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Cuba, completing the first circumnavigation of
the Gulf of Mexico on July 3, 1687.
Although their journey is known as the
Rivas-Iriarte expedition, the voyage’s most
valuable information resulted from Enríquez
Barroto’s navigational skills and diary. The
pilot chronicled the first accurate naviga-
tional data of Gulf Coast features, including
Galveston Bay; the Aransas, Sabine, and Cal-
casieu River passes; the Atchafalaya River;
and the Mississippi River passes. In late 1688
Barroto’s maps guided the voyage of Fran-
cisco López de Gamarra and Andrés de Pez,
who anchored at the mouth of the Río
Grande and sent an armed party 150 miles
upriver in canoes in search of La Salle. Yet,
despite all these maritime searches, La
Salle—as far as Spanish authorities knew—
was still a threat.
SEARCHING BY LAND
At the same time the Spanish were looking for
La Salle by sea, soldiers commanded by Gen-
eral Alonso de León repeatedly marched over-
land, collecting new geographical information
in the process, but searching in vain for the
French intruders. Their fourth search was suc-
cessful. On April 22, 1689, León at last found
Fort St. Louis and described the grim discov-
ery in his notes:
We went to see it and found all the houses
sacked, all the chests, bottle-cases, and all
the rest of the settlers’ furniture broken;
apparently more than two hundred books,torn apart and with the rotten leaves scat-
tered through the patios—all in French....
We found three bodies scattered over the
plain. One of these, from the dress that still
clung to the bone, appeared to be that of a
woman.... We looked for the other dead
bodies, but could not find them; whence we
supposed that they had been eaten by alli-
gators, of which there were many.León learned from two Frenchmen living
among friendly Hasinai tribes that the settlers,
with the exception of a few children saved by
Karankawa women, had been massacred by
the Karankawa. León was finally able to report
that the French threat was gone.
On April 26, 1690, León and his soldiers
returned to Fort St. Louis, accompanied by
Franciscan friars, who were eager to extend
their missions eastward. After the missionar-
ies torched the abandoned fort, León led them
northeast across the Colorado, Brazos, and
Trinity Rivers to Hasinai villages near the
Neches River. Before returning to Mexico,
León ransomed some of the French children
taken in the Fort St. Louis massacre.
The search for La Salle had yielded the first
accurate geographical discoveries in the Gulf
Coast region in 150 years. With the immediate
threat removed, Spain was content to leave
scattered Franciscan missions in east Texas to
warn of further European intrusions. The
episode, however, was a harbinger of the com-
ing century, when strategic power began to
drive exploration, replacing earlier quests for
gold and souls.(^144) B Discovery of the Americas, 1492–1800
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