Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, in his De orbe novo decades, wrote how Balboa had fed forty local homosexual men to his dogs.

Balboa, upset with "a brother of the king and other young men, obliging men, [who] dressed effeminately with women's clothing [... of those which the brother of the king] went too far with unnatural" temerity, threw forty of them as food to the dogs.

D'Anghiera continues his story saying that the indigenous people's "natural hate for unnatural sin" drove them so that, "spontaneously and violently, they searched for all the rest that they would know who were infected".

After all, D'Anghiera mentions that "only the nobles and the gentlemen practiced that kind of desire. [...The] indigenous people knew that sodomy gravely offended God. [... And that these acts provoked] the tempests that with thunder and lightning so frequently afflicted them, or the floods that drowned their fruits that had caused hunger and sickness."

Balboa arrives at the end of 1512 and the first months of 1513 in a region dominated by the cacique Careta, whom he easily defeats and then befriends.

Careta is baptized and becomes one of Balboa's chief allies; he ensures the survival of the settlers by promising to supply the Spaniards with food.

Balboa then proceeds on his journey, arriving in the lands of Careta's neighbor and rival, cacique Ponca, who flees to the mountains with his people, leaving his village open to the plundering of the Spaniards and Careta's men.

Days later, the expedition arrives in the lands of cacique Comagre, fertile but reportedly dangerous terrain.

However, Balboa is received peacefully and even invited to a feast in his honor; Comagre, like Careta, is then baptized.

Balboa writes a lengthy letter to the King of Spainin 1513, requesting more men (who are already acclimatized) from Hispaniola, weapons, supplies, carpenters versed in shipbuilding, and all the necessary materials for the building of a shipyard.

The importance given to the news, objects, and people that Hernández had brought to Cuba can be gleaned from the speed with which the following expedition has been prepared.

The governor Diego Velázquez places his nephew Juan de Grijalva, who has his complete confidence, in charge of this second expedition.

The news that this "island" of Yucatán has gold, doubted by Bernal but enthusiastically maintained by Julianillo, the Maya prisoner taken at the battle of Catoche, feeds the subsequent series of events that is to end with the Conquest of Mexico by the third flotilla sent, that of Hernán Cortés.

Governor Velázquez provides all four ships, in an attempt to protect his claim over the peninsula.

The small fleet is stocked with crossbows, muskets, barter goods, salted pork and cassava bread.

According to Hernán Cortés, one hundred and seventy people traveled with Grijalva, but according to the court historian Peter Martyr there were three hundred people.

The principal pilot is Antón de Alaminos; the other pilots are Juan Álvarez, Pedro Camacho de Triana, and Grijalva.

Other members include Francisco de Montejo, who will eventually conquer much of the peninsula, Pedro de Alvarado, Juan Díaz, Francisco Peñalosa, Alonso de Ávila, Alonso Hernández, Julianillo, Melchorejo, and Antonio Villafaña.

Bernal Díaz del Castillo serves on the crew; he is able to secure a place on the expedition as a favor from the governor, who is his kinsman.

They embark from the port of Matanzas, Cuba, with four ships in April 1518.

Francisco de Chicora was apparently from a Catawban group, based on analysis of the account by Peter Martyr, court chronicler, by the twentieth-century American ethnographer John R. Swanton.

Researchers have worked to identify the provinces and tribes described by Chicora.

They have analyzed phonetics of sixteenth-century Spanish, as well as the many languages of the North American tribes in the area, to reach their conclusions.

Francisco's home province, considered by Swanton to be on the lower Pee Dee River, is called Chicora.

Scholars generally consider the people a Catawban group.

Swanton (1940) proposed a connection with the Sugaree or Shakori; Rudes (2004) suggested Coree.

Although little is known about the Shakori, at the time of contact, they are not noted as being noticeably different from the surrounding tribes.

They make their wigwams and other structures out of interwoven saplings and sticks; these are covered in mud as opposed to the bark typically used by other nearby tribes.

They will later be described as being similar to traditional dwellings of the Quapaw from Arkansas.

In the center of the village, men often play a slinging stone game, probably similar to the chunkey played by tribes further south and west.

The Shakori are associated with other Siouan tribes of the Piedmont, such as the Sissipahaw and Eno, and they all are believed to have spoken the same Siouan language.

Scholars debate whether the Shakori, Eno, and Sissipahaw were different tribes or bands of the same tribe.

This distinction will become moot as the tribes merge with one another as their numbers decrease.

Chicora is evidently one of several Carolina Siouan-speaking territories subject to their king, Datha of Duahe (also recorded in Spanish as Duarhe).

Most of the natives abducted by the Gordillo expedition had died within two years, as recounted by Peter Martyr the court chronicler, according to colonial reports; many wandered the streets of Santo Domingo as vagrants, and the few who survived have become servants.

He described them as white, larger than the average Spaniard, and dressed in animal skins.

One who survived has been baptized Francisco de Chicora; he has learned Spanish and works for Ayllón.

Chicora had accompanied Ayllón on a trip to Spain, where he met the court chronicler, Peter Martyr, to whom he had recounted much about the practices of his people in Chicora and about the neighboring provinces.

Ayllón, having obtained a patent from Charles V in 1523, sends Quexos to explore the coastline further in 1525.

The trader makes peace with the natives and explores as far north as the Delaware Bay.

He persuades two natives from each district to return with him to learn Spanish, and thereafter act as interpreters for the colonists.

Ayllón, after returning to the Caribbean, leads an expedition to North America in 1526 with three ships and six hundred colonists with one hundred horses, bringing Francisco de Chicora with him.

After striking land at what Ayllón names the Jordan River (now the Santee River in South Carolina), one of his ships runs aground.

As the party goes ashore, Chicora immediately abandons the Spanish and flees to rejoin his own people.

He disappears from the historical record.

Ayllón and his colonists look for an area suitable for colonization approximately fifteen kilometers north, near Pawleys Island.

They find the area unsuitable, and Ayllón decides to move further south.

Some accounts say that some settlers took an overland voyage, while others left on a new boat built at the temporary settlement.

If true, this would probably be the earliest example of European-style boat-building in what is now the United States.

The Spanish colonists, heading southward, likely by both land and sea, reunite and on October 8, 1526 establish the short-lived colony of San Miguel de Gualdape, the first European settlement in the North American continent, probably at or near present-day Georgia's Sapelo Sound.

Ayllón dies on October 18 during a fever epidemic in the colony, purportedly in the arms of a Dominican friar.

His new colony uses the labor of enslaved Africans—perhaps the first instance within the present territory of the United States.

Ayllón's rough-hewn town withstands only about a total of three months, enduring hunger, disease, scarcity of supplies, and troubles with the local natives.

Of the colony of six hundred people Ayllón had brought with him, only one hundred and fifty survivors make their way back to Hispaniola in the late winter.

Most scholars consider attempts to locate the San Miguel settlement (Tierra de Ayllón) any farther north, even as far north as the Chesapeake Bay, to be unsubstantiated conjecture.