But Narvaez consulted
the pilot, who said he knew of a harbor some distance to the west,
ordered the ships to meet him there, and with forty horsemen and two
hundred and sixty men on foot, struck boldly into the interior.
It was an amazing country. It had magnificent forests and almost
impassable swamps, gorgeous tropical flowers and black bogs infested
with snakes, alligators and hostile Indians, game of every kind and
dense jungles into which it retreated. There seemed to be no towns, no
grain-land and no gold-bearing mountains. The persevering explorers
crossed half a dozen large rivers and many small ones, wading when they
could, building rafts or swimming when the water was deep. After between
three and four months of this, half-starved, shaken with swamp fever,
weary and bedraggled, they reached the first harbor they had found upon
the coast they followed, but no ships were there. Whether the ships had
been wrecked, or put in somewhere only to meet with destruction at the
hands of the Indians, they never knew.
Narvaez called his officers into consultation, one at a time, as to the
best course to pursue in this desperate case. They had no provisions, a
third of the men were sick and more were dropping from exhaustion every
day, and all agreed that unless they could get away and reach Mexico
while some of them could still work, there was very little chance that
they would ever leave the place at all.
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