previous next

[134] behold, for they were very great, and well made, and had their awnings, plumes, shields, and flags; and, with the multitude of people that were in them, they seemed to be a fair army of galleys.

In thirty days space, while the governor remained there, they made four barges, in three of which he commanded twelve horsemen to enter (in each of them four), in a morning, three hours before day,—men which he trusted would land in despite of the Indians, and make sure the passage, or die; and some footmen, being crossbow-men, went with them, and rowers to set them on the other side. And in the other barge he commanded John de Guzman to pass with the footmen, which was made captain instead of Francisco Maldonado. And, because the stream was swift, they went a quarter of a league up the river, along the bank, and, crossing over, fell down with the stream, and landed right over against the camps.

Two stones'-cast before they came to land, the horsemen went out of the barges on horseback, to a sandy plot of very hard and clear ground, where all of them landed without any resistance. As soon as those that passed first were on land on the other side, the barges returned to the place where the governor was; and, within two hours after sunrising, all the people were over.1 The river was almost half a league broad. If a man stood still on the other side, it could not be discerned whether he were a man or no. The river was of great depth, and of a strong current. The river was always muddy. There came down the river continually many trees and timber, which the force of the water and

1 The place of crossing was probably near Helena, Arkansas.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.

hide Places (automatically extracted)

View a map of the most frequently mentioned places in this document.

Sort places alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a place to search for it in this document.
Helena, Ark. (Arkansas, United States) (1)

Download Pleiades ancient places geospacial dataset for this text.

hide People (automatically extracted)
Sort people alphabetically, as they appear on the page, by frequency
Click on a person to search for him/her in this document.
Francisco Maldonado (1)
John Guzman (1)
hide Display Preferences
Greek Display:
Arabic Display:
View by Default:
Browse Bar: