The long walk from Malhado

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · 1528 CE – 1536 CE · Earth

The long walk from Malhado — Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca · 1528 CE – 1536 CE · Earth — Recorded expedition route · schematic map

Reach a Spanish settlement alive, from a beach on the Gulf coast with no ships, no horses and no idea of the distance.

Historical context

Narváez sailed in 1527 with a royal grant to conquer the coast from the Río de las Palmas to the cape of Florida, and lost his six hundred men to storms, swamps, hunger and Apalachee arrows within eighteen months. The men who came ashore in Texas in makeshift boats caulked with palmetto fibre were not explorers but castaways, and the walk that followed was made on the terms of the peoples who owned the country. What Cabeza de Vaca brought back was not a conquest but a book, and an argument that the Crown lost no time in ignoring.

The voyage, step by step

  1. Malhado, the isle of ill fortune

    November 1528

    A makeshift boat caulked with palmetto fibre is thrown ashore on a low Texas island in November, carrying survivors of six hundred men.

  2. Among the Karankawa

    1529 CE

    The islanders feed the strangers out of their own winter stores and then set them to work.

  3. From trader to slave of the Mariames

    1533 CE

    After almost six years trading along the coast, he joins Dorantes as a slave of the Mariames and waits for the prickly-pear season.

  4. Four men turn west

    September 1534

    In September the survivors slip away together and begin walking towards a coast they have to hope is there.

  5. The junction of the rivers

    1535 CE

    Beyond the mountains they reach the first real houses of the journey, most often placed at La Junta de los Ríos, among people who grow beans and squash.

  6. The Village of Hearts

    1536 CE

    In a farming town of Sonora they are given more than six hundred deer hearts, and told of the way to the South Sea.

  7. Meeting the slave-raiders

    1536 CE

    In Sinaloa, some thirty leagues short of Culiacán, they come on mounted Spaniards hunting people, and a quarrel soon follows.

  8. Mexico City, July 1536

    July 1536

    Four survivors walk into the viceroy’s capital nine years after sailing from Spain.

Outcome

Four men of six hundred came out at Culiacán in 1536 after eight years, and the Relación of 1542 gave Europe its first account of the interior of North America.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Treasurer of a wrecked Spanish invasion who walked for eight years from the Texas coast to the Pacific slope of Mexico, and wrote the first European description of the interior of North America.

Read on Wikipedia

Sources

Continue exploring