The Narváez Expedition — Six hundred men landed; four walked out eight years later

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.