De Soto now started inland leading a brilliant company of knights and private soldiers, all in bright armor. Over the shining helmets were waving plumes, and many a mailed fist held aloft a rich and beautiful banner. There were hundreds of horsemen and many more men marching on foot. No more richly dressed men and horses ever started out on a Crusade to regain possession of the Holy City. But the object of this Spanish quest was gold. Spanish serving men drove along with this rich and gay procession four hundred fat hogs. De Soto had decided not to risk being starved to death as so many explorers had been. And gamekeepers held in leash, not falcons to catch and kill birds or beasts, but bloodhounds for hunting Indians. Instead of mountains of rocks from which gold could be mined, De Soto’s men found swamps. The weather was sultry and moist. Insects got inside their knightly armor and stung them to madness, and venomous serpents coiled around their armored legs. Indians shot poisoned arrows at them from the bushes. Their coats of mail were so heavy that stout knights sank deep in the bogs. They advanced very slowly; they wallowed rather than marched, and their days and nights were spent in weariness and torture. The fame of the white men went on ahead of them. As De Soto advanced he found the savages on the warpath ready to drive back the invaders. All along their line of march they could hear savage threats in the distance. Juan Ortiz told the Spaniards that the Indians were shouting: “Keep on, robbers and murderers! In Apalachee you will get what you deserve. No mercy will be shown to captives, who will be hung on the highest trees along the trail.” After the Spaniards had marched through the lands of five different chiefs, they found a great chieftain who seemed to wish to make friends with the white men. De Soto gladly accepted, but Juan Ortiz warned him to look out for treachery. So the white men were secretly prepared; and when the traitor chief gave the signal to his men to attack, the Spaniards raised their battle cry, “_Santiago!_” and thousands of the savages were killed by a few hundred Spaniards. Hundreds of Indians took refuge in a lake. There five good swimmers would lie side by side, on the surface like logs, forming a human raft on which the best archer would stand and shoot back at the white men. The fight lasted all day and nearly all night. Before morning all the Indians were killed or captured, put in chains, and divided among the Spaniards as slaves. The Indians, who at first thought the white men were gods, were now sure they were devils. The boasted village of Apalachee was only a few straw huts on a knoll in the center of a great swamp. And the savages who defended it with bows and arrows were no match for armed Spaniards; the white men killed nearly all of them.