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.
In 1805 the Scottish surgeon and explorer Mungo Park led a British government expedition of roughly forty Europeans inland from the Gambia to trace the course of the River Niger to its end. Within a few months almost the entire party was dead. By the time Park reached the Niger at Bamako in mid-August 1805, only eleven of the Europeans were still alive; the rest had died of malaria and dysentery on the march. By the time he built a boat and set off down the river from Sansanding on 19 November 1805, the European company had shrunk to Park himself, one army officer, three soldiers and a few others. Park drowned at the Bussa rapids, on the Niger in what is now Nigeria, in about 1806, when his boat was attacked by people on the riverbanks and the men leapt into the water to escape. None of the Europeans who entered the boat survived; only an African guide, Amadi Fatouma, lived to carry the story out.
The expedition was the second time Park had gone to the Niger. His first journey, of 1795–97, had been a privately backed reconnaissance for the African Association; he had reached the river at Ségou in July 1796, the first European known to have seen it there, and returned to write a celebrated account. That success persuaded the British government to mount the far larger venture of 1805 — a column of soldiers and artificers commissioned to follow the Niger downstream and settle the geographical question of where it went. The difference between the two journeys was fatal: the small, lightly equipped first expedition had given Park the prestige that justified the second, while the second’s size, its soldiers and its timing turned it into a death march.
The decisive error was the calendar. The party left the coast late and pushed inland into the West African rainy season, the deadliest time of year for malaria, with no understanding of how the disease was transmitted and no effective protection against it. Men sickened and died at a catastrophic rate, the column melting away stage by stage until barely a tenth of it remained. Park pressed on regardless, converting the survivors’ situation into an all-or-nothing dash down the river. The attempt ended in violence at a rapids he could not pass, and with it the lives of nearly all the men he had led inland. The expedition is remembered as one of the costliest in the history of African exploration measured against the size of the party — a venture in which the science of geography advanced barely at all, while almost everyone who set out died.
Major Alexander Gordon Laing, a Scottish army officer in his early thirties, became in August 1826 the first European known to have reached Timbuktu by an overland crossing of the Sahara, only to be murdered roughly five weeks later on the desert track north of the city, his journals never recovered. He had left the North African coast at Tripoli in July 1825 and crossed some 2,650 miles of desert before entering the fabled town on 18 August 1826.
Laing’s reward for the achievement was death. He stayed in Timbuktu about five weeks, gathering geographical and commercial notes, then left on 24 September 1826 to travel onward. Within two or three days, on the caravan track near Araouane, north of Timbuktu, he was killed by men of his own Arab escort. Contemporary accounts hold that he was strangled or beheaded; his servant survived to carry word of the killing, but Laing’s papers, maps and journals disappeared and were never found.
The expedition was driven as much by Anglo-French competition as by science: Timbuktu had become a symbol, and reaching it first was a prize of empire. Laing won the race in fact but not in lasting credit. He died before he could publish a word, and two years later the Frenchman René Caillié reached Timbuktu, returned alive, and claimed the geographical prize and the public fame. The loss of Laing’s papers fed a bitter dispute between his father-in-law, the British consul at Tripoli, and the French, who were accused without evidence of procuring the lost journals. What survives of the first European visit to Timbuktu is mostly a handful of letters posted before the final, fatal stretch.