IN THE SPRING, the Karankawa began preparing for their seasonal migration inland, and it became clear to Dorantes, Castillo, and the other Spaniards that it was time to move on. They had learned enough of the native language to know that these isolated tribes were going to move away from Galveston and the coast. But the Spaniards had little interest in going with them; their best hope was to continue west along the coast in search of Pánuco, keeping a watchful lookout for any passing ship that might rescue them.
But while the Spaniards were strangers to their new role as aliens, Esteban was no more an alien among the Karankawa than he had already been for many years among the Spaniards. And now, adversity had destroyed the social order; perhaps for the first time, Esteban began to experience the anxieties of freedom. He could travel inland with the Karankawa and forever escape the Spaniards’ savage slavery. But why relinquish any lingering hope of seeing Africa again? Why forsake so soon the elevated status suddenly bestowed on him by their predicament? Could he turn his back on everything he had ever known and roam for all eternity among these alien nomads, living out some personal purgatory in order to avoid the gilded hell of the Spanish world? Had Andrés Dorantes promised him his freedom, perhaps?
The answer may be that Esteban now became an equal of the Spaniards. In fact, there is every reason to believe Esteban became the first among those equals. He was a man of wide experience and had seen many worlds and many different human ways. Esteban spoke the language of his mother and the many languages of his many masters. He had long been an outsider, an alien, a foreigner, a stranger. Experience had taught him the meaning of difference; he had learned that the battle between good and evil is fought everywhere and in every soul. He knew the meaning of hunger and of fear. The Spaniards no doubt turned to him for his experience of dealing with adversity.
Over that winter of 1528 to 1529, for the first time in the history of modern American soil, an African slave shed his bonds and became a man in the eyes of his former masters. Over that winter, the first African-American was born. Esteban must then have felt the first thrill of power.
This moment of epic personal transformation was succinctly but eloquently recorded in the testimony given to the Mexican magistrates by the survivors. They were asked to list the men who eventually set off from Malhado with Andrés Dorantes, to go along the coast in search of Pánuco: “Alonso del Castillo, Andrés Dorantes, Diego Dorantes, Valdivieso, Estrada, Tostado, Chaves, Gutiérrez, Asturiano the Priest, Diego de Huelva, Estebanico the Black, Benítez.”
For the first time in the survivors’ testimony and for the first time in the official record, Esteban is mentioned by name. For the first time in the history of America, an African is mentioned by name. In fact, of this list of largely long-forgotten people, Esteban was to become the most influential in his lifetime and the most important figure in history. Both in real life and in the writings of historians, the slave was to prove more important and more famous than his master. What is more, by a curious irony, it was the master’s testimony that served to leave a record of the slave.
In the shaded cool of a Mexican courtroom, in the summer of 1536, Esteban was born into the virtual world of words and literature; he now became part of that ephemeral account of humanity that we know as history. There and then, Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, the great conquistador Hernán Cortés, Archbishop Zumárraga, Cabeza de Vaca, and Esteban himself all bore witness as his name took its place alongside theirs in the pantheon of the unforgotten. His grave unknown, his flesh gone, his bones lost, Esteban now lives on in the modern mythology of the American dream, another heroic protagonist in some semi-documented legend about the origins of a stolen continent.
TOWARD THE END of March 1529, the Dorantes “tribe” crossed back to Malhado, where they were soon joined by six other survivors who had wintered on the mainland: Diego de Huelva, Benítez, Chaves, Gutiérrez, Estrada, and Tostado. On the island, they came across a man called Jéronimo de Alanís, a distinguished royal official, a notary or scribe, with twenty years’ experience in the Caribbean. He had been appointed to his first position in Jamaica by Diego Columbus, brother of Christopher Columbus. But there was now no need for such a hired pen, an unnecessary official who could rubber-stamp a written record of their activities.
They also came across Lope de Oviedo, Cabeza de Vaca’s intrepid scout. But both Alanís and Lope were gravely ill.
The Dorantes “tribe” abandoned them to their fate, leaving them behind on the island of Malhado. For all the blank pages Alanís filled in his lifetime with carefully scripted business contracts, official reports, and information about births, marriages, and deaths, he himself received only a cursory obituary: a note to the effect that “later, he died,” made by Cabeza de Vaca in Shipwrecks.
Dorantes now bought his group passage across the Galveston lagoon with a sable cloak they had acquired from the Indians of Mississippi many months before. They then set out on foot along the mainland coast. It is far from clear whether they realized that Cabeza de Vaca was close at hand, also terribly ill. But if they did, then they took the decision to abandon him as well.
There is considerable debate over the precise route taken by the survivors after they left Malhado, but most scholars now believe they followed the coast as far as Corpus Christi Bay, where the Texan shore sweeps south towards Mexico. They must have stayed as close as they could to the open sea of the gulf so as not to lose their way and in order to remain in sight of any rescue ship that might be searching for them. This route was to take them along the mainland beaches as far as Matagorda Bay, through the area of modern Freeport. Their actual path has long been erased by the continuously shifting sands of the barrier islands and river mouths along the gulf coast.
As the men set out, the brambles were beginning to bear blackberries, and the sweet fruit must have been welcome after the long, hungry winter. But the weather was against them as they walked along the coast, keeping to the beaches. They reached a large river in flood, its waters rising quickly because of incessant rain. As they made rafts, they must have known that the crossing was fraught with danger, but they made it across. Then they walked nine exhausting miles farther along the sands, with no sign that the weather would improve, until they came upon another river in flood. It flowed so powerfully and with such fury that its sweet water reached far out into the sea, and again they hastily, hopefully made rafts.
The first raft made it safely across, with Esteban and Castillo aboard, all of the bedraggled crew paddling for their lives as they took the flimsy, improvised craft across the torrent. But the second raft was swept out to sea, for the men were too weak and tired to paddle; they had eaten nothing along all that coast but seaweed and some tiny crabs “which were all shell and no meat.” Two of the men drowned, while two swam for shore. The others could only watch, wearily aghast, as one of their companions was washed out to sea on the wild current, a lone figure clinging to the makeshift raft. The castaway was carried so far adrift that Dorantes, Castillo, and Esteban told the Mexican Audiencia that the raft was three miles offshore. But, they said, when this man had drifted beyond the force of the river current, he made use of a strong landward breeze, struggling up onto the top of the raft and, using his body as a sail, he slowly regained the land.
Such ingenuity and caprices of fate were the arbiters of life and death among those alien trespassers on foreign shores.
As they mourned the loss of two more men and celebrated the seemingly miraculous survival of this third man of iron will and nerve, they came across another survivor, Francisco de León, who had spent the winter alone, eating oysters and seaweed. He gladly joined the Dorantes “tribe.”
Stunned by trauma, loss, and joy, they continued along the coast. Ten miles or more farther on, near the mouth of yet another river, they found the abandoned wreck of one of the other boats they had built at the Bay of Horses, the one Alonso Enríquez had commanded. There was no sign of the passengers and crew. Among them had been Friar Juan Suárez, who, in his absence and without his ever finding out, had been officially appointed bishop of Florida by the Spanish authorities in Europe.
They inspected the wrecked barge for signs of other survivors and probably spent the night there, but they found nothing to give them hope. There was nothing for it but to continue their journey in the morning.
After a trek of fifteen or twenty miles, which must have taken them a day or more, they reached another large river, probably the Colorado. There, they came across a group of Indians, who immediately fled, leaving behind two wigwams. As they contemplated yet another precarious river crossing, a group of Indians appeared on the opposite bank of the stream. These Indians had already had dealings with the men from Enríquez’s wrecked boat and were familiar with such strangers.
The Indians armed themselves and, thus protected, they brought the survivors across the river and took them to their encampment. There, despite the fact the Indians themselves had almost nothing to eat, they were hospitable and generously gave the Spaniards a meal of fish and a bed for the night.
In the morning, the party set off on the fourth day of continuous travel since leaving Galveston on April 1. Over the next four days, two men collapsed as their debilitated bodies broke down under the effort of their relentless progress westward. The others were too weak to help or even bury their lifeless companions. With each day, their sense of humanity and civilization that was such a source of aristocratic, European pride gave way to casual barbarity, savagery, and a necessary disregard for their fellows. Esteban perhaps recalled the execution of a young man in Jerez in 1522.
We can imagine that Mendoza and his magistrates were themselves weary of this endless tale of woe. The loss of so many minor lives was of no consequence to the imperial machine. No doubt Esteban, Dorantes, and Castillo well remembered where and when their companions had died, but details of those deaths are not recorded in the official account. The crown officials were more interested in useful, geographical facts than in the meaningless names of lost proletarians.
By the end of the seventh day, a total of 120 miles from Malhado, the few survivors reached a great expanse of water. “We believed,” Dorantes and Castillo explained, “that we had reached the River of the Holy Spirit, because we came across a wide bay that was nearly three miles across its mouth. It had a spit of land on the Pánuco side about a mile long, which has very large white sand dunes that must be visible many miles out to sea.” They were finally on the tip of the Matagorda Peninsula, looking out across Matagorda Bay.
They were making remarkable progress.
The nine remaining men rested in this bleak place for two days, attempting to regain strength, eating whatever they might scavenge. They did not report eating fish, although we have to assume that they did, for they must have learned basic survival skills from the Indians at Galveston. Even so, their bodies were beginning to swell with malnutrition because much of their diet was indigestible.
As they rested, they slowly repaired, as best they could, a damaged canoe that they had found near the shore so they might cross Cavallo Pass onto modern Matagorda Island, a long strip of land that is one of the most spectacular nature reserves along the Texas coast. Matagorda Island today is nothing like it was when Dorantes and Esteban passed that way. Late seventeenth-century maps show that this single long strip of land was once a labyrinthine archipelago: islands set in shallow lagoons, swamps, and marshy ground. The survivors now ferried each other across Cavallo Pass and carried on, as best they could, along the coast.
After thirty or forty miles, they reached a narrow pass where another, smaller lagoon opened into the sea. “It was no wider than a river,” they recalled. “The following morning, we saw an Indian on the other shore, but although we called out to him, he would not come, but went away. In the afternoon he came back and brought a Christian with him, a man called Figueroa, one of the four men we sent the previous winter to see if they could reach Christian territories.”
“And then,” Dorantes continued, “the Indian and Figueroa crossed over to where we nine survivors were. There and then he told us that his three companions were dead.”
Two had died from hunger, but the third had been killed by Indians, he explained.
Dorantes and the other survivors were alarmed.
As yet the Indians had been mostly welcoming, at least at first. But those friendly Indians they had encountered at Galveston were in fact peripheral to the main Karankawa culture, which was centered on Corpus Christi Bay. Now they were heading deep into the Karankawa heartland.
But Mendoza and the Mexican magistrates were more interested in the secondhand account of Figueroa’s story. They wanted a report on the fate of Narváez himself.
“Figueroa told us,” Dorantes and Castillo continued, “that he had come across a Spaniard called Esquivel.” Esquivel was the last man left alive out of all those who had sailed on the other boats captained by Alonso Enríquez and Narváez himself. “All the others died of hunger,” but he survived, according to Figueroa, by “eating the flesh of the men who died.”
Enríquez and his men had come across Narváez, still on his boat, farther down the coast. Narváez had then ordered his men to go ashore so that the survivors from the two boats could travel along the coast together, while he followed in his barge, ready to ferry them across the lagoons, rivers, and passes where necessary.
At the Bay of the Holy Spirit, Shipwrecks reports, Narváez then revoked Enríquez’s command and put one of his own captains in charge of the group that was on land. That night, according to both accounts, Narváez, now very ill, had remained resolutely aboard his barge, without food or water. He was perhaps terrified that his own men would leave him behind. He need not have worried, for fate had stayed her hand too long. In the dead of night she crept up on him in the form of a northern breeze. As the wind got up, the boat began to drag the stone that served as an anchor and gently floated out to sea, with the captain general, his page, and his pilot aboard. They were neither seen nor heard of again.
The men left behind on the shore now blundered deep into the waterlogged world of the Matagorda coast. They gathered wood, threw together some basic rafts, and crossed the lagoon, making their way inland. There, in a swampland that they did not understand, they became prisoners of their own ignorance and were trapped by misery and despair. In the forests and thickets of their watery jungle, Narváez’s newly appointed captain lost control of his men. They set upon him. They killed him. They ate him.
“Esquivel butchered the last man to die and by eating him, he kept himself alive until the beginning of March, when he was rescued by an Indian,” the official report would eventually read.
This was much worse than what had happened at Galveston.
In Mexico, the listeners were now spellbound. They wanted to know what had happened to Hernando de Esquivel, the Christian cannibal of Badajoz.
“About a month later, more or less,” Dorantes and Castillo replied, “we learned from some Indians with whom he had been living that they themselves had killed him because he ran away from them.”
WHEN ESTEBAN HEARD Esquivel’s story of Christian cannibalism and remembered the young would-be cannibal of Jerez and thought about the men who had resorted to cannibalism at Galveston, he must have wondered whether his companions would choose to sacrifice him first, when the time came. Spaniards evidently surrendered easily to their savage instincts, he must have thought.
“We were a short time with Figueroa,” Dorantes and Castillo recalled, “listening to that awful news, but the Indian did not want to leave him with us and forced him to leave.”
This is another astonishing reversal of the usual histories of Spanish heroism during the conquest of America. Instead of the typical story of a how a few valiant conquistadors defeated hundreds if not thousands of Indians, Dorantes and Castillo told the viceroy that one Indian had been able to impose his will on ten Spaniards.
But the reality appears to have been more complicated than the story they told. Probably under pressure from the Mexican magistrates, Dorantes and Castillo admitted that only two of their party could swim and that these men—the Asturian priest and “a youth”—did in fact cross the lagoon with Figueroa and the Indian. “These two went,” the survivors claimed, “with an idea that they would bring back some fish” that Figueroa and his Indian said they had back at their camp.
In the morning, the youth swam back across the pass, bringing a little fish for his former companions. The Indians, he explained, were leaving that day to collect some kind of plant, which they brewed into a drink. They insisted that the three Spaniards who could swim should go with them, but wanted nothing to do with the hapless men stranded on Matagorda Island.
The following day briefly brought some semblance of hope to the forlorn group of abandoned survivors. Two Indians were gathering berries on the far shore when they saw the Spaniards and hollered to them. These Indians then crossed the narrow strait and began to help themselves to the survivors’ meager possessions, treating them “like people for whom they had little respect.”
Years later, in Mexico, Dorantes and Castillo need not have mentioned this detail. But they had been well coached by Zumárraga and they knew Jesus Christ had shown that suffering was the way to salvation. Their own suffering would make the story of their eventual redemption more forceful and more Christian.
But Oviedo’s account also betrays the compassion of these Indians. They may or may not have treated the Spaniards with “little respect” at first, but they later invited the strangers into their homes and shared their food with them for several days. And Oviedo lamented, “What a surfeit of hardship a man may suffer in his short life! Oh, unmentionable torments wreaked upon a human body! Such unbearable hunger for those so weak of flesh! What excessive calamities cut them to the quick!” The royal historian well understood the meaning of their nadir, the importance of their degradation and suffering to the telling of a good tale. All this was highly emotive.
Dorantes testified to the Mexican Audiencia that he was certain only God could have sent them patience enough to atone for their sins through such suffering. The message was clear. It may have been a high price to pay for the folly of their greed, and ambition, but their due penitence must be endured to achieve absolution. Their terrestrial perdition was a gift from God that might earn them an eternity in paradise. “And,” Oviedo would add, “because they were Spanish noblemen, men of moral worth who had never known such poverty, their patience needed to be equal to their hardships and their suffering in order to survive.”
The link was now complete between endurance and suffering on the one hand, and virtue and nobility on the other. Today, this is an unfamiliar image of the Spanish conquest of America. It seems to us a fitting role reversal, almost a haphazard revenge for the many atrocities of empire. But this ignominious suffering was the experience of thousands of Spaniards who set out for America in search of personal dreams, escaping from the poverty of their daily lives, only for those dreams to be shipwrecked on the rocks of brutal reality.
In the Archive of the Indies I have read the stories of hundreds of failed lives told by forgotten men and women whose dreams became disasters, but who believed that to survive such failure with stoical pride was in itself an act of heroism. As Oviedo warned, the foolish hopefuls thronging the port and riverbank at Seville should seek the advice of those who have returned home from America, disillusioned and broken. There are few who do return, however, he pointed out, “for while the journey is long, life is short and there are innumerable opportunities to lose it!”
THE KINDLY INDIANS who had taken in Esteban, Dorantes, and the others soon tired of caring for these survivors they had rescued from Matagorda Island. “As happens anywhere,” Oviedo commented acidly, “when guests outstay their welcome and all the more so when they are uninvited and have nothing to offer.” Castillo, Huelva, Valdivieso, and two others were forced away from the respite so briefly offered by their overstretched hosts. Those five suffering men shuffled on through the swamps in search of another Indian band said to be living on the shores of a lagoon twenty miles away. Of these five, only Castillo would survive.
Oviedo’s History reports that Andrés and Diego Dorantes remained at the Indian camp, along with Esteban, “whom it seemed to them was sufficient for what the Indians wanted of them, which was to carry wood and fresh water and serve them as if they were slaves.” In Oviedo’s account, Esteban remained a submissive slave, accepting stoically his duty to do the work of all three men as a kind of rent for their stay with the Indians. But that representation of the situation is so difficult to believe that at least one English translation of this passage appears to misunderstand the original Spanish, rendering the sense as meaning all three men, the two Spaniards and Esteban together, became slaves to the Indians.
It is, of course, entirely plausible that years later, in Mexico, Dorantes claimed that Esteban had loyally continued to submit to Spanish noblemen even in their most dire straits, willingly serving both the Indians and his European masters. Such a report would even have reflected well on Esteban in the eyes of the Mexican officials, giving them the impression that he was a strong, true, trustworthy slave.
But it is possible to deduce, beyond all reasonable doubt, what must have really happened on those unforgiving shores, for Oviedo goes on to report that after three or four days the Indians threw out “these others.”
Scholars have assumed that by “these others” Oviedo meant all three men and that Esteban must have been expelled from the Indian settlement alongside Andrés and Diego Dorantes, as though the role of the slave, by some natural law or by divine default, was to always remain at his master’s side. But as we read on, it becomes clear that in reality, Esteban had remained alone among these poor but hospitable Indians, after they had thrown out Andrés and Diego Dorantes. The explanation is obvious: Esteban worked hard, whereas the Dorantes cousins did not.
Esteban, after all, had lived the hard life of a slave and had starved in Azemmour. When he was offered hope by the sheltering Karankawa, amid such foreboding, he quickly did his duty, helping his hosts however and wherever he saw the chance. He was a hungry man glad to find men who would share their life with him. Eagerly he became used to the diet of “snakes, lizards, field mice, grasshoppers, cicadas, frogs and all kinds of vermin” that were to be had. There were spiders, too, and ants’ eggs and earthworms. There was a popular saying in sixteenth-century Spain that “there is no better sauce than hunger,” but Andrés and Diego Dorantes were oblivious of its meaning. They failed to work; they paid the price.
So Oviedo may have written the truth when he reported that the Dorantes cousins thought Esteban’s labor would be enough to satisfy their hosts. But it was Esteban’s choice to work with the Indians. He toiled not because his Spanish masters ordered him to do so, but because hard work was obviously necessary. He could see that he needed the help of their hosts in order to survive in a land of strange plants and animals. He knew perfectly well that in a country he did not know, he must make an alliance with the natives. Again and again, the Spaniards reported that at first the Indians were generous and shared their paltry supplies of food. Again and again, this generosity waned until the Indians became hostile. And, as Oviedo remarked, a useless guest is an unwelcome burden. So, while the Indians soon threw out the lazy Spanish aristocrats who served no useful purpose, they were happy to have the willing, hardworking Esteban as their guest.
For Esteban there was perhaps a breath of freedom in that prison without walls which was to be his home for many months. But what kind of freedom can he have felt, slave to his environment, beholden to his hosts, trapped between an endless continent and an endless sea? Freedom and liberty are not always easy to define.
Andrés and Diego Dorantes now wandered through the bog-lands for several days, lost and filled with a sense of hopelessness. Another band of Indians robbed them of their few remaining clothes. Then they came across the decomposing bodies of two of Castillo’s companions, men who had been with them only a few days before. They had little choice but to move on. Soon, they found another Karankawa clan and Andrés chose to stay with them while his cousin Diego continued as far as a lagoon, in search of Castillo. But, instead of Castillo, Diego came across the other Dorantes cousin, Valdivieso, who told him about a fight that had broken out between some Indians and Figueroa and the Asturian priest. Later, Andrés Dorantes saw the priest’s clothes, a breviary, and a book of hours, the treasured possessions of a pious man. But when the priest had returned to try to retrieve these possessions, he was murdered by the Indians.
ESTEBAN, CASTILLO, CABEZA DE VACA, and Dorantes spent five years living among the coastal Karankawa. What did they do? What did they think? Why did they decide to move on after five years and not before? When they did move on, they did not go to the Spanish settlement at Pánuco. Why not? Why on earth did they travel in the opposite direction? Why, instead, did they end up in Sonora in northwest Mexico?
Oviedo and Shipwrecks offer a bewildering range of differing and often conflicting answers to these questions. What is more, not only do Oviedo and Shipwrecks tell different stories, but neither account is especially clear in itself. Time goes astray. Whole years are missing. The anecdotal detail of individual incidents intrudes on broad generalizations, but with little sense of purpose. Important events are described differently and in a different order, so that they float like castaways on a narrative sea, washed hither and thither without much continuity of context. The most important of these floating elements in the story is the claim made in both accounts that somehow the survivors mysteriously became medicine men, shamans with almost magical, God-granted power over the Indians of the interior. But Oviedo and Shipwrecks do not concur as to how, when, or why this came about.
In spite of these confusing and at times contradictory sources, it is possible to shed light on what happened next. For five years, between 1529 and 1534, the survivors scratched a living for themselves as best they could. Most of that time, they were isolated from one another, each man being forced to surrender himself to whichever Indian band would have him. They were no longer treated as guests, but were forced to work hard alongside their hosts, each man his own island, a diminishing archipelago of Spaniards in the strange sea of Karankawa culture. Diego Dorantes lived and labored until the summer of 1531, when he was killed as punishment for “passing from one house to the next,” although neither Shipwrecks nor Oviedo makes it clear why that should be a crime. Valdivieso and Diego de Huelva met the same fate.
Dorantes, Castillo, and Cabeza de Vaca, urged on by Zumárraga, described these conditions as slavery.
“We were forced into slavery,” Dorantes reported of the survivors’ life among the coastal Indians. “They treated us more cruelly than any Moor could have done. We were forced to travel up and down that coast, barefoot and without clothing, in the burning summer sun. Our business was to carry loads of wood and drinking water and anything else the Indians wanted and we dragged their canoes through the swamps for them.”
But Shipwrecks states that among the Indians of Texas, “the men never carry heavy loads,” because that was the business of women and old people. “The women are very strong and hardworking, and from dawn until dusk they dig up roots and carry firewood and water back to the camp.” There is some indication that the survivors were forced to do women’s work, for all that it seems illogical and improbable to us that women and old people should have done the heavy work in Karankawa society.
At first glance, we might suggest this was done to degrade the survivors, but these Spanish intruders were not the only men who busied themselves with female chores. Cabeza de Vaca claimed that while he lived among the Karankawa, he had seen “men who were married to other men,” although his description of these feminized men is confusingly contradictory. He writes that “they go about dressed like women and do women’s work,” but he also explains that they could carry especially heavy loads and were much better built than the other men. Unlike women, they were also adept with the bow and arrow.
This is perhaps the earliest description of a practice, once widespread in Native American culture and common among the Karankawa, of allowing and even encouraging some people to cross the boundary between the sexes. Such people are often referred to as berdaches, although the term “two-spirit people” is preferred by some writers.
Berdaches were mostly men, and their sexual preferences seem to have varied between tribes and perhaps between individuals. Needless to say, Europeans have almost always assumed that these people were homosexual.
Sixteenth-century Spaniards were used to homosexuality, which they had been taught was a mortal evil, punishable by execution and referred to as the “unnatural sin.” Men whose “love would dare not speak its name” lived perilously and theirs was a necessarily clandestine sexuality. So, when the Spanish survivors were forced by the Indians to do women’s work, the experience must have been utterly humiliating and demeaning.
From the little we know of berdaches, scholars have been able to piece together a picture of a way of life that extended across most of North America. The exact nature of the individual male berdache and his role in society varied from tribe to tribe, but these men who lived in part as women were often very skilled at women’s work, which brought them considerable material wealth. They were respected members of their tribe whose ambiguous gender brought them power, influence, and a kind of talismanic status.
Men seem to have chosen the beradache way in adolescence, when female spirits appeared to them in dreams. In many tribes they were especially associated with the goddess of the moon, and because they crossed the rigid barriers between the sexes, they were held in awe as powerful, magical figures. They were a privileged class who could mix one gender with another because they had two complementary spirits, male and female. On a practical level, they could excel equally at hunting or doing housework. They also went into battle and, as Cabeza de Vaca reported, were often even stronger and more physically powerful than other men. Berdaches, as a result, were feared and treated with great reverence, and they have been associated with shamanism.
If the four survivors were forced to carry out the kind of burdensome tasks usually reserved for Karankawa women, were they in fact forced into the role of berdaches?
Anthropologists believe that it was common in some societies for men to become berdaches as a way of compensating for a lack of women. But why would there have been few Karankawa women?
Dorantes provided the answer in his testimony to the Mexican magistrates. “During the four years I lived among these people,” he claimed, “I saw them kill eleven or twelve children, burying them alive. And that just goes for the male children,” he added, for, extraordinary as it may seem, “they do not leave a single female child alive.”
In primitive cultures infanticide is often a response to famine. It is a kind of birth control. In such extreme circumstances, killing girls is more effective in the long term than killing boys, because fewer females mean fewer children in the future.
In a society where there are many more men than women, some men have to do women’s work. This may be what happened to the Spanish survivors and no doubt to a good many Karankawa themselves.
BY THE SUMMER of 1530, the survivors had separate lives, each eking out an existence as best he could, having occasional passing contact with the others. As berdaches or otherwise, they lived in this limbo until Diego Dorantes, Valdivieso, and Diego de Huelva were murdered by their Indian hosts. That frightened Esteban, Dorantes, and Castillo, and somehow they managed to communicate with one another and conspired to escape. They arranged to meet farther down the coast.
In August 1530, in the steam-room heat of the Texan summer, Andrés Dorantes fled his Indian hosts, who had scattered into the bush, setting about their seasonal business of gathering fruit and preparing for the hunt. He carefully waited until he was out of sight and then he ran for his life. The Indians did not follow him. Perhaps they did not notice him leave; perhaps they did not think him worth the effort. He soon came on another group of hunter-gatherers who called themselves Iguaces and “gladly welcomed Dorantes because they had heard that the Christians were hardworking servants,” or at least that is the explanation Oviedo recorded in his account.
Esteban and Castillo, perhaps cowed by the commotion caused by their companion’s escape, bided their time. Then, as the cold nights of November closed in and the Indians began to migrate toward the coast and the barrier islands, Esteban collected his courage and he too fled into the wilderness. Terrified, he crossed a wide body of water and struck out across the unknown territory beyond. Soon, in the depths of that wilderness, he met Andrés Dorantes, who was by now terrified of the Iguaces and was determined to go back along the coast.
It was a brief encounter between the former master and slave because, despite Dorantes’s warnings, Esteban preferred to join the Iguaces rather than continue with his former master. Any trace of the bond between master and slave seems to have been broken. In time, Esteban was joined among the Iguaces by Alonso del Castillo, the doctor’s son from Salamanca.
Meanwhile, Dorantes managed as best he could, but he struggled, claiming that he was forced to scratch a living for himself, surrounded by a malicious and hostile tribal group known as the Mariames. He was clearly incapable of integrating with their world or ingratiating himself with them in any way. He said that he suffered in abject terror, perpetually fearful that the Indians would murder him. Most of the time, he told the Audiencia, he tried to avoid them. Oviedo wrote that whenever the Indians “came across poor Dorantes, they were very aggressive, and sometimes, in fact often, they rushed up to him and drew their bowstrings back behind their ears, aiming their arrows at his chest. Then they laughed and asked him if he had been afraid.”
SHIPWRECKS RECORDS AN unlikely story about Cabeza de Vaca’s adventures during his five-year isolation from the other survivors. It is a curious piece of testimony in which he claims to have become so disillusioned with the hard life on Galveston that he escaped and turned his hand to trading among the Indians of the coast and the interior. As a merchant, he explained, he was treated well and earned respect.
Cabeza de Vaca’s own account in Shipwrecks is hardly convincing. He claimed that the Indians came to respect him to such an extent that his fame spread far and wide, that he was well treated, and that they gave him food. Why, one is impelled to ask, did he not use this preferential position to proceed in the direction of Pánuco and return to civilization? If, as he claims, he had the run of the coast down to the Bay of the Holy Spirit and traded with the Indians there, why did he not come across Dorantes, Castillo, and Esteban on one of these journeys?
These questions were apparently asked by someone in Mexico, or perhaps later in Spain. Cabeza de Vaca found himself compelled to offer an implausible answer. “The reason I waited for so long” to escape “was so that I could take another Christian with me who was still on the island, a man called Lope de Oviedo.” Each year, he claimed, he went back to the island to try to persuade Lope to leave with him, but every time Lope put it off for the following year. As one modern editor of Shipwrecks, Juan Maura, points out, such self-sacrifice would, unquestionably, have made Cabeza de Vaca a saint. But, while Cabeza de Vaca was many things, not all of them bad, he was definitely not a saint. After all, he had tried to abandon all his men at Malhado as soon as he saw a chance of escaping on Dorantes’s boat. To have waited so long for Lope would have been wholly out of character.
It would be all too easy to dismiss his story of becoming a merchant as a lie, a self-aggrandizing addition made up for the Spanish court, if it were not that the same story was recorded by Oviedo, but with one crucial difference: in Oviedo, Dorantes is the merchant, not Cabeza de Vaca. Did one man copy an untrue story from the other, or is the story itself actually founded in fact? Was there really a foreign merchant trading among the Karankawa in the 1530s?
Oviedo was, without doubt, confused as he gave an account of Dorantes’s life as a merchant. He clearly had trouble making sense of his sources. So much so, that he manages to have Andrés Dorantes in two places at once in his account. This has led scholars to assume that Oviedo’s account was wrong and that Cabeza de Vaca had been telling the truth. But there is a problem with this reading that has never been properly dealt with.
Oviedo was a conscientious historian who was scrupulous about his sources. He clearly realized that there was something wrong with the material he had in front of him. He was, we think, working with Andrés Dorantes’s partially revised copy of the official report. It was a much-traveled manuscript, and he seems to have come across a passage of testimony that was out of its place in the proper order. This may have been a loose sheet of paper that had been carelessly misplaced in the document. It may have been a mistake made by the person who copied down the version he had in front of him. We are unlikely to ever know the answer to these questions, as the original is probably lost forever. But Oviedo tried to make sense of the confusion by using the material he had in front of him. He worked hard to make it fit the facts and the context. And, after struggling with the material, he had clearly concluded that the merchant had been called Dorantes, and to make that point as plain as possible he stated it on three separate occasions.
But although Oviedo was confused and his lack of clarity affected his account, it is possible to demonstrate that neither Andrés nor Diego Dorantes could possibly have been the merchant.
However, there is a third “Dorantes” who has been overlooked. Esteban was frequently referred to in the contemporary documents as “Esteban Dorantes,” because it was common practice for a slave to be given his master’s surname. So, perhaps Mendoza and the magistrates asked Esteban what had happened to him during this period and perhaps this is what he told them? Perhaps Oviedo’s sense of hierarchy then led him to overlook Esteban completely, leaving him confused because he could not fit either one of the Dorantes cousins into the role of the merchant?
I have no idea of the true identity of the Spanish merchant. It seems to me to be equally unlikely that Esteban, Andrés Dorantes, Diego Dorantes, Cabeza de Vaca, or anyone else lived for five years as a renowned merchant, plying his trade in shells, flints, and animal pelts throughout the Karankawa nation. But history has always accepted Cabeza de Vaca’s claim that he was that merchant because that story was published in Shipwrecks in 1542. It seems to me that Esteban has an equal claim to that role, for what it is worth. If whimsy requires us to have a merchant, then let the first “European” trading venture in the geographical area of the modern United States belong to Esteban. Let the origin myth be that the first Old World businessman in Texas was African!
THE NOTION THAT Esteban Dorantes became the merchant may be appealing in all its multiple ironies, but it may be more useful to consider how Castillo and Esteban spent their time while nobody became a merchant and Dorantes lived in fear among the Mariames.
Shipwrecks and Oviedo have little to say about Esteban and Castillo during their stay around Matagorda and Corpus Christi Bay. But from the moment Castillo came across Esteban living with the Iguaces, the two men seem to have stayed together, and they evidently formed a strong partnership.
We cannot be sure how they spent their days, but they seem to have established a comfortable rapport with the Indians. Dorantes apparently told Cabeza de Vaca that while he himself lived in daily fear for his life, Castillo and Esteban were reluctant to leave the shelter provided by the Igauces Indians. Presumably their experience was more felicitous than Dorantes’s calamitous misery.
The Iguaces perhaps took Esteban and Castillo down to the bucolic banks of the nearby river, where there were plentiful groves of wild trees that bore a fruit strangely like walnuts. Here, Esteban was perhaps the first African to eat that quintessentially American nut, the pecan, and the stream is still known as the River Nueces, from the Spanish nuez, meaning walnut. It is still land where myriads of pecans grow.
They helped to stalk the deer that came down to the coast. They played their parts as their new companions spread out across the landscape, just inland from the where the deer were grazing. At high tide, they advanced together, carrying burning torches, setting alight the undergrowth, forcing their prey down over the dunes and cliffs and into the olive-green sea. Then they waited patiently for the tide to ebb, leaving the drowned beasts washed up on the beaches below.
Esteban and Castillo sucked and chewed on the succulent venison, the meat of kings, salted by the sea and barbecued over the sweet, smoky coals of mesquite wood or slowly stewed over a low fire. They gladly joined the Indians in their ritual dances to celebrate the successful hunt, giving thanks to their ancestors, gods, and spirits. There they smoked tobacco for the first time, and, with the full moon rising, in the shelter of a large wigwam, they watched as the men brewed up the leaves of the yaupon trees to make Carolina tea.
The leaves were carefully roasted in the bottom of a cooking pot. Water was poured on and brought to the boil, taken off the heat, and then boiled up again. Finally, the Mariames stirred the liquid with a dried-out squash, scooping it up and pouring it back, cooling it, until a yellow froth foamed on top.
With grave demeanor the men drank freely from this vessel, passing it from man to man around the circle. Then one of the Indians rose and began to move around the fire, bent double, almost on all fours, his face and body masked by animal skins. The men began to chant, their voices rising and falling with a melancholy cadence. Some drew out gourd rattles and set up a beat; others made a droning noise, drawing a stick back and forth across a corrugated piece of wood, like a washboard. A flute was whistled in time to the rhythm. All night the Indians danced and on into the next day and then the next, until, exhausted, they collapsed to languish in a torpor of calm, lying about their camp, resting.
THERE IS A long “rogue” passage in Shipwrecks, similar to the merchant myth, which contends that on Galveston, Malhado, the Indians “wanted us to become doctors, without testing us in any way, nor asking us for our qualifications.” It seems likely that this flippant but heavy-handed irony was inspired by a decree issued by the Spanish crown in 1535, the year before the survivors testified at the Audiencia, which ordered Mendoza to prevent people from “practicing as a doctor, surgeon, or pharmacist, or describing themselves as holding a degree or being a doctor unless they have passed the relevant university examinations.”
Shipwrecks describes the Karankawa of Malhado as animists who believed that rocks, trees, and other objects each had a spirit. As soon as one of the Indians fell sick, they would call for a doctor, who would blow on the patient and use his hands to expel the sickness. If this did not work, he would cut into the patient’s skin where the pain was and then suck at the flesh all around the wound. He would then cauterize the wound and blow gently on the crusting scab.
The Indians, we are told, insisted that the survivors take on the role of medicine men. “The way in which we healed the sick,” Shipwrecks explains, “was to cross ourselves, blow on the patient, recite the Lord’s Prayer and a Hail Mary, pray as best we could to God, and then make the sign of the cross over the patient.”
But it is impossible to believe that the survivors first became medicine men on Malhado, in 1528. Neither Oviedo nor Shipwrecks mentions shamanism again until all four had abandoned the Karankawa and the coast of Texas altogether, six years later, in 1534. If they had been working as revered medicine men during that time, then their experiences on the coast of Texas would have been quite different from the conditions of “slavery” and isolation that they in fact described. What is more, any such experiences as shamans would have inevitably been recorded in the two accounts. The most likely explanation is that the long description of shamanism on Malhado was added to the account of their experiences on the island after the manuscript of Shipwrecks had been written. Moreover, that description of shamanism itself was either made up especially for that purpose, or—as I think more likely—was moved from somewhere farther on in the original text, the place in the story which corresponded with the real moment when the survivors first began to experiment as shamans. But what was the point of this major manipulation of the story, and who was responsible?
A compelling explanation, and the most convincing, is that when the publishers acquired the manuscript from Cabeza de Vaca, they were unhappy with the story as he had told it. They were well aware that the real fascination Shipwrecks would hold for readers lay in the bizarre stories of shamanism, miracles, and extraordinary survival that were buzzing around the courtly world in Spain. The miraculous nature of their salvation was the source of the survivors’ celebrity. The traveler’s tale, a tall story that was ostensibly true, would sell books and make money. But they had a problem: that exciting material made up only a small fraction of the manuscript, and it came much too close to the end. There were eye-catching accounts of cannibalism, dissent, mutiny, and death, to be sure, but they needed a fuller, more titillating version of events if Shipwrecks was to sell, and they needed that version to be nearer the “top of the piece,” as it were. The publishers arranged for the necessary changes to be made, but in an age when printing was still an infant art and publishing an inexperienced trade, the results were far from seamless. Moreover, the editors’ task was complicated by the fact that a year before the publication of Shipwrecks, Cabeza de Vaca had left Spain for South America, so he was not on hand to do the rewriting.
So where and when did the survivors really first become medicine men?
There is no conclusive answer to this question, because Oviedo and Shipwrecks treat the whole business of the survivors’ shamanism quite differently. But the evidence, such as it is, suggests that Castillo and Esteban began to work as doctors, or, more accurately, witch doctors, among the Iguaces, in 1533 and 1534. Meanwhile Andrés Dorantes was suffering his personal purgatory surrounded by the hostile Mariames, and Cabeza de Vaca was isolated near Malhado. According to this theory, Shipwrecks and Oviedo are silent about Castillo’s and Esteban’s becoming doctors at this stage in the story because Cabeza de Vaca and Dorantes preferred to suppress their rivals’ success in favor of their own accounts of suffering and isolation. It may be that the rogue passage describing shamanism at Malhado was in fact based on the testimony provided by Castillo or Esteban to the Audiencia in about 1533 and 1534, but was moved back to 1528 in Shipwrecks.
My reasons for thinking that Castillo and Esteban began to work as shamans or doctors while they were among the Iguaces will be fully explained shortly, drawing on the accounts of healing rituals and miraculous cures in both Oviedo and Shipwrecks. For the moment, I confine myself to making one point: it does make sense that during this extended period, when Esteban and Castillo were isolated among the Iguaces, they should have had time to understand the complex Indian culture of their hosts. And while Castillo understood rudimentary European medical practice, the Indians’ animism was as natural to an African like Esteban as it was to foreign to men like Dorantes and Cabeza de Vaca.
The apparent assertion that Native American and African religions and belief systems should be comparable or similar runs the risk, of course, of implying that Africans and Indians were primitive peoples who shared a base, uncivilized humanity. This is the language of colonialism that was used to justify imperial oppression and explain empire as the civilizing mission of sophisticated Europeans. But my argument here is simply that European Christianity in the sixteenth century was intellectually determined to close off beliefs and ideas associated with other religions. This was especially true of Spain, where the Inquisition embodied a paranoid fear of spiritual difference. By contrast, American and African religions readily incorporated the gods and rituals of others into their own systems of belief. Even the great Islamic lords and kings of the sub-Saharan world recognized the power of pagan spirits.
Esteban was much better equipped than either Cabeza de Vaca or Dorantes to become a shaman. Of the Spanish survivors, only Castillo, with the open-mindedness of youth and some rudimentary medical knowledge, was well placed to help him.
The archives of the Inquisition in Spain’s former colonies contain thousands of documents that demonstrate how easily Africans and Indians adopted each other’s beliefs and spirituality in addition to Christianity. But such spiritual promiscuity baffled and frightened the Spanish authorities, which, ironically, is why the Inquisition created the documentary record, preserving precious evidence of African-Indian relations.
A century after the Narváez expedition was washed up on the shores of Texas, the Mexican Inquisition became especially concerned about a black witch doctor called Lucas Olola. The record of that case is merely one among many, but it is a good example of how Africans and Indians interacted. The events that had concerned the Spanish authorities took place near Pánuco, only two hundred miles south of Corpus Christi, where Esteban and Castillo spent 1533 and 1534.
The Guastesco Indians of Pánuco formed part of a continuous Indian culture, known to ethnographers as the Western Gulf Culture, and they often performed a ritual in which they carried a complex flower arrangement that formed an effigy of one of their gods as they danced to the beat of a drum. The Inquisition had heard that “blacks, mulattoes, and mestizos also dance” to that god, and “in particular a man called Lucas Olola,” a black slave who cured the Indians of their illnesses by “burning incense and sucking.”
One of the witnesses called by the Inquisitors said he had seen Lucas Olola “dressed in the costume that the Indians used for this dance. He pretended to levitate, appearing dead, and then fell to the ground. He then stayed unconscious for a long time, blowing foam out of his mouth. Suddenly, he raised himself with great fury and said that the spirit had come to him.” In that state, the document records, he would “walk through walls, going in and out of the houses.”
According to the Inquisitors, all the Guatescos were convinced that illness and death were caused by witch doctors. They now believed Olola’s claims to be a witch doctor, and there were reports that many Indians had died of fear because they believed that he could do them harm. The officials complained that he went about behaving like a “divine and powerful lord” and, like all witch doctors, “he robbed the poor Indians of all their possessions and even their women.” They found him so terrifying that if he fancied some girl or other, her relatives—her father, her brothers, and even her husband—would let Olola take his pleasure with her.
There are evident parallels between Olola’s story and the survivors’ accounts of their own shamanism among the Indians of Texas. It is also worth noting that one account of Marcos de Niza’s later expedition stated that Esteban had fallen out “with the friars because he took along the women who were given to him, and collected turquoises and accumulated everything,” whether we believe that account to be an approximation of the truth or merely salacious gossip.