36 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY IP.dll. 137 



latter (De Salazar, 1914, map). At the end of the seventeenth 

 century, the principal native tribes about Mobile Bay were the Mobile 

 and Tohome, but they were probably not the occupants of those 40 

 villages seen by Pineda. 



In 1521 Ponce de Leon made an attempt to further his Florida 

 claim by establishing a settlement on the peninsula. I agree with 

 Lowery and Davis that the place selected by him was in the Calusa 

 country where he had had his first experiences with the natives 

 (Lowery, 1901, pp. 158, 446 ; Davis, 1935, pp. 63-64) . While his party 

 were endeavoring to put up dwellings, they were attacked with the 

 same determination as before and retired to Cuba, where Ponce soon 

 died of wounds he had received in the encounter. 



The year before this occurred, Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon, one of 

 the auditors of the Island of Santo Domingo, sent out a caravel 

 under the command of Francisco Gordillo with instructions to 

 proceed northward through the Bahama Islands to the continent. 

 On the way Gordillo fell in with another caravel commanded by 

 a kinsman, Pedro de Quexos, sent out on a slave-hunting raid by 

 Juan Ortiz de Matienzo, an auditor associated with Ayllon in the 

 judiciary. The two captains continued together toward the northwest 

 and reached the mainland at the mouth of a considerable river to 

 which they gave the name St. John the Baptist because it was 

 on his day that they made the landfall. This took them into the 

 year 1521. The latitude of the place they estimated to be 30° 30'. 

 The date when they took formal possession of the land in the name 

 of the king and their employers was June 30. They soon opened 

 communications with the natives, whose friendliness they rewarded 

 by carrying off 70 to Santo Domingo. There the unfortunate Indians 

 were officially freed and it was ordered that they should be restored 

 to their native land at the earliest possible moment, but "meanwhile 

 they were to remain in the hands of Ayllon and Matienzo." From 

 what Peter Martyr tells us, it would seem that the effect of this 

 action, so far as the Indians was concerned was exactly nothing, 

 that some of them starved to death and that only one of them 

 probably saw his native country again. 



This exception, an Indian who came to be known as Francisco of 

 Chicora, was noteworthy because he was afterward especially 

 attached to Ayllon as a servant and happened to meet the historian 

 Peter Martyr, who obtained from him an account of the Indians, 

 the longest description of any tribe in North America which can 

 claim such an early date of record. It is of especial value because 

 our information regarding the Siouan tribes living near the coasts 

 of North and South Carolina is exceedingly meager. In 1525 Ayllon 

 sent two caravels under Pedro de Quexos to examine the newly 



