It wasn’t where Narvaez had hoped to begin his glorious conquest, but given the circumstances, the medium-sized fishing village at the back of the shallow bay would have to do. He knew from experience that improvisation was as important as planning in adventures such as these, and he ordered his hungry army to disembark and take the town, which the Indians had wisely abandoned. He was also certain that no great achievements came without great risks, and after a day or two of rest, he made a fateful decision. He announced that he would march the army inland while the ships continued to look for Tampa Bay.

The royal treasurer for the expedition, a somewhat prim and inexperienced courtier, was horrified by the plan. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca never really got along with Narvaez, and he argued now that if they didn’t leave the ships in some known location before they set off inland they would never see them again.

But Narvaez would have none of it. He may even have wanted to separate his army from the ships precisely to eliminate the temptation to run back to port when things got tough. He knew that his old nemesis, Cortes, had destroyed his own fleet for that very reason before marching inland to Mexico City. So into the flickering green jungle the army marched—a long, colorfully dressed line of pike men, horsemen, dog handlers, crossbowmen and slaves. Behind them, now on a falling tide, the ships with their crews and all the women dropped back through the opening into the Gulf of Mexico.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Cabeza de Vaca was right. They never did see the ships again. Once in a while, as the hungry army, dressed in heavy European clothes and armor, worked its way through insect-infested, sweltering swamps and forests up the Florida peninsula, Narvaez sent a scouting party back out to the coast. But every time it was the same: no bay, no harbor, no town, no ships, no hope. Just endless sawgrass and the flat blue sea.

Meanwhile, none of the Indian villages they came across inland raised enough food to feed the army for more than a day or two. In these towns violence erupted occasionally, more out of frustration than necessity. In one place, Narvaez apparently sicced his deadly war dogs on a local leader’s mother; in another, he burned a burial temple because the priests in his company were certain it represented some kind of deviltry.

Mostly, though, the would-be conquerors and their slaves trudged through the flickering light on footpaths worn into the soggy ground by people they never saw but who were presumably keeping an eye on them. Startled deer sometimes ran past, but the crossbowmen were not skilled enough to hit any, so they survived primarily on the hearts of palms. The only good news was that the few Indians they managed to capture in central Florida seemed to agree that there was a great civilization, loaded with corn and gold, somewhere far to the north. They had no translators, but whenever a Spaniard held a piece of gold and some corn up to the captives’ faces, the Indians pointed north and mentioned a place called Apalachee or Palachen or some such thing. Cabeza de Vaca, who was one of the four who ultimately survived, and who wrote the most important account of the journey, said that during those weeks Apalachee “was what they most wanted in the world.”

The Apalachee were, in fact, a very powerful and well-organized people. Their main city was at the current location of Tallahassee, and their territory included much of the Florida Panhandle. They were the southernmost example of what archaeologists today call “Mississippian” culture: a broad collection of hundreds of different native nations that built great mound cities and raised prodigious amounts of corn in the river valleys of the Midwest. The Apalachee were a sports-mad people and, by all Spanish accounts, much larger and healthier than the average European. Fantastic archers, they were not at all amused when Narvaez and his starving army took over a medium-sized border town near the Aucilla River and held its mayor hostage. Twice they attacked in great numbers and succeeded in burning down the huts within the stockade fence. But they were unable to drive the Spaniards out, and so they changed their strategy to something between a guerrilla insurgency and a siege.