by Tony Horwitz
The hidalgo who had left Spain as a teenager returned home in his mid-thirties as one of the country’s wealthiest men. He bought a palace in Seville, acquired pages, footmen, an equerry, and a majordomo, adorned himself in velvet and satin, and married into a distinguished noble family. Capping this astonishing rise was his induction by the king into the Order of Santiago, Spain’s loftiest chivalric society.
But De Soto had no intention of settling down. In 1537, a year after his return to Spain, he won a charter from the Crown to conquer and colonize La Florida. In the sixteenth century, conquest remained a private enterprise. The Crown granted licenses to explore and exploit new lands—retaining its royal fifth of the booty—but didn’t bankroll expeditions or send soldiers. Conquistadors were, in essence, armed entrepreneurs, who assembled their own force and assumed the risk.
In La Florida, the risk was considerable. Ponce de León had died trying to colonize it, and the follow-up mission by Pánfilo de Narváez had ended in the disaster that only Cabeza de Vaca and a few others survived. Several other expeditions had foundered along the coast. Undaunted, De Soto spent his entire fortune and went into debt assembling an invasion force of nine ships, six hundred men (including hardened veterans of Peru), 220 horses, a herd of pigs, and perros bravos—dogs trained to track and tear apart humans. In late May 1539, having established a base in Cuba, the armada arrived on the west coast of present-day Florida. The territory De Soto had contracted to conquer was vast, vaguely defined, and still virtually unknown to Europeans. Under the terms of the Crown’s grant, he had four years to make good on his audacious gamble.
THOUGH THE PRECISE site of De Soto’s landing in Florida isn’t known, Bradenton has long claimed the honor for itself. The city is home to the De Soto National Memorial and the De Soto Historical Society. Its main bridge is named for the conquistador, as are a speedway, mall, mobile-home park, Laundromat, and animal clinic. A De Soto–themed weekend is the city’s premier social event.
Bradenton is also the base camp for a rare band of conquistador reenactors, called Calderon’s Company in honor of a captain in De Soto’s army. Though I’d dabbled in Civil War reenacting near my home in Virginia, the existence of weekend conquistadors surprised me. Playing Johnny Reb and Billy Yank was one thing; portraying metal-clad Spaniards who slaughtered thousands of Indians seemed quite another.
After discovering Calderon’s Company on the Web, I phoned the bearded, helmeted figure pictured on the group’s home page: Tim Burke, a Bradenton land surveyor with a voice like poured gravel. He said a few members of the company were about to attend a history fest in Naples, Florida, and I was welcome to join them, even try on conquistador gear if I liked.
“What should I bring?” I asked.
“A nasty attitude,” Tim said.
THE HISTORY FEST was held at a small park between a Wal-Mart and a county jail. Arriving at twilight, I followed a trail into the palm grove shading the reenactors’ camp. The fest was a “Timeline” event, meaning that every era was represented, other than the present. I passed the tent of a Confederate doctor studying a jar of leeches, and another occupied by Revolutionary Minutemen. A World War II G.I. strode past, griping to a pirate about the difficulty of getting decommissioned grenades through airport security. Then I spotted a brawny, bearded man in a rough jersey, hacking at something by a low fire.
“Are you by any chance a conquistador?” I asked.
“No, sorry.” He held up a piece of flint he was honing. “I’m a paleo. The Spaniards are over near the Seminoles, I think.”
I finally found Calderon’s Company sipping wine from period goblets, though not yet in conquistador attire. Tim Burke turned out to be an amiable middle-aged man with gentle eyes and a quick smile. His compadre, Larry May, tall, lean, and soft-spoken, was a hospital technician who ran a vineyard on the side. Larry had brought along his wife and children, all of them blond and blue-eyed. As a group, Calderon’s Company looked about as fierce and Iberian as the Brady Bunch.
“Larry and I met years ago, doing medieval combat with wooden swords,” Tim said.
“I gave him a few blows and lopped off his head,” Larry recalled, sipping Shiraz. “Then we became friends.”
The two had since traveled forward in time, from Chaucerian days to the Age of Conquest, mainly to fill a void in the reenacting scene. “Medieval, Civil War, Wild West—everyone wants to do that,” Tim said. “Not many people want to be conquistadors. There’s a shortage of masochists in Florida.”
I UNDERSTOOD WHAT he meant the next morning, as I watched Larry and Tim unpack armor they’d made by beating sheet metal with auto-repair hammers. Larry strapped heavy plates over Tim’s chest, back, legs, and arms. A gorget went around his neck, beneath the high-crested helmet called a morion. “This is my light summer suit,” Tim quipped. Normally, he wore metal gloves and plates over his feet and ankles. Even without them, his outfit weighed sixty pounds.
Larry’s attire was much lighter but just as eye-catching: green wool jacket with braided buttons, green striped breeches, a green floppy hat, and knee-high black boots. He looked like a giant leprechaun. Larry’s outfit, like Tim’s, had been painstakingly researched and was modeled on the flashy camp attire of sixteenth-century Spaniards.
Tim flung a filthy white sack at my feet. “Your uniform, Don Antonio.” Reaching inside, I extracted a pair of baggy woolen breeches that reached only to my knees, with a cod flap sized for a porn star. Next I pulled out a ruffled muslin blouse that looked like a nightgown. At the bottom of the bag lay a pair of leather buskins. Donning the blouse, knee pants and slippers, I confessed to Tim that I’d anticipated a rather manlier ensemble.
“Not done yet,” he said, handing me a quilted wool doublet, just the thing for a hot autumn day in Florida. “And now, your cota de mallas.” Tim had crafted the coat of mail from flattened, interlocked rings of heavy wire, exactly like the museum pieces I’d seen in the Southwest. As he hoisted the mesh shirt, allowing me to slide in my head and arms, I felt as though I were climbing inside a chain-link fence. The mail weighed over thirty pounds, and that was before Tim strapped on a belt, scabbard, and sword. On my head, he planted a visored helmet with flaps that covered my neck and ears. All told, I was wearing fifty pounds of steel.
Staggering a few feet, I knocked over a camp table and slumped awkwardly onto a tree stump. The chain mail bunched over my belt, giving me a Gothic German beer belly. “What now?” I asked. The words echoed inside the cavern of my helmet.
“Take it slow and drink lots of water,” Tim said. “And resist the urge to use your sword on people who ask stupid questions.”
A few minutes later the crowds arrived, clad in the costume of twenty-first-century Floridians: shorts, flipflops, and T-shirts. They meandered from camp to camp, like window shoppers at the Mall of Time, snapping pictures of Indians weaving palm leaves, or pioneer women scouring pots. By comparison, our camp offered little drama: two steel-clad figures standing in the sun, and a leprechaun polishing armor.
“What period is this?” a woman asked, consulting her Timeline brochure.
“Sixteenth-century Spanish,” I muttered through my visor.
“Oh. Looks miserable.” She moved on to the Seminole camp.
Then a man stopped to study my chain mail. “If you look inside your toaster,” he said, “you’ll see metal bits that look just like what you’re wearing.”
Others were less inventive.
“That your shark suit?”
“Need some oil?”
“Hot?”
As Tim had warned, I felt like running them through with my sword. Instead, I offered samples of the hardtack biscuits Larry had put on display. Earlier in the day, I’d tried one and almost chipped a tooth. Larry showed me the recipe: flour, water, and salt, baked “until golden brown and rock hard,” then left to cool in the oven, “a process similar to case hardening in blacksmithing.” In Mexico, Moctezuma sampled Spanish hardtack and declared it indistingui
shable from limestone.
By midmorning I was drenched in sweat. In theory, chain mail offered ventilation—De Soto’s men even used it for sifting flour—but the heavy doublet I wore underneath trapped the heat and moisture. Tim’s plate armor allowed air in the sides and seemed to command respect, at least compared with the gawks and laughter my chain mail evoked. So at midday I asked whether we could swap outfits.
“Be my guest,” he said, stifling a smile.
The plate armor not only weighed more than chain mail; it had all the flexibility of a back brace, and poked into my kidneys, collarbones, and groin. The gorget was unbearable, like an iron collar. And the armor was even hotter than mail. After ten minutes in the midday sun, the plate on my chest felt like the hood of a parked car on the Fourth of July.
“The Spanish didn’t really wear this,” I moaned. “They couldn’t have.”
In answer, Tim hurled a piece of hardtack at my chest. The biscuit crumbled on impact. Then he gave me a sharp blow with the butt of his musket. I was conscious of having been struck, but only just, as when someone taps your car bumper in traffic. Tim explained that chain mail was effective at blunting sword slashes, but it didn’t offer defense against the fire-hardened arrows of Florida Indians. In battle, you wanted the sixteenth-century equivalent of Kevlar.
De Soto’s men, however, didn’t just fight; they marched, typically fifteen miles a day, across the entire South. When I took a sample stroll around the park with Tim, I lurched and creaked like the Tin Man. My sword, protruding tail-like behind me, kept catching on bushes and the wide skirts of pioneer women. As we approached a narrow bridge over a pond, Tim took firm grip of my arm. “If you fall in you’ll go down like a sinker,” he said. Small wonder that several of De Soto’s men drowned while crossing the South’s many rivers.
Clunking back to camp, with passersby affording me a wide berth, I sensed that Americans’ neglect of conquistadors was partly due to their attire. Unlike others represented at the history fest, knights in armor seemed utterly misplaced on the U.S. continent. They belonged in the Crusades, or at the battle of Agincourt, not tramping through the woods and swamps of Florida.
I also felt a stab of period envy, jealousy of reenactors from other eras who appeared much more sensibly clad: bare-chested Indians, Highlanders in kilts, even the “paleo” I’d met the night before, who was still wearing his sleeveless jersey and hacking at his flint.
“What’s your technique?” I asked, stopping to watch him.
“Basically, beating a rock into submission,” he grunted.
I also paused to chat with a fellow “Spaniard,” a bearded man in sandals and hooded cassock who played an early missionary, Juan Rogel. The historic Father Rogel found it impossible to convert the Calusa Indians of southwest Florida, who believed that humans possessed three souls: one inside the body, another in the pupil of the eye, and a third in each person’s shadow. The present-day Father Rogel faced a different challenge. “People keep asking if I’ll hear their confession,” he said. “I have to tell them, ‘No, I’m Jewish.’ ”
A Bronx-born teacher, Larry Litt had agreed to the role because the event’s organizers needed a friar, and he looked the part. Larry also played Santa Claus at his school. “I’m the one who needs forgiving,” he said, as another penitent approached. “A bar mitzvah boy, and look what’s become of me.”
When I returned to the conquistador camp, Tim was busily priming his harquebus, or musket, for the day’s climactic event: the Timeline Shooters, a demonstration of weapons from every era, in chronological order. The show opened with an Indian using an atlatl to fling a spear. Then came Tim, who asked me to stand beside him, holding up a shield. Early Spanish firearms were extremely clumsy, almost five feet long and so heavy that soldiers rested them on tripods. Harquebusiers also had to carry their own ignition, a piece of slow-burning rope called a match cord.
Tim poured black powder into a flash pan, pretended to ram a bullet down the muzzle, and cocked the trigger. “I’m being shot at with arrows all this time,” he told the audience. That’s where I came in: as an expendable, shielding the harquebusier. Finally, Tim touched the burning wick to the powder and yelled, “¡Fuego!” Fire flashed from the barrel and an imaginary lead ball crashed into the palms.
We exited to polite applause and stayed to watch the others: Brits in bearskin hats, firing flintlocks; Johnny Rebs shooting muskets; a cowboy emptying a Remington; and, as a crowd-pleasing finale, World War II Marines rattling off hundreds of blanks from a mounted machine gun. Taken together, the Timeline Shooters was a fireworks display in which we’d played the part of sparklers. Which made me wonder yet again: why choose to reenact a conquistador?
When I posed the question that night, Larry stared into his goblet. “Maybe it’s because modern life can be so soft and boring,” he said.
Larry had served with the Special Forces in Vietnam and the Middle East. He said modern soldiers carried as much weight as the Spanish did, “and maintaining your gear is still crucial.” But he was struck by how much more intimate and horrible warfare must have been in the sixteenth century, when the killing occurred at close range, rather than from tanks, planes, or missile batteries.
“We can’t condone what the Spaniards did; it seems barbaric to us,” Larry said. “But I admire their tenacity, giving up everything familiar to come here. It would have been like traveling to the moon today.”
Tim agreed. “Unless you reenact Mother Teresa, you’re going to run into problems if you judge people by today’s moral standards.”
Also, whatever one thought of De Soto, the man had cojones. He’d made a fortune several times over before turning forty. But rather than live out his days as an idle aristocrat, he’d risked everything on the chance of making the biggest score yet, in La Florida.
“Probably a drug kingpin is the closest you could get to him today,” Tim said. “Like one of those Colombian cartel leaders who can never get enough of the action, and can’t quit when they’re on top.”
SOON AFTER LANDING in Florida, De Soto had an extraordinary stroke of luck. Near shore, mounted Spaniards came upon Indians with bows and arrows. One of the horsemen was about to charge with his lance when his intended target, a naked man with tattooed arms, cried out in Spanish. The tattooed man’s name was Juan Ortiz. He’d come to Florida on an expedition eleven years before, only to be captured by Indians. He said his native captors had bound and laid him on a grill, and were about to kindle a fire under him when the chief’s daughter intervened, begging that the Spaniard be spared.
This story bears a striking resemblance to that of John Smith’s rescue by Pocahontas, which occurred eighty years later, near Jamestown. It’s possible that Indians in both Florida and Virginia practiced a similar ritual, threatening to execute captives before adopting them. It’s also possible that John Smith lifted his romantic story from published accounts of Juan Ortiz’s earlier rescue. The Spaniard was saved a second time by the Indian princess, who warned that he was about to be sacrificed to appease an Indian spirit. He fled to another tribe, which alerted him to the arrival of De Soto’s ships. So Ortiz had come in search of the Spanish, only to narrowly escape their lances.
A portrait of De Soto from a Spanish history of the Indies
“He knew little of our language, since he had forgotten it,” wrote one of De Soto’s men. “He remembered how to call to Our Lady, and by this he was recognized to be a Christian.” For several days he could barely communicate, “since upon saying one word in Spanish, he would say another four or five in the language of the Indians.”
Ortiz’s fluency in the language and customs of Florida Indians made him invaluable to De Soto as an interpreter and intermediary. Without Ortiz, De Soto wrote soon after landing, “I know not what would become of us.”
De Soto possessed another great advantage over his predecessors: several decades of experience in hostile lands, from the jungles of Panama to the mountains of Peru. The qualities he�
��d honed in Central and South America—daring, deception, utter ruthlessness—quickly came to the fore in Florida. De Soto left a hundred men at a base camp by the coast and marched his army inland, taking few provisions. Upon reaching native settlements, the Spanish looted storehouses of maize and seized Indians as guides and porters, chaining them together at the neck so they couldn’t escape.
Those who tried to flee, or who misled the Spanish, were burned at the stake or thrown to attack dogs. De Soto’s favorite, an Irish greyhound named Bruto, once chased down a fleeing chief and dragged him to the ground. In his initiative and ferocity, Bruto matched his master. Before battle, one Spaniard wrote of De Soto, “He was always the first or the second to come out armed, and never the third.”
His men weren’t quite so avid. Early on in their march, they realized De Soto was leading them to Apalachee, the warlike Indian province where Narváez’s expedition had unraveled, causing the desperate flight by sea that few of the three-hundred-man force survived. As De Soto’s men struggled through woods and swamps in summer heat, fending off hit-and-run attacks by native archers, they buried horseshoes and other supplies to dig up during what they felt sure would be the army’s eventual retreat.
De Soto not only pressed ahead; he went on the attack. Warned by Juan Ortiz of an impending ambush, he laid a trap of his own, luring four hundred Indians into open ground and launching a cavalry assault. Those warriors who weren’t lanced fled into shallow ponds, hiding beneath water lilies as Spaniards shot at them with muskets and crossbows. Fatigue finally forced the two hundred or so survivors to surrender. Most were quickly massacred. The rest, apart from “the youngest boys,” were fastened to stakes and shot with arrows by Indians of another tribe, whom the Spanish had previously captured.