The Narváez expedition was a Spanish colonising venture that sailed from Spain in June 1527 under Pánfilo de Narváez with roughly 600 people, intending to conquer and settle “La Florida,” the Gulf Coast of North America. It disintegrated almost completely. After storms and desertions, about 400 landed near Tampa Bay in April 1528; within months the land party was cut off from its ships, ground down by hunger, disease and conflict, and forced to build five crude rafts to escape along the coast. The rafts were scattered and wrecked, Narváez himself was lost at sea, and of the roughly 600 who had set out, only four men survived. They reached Spanish territory in Mexico in 1536 after an overland ordeal of some eight years.
The four survivors were Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, the expedition’s treasurer; the captains Andrés Dorantes de Carranza and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado; and Estevanico, an enslaved North African man — variously described as Moroccan — whose knowledge, languages and labour were essential to the group’s survival and who is too often reduced to a footnote. Cast ashore on the Texas coast in November 1528, they lived for years among the Indigenous peoples of the Gulf Coast and the interior, at first as captives and labourers, later as traders and as healers whose reputation travelled ahead of them. Stripped of armour, horses and the apparatus of conquest, they survived only because Indigenous communities fed, sheltered, employed and guided them.
The expedition is sometimes told as a conquistador’s heroic trek; it was nothing of the kind. It was the collapse of a conquest, after which four destitute men were kept alive across a continent by the very peoples the venture had come to subjugate. Cabeza de Vaca recorded the journey in his Relación (also published as Naufragios, “Shipwrecks”), the first detailed European account of the interior of North America and an unusually attentive, comparatively humane record of its peoples. His later career as a colonial official, and his arguments for treating Indigenous peoples less brutally, grew directly out of those eight years of dependence on their generosity.
The Darién Scheme was the Kingdom of Scotland’s attempt, between 1698 and 1700, to plant a colony called New Caledonia on the Isthmus of Panama and seize the overland trade between the Atlantic and the Pacific. It was the project of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies, promoted above all by the financier William Paterson, a co-founder of the Bank of England, and it was financed not by a handful of merchants but by the savings of a whole nation: the Company raised roughly £400,000 sterling, on the order of a fifth to a quarter of Scotland’s liquid capital. It failed almost completely, and it killed almost everyone who sailed.
The first fleet of five ships — the Saint Andrew, Caledonia, Unicorn, Dolphin and Endeavour — left Leith in July 1698 with about 1,200 colonists and reached the Darién coast on 2 November 1698. The settlers built a township they named New Edinburgh and a stockade, Fort St Andrew, on a hot, swampy bay with poor water and ground that would not feed them. Malaria, yellow fever and dysentery did the rest. Within about eight months the colonists were dying at a rate reported near ten a day, and in July 1699 the survivors abandoned the settlement; only some 300 of the first 1,200 ever returned to Scotland.
A second fleet of more than 1,000 settlers, sent out in ignorance of the disaster, reached Caledonia Bay at the end of November 1699 to find the first colony deserted and overgrown. Disease, a fire that destroyed a supply ship, and a Spanish land-and-sea blockade finished the venture; the Scots capitulated to the Spanish in early 1700 and sailed away, and only a few hundred of the second fleet survived. Across all the sailings roughly 2,000 of about 2,500 colonists died. The financial wreck helped persuade Scotland’s ruined elite that the country could not stand alone, and it fed directly into the 1707 union with England that created Great Britain.
The Coronado expedition marched out of Compostela in New Spain on 23 February 1540 under Francisco Vázquez de Coronado, governor of Nueva Galicia, to seize the “Seven Cities of Cíbola” — wealthy cities reported by the friar Marcos de Niza to lie north of Mexico. It was a large armed enterprise: roughly 400 European men-at-arms, mostly Spaniards, together with an estimated 1,300 to 2,000 Indigenous Mexican allies, four Franciscan friars, enslaved people, servants, and great herds of horses and livestock. Over more than two years it crossed what is now Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. It found no gold. It returned in 1542 a financial and strategic ruin, and most — though far from all — of those who set out came back alive.
What the expedition found instead of cities of gold was, at Cíbola, the Zuni pueblo of Hawikuh: a rock-and-adobe town that the Spaniards stormed and took on 7 July 1540, wounding Coronado in the assault. The “seven cities” were farming villages of earth and stone. Pressed for the wealth they had been promised, the Spaniards quartered themselves on the Tiwa pueblos of the Rio Grande for the winter of 1540–41, demanding food, clothing and shelter, and the abuses — including the sexual assault of a Puebloan woman — provoked a revolt. The Spanish response was the Tiguex War: under García López de Cárdenas they besieged and destroyed pueblos, and at Arenal burned to death an estimated thirty captives who had tried to surrender. Hundreds of Tiwa people died and a dozen or more pueblos were ruined or abandoned, in what is reckoned the first named war between Europeans and Native Americans in the present-day United States.
Lured on by an enslaved Plains captive the Spaniards called “the Turk,” who described a rich kingdom called Quivira on the eastern plains, Coronado marched out across the Llano Estacado in 1541 and reached Quivira — grass-house villages of the Wichita people near present-day Kansas — late that July. There was no gold there either. Concluding he had been deliberately misled, Coronado had the Turk garroted. A fall from his horse left him injured, and in spring 1542 the broken expedition turned back for Mexico, arriving that autumn. Coronado was later tried over the conduct of the expedition and acquitted; he died in 1554. The march mapped a vast stretch of the continent’s interior, but it did so at the cost of Puebloan lives and towns, and it is honestly read not as an epic of discovery but as a failed conquest.