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 everything between Florida and the Rio Grande, and lost his six hundred men to storms, swamps, hunger and Apalachee arrows within eighteen months. The forty who came ashore in Texas on rafts of horsehide and palmetto 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 raft of horsehide and palmetto grounds on a low Texas island in November, carrying the last 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. Six years in the prickly-pear country

    1533 CE

    Enslaved, then a trader, he learns the seasonal round of the Coahuiltecan bands between the Nueces and the Rio Grande.

  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

    At La Junta de los Ríos they find farming towns of flat-roofed houses, maize and beans.

  6. The Village of Hearts

    1536 CE

    On the Río Sonora a farming town gives them six hundred deer hearts and a route to the sea.

  7. Meeting the slave-raiders

    1536 CE

    Near Culiacán they come on mounted Spaniards hunting people, and the argument begins at once.

  8. Mexico City, July 1536

    July 1536

    Four survivors walk into the viceroy’s capital eight 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

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