a distance of 233 3/4 miles, or about one hundred miles above the mouth of the Gila.  This stream he does not mention.  He may have taken it for a mere bayou, but it appears to be certain that he passed beyond it.  He says Ulloa was mistaken by two degrees as to his northernmost point, and that he sailed four degrees beyond him.  The meaning of this may be that he went four degrees beyond Ulloa’s false reckoning, or actually two degrees above the shoals where Ulloa turned back.  This would take him to the 34th parallel, and would coincide with his eighty-five leagues, and also with the position of the first mountains met with in going up the river, the Chocolate range.  Alarcon was not so inexperienced that he would have represented eighty-five leagues on the course of the river as equalling four degrees of latitude.  Had he gone to the 36th degree he would have passed through Black Canyon, and this is so extraordinary a feature that he could not have failed to note it specially.  When Alarcon arrived at the ships again, he evidently had strong reason for abandoning his intention of returning for another attempt to communicate with Coronado, and he set sail for home.  Another document says the torredo was destroying the ships, and this is very probable.  He coasted down the gulf, landing frequently, and going long distances into the interior searching for news of Coronado, but he learned nothing beyond what he heard on the river.

* The tribes and bands spoken of by Alarcon cannot be identified, but these Quicomas, or Quicamas, were doubtless the same as the Quiquimas mentioned by Kino, 1701, and Garces, 1775.  They were probably of Yuman stock.  The Cumanas were possibly Mohaves.

While he was striving to find a way of reaching the main body of the expedition, which during this time was complacently robbing the Puebloans on the Rio Grande, two officers of that expedition were marching through the wilderness endeavouring to find him, and a third was travelling toward the Grand Canyon.  One of these was Don Rodrigo Maldonado, thus bearing exactly the same name as one of Alarcon’s officers; another was Captain Melchior Diaz, and the third Don Lopez de Cardenas, who distinguished himself on the Rio Grande by particular brutality toward the villagers.  Don Rodrigo went in search of the ships down the river to the coast from the valley of Corazones, but obtained no information of them, though he met with giant natives and brought back with him one very tall man as a specimen.  The main army of Coronado had not yet gone from this valley of Corazones, where the settlement called San Hieronimo had been established, and the best man in it reached only to the chest of this native giant.