Ill] AND HISTORIC TIMES 273 



De Soto died by the Mississippi, and to conceal his death from 

 the Indians, whom he had persuaded that he was immortal, his 

 followers by night cast his body into the Father of Waters. 

 His goods were sold by auction : they consisted of two men 

 slaves, two women slaves, and three horses and seven hundred 

 hogs, the posterity of the sows which he had brought from 

 Cuba to Florida. " For every slave or horse they gave two or 

 three thousand ducats : two hundred ducats for a hog\" Luys 

 de Moscoso now took the command and determined to return 

 to Minoya and to make ships there. " They shipped twenty- 

 two of the best horses that were in the camp : the rest they 

 made dried flesh of-." They made their way down the river 

 with great difficulty, fighting against the river-side natives. 

 Finally, as the canoes in v/hich they were conveying the horses 

 made such slow progress, Luys de Moscoso determined to go 

 on shore and kill them. " As soon as they saw a place con- 

 venient for it, they went thither and killed the horses and 

 brought the flesh of them to dry it aboard. Four or five of 

 them remained on shore alive : the Indians went unto them 

 after the Spaniards were embarked — the horses were not 

 acquainted with them and began to neigh and run up and down 

 in such sort that the Indians, for fear of them, leaped into the 

 water, and getting into their canoes went after the brigandines, 

 shooting cruelly at them^" 



According to another account of the expedition, written by 

 Hernandez de Biedma'*, when de Soto landed in Florida he had 

 six hundred and twenty men and two hundred and twenty- 

 three horses^. He says that when they came to the great 

 river " we resolved to make four large pirogues, each capable 

 of containing sixty or seventy men and five or six horses, and 

 we spent twenty-seven or twenty-eight days in constructing 

 them," The river Avas crossed where it was about a league 

 broad and the depth from nineteen to twenty fathoms. In 

 their subsequent wanderings they reached a place where the 



1 Hakluyt, op. cit. pp. 126-7. - Ibid. p. 148. ^ m^^ pp. 153_4. 



* This account is given by Eye in an appendix to his reprint of Haklu-yt's 

 translation of The Discovery, pp. 173 sqq. 

 5 Ihid. p. 178. 



R. H. 18 



