The expedition travels north, exploring Florida's West…
May 1539 CE
The expedition travels north, exploring Florida's West Coast, encountering native ambushes and conflicts along the way.
Ortiz establishes a unique method for guiding the expedition and communicating with various tribal dialects.
He recruits guides from each tribe along the route.
A chain of communication is established whereby a guide who had lived in close proximity to another tribal area is able to pass his information and language on to a guide from a neighboring area.
Because Ortiz refuses to dress as an hidalgo Spaniard, other officers question his motives.
De Soto remains loyal to Ortiz, allowing him the freedom to dress and live among his friends.
De Soto's first winter encampment is at Anhaica, the capital of the Apalachee.
Located about a mile east of the present Florida capital in Tallahassee, it is one of the few places on the route where archaeologists have found physical traces of the expedition.
In the late prehistoric/protohistoric era the site had become the capital of the Apalachee after the abandonment of the former capital, the Lake Jackson Mounds Site, in approximately 1500.
The fact that no platform mounds are found at Anhaica may indicate a political change.
Either Anhiaca was not occupied long enough for the construction of mounds to begin, or mounds were no longer being built.
Also, disease could have been introduced from the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition through Apalachee in 1528 reducing population, changing village location and/or mound-building activities.
Anhaica has two hundred and fifty buildings when Hernando de Soto sets up camp here on October 6, 1539, forcing the Apalachee to abandon the village.
It is described as being near the "Bay of Horses", named for where the starving members of the preceding Narváez expedition killed and ate their horses while building boats for escape.