought. This art historian ha
s his facts mixed up. The first Protestant refuge in North America was established by English Pilgrims at Plymouth, in 1620. Not by some French dandy in Florida, in 1564. Every schoolkid knows that.

  I was, of course, wrong. And this time my reeducation took me across the Atlantic, to a terrain I’d last visited on college exams: the Reformation. Huguenots were followers of John Calvin, a French exile in Geneva who sought to cleanse Christian worship of ceremony, superstition, and papal “abomination.” This purification extended to personal behavior. Huguenots formed morals boards to punish drinking, dancing, and fornication, and abolished all holidays, including Christmas. English Puritans later looked to French Protestants as a model.

  But Huguenots were also, well, French. The captain in the watercolor was René de Laudonnière, who first appears in the historical record in 1561, when the Spanish seized a ship under his command. Cataloguing the contents of his wardrobe, they found a “tooled-leather collar from Morocco, a doublet of white taffeta decorated with crimson silk, a gray cloak with a velvet border two feet in width, and a pair of black woolen cloth shoes trimmed with velvet.” Laudonnière’s austere Calvinism evidently left room for Gallic vanity—as well as for a “poor chambermaid” he later brought with him across the Atlantic as his mistress.

  Huguenots were also flexible in their relationship with France’s monarchy. The Protestant leader in France, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny, sought radical reform of the established church and took up arms against Catholics. Yet he remained a fixture at the royal court and a close adviser to France’s Catholic queen, Catherine de Médici. In 1562, Coligny won royal backing for the creation of a Huguenot colony on the Atlantic coast of North America (an earlier attempt in South America had failed).