discovered the South Sea (the Pacific Ocean) and all Spain was aflame
with gold-lust. Narvaez, in great pomp and ceremony, with six hundred
soldiers of fortune, many of them of good families and high social
station, in his five specially built vessels, sailed to gain fame,
fortune and the fountain of perpetual youth in what we now call Florida.

Disaster, destruction, death--I had almost said entire
annihilation--followed him and scarce allowed his expedition to land,
ere it was swallowed up, so that had it not been for the escape of
Cabeza de Vaca, his treasurer, and a few others, there would have been
nothing left to suggest that the history of the start of the expedition
was any other than a myth. But De Vaca and his companions were saved,
only to fall, however, into the hands of the Indians. What an unhappy
fate! Was life to end thus? Were all the hopes, ambitions and glorious
dreams of De Vaca to terminate in a few years of bondage to
degraded savages?

Unthinkable, unbearable, unbelievable. De Vaca was a man of power, a man
of thought. He reasoned the matter out. Somewhere on the other side of
the great island--for the world then thought of the newly-discovered
America as a vast island--his people were to be found. He would work his
way to them and freedom. He communicated his hope and his determination
to his companions in captivity. Henceforth, regardless of whether they
were held as slaves by the Indians, or worshiped as demigods,--makers of
great medicine,--either keeping them from their hearts' desire, they
never once ceased in their efforts to cross the country and reach the
Spanish settlements on the other side. For eight long years the weary
march westward continued, until, at length, the Spanish soldiers of the
Viceroy of New Spain were startled at seeing men who were almost
skeletons, clad in the rudest aboriginal garb, yet speaking the purest