dred and sixty men on foot, struck boldly into the interior.

It was an amazing country. It had magnificent forests and almost
impassable swamps, gorgeous tropical flowers and black bogs infested
with snakes, alligators and hostile Indians, game of every kind and
dense jungles into which it retreated. There seemed to be no towns, no
grain-land and no gold-bearing mountains. The persevering explorers
crossed half a dozen large rivers and many small ones, wading when they
could, building rafts or swimming when the water was deep. After between
three and four months of this, half-starved, shaken with swamp fever,
weary and bedraggled, they reached the first harbor they had found upon
the coast they followed, but no ships were there. Whether the ships had
been wrecked, or put in somewhere only to meet with destruction at the
hands of the Indians, they never knew.

Narvaez called his officers into consultation, one at a time, as to the
best course to pursue in this desperate case. They had no provisions, a
third of the men were sick and more were dropping from exhaustion every
day, and all agreed that unless they could get away and reach Mexico
while some of them could still work, there was very little chance that
they would ever leave the place at all. But they had no tools, no
workmen and no sailors, and nothing to eat while the ships were
a-building, even if they knew how to build them. They gave it up for
that night and prayed for direction.

Next day one of the men proved to have been a carpenter, and another
came to Cabeca de Vaca with a plan for making bellows of deerskin with a
wooden frame and nozzle, so that a forge could be worked and whatever
spare iron they had could be pounded into rude tools. The officers took
heart. Cross-bows, stirrups, spurs, horse-furniture, reduced to
scrap-iron, furnished axes, hammers, saws and nails. There was plenty of
timber in the forests. Those not able to do hard work stripped palmetto
leaves to use in the place of tow for calking and rigging. Every third
day one of the horses was killed, the meat served out to the sick and
the working party, the manes and tails saved to twist into rope with
palmetto fiber, and the skin of the legs taken off whole and tanned for
water bottles. At four different times a selected body of soldiers went
out to get corn from the Indians, peaceably if possible, by force if
necessary, and on this, with the horse-meat and sometimes fish or
sea-food caug