If Hirrihigua is the chief who embodies the bay's hatred of the Spanish, Mocoso is the one who embodies something rarer in these chronicles: a Native leader who gave his word to a desperate man and kept it, for ten years, against every pressure to break it. Chief of a small polity on the eastern shore of Tampa Bay, Mocoso took in the fugitive Juan Ortiz and protected him through a decade of captivity-turned-refuge, and in doing so he preserved the man who would unlock Florida for Hernando de Soto.
Mocoso ruled a chiefdom on the east side of Tampa Bay, near the mouth of the Alafia or Hillsborough River, one of the cluster of small polities, with Uzita and Pohoy and the dominant Tocobaga, that the Spanish found ringing the bay. His people may have spoken a Timucuan tongue, different from the language of neighboring Uzita, a reminder that the bay was not one people but several, with their own rivalries and alliances. Like Uzita, Mocoso owed tribute to a more powerful chief in the interior, Urriparacoxi, the paramount to whom the coastal towns answered.
When Juan Ortiz fled the murderous court of Hirrihigua, it was to Mocoso that he ran, and Mocoso took him in. This was no small thing. Sheltering the rival chief's escaped captive was a standing insult and a danger, and the chronicles say it cost Mocoso dearly in the politics of the bay; by one account he lost a betrothal over it, Hirrihigua forbidding the marriage because Mocoso would not give Ortiz up. Yet Mocoso held firm. For roughly nine or ten years Ortiz lived among Mocoso's people, learning their language and their land, treated not as a prisoner but as a protected guest, while the chief absorbed the cost of keeping faith with him.
When de Soto's fleet appeared in 1539, it was Mocoso who let Ortiz go to his countrymen, and Ortiz walked out of a decade in the wilderness to become the expedition's interpreter, the hinge on which much of the entrada would turn. The chronicles treat Mocoso with unusual respect, casting him as honorable and humane in a story otherwise full of cruelty on every side. But honor did not save his world. Like Uzita, the chiefdom of Mocoso disappears from the Spanish record after the de Soto expedition passed, another of the bay's peoples erased by the violence and disease the Europeans carried. Mocoso is remembered here as the man who, in the middle of the conquest, simply kept his promise.