An Inca veteran marched the first deep U.S. interior entrada
Hernando de Soto (c.1497–21 May 1542), Extremaduran hidalgo and Inca campaign veteran under Pizarro, led the first European expedition deep through today’s southeastern United States. He died in 1542 on the Mississippi’s banks while still hunting gold and a Pacific passage.
His parents were hidalgos of slender means in the poor province of Badajoz, and three towns there, including Jerez de los Caballeros, claim him. Spain had just finished off the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia, leaving young men hungry for glory, and Columbus’s voyages pointed them west. De Soto reached Central America as a teenager in 1514 with Pedro Arias Dávila, Panama’s first governor, fought in Veragua in 1520 and in the conquest of Nicaragua in 1524, and became known as a superb horseman who also squeezed ransoms out of villages by seizing their chiefs.
In 1530 he was a councillor of León in Nicaragua and probed the Yucatán coast for a sea link between the oceans. Joining Francisco Pizarro as a captain, he rode with fifteen men to invite Atahualpa to the fatal meeting at Cajamarca and led one of three cavalry groups in the ambush. During the months of ransom he befriended the captive ruler and taught him chess; the Spaniards executed Atahualpa while de Soto was away checking rumours of a rescue army that he found did not exist. By 1534 he was lieutenant governor of Cuzco.
Back in Spain in 1536, he entered the Order of Santiago and collected a royal share of 17,740 pesos plus 724 marks of gold, and received Cuba’s governorship plus a licence to conquer Florida within four years. Inspired by the castaway Cabeza de Vaca, he recruited 620 Spanish and Portuguese men, including Atlantic Creoles of African descent, and on 10 May 1539 near Tampa Bay drew up a will funding a 2,000-ducat chapel in his home town.
Tracing his route has long been contested, with towns competing for a link. Archaeology now firmly ties the Governor Martin Site, the Apalachee town of Anhaica in Tallahassee found in 1987, to his army. The writers Garcilaso and Hakluyt later gave informal accounts official weight for rival empires.
Source: Hernando de Soto
