Chap. II.} 1528. Sept. |
Oct. |
This text is part of:
[40b]
the party whom famine, autumnal fevers, fatigue and
the arrows of the savage bowmen had spared, embarked for the river Palmas.
Former navigators had traced the outline of the coast, but among the voyagers there was not a single expert mariner.
One shallop was commanded by Alonso de Castillo and Andres Dorantes, another by Cabeza de Vaca.
The gunwales of the crowded vessels rose but a handbreadth above the water, till after creeping for seven days through shallow sounds, Cabeza seized five canoes of the natives, out of which the Spaniards made guard boards for their five boats.
During thirty days more
they kept on their way, suffering from hunger and thirst, imperilled by a storm, now closely following the shore, now avoiding savage enemies by venturing upon the sea. On the thirtieth of October, at the hour of vespers, Cabeza de Vaca, who happened then to lead the van, discovered one of the mouths of the river now known as the Mississippi,1 and the little fleet was snugly moored among islands at a league from the stream, which brought down such a flood that even at that distance the water was sweet.
They would have entered the ‘very great river’ in search of fuel to parch their corn, but were baffled by the force of the current and a rising north wind.
A mile and a half from land they sounded, and with a line of thirty fathoms could
1 Mi Barca, que iba delante, descubrio una Punta, que la Tierra hacia, i del otro se via un Rio mui grande, i en una Isleta que hacia la Punta, hice Yo surgir, por esperar las otras Barcas. El Governador no quiso Ilegar, antes se metio por una Baia mui cerca de alli, en que havia muchas Isletas, i alli nos juntamos, i desde la Mar tomamos Agua dulce, porque el Rio entraba en la Mar de avenida:—acordamos de ir al Rio, que estaba detras de la Punta, una Legua de alli: i iendo, era tanta la corriente, que no nos dexaba en ninguna manera llegar;—a media Legua que fuimos metidos en ella, sondamos, i hallamos, que con treinta bracas no podimos tomar hondo. Naufragios de Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, cap. x. I have revised this subject, and with the greatest willingness to derive instruction from the judgment of others, I am unable to interpret these words of any river but the Mississippi.
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1859.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
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.