The Bay of Horses

The Remains on the Coast

Eleven years before Hernando de Soto reached Apalachee, another Spanish army had come here looking for wealth.

It had failed.

Now De Soto's men were about to find the remains.

And before this expedition was over, the survivors would carry their search hundreds of miles west, eventually crossing into what is now Texas. But for now, they were still fighting to hold their ground in Florida.

Last time, the expedition forced its way across the Aucilla River, entered Apalachee country, and occupied Anhaica, the principal town near modern Tallahassee. The people had left, but they had not surrendered. De Soto had shelter and food for the winter.

What he did not have was a secure road to the coast, or to the men and ships he had left behind near Tampa Bay.

So he sent men south.

The Gentleman of Elvas says De Soto had been told the sea lay only a short distance away. A captain went out with horsemen and infantry, passing through a town the account calls Ochete before reaching the coast.

From Anhaica, in modern Tallahassee, the Gulf lies to the south in what is now Wakulla County. The St. Marks and Wakulla rivers empty into Apalachee Bay.

Somewhere in that coastal country, the Spaniards saw something they recognized.

A great tree had been cut down.

Its trunk had been split into stakes.

Its branches had been shaped into feeding troughs.

Nearby were horse skulls.

For anyone who followed our Cabeza de Vaca episodes, we know what those remains meant.

In fifteen twenty-eight, Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition had reached this same region in disastrous condition. With no ships waiting for them, the survivors killed their horses, scavenged what iron they could, and built makeshift boats on the coast.

They launched into the Gulf hoping to reach Mexico.

Those boats carried Cabeza de Vaca's story west toward Texas.

Eleven years later, De Soto's men had found the scar that expedition left behind.

That area of coast became known to the Spaniards as the Bay of Horses.

Modern attempts to locate the exact boat-building site differ, so I do not want to give it a false street address. But the setting belongs to the Apalachee Bay and St. Marks region south of Tallahassee.

De Soto had found evidence of failure.

His response was not to turn back.

It was to strengthen his connection to the sea.

A Report of Gold

At the same time, the Spaniards were gathering information about the interior.

Two young Native captives enter the story here named Marcos and Perico. The route study prepared for the National Park Service describes them as boys of about sixteen or seventeen who had traveled with Native traders and claimed knowledge of roads beyond Apalachee.

Perico said he came from, or knew of, a province the Spaniards recorded as Yupaha. It lay to the east or northeast and, according to the story he told, was ruled by a woman.

Her subordinate chiefs supposedly paid tribute.

And some of that tribute, the Spaniards heard, was gold.

That was enough to get De Soto's attention.

The surviving accounts do not all preserve the story in the same form, and the Spaniards would later discover that Perico's knowledge had limits. But the rumor gave De Soto something he had been looking for since he landed in Florida.

Another rich country just over the horizon.

But before he chased it, he still had to secure his rear.

The Road Back to Tampa Bay

Juan de Añasco was ordered to return all the way to the port of Espíritu Santo, the base near Tampa Bay where Pedro Calderón and part of the expedition had remained.

Añasco took thirty cavalry.

Think about that route.

The main army had spent months forcing its way north through Florida.

Añasco now had to reverse that journey with only a fraction of its strength.

Elvas says that in Uçachile and other towns along the road, people had become less cautious again. Añasco avoided taking captives because he could not afford to stop long enough for resistance to gather around him.

He moved through populated places at night.

He rested outside them for only a few hours.

And after ten days, he reached the port.

That speed tells us what this mission was.

It was not exploration.

It was a dash through country the Spaniards knew could turn hostile in a heartbeat.

At Espíritu Santo, Añasco delivered De Soto's order.

Calderón was to abandon the old base and bring the remaining men north to Apalachee.

Añasco also sent two caravels to Cuba.

Elvas says twenty Native women taken earlier in the expedition were put aboard and sent to Doña Isabel de Bobadilla, De Soto's wife and the acting governor of Cuba.

Then the old base began to disappear.

Ranjel says the supplies they could not carry were burned, along with the settlement.

Calderón led the cavalry and some crossbowmen back overland.

Añasco took the foot soldiers by sea, moving along the coast in brigantines.

The expedition was consolidating itself around Apalachee.

An Occupied Town

But the road north was no safer simply because Spaniards had traveled it once.

Elvas says Native fighters attacked Calderón's column in several places and wounded men.

Ranjel's account gives the cost more sharply.

He says Calderón reached Apalachee missing two men and seven horses, killed on the journey.

The sources do not preserve the circumstances of every one of those attacks.

That is part of the nature of this war.

There was no single battlefield.

A small column could be watched from the woods, struck on the road, and forced to keep moving.

That was the problem De Soto had created for himself when he chose Anhaica as winter quarters.

He occupied the town.

The Apalachee still occupied the country around it.

Fire in the Winter Quarters

Back at Anhaica, the attacks continued.

On November twenty-ninth, according to Elvas, a strong wind was blowing.

One Apalachee man slipped past the sentries without being detected.

Then he set the town on fire.

Elvas says two portions of the settlement were quickly consumed.

For Spaniards occupying Native buildings made from combustible materials this was a serious problem.

Fire could turn the shelter they had taken into a weapon against them.

The attack also shows the difference between occupation and control.

Hundreds of Spaniards could sleep in Anhaica and still fail to prevent one man from getting through their guards.

Other attacks continued.

The Apalachee came close enough to the camp that Spaniards rode out after them.

Elvas says they became bold enough to approach within a couple of crossbow shots.

When eight horsemen went out in pursuit one day, they found two men gathering beans with a woman.

The two men could have fled.

They did not.

Elvas says the woman was the wife of one of them, and they stayed to fight.

Before the Spaniards killed them, three horses were wounded.

One of those horses died a few days later.

Again, this was not Napituca.

There was no large formation waiting in an open field for Spanish cavalry.

The fighting was scattered, local, and persistent.

The Apalachee could attack a road party, threaten men collecting food, approach the camp, or use fire against the town itself.

De Soto had winter quarters, but he did not have peace.

The Capture of Capafi

There is another episode from this winter involving the Apalachee chief, Capafi.

This episode is preserved through Garcilaso rather than through Ranjel, Elvas, or Biedma, so it deserves that source warning before we use it.

Capafi had withdrawn into the Ochlockonee Valley, west of the Tallahassee area, where his followers had prepared a difficult defensive position.

De Soto went after him with a selected force.

The account describes a narrow approach blocked again and again by defensive works, with Apalachee warriors contesting the path while the Spaniards cut their way through.

Eventually the Spaniards reached Capafi and captured him.

If De Soto hoped that holding the chief would end the resistance, it did not.

The larger pattern remained the same.

The Spaniards could seize a leader.

They could seize a town.

But they could not make the province stop fighting.

A Connection to the Sea

Along the coast, meanwhile, the Spaniards were trying to create a dependable connection to the sea.

Elvas says planks and spikes were taken down to the Bay of Horses to build a large piragua, basically a dugout canoe, big enough to carry thirty armed men.

The boat went out to watch for the brigantines.

Native canoes moved through the same coastal waters, and Elvas says fighting sometimes broke out there as well.

So picture the expedition's position by late fifteen thirty-nine.

The main camp sat at Anhaica in what is now Tallahassee.

A coastal position had been established somewhere toward Apalachee Bay and the St. Marks region.

Men were moving by land and water between those points.

And every trip beyond the occupied settlement carried risk.

By late December, Añasco was back.

A Harbor to the West

Now De Soto looked west.

He sent Francisco Maldonado with fifty men to follow the coast and search for a good harbor.

That decision is important because the expedition was beginning to plan beyond Florida.

Maldonado was not being sent back toward Tampa.

He was moving west along the northern Gulf.

The place he eventually found was called Ochuse.

It is generally identified with Pensacola Bay, far to the west across the Florida Panhandle from Tallahassee.

Elvas says Maldonado found a sheltered harbor with good depth and returned with a Native man from the province.

De Soto was delighted.

Here was a possible link between his overland expedition and ships from Cuba.

He sent Maldonado to Havana for provisions and ordered him to meet the expedition at that western harbor.

If De Soto did not arrive that summer, Maldonado was to return the following year and wait again.

It sounds like a sensible plan.

It also depended on De Soto actually reaching the coast where he said he would.

That would become a problem.

Leaving Apalachee

Because Perico's story was already pulling him in another direction.

De Soto had just stood in the landscape where Narváez's men had abandoned the interior and built boats for Mexico.

He had been shown, almost literally, what failure looked like.

He now had a route back toward Tampa.

He had contact with Cuba.

He had a harbor waiting near modern Pensacola.

And he still chose to go deeper inland.

By the end of the winter, the cost of staying in Apalachee was visible in another way.

Elvas says many of the Native people the expedition had forced to carry its loads died during the winter.

The army was preparing for another march.

On March 3rd, 1540, De Soto left Anhaica.

The archaeological footprint of his winter camp remains in modern Tallahassee.

The expedition did not.

It turned northeast toward what is now Georgia, following reports of Yupaha and the wealth Perico had described.

That is where we will pick up next time.

In modern terms, the Spaniards were leaving the Tallahassee region and moving into southern and central Georgia.

And waiting somewhere beyond that road was one of the most remarkable figures in the entire expedition.

The woman the Spanish sources remember as the Lady of Cofitachequi.

De Soto had spent the winter fighting to hold a town whose people would rather burn it than surrender it.

Now a teenager's story of gold was leading him away from the Gulf, away from his ships, and deeper into the continent.

How much farther would he go before the search for wealth became a road he could no longer turn back from?