When Hernando de Soto's horsemen swept down on a band of Native people near Tampa Bay in 1539, lances leveled, one of the band threw up his arms and cried out in broken, half-forgotten Spanish. He was Juan Ortiz, a young man of Seville who had come to this same bay eleven years before with the doomed Narvaez expedition, been captured, condemned to a horrible death, and saved by a chief's daughter. His was a Pocahontas story told three generations before Pocahontas, set right here, and his rescue handed de Soto the one thing his expedition could not have done without: a man who could speak to the peoples of Florida.
Ortiz had come to Florida in 1528 as a young gentleman of the Narvaez expedition. When Narvaez marched inland and vanished, the ships searched the coast for him, and near the town of the Uzita chief, whom the chronicles call Ucita or Hirrihigua, the searchers were lured ashore by a trick, the sight of a paper held up on the beach as if it were a message from the lost commander. Ortiz and a companion went to fetch it. They were seized. His companion was killed, and Ortiz was carried captive into the town.
He had fallen into the worst possible hands. The chief Ucita hated the Spanish with a personal fury, for Narvaez's men had earlier mutilated him, by the accounts cutting off his nose, and had thrown his mother to be torn apart by their war dogs. He resolved to burn Ortiz alive, and had him stretched on a wooden frame, a barbacoa, over a bed of coals. As the fire took, the chief's wife and daughters begged for the young stranger's life, and his eldest daughter pleaded hardest of all, arguing that one helpless captive could do no harm and might be of use. The chief relented, and Ortiz was pulled, scorched and scarred, from the fire. He was set to the grimmest of labors: guarding the town's charnel house at night, the open temple where the bodies of the dead were laid, keeping the scavenging animals from carrying them off. When a panther one night took the corpse of a child, Ortiz tracked it in the dark and killed it with a well-thrown dart, winning a brief, grudging respect.
It did not last. When Ucita resolved at length to sacrifice him after all, it was again the daughter who saved him, slipping to him by night to warn him and guiding him to the edge of her father's land, from which she sent him to a rival chief, Mocoso, who had sought her hand. Mocoso took the fugitive in and protected him, refusing to surrender him even when Ucita demanded it and the refusal cost Mocoso his hoped-for marriage. For some nine or ten years more Ortiz lived among Mocoso's people, learning their language and their world from the inside, until he was less a Spaniard than a man of the bay who happened to have been born in Seville.
When de Soto landed in 1539, Mocoso sent Ortiz out with a party to meet the newcomers, and the famous near-disaster followed: de Soto's mounted scouts under Baltasar de Gallegos took the group for hostile Indians and almost ran them through before Ortiz, who by Garcilaso's account had nearly lost his Spanish, managed the words and the sign of the cross that saved him. Restored to his countrymen, he became de Soto's chief interpreter, the irreplaceable hinge of the expedition's every dealing with the Native nations, building chains of relay interpreters as the army passed from one language into the next. The conquest that ground north through the Southeast would have been even blinder and bloodier without him.
Ortiz did not survive the venture he had rejoined. Worn out by the relentless march, he died in the winter of 1541 to 1542, in the country of Autiamque in the interior, and the chroniclers record that de Soto grieved the loss deeply, saying he would rather have lost any other man, because without Ortiz the Spanish were reduced to a clumsy chain of boys and signs to make themselves understood. He is among the most poignant figures in the bay's whole story: a man who belonged fully to neither world, who survived a decade of captivity only to die as the conquerors' indispensable servant, far from the bay where his strange double life began. His tale carries a caution, too. The romance of the chief's daughter is exactly the kind of story the chronicler Garcilaso de la Vega loved to polish, and it should be held a little more lightly than the hard facts around it, even as it remains one of the oldest and most haunting human stories these shores have produced.