“I overtook four of them on horseback, who
were astonished at the sight of me, so strangely
dressed as I was, and in the company of Indi-
ans,” Cabeza de Vaca recalled. “They stood star-
ing at me for a time, so confounded that they
neither hailed me nor drew near to make an
inquiry.”
The Spanish slaving party was starving.
They were fed by the “medicine men” and the
600 Indians traveling with them. Despite this
kindness, Cabeza de Vaca had to argue with
the slavers to prevent them from kidnapping
the Indians. Indians witnessing the quarrel
told Cabeza de Vaca that they could not
believe that the survivors of the Narváez expe-
dition belonged to the same people and reli-
gion as the Spanish raiding parties, who had
been terrorizing the Mexican frontier: “We
healed the sick, they killed the sound,” Cabeza
wrote; “we came naked and barefoot, they
clothed, horsed, and lanced; we coveted noth-
ing but gave whatever we were given, while
they robbed whomever they found.”
The slavers ultimately agreed to guide
Castillo, Dorantes, Estéban, and Cabeza de
Vaca into Spanish-held Mexico. Traveling
through Culiacán near the Sonoran coast, the
four survivors arrived in Mexico City on July 25,
1536, morethan eight years after landing in
Florida.
RUMORS OF FORTUNE
News of four survivors of the lost Narváez expe-
dition was a sensation in Mexico City. Although
the survivors offered no grand tales of wealth,
their mention of permanent Indian houses
north of the frontier was enough to excite the
imagination of treasure-hungry Spaniards.
New Spain’s viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, was
sufficiently intrigued to sponsor northward
exploration by Fray Marcos de Niza in 1539 and
Coronado in 1540. The journey of the survivors
was also a major inspiration for Hernando de
Soto’s 1539 incursion into Florida. The sur-
vivors themselves, however, had no interest in
retracing their route. All three Spaniards
declined Mendoza’s request to participate in
exploratory ventures, although Dorantes either
sold or lent his Moorish servant Estéban to
Mendoza, who assigned him to Niza’s ill-fated
expedition.
The first official report by the survivors
was an account jointly written by Castillo,
Dorantes, and Cabeza de Vaca. It was submit-
ted in 1537, a year after their return, to the
audiencia,or governmental tribunal, of Santo
Domingo, under whose authority the Narváez
expedition had embarked. Then, in 1542,
Cabeza de Vaca published a memoir of his
experiences, commonly called La Relación;it
was retitled Naufragios(Shipwrecked) in later
editions. His description of the journey was too
imprecise to be valuable to mapmakers, but
his portrait of the arid lands above Mexico’s
northern frontier attracted curious readers.
“Throughout all that country, wherever it is
mountainous, we saw many signs of gold, anti-
mony, iron, copper, and other metals,” he
wrote. “The Indians who live in permanent
houses and those in the rear of them pay not
attention to gold and silver, nor have they any
use for either of these metals.” No such
description of potential wealth had been pres-
ent in the survivors’ joint report to the audien-
ciaof Santo Domingo. At the time La Relación
appeared five years later, in 1542, however,
readers were eagerly speculating what the
ongoing expeditions of Coronado and de Soto
might be discovering.CABEZA DE VACA IN
SOUTH AMERICA
Cabeza de Vaca’s experiences among the Indi-
ans of North America had transformed himCabeza de Vaca’s Epic Journey B 89