five of them—here, take them—which, the Spaniards thought, shone like emeralds. Emeralds treated like common flint for arrowheads! For such treasures, Indians went on a long trail crossing the deserts and mountains to the great house-cities of the north on the river, and traded yellow, scarlet, blue and orange macaw feathers, and the tiny green breast feathers of little parrots for them. At the right times of the year the trail was well-travelled.
The four travellers followed it to the south, and took with them in experience and memory all they had seen and all they had been told, that would soon reveal a whole new world to those whom they at last met—Spanish soldiers bearded and helmeted, mounted on horses, armed with swords and lances, at the outposts of the slave trade in the province of New Galicia whose governor was the former governor of the River of Palms, Nuño de Guzmán.
They were delivered from their prison of space. The wilderness of their tremendous passage ceased to be an abstraction as soon as they found succor amongst those who could hear what they had to tell, Spaniard to Spaniard.
* One more survivor of the Narváez entry was still alive, a prisoner of Indians in Florida. He was Juan Ortiz, who suffered abominable captivity before his rescue a few years later by De Soto, and died before seeing his Spanish homeland again.
4.
The Travellers’ Tales
They were given clothes to wear, and after seven years of nakedness they could scarcely endure the feeling of cloth. They were given beds to sleep in, but for many nights could not sleep anywhere but on the ground. Their rescuers wept and prayed with them giving thanks for their delivery out of the barbarian lands. But there were bitter discoveries to make again of rapacity and greed among their own kind as represented by Governor Guzmán’s men at Culiacan. Still, every sense of the value inherent in their extraordinary—and exclusive—news of vast new kingdoms helped to urge Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions on to the city of Mexico, where they arrived on Sunday, July 25, 1536. Here there were two men who, more than anyone else, wanted to see them, to question them, and to glean their treasure of information.
One was the Viceroy, Don Antonio Mendoza, maintaining in his palace a state proper to the direct representative of the Emperor Charles V, with sixty Indian servants, three dozen gentlemen in his bodyguard, and trumpets and kettledrums.
The other—how could it have been otherwise so long as he breathed?—the other was the Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, Cortés, starving for a renewal of conquest, and gnawing on his pride like a dog on a bare bone. Still restless, he still saw the new continent as exclusively the vessel of his aging energies.
The sabbatical refugees were splendidly received, now by the Viceroy, now by Cortés, and given fine clothes and other gifts. On the feast day of St. James the Apostle, a bull fight was arranged with a fiesta to honor the heroes. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was put up at the viceregal palace. Interesting interviews followed.
What was the extent of the seven-year journey?
The travellers drew a map for the Viceroy and on it traced their immense passage that spanned the continent from ocean to ocean.
And what had befallen them in that seven-year passion of survival?
The travellers had much to tell:
How seven years before with the whole company they had set out with the Grand Constable in Florida to find the rich inland country of Apalachen where they were promised gold and food, and how when they got there all they saw was a starving tribe of belligerent Indians; how days of roaming brought them nothing better; how the Governor fell ill and irresolute; how they tried to find the sea again and, having found it, how they wondered whether they could build boats in which to go by water to the River of Palms; how they had no tools or crafts with which to build boats; and yet how one day a soldier volunteered to make pipes out of tree branches and bellows out of deerskins; how they turned their stirrups, spurs, crossbows into nails, axes, saws and other tools, and set to work; how in twenty days with only one real carpenter among their number they constructed five boats about thirty feet long, caulked with palm fibre, and rigged with ropes made from horsehair, and sails made from Spanish shirts, and oars carved out of willow; how two hundred and two men embarked for the River of Palms in the five boats on the twenty-second of September in 1528, and how when all were loaded, the sea reached to within the spread of a thumb and little finger of the gunwales, and how men could hardly move for fear of swamping; how nobody in the party knew navigation; how they drifted west in hunger, and thirsted when the water containers made from the whole skins of horses’ legs rotted and would not serve further; how it was when men died from drinking sea water; how when they landed now and then to forage they were attacked by Indians; how winds and currents drove the boats apart from one another; how the Captain-General dissolved his command, saying it was each man for himself, and how he himself in his boat vanished out to sea one night in high weather and was never again seen; how two of the boats were blown ashore and broken on a barren island near the coast; how those who escaped, now only eighty in number, came to land naked and skeletal; how they passed the winter there amidst Indians, digging in the shallows for roots until January; how with spring all went to hunt blackberries; how they agreed to demands by Indians to effect cures of the sick, praying the Pater Noster and the Ave María, which healed the infirm; how certain Indians on meeting one another sat and wept for half an hour, then how he who was visited rose and gave the visitor all he owned who went away often without a word; how they were enslaved as root diggers by the Indians; how Núñez Cabeza de Vaca became a trader between coastal and inland people, taking from the shore such things as sea snail, conch shell for use as knives, sea beads, and berries, and bringing from inland in return skins, reeds or canes to make arrows of, hide thongs, ochre for face-painting, and tassels of deer hair; how one of their companions refused to leave the island to try for freedom overland, and how Núñez Cabeza de Vaca tried each year for several years to persuade him, and, having succeeded, only saw him give up and return to the island where he died; how others of the company died until eighty became fifteen, and those became four, threatened and terrorized by Indians through the years of captivity and constant movement from sea to plains, from plains to rivers, according to the seasons of food; how the company sliced and dried the flesh of their companions who died, and ate it to live; how the Indian people ate ant eggs, and spiders, worms, lizards, poisonous snakes (even those that bore at the tips of their tails little horny pods that shook with the sound of castanets), the droppings of animals, powdered fishbones, and other things to be remembered but not told; how the mosquitoes caused such torment that the people at times set fire to forests and grasses to drive them off; how they saw buffalo, some tawny, some black, with small horns; how the ground fire-hot from the sun in summer burned their bare feet as they wandered naked; how the four friends were separated many times when their Indian masters of different tribes met and parted; how one day after years they heard of the remains of one of the five poor boats and were shown by Indians the weapons and clothes of the occupants who had been too weak to resist as they were killed by the people of the coast; how the friends escaped and came to friendlier tribes inland among whom they became, all four of them, powerful doctors of medicine, making cures by the grace of God, and even as Núñez de Cabeza de Vaca did, restoring to life an Indian admitted to be dead; how after six months with those people, in famine, they found the prickly pears ripening and regaled themselves though the fruit was green and so milky it burned their mouths; how when the Indians set them to scraping skins to cure they scraped diligently and ate the scraps which would sustain them for two or three days; how going naked under the sun they shed their skins twice a year like snakes, and carried open sores on their shoulders and breasts, and were torn by thorns in the heavy brush of the inland country; how they came to be with other Indians who were astonished by their appearance and who overcoming their first fear put their hands on the faces and bodies of the strangers and then on their own faces and bodies almost as though to banish the
