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Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca
Spanish Explorer
 The journey of Alvar
Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca remains one of the most amazing feats of
exploration in the Americas.
Cabeza de Vaca was born into the Spanish nobility in 1490. Little of his
early life is known, except that he made his career in the military. In
early 1527 he left Spain as a part of a royal expedition intended to
occupy the mainland of North America.
After their fleet was battered by a hurricane off the shore of Cuba, the
expedition secured a new boat and departed for Florida. They landed in
March 1528 near what is now Tampa Bay, which the expedition leader,
Pánfilo de Narváez, claimed as the lawful possession of the Spanish
empire.
Despite this confident declaration, the expedition was on the verge of
disaster. Narváez's decision to split his land and sea forces proved a
grievous error, as the ships were never able to rendezvous with the land
expedition. The party soon overstayed its welcome with the Apalachee
Indians of northern Florida by taking their leader hostage. Expelled and
pursued by the Indians, suffering from numerous diseases, the surviving
members of the expedition were reduced to huddling in a coastal swamp
and living off the flesh of their horses. In late 1528, they built
several crude rafts from trees and horse hides and set sail, hoping to
return to Cuba.
Storms, thirst and starvation had reduced the expedition to about eighty
survivors when a hurricane dumped Cabeza de Vaca and his companions on
the Gulf Coast near what is now Galveston, Texas. They were initially
welcomed, but, as Cabeza de Vaca was to remember, "half the natives died
from a disease of the bowels and blamed us." For the next four years he
and a steadily dwindling number of his comrades lived in the complex
native world of what is now East Texas, a world in which Cabeza
transformed himself from a conquistador into a trader and healer.
By 1532, only three other members of the original expedition were still
alive -- Alonso del Castillo Maldonando, Andrés Dorantes de Carranca,
and Estevan, an African slave. Together with Cabeza de Vaca, they now
headed west and south in hopes of reaching the Spanish Empire's outpost
in Mexico, becoming the first men of the Old World to enter the American
West. Their precise route is not clear, but they apparently traveled
across present-day Texas, perhaps into New Mexico and Arizona and
through Mexico's northern provinces. In July 1536, near Culiacán in
present-day Sinaloa, they finally encountered a group of fellow
Spaniards who were on a slave-taking expedition. As Cabeza de Vaca
remembered, his countrymen were "dumbfounded at the sight of me,
strangely dressed and in company with Indians. They just stood staring
for a long time."
Appalled by the Spanish treatment of Indians, in 1537 Cabeza de Vaca
returned to Spain to publish an account of his experiences and to urge a
more generous policy upon the crown. He served as a Mexican territorial
governor, but was soon accused of corruption, perhaps for his
enlightened conduct toward Indians. He returned to Spain and was
convicted; a 1552 pardon allowed him to become a judge in Seville,
Spain, a position which he occupied until his death in 1556 or 1557. |
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