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Cavelier de La Salle, 1684-1687   147

In 1679, six years before de La Salle landed in Texas,
a French frigate having been captured in the Gulf of Mexico,
Louis XIV sent a small fleet under Admiral d’Estrées with
orders to find out the whereabouts of Admiral Quintana (the
Spanish admiral) and to sink his ships. Again in 1682 the
French, ignoring Spanish orders, had entered the Gulf of
Mexico with a fleet under the command of Gabaret in order
to curb the activities of the Spanish, to investigate the situa-
tion in the Mexican ports and also to draw a map of the
northern shore of the Gulf.

The situation in 1684 stood thus, the Spaniards considered
the Gulf of Mexico a closed sea and all the territories ex-
tending from Florida to the northern part of Mexico as
strictly Spanish possessions, from which they wanted to bar
all foreign nations rigorously, although they neither occupied
them nor thought of doing so, as long as they were left alone.
The expedition of de Narvaez in Florida, in 1528, and the
march of Cabeza de Vaca had aroused in Spain great expec-
tations, but these had been shattered by the fateful expedi-
tion of de Soto, whose body lay in the Mississippi. The
Spaniards had lost all interest in Texas and Louisiana which
were considered as lands of misfortune. They had turned
their efforts to the colonization of Florida but entirely neg-
lected Texas and Louisiana. The few survivors of de Soto’s
expedition, Moscoso and his companions, escaped in hurriedly
built boats, down what they called the Rio Grande (but
which really was the Mississippi), without ever wanting to
see it again and never pausing a moment to consider its
value as a great waterway. “They had fled,” in the words
of Parkman, “from the Eldorado of their dreams,” which
had been “transformed to a wilderness of misery and death.”

For over a hundred years the Spanish government had
remained deaf to all suggestions of colonial expansion in the

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