He went prepared to settle, carrying clergymen for the colonists, friars to found Indian missions, and horses, cattle, sheep, and swine. Where precisely he made the Florida coast we do not know; but it is stated that on attempting to erect dwellings for his colonists he was attacked by the natives, who showed great hostility. Ponce himself, while leading his men against his assailants, received so dangerous an arrow wound, that, after losing many of his settlers by sickness and at the hands of the Indians, he abandoned the attempt to plant a colony in Florida, which had so long been the object of his hopes; and taking all on board his vessels, he sailed to Cuba. There he lingered in pain, and died of his wound.[807] John Ponce de Leon closed his long and gallant career without solving the problem whether Florida was an island or part of the northern continent. Meanwhile others, following in the path he had opened, were contributing to a more definite knowledge. Thus Diego Miruelo, a pilot, sailed from Cuba in 1516 on a trading cruise; and running up the western shore of the Floridian peninsula, discovered a bay which long bore his name on Spanish maps, and was apparently Pensacola. Here he found the Indians friendly, and exchanged his store of glass and steel trinkets for silver and gold. Then, satisfied with his cruise, and without making any attempt to explore the coast, he returned to Cuba.[808] The next year Francis Hernandez de Cordova[809] sent from Cuba on the 8th of February two ships and a brigantine, carrying one hundred and ten men, with a less humane motive than Miruelo’s; for Oviedo assures us that his object was to capture on the Lucayos, or Bahama Islands, a cargo of Indians to sell as slaves. His object was defeated by storms; and the vessels, driven from their course, reached Yucatan, near Cape Catoche, which he named. The Indians here were as hostile as the elements; and Hernandez, after several sharp engagements with the natives, in which almost every man was wounded, was sailing back, when storms again drove his vessels from their course. Unable to make the Island of Cuba, Alaminos, the pilot of the expedition, ran into a bay on the Florida coast, where he had been with Ponce de Leon on his first expedition. While a party which had landed were procuring water, they were attacked with the utmost fury by the Indians, who, swarming down in crowds, assailed those still in the boats. In this engagement twenty-two of the Indians were killed, six of the Spaniards in the landing party were wounded,—including Bernal Diaz, who records the event in his History,—and four of those in the boats, among the number Anton de Alaminos, the pilot. The only man in the expedition who had come away from Yucatan unwounded, a soldier named Berrio, was acting as sentry on shore, and fell into the hands of the Indians. The commander himself, Hernandez de Cordova, reached Cuba only to die of his wounds.