Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/98

78 of equipments and workmen, swine and poultry, priests, monks, and altar furniture. He had learned in Peru just what appliances were necessary for hounding and tormenting savages. But he had a rough and fierce experience in Florida. The natives were numerous, bold, and enraged by the memory of the barbarities of Narvaez. Yet he was, as a matter of course, successful. He soon captured Indians enough to carry his baggage and to do the menial work of his camps, as goaded slaves. He steadily hewed on his plundering way, with an expedition to Pensacola and an invasion of Georgia. Though he received kind treatment and warm hospitality from many chiefs and their tribes, he villanously repaid it by all manner of dastardly outrages, led on and maddened by the hope of mineral treasures, and indulging in abominable debaucheries. After having been generously entertained for thirty days where now stands the town of Rome, he proceeded to ravage the neighboring country. With Indians as his burden carriers, he entered Alabama, in July, 1540, where the natives had then their first sight of white men and horses. The pestiferous miasmas of those fair and fruitful regions proved very fatal to the Europeans, and the swamps, mosquitoes, and alligators would have overborne the fortitude and resolve of the invaders but for the passion for wealth that lured them on. The enslaved natives had to carry on litters many sick, in addition to their other burdens. De Soto had brought with him from Florida five hundred of the natives, men and women, chained and under guard. As any of these sickened or died, their places were supplied by fresh captives from bands of the Indians who ventured to face him. The simple and bewildered natives soon lost all the dread and awe with which they would have continued to venerate the strangers, as they saw them not only reduced by common human weaknesses, but exhibiting their odious character as robbers, thieves, assassins, and cruel desperadoes. The Spaniards visited