40 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY Hull. 78 
could cross only at high tide- — "la tierra toda muy liana e do muchas 
cienegas, pero el ri<> muy podoroso e de muchos e buenos pescados; e 
a la entrada del era baxo, si eon la cresciente no entraban los navios. " 
("The land very flat and with many swamps, but the river very pow- 
erful and with many good fish, and at its entrance was a bar, so that 
the vessels could enter only at flood tide.") 1 If Navarrete is right in 
stating that the able-bodied men reached Gualdape by land I think 
we must make a very conservative interpretation of the 40 or 45 
leagues and assume miles rather than leagues. This would not 
bring us farther than the neighborhood of Charleston Harbor. If, 
however, we take the distance given by Oviedo at its face value it 
carries us to the mouth of the Savannah. As a matter of fact we 
can not know absolutely where this river lay. It might have been the 
Stono, the North or South Edisto, the Coosawhatchie, the Broad, or 
some less conspicuous stream. All of these have offshore bars, and 
the channels into most are so narrow that they might not have been 
discovered by the explorers, who therefore supposed that the Gual- 
dape River could be entered only at high tide. But taking Oviedo 's 
two statements, regarding the distance covered and the size of the 
river, which was apparently of fresh water, I am inclined to believe 
the Savannah to have been the river in question, because there are 
two independent facts which tend to bear out this theory. In the 
first place the companions of De Soto when at Cofitachequi dis- 
covered glass beads, rosaries, and Biscayan axes, "from which they 
recognized that they were in the government or territory where the 
lawyer Lucas Vazquez de Ayllon came to his ruin." So Ranjel. 2 
Biedma says in substance the same, 3 but what the Fidalgo of Elvas 
tells us is more to the point: "In the town were found a dirk and 
beads that had belonged to Christians, who, the Indians said, had 
many years before been in the port, distant two day's journey. " 4 
Now Cofitachequi has usually been placed upon the Savannah 
River, and "the port" might naturally refer to that at its mouth. 
At all events two days' journey would not take the traveler very 
far to the north or south of that river, nor is it likely that these 
European articles had gotten many miles from the place where they 
had been obtained. They might indeed have been secured from 
the navigators who conducted the first or the second expedition or 
from Ayllon when he was at "the River Jordan," but on the first 
voyage the dealings with the natives were very brief, and no rela- 
tions with them seem to have been entered into while Ayllon and 
his companions were at the Jordan on their last voyage. It is also 
rather unlikely that so many Spanish articles should have reached 
the Savannah from the mouth of the Pedee. In fact this is pre- 
> Oviedo, Hist. Gen., m, p. 628. 3 Ibid., p. 14. 
2 Bourne, Narr. of De Soto, II, p. 100. < Ibid., I, p. 67. 
