agreed, but at his signal, a trumpet sounded
and his cavalry charged. It took all night for
the conquistadores to defeat the Timucua
fighters. De Soto’s Paracoxi allies tied the van-
quished survivors to posts and used them as
live archery targets.
De Soto’s men headed northwest, building
bridges across the Suwannee and Aucilla
Rivers on the way to Apalache, the area
around modern-day Tallahassee. There de
Soto camped for the winter. He sent expedi-
tion comptroller (supervisor of finances) Juan
de Añasco toward the coast in search of a
usable port. At the shoreline Añasco found the
ghostly remains of Narváez’s last encamp-
ment, with its forge used to make nails for the
doomed expedition’s escape ships.
THE PEARLS OF
COFITACHEQUI
That winter, a young Indian captive named
Perico told the Europeans that he knew of
gold mines to the north. Perico described the
process of refining gold with enough accuracy
to convince them he was telling the truth. The
land, he claimed, was called Cofitachequi and
was ruled by a woman. When the expedition
Hernando de Soto and “La Florida” B 97
The Timucua depended on farming for much of their food. This engraving of a painting by Jacques Le Moyne,
a founder of the Huguenot colony at Fort Caroline near the mouth of the St. Johns River in Florida in the
mid-16th century, demonstrates a European influence on the Timucua’s planting of crops.(Library of
Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [LC-DIG-ppmsca-02937])