to the contrary conditions of
the other.

De Soto and his men wandered through the southern part of what is now
the United States for four ghastly years. It is probable that their
travels took them through the present States of Florida, Georgia,
Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, and the northeastern corner
of Texas. In 1541 they reached the Mississippi River; and theirs were
the first European eyes to look upon the Father of Waters, anywhere save
at its mouth,--a century and a quarter before the heroic Frenchmen
Marquette and La Salle saw it. They spent that winter along the Washita;
and in the early summer of 1542, as they were returning down the
Mississippi, brave De Soto died, and his body was laid to rest in the
bosom of the mighty river he had discovered,--two centuries before any
"American" saw it. His suffering and disheartened men passed a frightful
winter there; and in 1543, under command of the Lieutenant Moscoso, they
built rude vessels, and sailed down the Mississippi to the Gulf in
nineteen days,--the first navigation in our part of America. From the
Delta they made their way westward along the coast, and at last reached
Panuco, Mexico, after such a five years of hardship and suffering as no
Saxon explorer of America ever experienced. It was nearly a century and
a half after De Soto's gaunt army of starving men had taken Louisiana
for Spain that it became a French possession,--which the United States
bought from France over a century later yet.

[Illustration: THE ROCK OF ACOMA.

_See page 125._]

So when Verazzano--the Florentine sent out by France--reached America in
1524, coasted the Atlantic seaboard from somewhere about South Carolina
to Newfoundland, and gave the world a short description of what he saw,
Spain had circumnavigated the globe, reached the southern tip of the New
World, conquered a vast territory, and discovered at least half-a-dozen
of our present States, since the last visit of a Frenchman to America.
As for England, she was almost as unheard of still on this side of the
earth as though she had never existed.

Between De Leon and De Soto, Florida was visited in 1518 by Francisco de
Garay, the conqueror of Tampico. He came to subdue the Flowery Land, but
failed, and died soon after in Mexico,--the probability being that he
was poisoned by order of Cortez. He left even less mark on Florida than
did De Leon, and belongs to the class of Spanish explorers who, though
real hero