BY MAY 15, 1536, a caravan had been organized for the difficult journey to Compostela, the capital of New Galicia, seat of Nuño de Guzmán’s government. Esteban, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, and Dorantes left Culiacán in the company of twenty cavalrymen and 500 Indian slaves. Despite all the documentary reports of peaceful settlement and Spanish promises to desist in the abuse of Indians, the stark reality was clear: slaving was still as much the business of Culiacán when the fours survivors left as it had been when they arrived. The twenty cavalrymen were to accompany the caravan forty leagues along the road until they were beyond the reach of the Indians from around Sinaloa and Culiacán who might rescue the captive Indians. Then, the twenty cavalrymen would turn back, leaving six Christian slavers and the four survivors to continue the further sixty leagues to Compostela.
At Compostela, a minuscule settlement with no proper church, no proper buildings, and none of the necessary fabric of civic government, Governor Nuño Beltrán de Guzmán received the four survivors with as much pomp as he could and pampered them for a dozen days. He arranged lavish hospitality for the three Spaniards in the barrack house of Captain Francisco Flores. He also offered them rich clothes from his own wardrobe, but the heavy Spanish attire was tedious and uncomfortable for men accustomed to the freedoms of nakedness and cotton blankets, and they turned down his offer. The four survivors were also no doubt keen to keep wearing their Indian garments, potent, startling symbols of their suffering and mysterious survival, trophies of their great journey with which to impress their fellow Spaniards.
Esteban was lodged in Guzmán’s own paltry palace, where he was feted as rarely a slave has ever been regaled. There were gifts of food and perhaps the company of women from the harem Guzmán is said to have kept. We can assume that there was cajoling as well as carousing, as Guzmán pressed him for information about the unexplored north. There were threats too, for Guzmán was a governor general on the brink of disgrace and desperate to escape his enemies by leading a successful campaign of conquest in the north. But Esteban remained calmly reticent, unperturbed by his host’s anger. From what Díaz had told the survivors at Culiacán, he knew that Guzmán’s downfall was imminent. In fact, in due course, testimony provided by the four survivors themselves would assist in his prosecution. But for the time being, the four hurried on for Mexico City.
NEWS THAT FOUR men had survived Pánfilo Nárvaez’s Florida expedition had already traveled fast. Settlers throughout New Galicia had heard something of the survivors’ reappearance in the badlands of the north. Garbled versions of the story were carried by word of mouth, told and retold by Spanish, black, and Indian messengers alike, verbal traffic on the main highway to Mexico City, the Camino Real. Hungry and dissatisfied conquistadors heard the whispered rumors and speculation about the wizardry or even wickedness of that survival. It was a news-rich cocktail that fascinated them and stimulated their appetite to find out what had really happened.
All along the road from Compostela to Guadalajara and then on to Mexico, settlers and colonists came to see them, to offer them hospitality, to hear their story at first hand, and to give thanks to God for their salvation. Then, somewhere near Guadalajara, it seems likely that they would have met three inquisitive settlers who were especially interested in their story.
These three men—Antonio de Aguayo, Juan de Castañeda, and Alonso de Castañeda—knew that Esteban, Dorantes, Castillo, and Cabeza de Vaca would likewise be particularly interested in the story that they had to tell, because they had also been part of Pánfilo Nárvaez’s expedition. They too had all sailed from Cuba in quest of the fabled promise of Florida. They too had landed at Tampa Bay. But when the main body of the expedition marched inland in search of conquest, Aguayo and the Castañedas were among the 100 men and women who remained with the boats. The four survivors, Narváez, and the hundreds of men who perished had never seen those ships again, and that had sealed their fate.
Aguayo and the Castañedas explained that they had searched the endless expanses of coastal Florida throughout the summer and fall of 1528. Time and again they had clashed with hostile Indians during their sorties inland in search of the expedition. One of their number, an aging man called Juan Durán, later reported that during one desperate skirmish he was “gravely injured,” as was his horse. Eventually, they realized that their search was futile. So, when the threat of winter storms had passed, they made preparations to return to Cuba.
Aguayo and the Castañedas were among a group of a few broken survivors who guided their ship into the harbor at Havana in the spring of 1529, a year after the main expedition had disembarked at Tampa Bay. Battered by hunger and the elements and harried by Indian braves, they sold a few Native American slaves on Cuba for what little the local merchants were prepared to pay. They took their money and went off elsewhere, to Mexico, to try their luck again in another as yet uncertain but surely less inhospitable place.
But there is some suggestion that the search for the expedition may not have been especially assiduous. Cabeza de Vaca reported that years later various witnesses told the four survivors that as soon as the main expedition set out overland, the women who were left behind all forsook their husbands and “married or began sleeping with the men who remained on the boats.” A document I came across in Spain hints that this may have been true. It mentions that Mari Hernández, a woman who went on the Florida expedition with her husband, Francisco Quevedo, had married another man “who was also a conquistador” by 1539, but it does not say exactly when.
Moreover, the Indian captives brought back to Cuba in 1529 reported to officials that Narváez and his men were still alive, somewhere on the Florida coast, although their lives were basic. “All they do is eat, sleep, and drink,” the Indians said. There is no record of the excuses offered by Aguayo, the Castañedas, and their companions for failing to find the stranded expedition in spite of the help they should have had from these Indian captives, but we do know that this news was enough encouragement for Narváez’s loyal and determined wife, María de Valenzuela, to organize a further, tragically unsuccessful search. But Aguayo, the Castañedas, Mari Hernández, and these other unfaithful men and women took the money they had made from selling their Indian captives as slaves and sailed their damaged ship to Mexico. They arrived as “defeated soldiers,” “naked and poverty-stricken.” They were rescued by friends and acquaintances, men they knew from their old lives in Spain. Aguayo could count one brother among the dead during the conquest of Mexico and another brother among those who lost their lives during the futile exploration of Honduras. Of this luckless brood at least Antonio remained alive. He now turned for help to another immigrant from Portillo, the town in Spain where he was born, and he was offered shelter and what little succor was available.
These survivors had arrived in Mexico during a period of extreme political tension. In 1529, Nuño de Guzmán was still the governor, but he had made a mortal enemy of the powerful Archbishop of Mexico, Juan de Zumárraga, and he was preparing to flee Mexico City by leading an army into the unconquered lands to the north. For bankrupt men like Aguayo and the Castañedas, there were few opportunities in Mexico City, and they must have felt that their best option was to throw in their lot with Guzmán, whose villainy and brigandage asked little of a man other than a strong arm. They had ended up poor and desperate in Guzmán’s ailing, badly run settlement at Guadalajara.
Aguayo and the Castañedas were no doubt determined to find out from the four survivors whom they had abandoned on the Florida coast whether there might be prospects of rich conquests in the remote north. But they also had more personal questions about the fate of relatives, friends, and rivals. No doubt there were some other men who wanted to be sure that their wives’ former husbands were really dead.
Esteban, Dorantes, Castillo, and Cabeza de Vaca were all quickly learning that the story they had to tell might prove much more powerful than the truth about what had really happened to them. Everyone wanted news of the unknown lands to the north; the question was how best to manipulate their account of what had happened so as to turn that news into kudos, power, and wealth.