Hernando de Soto Trivia
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50 free Hernando De Soto trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Hernando de Soto trivia quiz follows the Spanish conquistador from a poor corner of Extremadura to the banks of the Mississippi. The easy questions are ones anyone who studied American exploration could answer: the river he is credited with crossing first, the state where he landed in 1539, the Inca conquest he took part in, and how his men disposed of his body. The harder end is for history readers: the three towns that claim his birth, the governor whose daughter he married, the game he taught Atahualpa in captivity, the Spaniard found living naked among the Mocoso, the Napituca massacre, the female chief who gave him pearls, the paramount chief who ambushed him at Mabila, the pigs that became razorbacks, the four chroniclers historians rely on, the commander who led the survivors to Mexico, and how many of the roughly 700 came home. Pedrarias Dávila, the Coosa chiefdom, the De Soto National Memorial, the Memphis bridge and the Chrysler car get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the explorer, his expedition and the peoples he met before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our conquistadors, Age of Exploration and Inca Empire quizzes next.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01William Powell's huge painting of de Soto reaching the great river hangs in which Washington building?
The US Capitol
The US Capitol's Rotunda holds it, the last of eight big history paintings Congress commissioned; the real scene was far less grand, the river first glimpsed through thick forest.
Q 02In which Spanish region was de Soto born?
Extremadura
Extremadura was poor, so its young men looked overseas for their fortune; three towns in its province of Badajoz still claim to be de Soto's birthplace.
Q 03Which order of knights held de Soto's boyhood home, Jerez de los Caballeros, in the 13th century?
The Knights Templar
The Knights Templar held the town until the order was dissolved in 1312; de Soto's will asked that he be buried there among his family.
Q 04Pedrarias Dávila, the governor who took the teenage de Soto to the Americas, had which famous explorer beheaded in 1519?
Vasco Núñez de Balboa
Vasco Núñez de Balboa, the first European to reach the Pacific from the Americas, had been promised one of the governor's daughters before Pedrarias had him tried and executed.
Q 05De Soto grew rich trading enslaved Indians in which Central American land?
Nicaragua
Nicaragua: he helped conquer it in 1524, sat on the town council of León and traded in enslaved Indians, wealth that paid for the ships he later took south.
Q 06Which monarch approved de Soto's plan to conquer Florida in 1537?
Charles V
Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain, risked nothing: de Soto had to meet every expense himself, and his own rewards were to come out of the colony's income.
Q 07Whose conquest of the Inca Empire did de Soto join as a captain?
Francisco Pizarro
Francisco Pizarro made him captain of horse and chief lieutenant in return for the ships de Soto had lent to the venture.
Q 08Which mountains did de Soto's army cross in the summer of 1540, hunting for gold?
The Appalachians
The Appalachians: the woman ruler of Cofitachequi had spoken of gold and silver in the Blue Ridge, and she slipped away from her Spanish captors during the climb.
Q 09What game is de Soto said to have taught the captive Atahualpa?
Chess
Chess filled the months while the Inca's subjects heaped up his ransom in gold and silver; the two men became friends, and de Soto taught him some Spanish too.
Q 10Where was de Soto when the Spanish decided to execute Atahualpa?
Scouting for a rumoured Inca army
Scouting for a rumoured Inca army, he found no trace of one, and rode back to learn that the emperor he had befriended was already dead.
Q 11Which post did de Soto hold in 1534, two years into the conquest of the Incas?
Lieutenant governor of Cuzco
Lieutenant governor of Cuzco was his last post in the Inca lands; refused the second-in-command's place on the march to Chile, he packed up his treasure and sailed for Spain.
Q 12Which chivalric brotherhood admitted de Soto on his wealthy return to Spain in 1536?
Order of Santiago
The Order of Santiago made him a knight on his return, and his will asked for its red cross to be laid on the black cloth over his tomb.
Q 13Which governorship did de Soto receive in 1537 as his base for conquering Florida?
Cuba
Q 21De Soto's first winter camp, at the Apalachee capital Anhaica, lies beneath which modern state capital?
Tallahassee
Tallahassee: the camp turned up in 1987 about a mile from Florida's capitol, when a state archaeologist spotted Spanish artefacts by chance; a pig's jawbone helped clinch it.
Q 22Acipenser desotoi, a big fish of Gulf Coast rivers named in de Soto's honour, is what kind of fish?
A sturgeon
A sturgeon: the Gulf sturgeon was named for de Soto in 1955 because he explored the rivers where it spawns, from Louisiana round to Florida's Suwannee.
Q 23What did the woman ruler of Cofitachequi give de Soto when his army reached her town in 1540?
Freshwater pearls
Cuba was his at once under the royal grant, while Florida's governorship would follow only once he had conquered it, and entirely at his own expense.
Q 14Whose tales of surviving years as a castaway in North America fascinated de Soto?
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca
Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca had just come home from years lost in North America, and reportedly would have joined de Soto himself but for a squabble over his contract.
Q 15What had an earlier Spanish expedition done at the 'Bay of Horses', near de Soto's first winter camp?
Eaten its horses
Eaten its horses: the starving men of the Narváez expedition killed them for food, and de Soto's scouts found the skulls on the beach a decade later.
Q 16Where is de Soto generally thought to have landed in May 1539?
Tampa Bay
Tampa Bay is the usual choice, but the landing camp has never been found, and some historians argue for Charlotte Harbor further down the coast.
Q 17What did de Soto name his Florida landing place, first sighted on the feast of Pentecost?
Espíritu Santo
Espíritu Santo, Spanish for the Holy Spirit, honoured the feast day; within months he ordered the garrison he had left there to abandon it and march north to join him.
Q 18Juan Ortiz, the castaway who became de Soto's interpreter, told of a rescue later echoed in the story of whom?
Pocahontas
Pocahontas: Ortiz said a Florida chief's daughter begged for his life as he lay bound over a fire, and some scholars think John Smith borrowed the tale decades later.
Q 19How did the lost Spaniard Juan Ortiz look when de Soto's horsemen found him in Florida?
Naked, holding a bow and arrows
Naked, holding a bow and arrows, he was nearly speared by a lancer before he made the sign of the cross and stammered a few words of half-forgotten Spanish.
Q 20After de Soto died, his successor first tried to lead the army to safety overland, getting as far as which present-day state?
Texas
Texas proved too dry and too thinly settled to feed an army that lived by raiding village granaries, so the Spaniards turned back to the river they had left.
Freshwater pearls were the only treasure there: the 'gold' the Spaniards had been promised proved to be copper and the 'silver' sheets of mica.
Q 24In which modern state do most scholars place Cofitachequi, the chiefdom de Soto reached in 1540?
South Carolina
South Carolina: its main town is usually placed near present-day Camden, and by the time Juan Pardo's Spaniards arrived in 1566 the chiefdom appears to have lost much of its former power.
Q 25Which paramount chief lured de Soto to the fortified town of Mabila in 1540?
Tuskaloosa
Tuskaloosa, seized as a hostage, promised the Spaniards supplies at Mabila and sent runners ahead to fill the town with warriors; the city of Tuscaloosa is named for him.
Q 26The battle of Mabila in 1540, among the bloodiest ever fought between Europeans and Native Americans, took place in which present-day state?
Alabama
Alabama: the palisaded town burned down with the Spaniards' baggage inside, and where exactly it stood has been argued over for centuries.
Q 27After the costly battle at Mabila, what did de Soto do when told his supply ships had arrived?
Hid the news and marched inland
He hid the news and marched inland, unwilling to go home a failure; the fleet waited in vain, and his battered army fought on for three more years.
Q 28The modern economist Hernando de Soto, author of The Mystery of Capital, shares the explorer's name and comes from which country?
Peru
Peru, the land his namesake helped to conquer, is home to the economist, who argues that poor people prosper once they hold legal title to their homes and businesses.
Q 29In 1541 de Soto's army became the first Europeans known to have crossed which river?
The Mississippi
The Mississippi was to de Soto mainly an obstacle: his chroniclers just called it the Río Grande, and it cost him a month of barge-building before a crossing made at night.
Q 30At Casqui in 1541, de Soto raised a tall cross after the chief asked for help with what?
A drought
A drought was starving the town, the chief said; the Spaniards made the cross from two pines, and the downpour that followed did wonders for de Soto's reputation.