THE EXPEDITION SPENT forty-five days at Santo Domingo arranging provisions and, in particular, buying the horses they would eventually be forced to eat on the shores of Alabama. During that time, 140 men deserted. Captains and commanders were accustomed to unscrupulous emigrants who would hitch a ride with a military expedition and then desert when they landed in their promised American New World, but by all accounts more men than might have been expected chose to jump ship at this juncture.
These deserters were no doubt in part persuaded by the gloomy predictions of the Moorish soothsayer and the repeated incantation of those predictions aboard ship. Also, Narváez’s men can hardly have been encouraged by local reports of Florida and the north coast of the Mexican Gulf.
A century and a half later, the geographical territory covered by the southern states still remained almost entirely Indian country. When a French expedition led by the indefatigable René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle touched at Santo Domingo on its way to establish a colony at the mouth of the Mississippi, the picture painted by buccaneers, pirates, and other old hands of the New World was so sordid and evil that many of La Salle’s Frenchmen deserted. They preferred piracy to the horrible privations of a world of alligators, ferocious insects, and fearsome Indians. There is little reason to think that the motives of the deserters from the Narváez expedition were any different.
The intrepid English traveler Robert Tomson suggests that by the 1550s, Santo Domingo remained a moderately prosperous port of about 500 Spanish households. Although he complained about the cassava bread, which he did not like, he reported finding plenty of beef, mutton, and cows and noted that there were wealthy farmers with more than 1,000 head of cattle. He mentioned the “good store of hogs flesh,” which he described as so “sweet and savory and so wholesome that they give it to sick folks to eat instead of hens and capons.” Even today, Spanish cured hams made from the small Iberian black pigs fed on acorns remain one of the great gastronomic pleasures of the world.
At Santo Domingo, the local mosquitoes had their first taste of Narváez’s men, and the men had their first experience of tropical mosquitoes. Tomson offers an exemplary novice’s account of the experience:
The country is for the most part of the year very hot and very full of a kind of fly or gnat with a long bill that bites and troubles people very much at night when they are asleep. It stings their faces and hands and other parts of their bodies that are uncovered, making them swell up amazingly.
For Tomson, the horrors of the mosquitoes were perhaps equaled by another pest:
There is also another kind of small worm, which creeps into the soles of men’s feet and especially the blacks and children, who are usually barefoot; and it makes their feet grow to the size of a man’s head and ache enough to drive one mad. They have no remedy for this other than to cut open the flesh, sometimes as much as 3 or 4 inches, in order to dig them out.
Santo Domingo held only the toughest of attractions for the deserters, because the colony had become depopulated and had fallen on hard times. Interest in the Spanish Caribbean islands had waned in favor of exploration of the American mainland. One deserter, Francisco Díaz, tried to settle, but there was nothing to hold the attention of a man in search of glory and he soon sought his fortune in Colombia.
Santo Domingo was also a terrifyingly expensive place, where merchants easily marked up their prices by 200 percent and their customers readily paid. But the crown forbade the local government to impose price controls, for only such vast rewards would persuade merchants to run the risk of ruin involved in trading with so isolated a colony. Pirates lurked offshore, patrolling the seas in search of ill-defended merchant ships, and there were storms that would sink a ship without a trace.
Even the roads that ran out of town to the hinterland farms were dangerous: travelers were menaced by robber bands of Indians and escaped slaves. The priests were few and reluctant to travel, so many a lonely rancher died unconfessed and unblessed. Those priests and friars who dared to serve their flock were often corrupt and unscrupulous, cajoling the sick and dying into making wills in favor of the parishes and monasteries.
WITH MORE OF his men abandoning the expedition for the false promise that Santo Domingo held for the gullible, Narváez was anxious to move the remaining loyal men and his fleet to his personal stronghold, Cuba. No man would dare desert Governor General Pánfilo de Narváez on Cuba, the island where his wife, María de Valenzuela, ran the vast estates he had won with the cut and thrust of his own steel. On Cuba he was a powerful oligarch and the inhabitants, Spaniard and Indian alike, well remembered Narváez’s brutal campaigns against the Indians, so vividly described by Las Casas.
Narváez’s barbarity had brought fleeting wealth to the first conquistadors in Cuba, but by 1527 the island was in sharp decline. Too many Indians had been murdered or had died from disease; those who remained to work the Spaniards’ farms were the living dead who had lost their natural will to live, to love and breed, to sing and dance, to resist their captors. They had no strength to work the mines and fields that made their captors rich.
But Narváez was still rich and powerful in that wasted land of broken people. The governor general, with the treasurer Cabeza de Vaca at his side, now concluded the purchase of another ship at Santo Domingo, and by the end of August they had moved the fleet to the Cuban port of Santiago. Narváez was temporarily home.
They now urgently needed to replace the deserters. Narváez knew that he would find some men with experience of Florida who might be prepared to join his great venture. For many years, the colonists on the Caribbean islands had quietly and secretively carried on an illegal trade in Indians captured and enslaved on the northern coasts of the Mexican Gulf. There can be little doubt that some such skullduggery was in Narváez’s mind as he prepared his expedition, for he had long played his part in that illicit business.
The late summer of 1527 was an especially propitious time for Narváez to be on the lookout for old Florida hands. There were many men milling around the ports of Santo Domingo, Cuba, and nearby Puerto Rico who, the year before, had escaped with nothing but their lives from a disastrous attempt to settle the Atlantic coast of modern Georgia. They had sailed with the most expensive colonizing fleet in Spanish imperial history, led by Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, a long-standing enemy of Narváez, who lost his own life at the settlement he established briefly at Sapelo Sound. The few men who survived returned to Cuba and Puerto Rico completely ruined.
Many of these destitute refugees must have joined Narváez’s expedition. We can only identify one of them, Antonio de Aguayo, who was among the small group of men who were to survive the Florida disaster because they stayed with the ships and who ended up in Guadalajara with Nuño de Guzmán. It also seems likely that a man called Pedro de Valdivieso, a cousin of Andrés Dorantes, also survived Ayllón’s colony. He was a veteran of the conquest of Mexico and Cortés’s subsequent mission to Honduras, which had also ended in disaster. He too joined Narváez’s expedition to Florida and eventually lost his life on the shores of Texas.
I HAVE A tentative theory that Esteban had also escaped Ayllón’s colony and that Dorantes first met Esteban in Cuba through Valdivieso. We know that there were many slaves among the men and women who abandoned Ayllón’s hopeless settlement. It is even perhaps plausible that Valdivieso sold Esteban to his cousin in order to pay for his passage with Narváez. Although it is usually accepted that Esteban sailed from Spain with Narváez’s fleet, there is no actual record that he did.
Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón was a corrupt, ambitious lawyer and administrator who had become rich in the New World by financing slaving raids in the Bahamas. But as the islands were stripped of their people, those expeditions became fruitless. His captains soon needed to look beyond the outlying Caribbean islands, and in due course they started to explore the Atlantic coast of Florida.
Early expeditions took some slaves, but also reported the promise of rich agricultural lands, which led Spaniards to describe the place as a “New Andalusia,” reminiscent of the fertile fields of southern Spain. Ayllón seized his opportunity, for the Spanish Crown was then promoting peaceful settlement and trade with the Indians. Florida would provide the ideal opportunity to establish such a colony. And if a little quiet slaving went on unheeded by the Crown, well, what of it?
Ayllón went to Spain to plead his case and was richly rewarded with an exclusive contract to explore further and to settle that newly discovered land.
Oviedo, with his acerbic hindsight, wrote that while he well believed that Ayllón was a good administrator and an able judge, “which was why he studied law,” he was not well suited for conquests. “He who would lead soldiers, should himself a soldier be,” the royal historian remarked. It is Oviedo who tells us the sorry tale of Ayllón’s colony.
The problems began as soon as the expedition reached the site of the proposed settlement at the mouth of the south Santee River. The flagship sank, taking most of the supplies down with it. Worse was to follow, for it quickly became clear that this was no place to found their colony, and further exploration led Ayllón to move the party south, to Sapelo Sound.
It was a cold autumn and the expedition was now short of supplies. To compound their troubles, the men seem to have soon polluted the freshwater supply where they had pitched their camp, and disease struck mercilessly. The commander fell sick and, on his own saint’s day, October 18, the day of Saint Luke, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón died.
The expedition now split into two factions, and as they fought among themselves, the Indians attacked, killing many of the Spaniards. That fraught situation came to a head when two characters whom Oviedo portrays as upstart rebel leaders imprisoned some noblemen who remonstrated with them.
The rebels now plotted to murder those who had dared oppose their proletarian rule. But on the very night that they determined “to put those evil plans into effect, a group of black Africans set fire to the rebel leader’s house,” where the noblemen were being held captive. These slaves were motivated by their own revulsion at the rebels, or so Oviedo implies, indicating that they rose up on their own initiative. As the leading modern scholar of this incident, Paul Hoffman, had pointed out, the slaves were probably mostly household servants rather than agricultural laborers. There must have been “extreme personal provocation” for such individuals to have taken sides in a dispute between their masters.
The timely intervention of these slaves, as Oviedo interpreted the story, led to some semblance of order in the colony. The incarcerated noblemen escaped and overpowered the rebels, who were then, in their turn, imprisoned. The decision was now taken to evacuate the remains of the colony, and the refugees made their way back to the Caribbean.
So many of the colonists had perished on that hostile shore that many of the slaves who had saved the colony from the rebels now found themselves in the unusual position of having no master. Some presumably considered remaining where they were, but the increasing appearance of aggressive Indians and the godforsaken conditions they had so far experienced seem to have decided them to return to Spanish jurisdiction. On their return, they once again submitted to being chattels, now owned by the beneficiaries of their masters’ wills or by their masters’ creditors. In many cases, the surviving slaves may have been almost the only legacy left by the deceased Spaniards.
Many of those slaves would therefore have found themselves put up for sale by executors, widows, or children as they attempted to pay off the heavy debts incurred by the colonists before they set out. With their experience of Florida and their apparent record of loyalty, these slaves must have seemed an especially attractive purchase to Narváez’s men. One day someone may be able to prove that Esteban was among them.
AS NARVÁEZ SET about rebuilding his expedition on Cuba, he ordered Cabeza de Vaca to take two ships to the town of Trinidad where one of his cronies, a local official, had offered to supply the expedition with the contents of a warehouse or store he owned. As soon as they anchored in the poorly sheltered bay that served as a harbor for Trinidad, the pilots became uneasy. Foul weather was brewing and they were anxious to find a more secure haven for the ships.
The following morning, the skies had darkened and it began to rain so hard that the men given leave to go ashore went back to their ships to be out of the cold and the wet. Had they taken refuge in the town, they might have lived long enough to perish alongside their companions on the shores of Alabama and Texas.
A canoe now appeared, struggling through the waves, bringing word to Cabeza de Vaca that he should go to the town and take official receipt of the promised supplies of food and other necessary items. But Cabeza de Vaca preferred to stay aboard the ships, or so he claimed in a letter to the Crown. By midday, the messengers had returned with another missive, begging the treasurer to go to the town. They had also brought him a horse to ride. It was providential and proof of Cabeza de Vaca’s luck, for although he again said that he preferred to remain with the ships, the pilots and sailors urged him to complete the business as soon as possible so that they might seek a better port in which to see out the coming storm. Those old sea dogs knew what was coming and they were terrified that the ships would be lost if they remained where they were.
Cabeza de Vaca set out on the short journey to La Trinidad, but the vicious wind now whipped up the sea. The terrified mariners were trapped, unable to launch the longboats and unable to beach the ships. “By Sunday night,” Cabeza de Vaca recalled, “the rains and the tempest raged such that it was as stormy in the town as it was out to sea. All the houses and the church collapsed and we were only able to stay upright and walk about when seven or eight of us grabbed a-hold of one another.”
All night they huddled together, unable to find respite from the storm. “As we walked in the woods, we were as fearful of the falling trees as we were of the collapsing houses in the town.” And “all night, amongst the great thunderclaps, we could hear the murmur of voices and the sound of bells and flutes and drums and other instruments.”
Cabeza de Vaca and his companions shivered and shook until daybreak, when the storm relented and the tropical sun once again shone in a blue sky. There was no sign of the ships at the port, although the search party saw their buoys, a sure sign that both vessels were lost. Half a mile inland they found one of the ships’ boats, swaying in the brisk breeze, caught in the canopy of the trees. Thirty miles down the coast, two of the mariners were found smashed against the rocks, “so disfigured by their injuries that they were unrecognizable.” This is the earliest known description of a hurricane.
The survivors remained at Trinidad for five days, the supplies spoiled and town destroyed. They were rescued by Narváez, whose ships had survived the storm. With the sense of foreboding caused by the loss of two ships, sixty comrades, twenty horses, and so many valuable provisions, the expedition set sail to spend the winter at the good port of Jagua.
Those few weeks of winter were the last repose the expedition was to enjoy. The Cuban hurricane had been the first of an increasingly relentless cataract of disasters that scythed through Narváez’s men just as his own band of brigands had cut down so many defenseless Cubans. God was against them, and even as Narváez’s ships crept out of the safety of Jagua and again took to the high seas, they were headed for immediate misfortune because of the bad luck of their pilot, Miruelo.
Miruelo seems to have had some experience sailing the northern coast of the Mexican gulf, but misfortune and mishap seem to have been his constant companions, as though he had been cursed by the evil eye. “A pilot is to a ship what the soul is the human form,” according to Alonso de Chaves’s sixteenth-century Spanish seamen’s manual, the Mariner’s Mirror. A pilot needed to know the currents, the great geographer Velasco wrote in 1571, “which serve to retard or accelerate the voyage. For, when voyaging where the currents flow, vessels can drift many leagues and travel much more than seems to be the case. Sometimes, indeed, the currents have such force that they will carry a ship against a contrary wind.”
But Miruelo was evidently unlucky and has been accused of incompetence, and as they sailed for Havana, he grounded the fleet on the shoals of Canarreo off a deserted and remote stretch of Cuban coast. For a full fortnight the ships lay trapped by the exposed reefs, with their keels grazing the sand, until another storm blew in and flooded the shallows long enough for them to reach the high seas. But the Fates were again unkind, and as Miruelo tried to enter Havana harbor, a powerful south wind blew them far out into the Mexican Gulf.