Juan Ortiz was a Spanish sailor who was held captive and enslaved by Native Americans in Florida for eleven years, from 1528 until he was rescued by the Hernando de Soto expedition in 1539. Two differing accounts of Ortiz's eleven years as a captive tell of Ortiz being sentenced to death by a Native American chief two or three times, being saved each time by the intervention of the chief's daughter (and possibly other female relatives), and eventually escaping to a neighbouring chiefdom, whose chief sheltered him. 𝐂𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐭𝐲 In 1528, Juan Ortiz was on a ship searching Tampa Bay for any trace of the Narváez expedition, which had landed the previous year. Some people enticed Ortiz and one or more companions on shore with what the Spanish mistook for a message from Narváez. (The fate of the Narváez expedition would not be known to the Spanish for another eight years until Alvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca and three other survivors arrived at a Spanish outpost in northwestern New S...