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without either a sight of gold or a taste of the magic spring. (But his voyage was not fruitless, for on the way back to Española Ponce made a valuable find. He discovered the Bahama Channel,,\ which later became the route for treasure ships returning to Spain from the West Indies. It was to protect this channel that Florida eventually had to be colonized. し

Ponce proceeded at once to Spain, where he "went about like a person of importance, because his qualities merited it." From the King he received another patent (1514) authorizing him to colonize not only "Bimini," which one of his ships was said to have discovered, but the "Island of Florida" as well. Just now, however, renewed complaints came in of terrible devastations wrought upon Spanish colonies by the Caribs of the Lesser Antilles. Ponce was put in command of a fleet to subdue these ferocious savages, and his plans for Florida were delayed seven years.

Meanwhile other expeditions from the West Indies found Florida to be part of the mainland. By 1519, indeed, the entire coast of the Gulf between Yucatán and Florida had been explored and charted, thus ending the Spanish hope of finding there a strait leading westward to India. Chief

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among these explorers of the Gulf was the good pilot Pineda, agent of the governor of Jamaica. He mapped the coast of Amichel - as the Spaniards called the Texas coast- and was the one to discover the mouth of that large river flowing into the Gulf which he named the Espíritu Santo, but which we know today as the Mississippi. This was twenty-two years before De Soto crossed the Father of Waters near Memphis. Amichel was a wondrous land, indeed, according to the reports dispatched to Spain by Pineda's master. It had gold in plenty and two distinct native races, giants and pygmies.

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At last Ponce returned to his task. On February 10, 1521, at Porto Rico, he wrote to King Charles: "Among my services I discovered at my own cost and charge, the Island of Florida and others in its district. and now I return to that Island, if it please God's will, to settle it.” According to Herrera, the rare old chronicler, it was emulation of the conqueror of Mexico that aroused Ponce to make this venture. For now "the name of Hernando Cortés was on everybody's lips and

I Lowery, Spanish Settlements, p. 158, quoting Shea's transla tion in Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, vol. IL p. 234.

his fame was great." In February, then, Ponce again set sail, with two ships, two hundred men, fifty horses, a number of other domestic animals, and farm implements to cultivate the soil. By the King's command, monks and priests accompanied him for missionary work among the natives.

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Ponce landed on the Florida coast, probably in the neighborhood of Charlotte Harbor, where, on his earlier voyage, the natives had regaled him with fables of the golden realm of Carlos, the cacique, and had attacked his ships. Since then slave-hunt-、 ing raids along their coast had filled these warlike, freedom-loving Florida natives with an intense hatred for Spanish invaders. Hardly had the colonists begun to build houses when the Indians set upon them with fury. The valiant Ponce, leading his men in a counter attack, received an Indian arrow in his body. Some of his followers were killed. This disaster put an end to the enterprise. Ponce and his colonists departed and made port at Cuba, having lost a ship on the way. A few days later Ponce died from his wounds, leaving unsolved the mystery of the Fountain of Youth. Over his grave in Porto Rico, where his body was sent for burial, his epitaph was thus inscribed:

Here rest the bones of a LION,

Mightier in deeds than in name.'

So perished the discoverer and first foreign ruler of Florida, as many another standard-bearer of the white race on this soil was to perish, from the dart of the irreconcilable Indian. (The conquest of the Aztecs, living in permanent towns, proved comparatively easy for Cortés, with his superior means of waging war; but the subjection of the northern tribes, who had no fixed abodes, who wandered over hundreds of miles in hunting and war, was another task. Europeans began the conquest of America by seizing the Indians and selling them into slavery. It is an oft-repeated boast that tyranny has never thrived on American soil, but it is seldom remembered that the first battles for freedom in this land were fought by the red natives.

Meanwhile a new star arose to beckon explorers northward. A new region had been discovered far up the eastern coast by adventurers who were spy ing about Florida while Ponce was absent at th Carib wars. Chief of these interlopers was Luca

"Mole sub hac fortis Requiescunt ossa LEONIS
Qui Vicit factis Nomina magna suis."

Lowery, Spanish Settlements, p. 160.

Vásquez de Ayllón, an oidor, or superior judge, of Española, who took into his service one Francisco Gordillo and sent him out to explore. Gordillo met in the Bahamas a slave hunter named Quexos, and the two joined company. Thus it happened that in June, 1521, about the time that Ponce was driven from Florida, these two adventurers landed in a region, called Chicora by the natives, which seems to have been near the Cape Fear River on the Carolina coast. After taking formal possession of the country, they coaxed one hundred and fifty of their red-skinned hosts on board and sailed away to sell them in Santo Domingo. This time a rude shock awaited the slave hunters. When they reached the capital they were ordered by Governor Diego Columbus to set the Indians free and return them to their native land. Don Diego deserves remembrance as a liberator.

Among the captives, however, there was one whom the Spaniards detained. They baptized him Francisco Chicorana, and Ayllón took him as his personal servant. Francisco was a choice wag. Doubtless because he desired to be taken home, he employed his time and talents in regaling his captors with romances of Chicora. He was taken by Ayllón to Spain, where two famous historians,

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