THERE WAS A surprise awaiting the large group of Karankawa Indians who were sheltering from a violent storm on the night of November 4, 1528, huddled together, crouching around the hearths of their open-sided wigwams. As the Karankawa had always done, they had migrated toward the Texas coast during the fall in order to spend the winter there after the long hot summer in the river valleys of the mainland, eating fruits and seeds and hunting bison and other game. Now, they had come out to one of the barrier islands, probably Galveston, where plenty of fish and cattail roots would keep them well fed as the bitter “Blue Norther” winds blew the cold of the Midwest down into the Mexican Gulf.
Karankawa Indians and their ancestors had long lived along the coast of Texas; for generations they had been almost amphibious hunter-gatherers, masters of their salty winter world of land, marsh, and sea. As yet, they knew little of Europeans. One or two of them had, no doubt, seen a passing ship, nothing more than a strange if wondrous sight on the horizon. Others had heard rumors of raiding parties, perhaps, for Narváez and his cronies had sent their slavers to the north coast of the gulf from time to time. But those savage, barbarian missions had barely touched the lives of the isolated Karankawa, living in their hidden world behind the barrier islands.
With the passage of the centuries, these Indians would develop a ferocious reputation among European colonists. In 1687, the Karankawa massacred the survivors of a French expedition that established a camp at Matagorda Bay. By the time of the Texan War of Independence, in 1835, they were renowned as ruthless raiders and cannibals, described by many as giants. Although this picture of semi-human savagery was largely an insidious, colonialist myth, it is notable that the Karankawa struck almost everyone who left a record of meeting them as exceptionally tall. The men are constantly referred to by travelers and colonists as strong and well-built, able to fight off many assailants. And archaeologists have found enough old bones to confirm that they were indeed an exceptionally tall group, with skeletons and skulls that set them apart from neighboring Native American tribes.
AS THE STORM abated and Aurora rose out of the olive-dark Mexican gulf, bathing the seaward beaches of their island in a golden glow, the Karankawa set about the daily business of finding enough to eat. The men inspected their fishing traps, set in the tranquil lagoon that lay between the island and the mainland. Some no doubt repaired any damage that had been caused by the storm. Others waded out into the water with their bows at the ready, poised to shoot the large black drum, sheepshead, and other fish that came to shelter in the calm, shallow waters of the lagoon.
The women busied themselves with finding fresh water and uprooting the tubers that the Karankawa ate for starch. Others gathered firewood thrown up onto the seaward shores by the storm. As they searched the beaches, looking out across the open sea, these women no doubt stopped to wonder at a strange sight out on the shining horizon. In the hazy distance something loomed and lifted on the glittering foam of the white horses, floating and flying, rising and sinking, coming nearer and nearer. Soon they realized that it was some kind of boat, much larger than the canoes that their men punted about the lagoons. It was approaching their island, and it seemed to be filled with men. Small children were dispatched to alert the elders.
Andrés Dorantes, Esteban, Castillo, and the rest of their crew were desperate to land after their terrifying night at sea. They had been battered by the storm, barely able to keep their barge afloat, bailing furiously as the wind whipped the waves into great crests from which the little craft crashed down, time and again, into the deep canyons that briefly sank between the walls of water. Now, with the relative calm of morning, there were prayers of thanks to the Lord for the miracle of their temporary salvation from the wrath of Poseidon. But that joy and elation were quickly tempered by hunger and the sight of smoke on the horizon, a sure sign that this otherwise hospitable land was populated by Indians.
As they strained at their oars, Dorantes ordered caution. But the sea was still too strong for their vessel and their fate remained beyond their control. They were quickly caught on the fast-rolling breakers of the flow tide and brought crashing up onto the beach, stranded on the sandy margin of an unknown land. Those with the strength to do so dragged the boat high up onto dry ground, away from the rabid sea. But most were weak and painfully thin, their ribs clearly visible against their taut skin, their thin torsos showing beneath the tatters of their grime-encrusted clothes. They looked like medieval and Renaissance images of death herself, vividly portrayed by artists as a lifelike skeleton, with dangling flaps of rotten flesh, devoured by worms and beset with flies.
Among these living pictures of death there were no doubt some who had been in Mexico, or at least heard rumors that the Aztecs practiced human sacrifice and cannibalism. Fear spread fast among the weakened Spaniards, but while there were those who dreaded any meeting with Indians, it was clear that they must rest a long while on this desolate strand before returning to the sea. They began to set up camp, there and then, on the beach.
There is no record of how these survivors and the Karankawa first came into contact with each other, but it seems likely that Dorantes would have turned to those with the strength to make a foray inland. If such a party was indeed sent, Alonso del Castillo is the most likely candidate for leading it. Although young, Castillo was Dorantes’s most senior officer, and the two men had together led early exploratory missions sent out by Narváez. We also know that Esteban was strong and reliable and that he would later prove to be brave, perhaps fearless when communicating with potentially hostile Indians. He too seems a likely candidate. Perhaps the first “European” these Karankawa met was, in fact, an African.
The tall Karankawa, with their matted hair, their brutal tattoos, and their bodies pierced by sherds of cane skewered through their breasts and earlobes, were the epitome of the European image of American savagery. Yet, despite their strange ways, these gentle giants soon comforted Dorantes and his men. The Indians turned their heads, averting their gaze from these unknown creatures who had floated out of the sea, their ragged clothes flapping about them like the skin of a molting snake.
The Karankawa tried to converse with these outsiders in the short-winded accents of their foreign tongue, punctuating their peculiar, alien prose with melancholic sighs. Esteban and the Spaniards did their best to understand the Indians and to explain their own plight, and when their gestures of hand to mouth brought agitated action, they understood that the Indians were eager to help. Soon the Indians came with fish and roots to feed the washed-up adventurers.
Esteban no doubt eagerly devoured his share of that native generosity. He and some of his companions had, perhaps, already cast about the beach in search of sustenance and found little to appease their hunger. Above the beach, the desert dunes seemed nothing but grass and barren trees. The Karankawa were masters of a difficult terrain, rich in food as well as dangers, but for the foreigner, the shores of Texas are a bewildering world, a “maze of islands, lagoons, and salt marshes.” The low flat ground, the thick vegetation of the marshlands, and the endless interplay of land and water were the domain of the Indians alone.
The warriors had come to investigate the alien arrivals, but now they saw there was no danger and brought their wives and children down to the beach. The Karankawa had come to gawk at the foreign freak show. They wondered at the flimsy craft in which their guests had survived the violent winter storm on the open seas. They gladly accepted the baubles, the almost valueless colored glass beads that Spaniards used as currency with Indians.
Then news came from the other end of the island. Another unusual canoe had appeared, also thrown up on the beach, and more aliens had landed. One of these strange creatures had climbed a tree and then followed one of the paths that had been cut through the long grass and bushes.
This man was Lope de Oviedo, the most able-bodied of Cabeza de Vaca’s men. They had survived the storm, but without the strength or will to manage their oars, they had drifted aimlessly in the rowdy seas all day and into the next night. In the dead of darkness, the dread sound of breakers alerted Cabeza de Vaca and his pilot that land was near at hand. They cast a plumb line to a depth of three or four fathoms, and the few who had the strength rowed with all their pathetic might, turning the prow away from the shore for fear they be dashed on the rocks. But the sea caught them up and threw them down again with such a blow that the torpid, starving men stirred into action. They struggled with their boat to beat the ripping surges that dragged them down. They breasted the swollen, rolling white caps, looking for a firm foothold on the sandy bottom. Somehow, they kept themselves above the waves, and with renewed vigor they rowed with flailing strokes until they reached the land alive.
The crisp and golden light of dawn rose upon a sorry scene. The men were eating a meager meal of toasted maize and slowly recovered their strength. Presently, as morning broke and the long shadows shortened, Cabeza de Vaca sent Lope de Oviedo to see what he could see. He wandered off and climbed a tree and there he deluded himself that the tufts of the island grass and pockmarked dunes had been caused by the hooves of cattle. In his foolish excitement, he rushed to tell his companions that they had been blown by fortuitous winds to a land of Christian cowboys. He then rushed back to his vantage point by the tree in order to search for some path or road and found an Indian trail, which he followed for a mile or two along the island, until he came to some deserted shelters. The hopes and fears of this human flotsam were no doubt as variable as the weather. Instead of some Christian farmstead, Lope de Oviedo found a cooking pot and some food: some small creature that the Spaniards referred to as a dog and some fish.
The intrepid castaway made off with the Indians’ dinner, but soon saw three Indians coming along the path who called out to him. He gestured for them to follow him. The panicked Spaniards now gathered on the beach for comfort, while the three Indians waited and watched for half an hour, until a cohort of fully armed archers arrived.
Shipwrecks reports that the Indians seemed like giants to the Spaniards, although it also explains that Cabeza de Vaca could not tell whether this was because the Indians really were large or, whether they seemed giants because the Spaniards were so terrified. It is a marvelous literary moment that perfectly evokes the helplessness of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions.
Shipwrecks tells us that the Spaniards had every excuse for shunning battle with these Indians, for only six men had the strength to stand. But Cabeza de Vaca was the hero of his book and he alone, he said, approached this terrifying army. Each side did its best to reassure the other of its good intentions and the Spaniards handed over some cheap rosaries and tiny brass hawk’s bells as a sign of peace. Each of the Indians, Shipwrecks claims, handed a single arrow to Cabeza de Vaca in exchange, and they indicated that the following day they would bring the castaways something to eat.
As good as their word, the Karankawa appeared as golden dawn rose from the olive-dark sea and her honeyed fingers touched the white sands of the beach. They came with plenty of fish and cattail roots, as promised, and then they came back again, bringing more food and their women and children to see the straggling Spaniards. They went away with a wealth of gaudy trinkets that the Spaniards gave them. But as yet, the shrewd Karankawa left the two groups of Spaniards in ignorance of each other.
The Spanish conquistadors are nowadays rarely praised—in fact, they are deservedly maligned—but their characteristic perseverance and determination should be admired. With the bare sufficiency of food supplied them by the Karankawa, Cabeza de Vaca and his men set about launching their boat again, to continue their journey to the longed-for settlement at Pánuco, somewhere in the west.
They stripped down to their undershirts and carefully tied their bundles of belongings inside the boat. They dug it out of the sand and manhandled it down the beach and into the water. They rowed out bravely into the wild sea, but a great wave crashed against the bows and flooded the gunwales. The oarsmen lost their grip on the oars and they were suddenly turned topsy-turvy by another wave washing over them. The tremendous winter seas disgorged them again on the beach, but the waters took their toll, for that day they lost the boat and three men.
As the sun set beyond the mainland and the white-horses winked orange out of the olive sea, the Indians came down to the beach to find their guests broken in mind and body, more dead than alive. By those waters they all sat down and wept, Spaniard and Indian alike, at the evil turn of fate, so that the sound of their lament could be heard far and wide. Then the Indians escorted the bedraggled Spaniards to their camp. They had lit fires along the route against the cold and they half carried, half hurried the weary Spaniards to the comfort of a large shelter.
THE KARANKAWA NOW sent word to Dorantes and his men, who were down at the beach camp, making repairs to their boat and preparing for an early departure. Communication was always slow and uncertain with the Indians, but the message must have been clear enough. There were other survivors; apparently one of the other boats had also washed up on these godforsaken shores. That could only be good news, as two boats were more secure than one. In the morning, Esteban, Dorantes, and Castillo set out for the Indian camp with a band of men.
Their optimism at finding that some of their companions had survived soon turned to grim pragmatism. Cabeza de Vaca’s men were fearfully weak and had nothing—no clothes, no trinkets to barter, no weapons. They were very evidently a burden and as the expedition treasurer gave an account of himself and his men, it became clear that they were a burden best left behind.
Cabeza de Vaca explained that his boat was lost. The state of his men was enough to explain their predicament.
What of Narváez, the Captain General? Dorantes asked.
Zumárraga had seen to it that the four survivors should portray Narváez not only as foolhardy and incompetent, but also as a cowardly leader worthy of the most vile contempt. Cabeza de Vaca later told the Mexican magistrates that a few days before, as the ferocious seas had given way to relative calm, he had managed to steer his boat toward the governor general’s faster craft. The two vessels had then headed for the shore with all hands rowing hard, but Cabeza de Vaca’s men had been weakened and their boat sat low in the water. They knew that they could not make the beach without help from the stronger, swifter vessel.
“Throw us a line,” Cabeza de Vaca had asked of Narváez.
“Every man for himself,” was the impious reply recorded for posterity.
What Cabeza de Vaca really told Dorantes, Esteban, and Castillo about Narváez’s conduct when they met at Galveston remains uncertain. But for Cabeza de Vaca, this was a difficult point in his story as he gave evidence to the viceroy and the Audiencia.
“Together, we determined,” Cabeza de Vaca testified, “that we would repair Dorantes’s boat and that those of us who were strong enough would sail onward. The others should remain on the island until they had recovered. And when God saw fit that they might be able to join us in a Christian land; then they could follow us along the coast.”
It was clear to everyone in the courtroom that Cabeza de Vaca, like Narváez, had decided to abandon his men. Narváez’s final instruction had been “Every man for himself,” and Cabeza de Vaca seems to have taken that order to heart.
Dorantes’s responsibility was clearly to his own men. So although we will never know how many of his charges he decided it would be reasonable to maroon on the island in order to make room for Cabeza de Vaca and perhaps a few others, the likelihood is that they were few.
It was an uneasy moment for Cabeza de Vaca as he explained himself years later in Mexico, but he knew that discomfort would be fleeting, because the attempted launch of Dorantes’s boat had soon ended in disaster. It had sunk quickly and they were all, once again, washed up on that ill-fated shore. Fate had determined that Cabeza de Vaca would not abandon his men. However, he was soon to be abandoned himself.
“We agreed to send four very strong swimmers along the coast,” Cabeza de Vaca said, in the hope that they could reach Pánuco. But for the remainder, “given the state that we were in, we agreed that necessity was the mother of invention and that we would have to spend the winter on that island. Most of the men were without clothing and the weather was far too stormy for a long march.” It would have been madness to try to “swim across the endless rivers and lagoons.”
Then disease struck them brutally.
“After five or six days,” the survivors explained, “the men began to die. After a short period of time, of the eighty men in total from both groups who landed on the island, only fifteen were left alive.”
Memories of famine in Azemmour and his seaborne flight to southern Spain must have flooded Esteban’s mind as he contemplated the awful scene before him. Once again he found himself among starving, sick men cast carelessly by fate upon a foreign shore where any faint, fleeting hope was dashed on the treacherous rocks of pestilence.
Among the dead were “five Christians who had remained at the camp on the beach and who reached such an extreme condition that they ate one another, one after the other, until there was only one of them left.”
At some point, either in Mexico or in Spain, Cabeza de Vaca was asked for the names of these desperate sinners, whose memory was perhaps better forgotten than recorded for posterity. He gave their names as “Sierra, Diego López, Corral, Palacios, and Gonzalo Ruiz.” Strangely, no one seems to have asked him which of these cannibal Christians was the last one left alive.
Tragedy was overtaking Narváez’s men up and down the coast. Hunger, violence, and disease would soon account for all but Esteban, Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, and Castillo. But as the men lay dying in the Karankawa camp and down on the beaches, one of the priests who remained alive, a man from rugged and mountainous Asturias in the north of Spain, moved among those stricken soldiers of fortune, muttering prayers and giving the men their last rites as best he could. Castillo, whose father was a doctor, gave what comfort he could by drawing on half-remembered remedies vaguely learned at his father’s side.
The Indians must have watched the curious incantations of these foreign shamans with a peculiar fascination as the priest bent low to hear the feeble confessions of the dying and blessed the cattail roots as the bread of heaven. And then the Indians also began to fall sick, and soon many of them died of “a stomach disease,” presumably the typhoid fever or cholera which had struck the Spaniards, and against which the Indians had no immunity. The disease spread fast, until only half the Indians were left alive. The Asturian priest now went among his dying hosts, for it was his Christian duty to baptize these men before they died, so that their souls might go to heaven. Did he, one wonders, seem a sinister figure to the bereaved Karankawa, distraught at the loss of so many bretheren?
With fear and anger pounding in their hearts and vengeance coursing through their veins, the Karankawa rose up and came to seek revenge against the disastrous Spanish aliens who had brought them nothing but death and destruction. Their valiant warriors, so skilled as archers, now bore down on the fifteen traumatized, skeletal Spanish survivors who remained.
But suddenly an Indian chief spoke up, calling for the aggressors to desist, and with his words he stayed the Spaniards’ execution. How can you think that these strangers are the cause of our sickness? Can you not see that they too have suffered the same deadly fate, so that only a handful of them are left alive among us? If they had brought this evil upon us, then they need not have perished as well.
With some such speech, a Karankawa elder saved the few of surviving Spaniards and Esteban from the Indian archers and their arrows.
“At this point,” Cabeza de Vaca explained in the emotionless language of the courtroom, “I became separated from my companions.”
Ravaged by disease, the Indians moved away from the island in small groups, taking the Spanish survivors with them. The Indian social system was devastated, and too few were alive and healthy enough to perform the sacred rituals for the dead. The Spanish expedition broke up, its hierarchy also smashed. Despite Oviedo’s objections, the island was unquestionably a place of malhado, of “misfortune,” “bad spirit,” or “ill luck.” The ragged groups of Indians and Spaniards retreated to the salt marshes on the mainland, where they could scratch a living collecting oysters.
These almost beaten conquistadors spent the winter dispersed about the waterlogged world of the Karankawa, desperately hungry and utterly helpless—because of their ignorance of that wilderness—except for the help of their Indian friends.
“The Indians who were holding me left the island and crossed over to the mainland in their canoes,” Cabeza de Vaca reported. But “Alonso del Castillo and Andrés Dorantes, and the others who were still alive, were with some other Indians who spoke a different language and were from a different family.” They were not to see each other again for five years.
THE MAGISTRATES AND the viceroy now turned to Dorantes and Castillo as their principal witnesses. They too had crossed the narrow strip of water to the mainland. But for all that the strangers and deadly diseases had disrupted the usual pattern of winters spent on Malhado, the Karankawa knew well enough that they would best survive the coldest months around the lagoons and barrier islands, where the fishing was good.
Dorantes and Castillo recalled how they had then set out again, no doubt with Indians as their guides, back across the lagoon, to another island. With them went the Asturian priest, two of Dorantes’s cousins called Diego Dorantes and Pedro de Valdivieso, and, of course, Esteban.
This was almost a family group, the Dorantes “tribe,” the master and his slave now struggling to survive side by side and on equal terms, the priest, the cousins, and the faithful friend, teenage Castillo, the doctor’s son. Theirs were ties of blood and purpose, genetics and practicality. There was a bond between these men, an understanding, a subconscious adaptation to the Indian way of life that, in the course of things, would make Dorantes, Esteban, and Castillo invincible in the face of perils and adversity. In that winter of disaster and tragedy, in their desperation, they forged a sense of a common future.