While Cortes and his army were in such desperate straits, word came that the governor of Cuba had sent ships and nearly a thousand men to bring the general and his followers back, to be punished as deserters. Cortes and a picked band crept out of the capital one dark night, marched hundreds of miles to the coast, and surprised and defeated the army the governor had sent. Then he returned, with all those armed men and many more cannon and horses, to relieve the small garrison he had left to hold the many thousands of Aztecs at bay, and capture the city of Mexico. The Aztecs were frightened when they saw the thousand soldiers Cortes now brought up against them, for it looked as if the new troops had come down from the skies to the help of the Spaniards. When the battle was fiercest, the broken-spirited emperor went out to plead with the natives to stop their fighting. This made them so angry that they hurled stones at him and he died of a broken heart. The hatred of his own people was even harder to bear than Spanish cruelty. After more fierce fighting, Cortes completed the conquest of Mexico. Years afterward he returned to his old home in Spain, where he was, for a time, treated as a great conqueror. But he suffered in later years from remorse for his treachery and cruelty. When he grew old he was imprisoned through the influence of Spanish enemies. One day an old, broken man with shaggy gray locks pushed through the crowd around King Charles of Spain, now known as Emperor Charles the Fifth and the most powerful monarch in the world. When the emperor asked the old man who he was, he replied with indignant pride, “I am Cortes, the man who has given you more provinces than your ancestors left you cities.” DE SOTO, A GOLD HUNTER IN SOUTHERN SWAMPS Hernando de Soto was the Spanish grandee, or noble, appointed governor of Cuba and “the Floridas” about twenty-five years after Florida was discovered. It was Ponce de Leon who landed near the southern point of North America, on Easter Day, 1513, and named that lovely country Florida--Land of Flowers. De Leon had heard a beautiful story that far inland in the heart of the wilderness there was a magic spring that would make young forever all who drank of its sparkling waters. Though he searched long and eagerly, Ponce de Leon discovered no Fountain of Eternal Youth, but he did find endless swamps full of snakes and alligators.