But long months of wandering in pathless prairies bringing him apparently no nearer to the sea, and dreading to be overtaken in the wilderness by the winter, he turned back and retraced his steps to the Mississippi, where he once more pitched his camp, and spent six months in building boats, in which he hoped to go down the river to its outlet in the Gulf of Mexico. In this bold scheme he was successful. The embarkation into seven roughly-constructed brigantines took place on the 2d July, 1543, and a voyage of seventeen days, between banks lined with hostile Indians, who plied them unceasingly with their poisoned arrows, brought a few haggard, half-naked survivors to the longed-for gulf. Fifty days later, after a weary cruise along the rugged coast of what is now Louisiana and Texas, a party, still further reduced, landed at the Spanish settlement of Panuco, in Mexico, where they were received as men risen from the dead. In spite of the disastrous conclusion of so many expeditions to the ill-fated “Land of Flowers,” there were not wanting many adventurers still eager to try their fortunes in the newly-discovered districts. The first hero of note to succeed De Soto was a Dominican priest named Louis Cancello, who, with a number of his brethren, determined to endeavor to convert the natives to Christianity, and, as an earnest of their peaceful intentions, took with them to Florida a number of natives who had been carried off as slaves by their predecessors. Martyrdom was, however, their only reward. The Indians, who had been taught in a long series of severe lessons to look upon white men as their natural enemies, fell upon the missionaries, who were the first to land, and put them to death. With the fate of their leaders before them, the minor members of the party lost no time in effecting their escape, and the freed slaves alone reaped any profit from the trip. Not more successful was an imposing expedition headed by Don Tristan de Luna in 1559. Although provided with an army of 1,500 men, and accompanied by a large body of missionaries eager to convert the natives; the weapons, alike temporal and spiritual, of the new adventurers were powerless against the prejudices of the Indians and the ravages of fever. Those of the explorers who escaped the evil effects of the climate fell victims to the vengeance of the sons of the soil, and but few survived to tell the tale of the failure of the most carefully organized of all Spanish attempts at colonization north of the Gulf of Mexico. We shall meet yet again, however, with the Spanish in Florida; but it was now the turn of the French to gain a footing in the New World, and before we complete the tale of Spanish discovery in the North, we must give a brief account of the adventures of the Gauls in the great exodus of the Western nations, in which they bore so important――though so fitful――a part. Illustration: (‡ Spanish warships coming ashore) CHAPTER III.