Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca.

Episode 8, Castaways. I'm Brandon Seale.

By the time they reached Galveston Island in November of 1528, the surviving members of the Panfilo the Narvaise Expedition no longer harbored any pretensions to being conquistadors.

Even calling them expeditionaries seems a bit generous, given that they didn't know where they were or where they were trying to go.

The Narvaise Expeditionaries were, most properly speaking, mere castaways by this point,

shipwreck survivors barely holding onto life on a Gulf Coast barrier island somewhere near

modern-day Galveston, Texas.

Indeed, Cabesa de Vaca would title the second edition of his account, Nauphrakios,

a term that we can translate literally as shipwrecks, but that more broadly also means calamities or misfortunes. Because that

is what Cabesa da Vaca's fellow castaways had mostly suffered since they had landed in North

America. After having trapes through a large swath of the Florida Peninsula and lost communication with their ships,

the Narvaise Expeditionaries had been forced to venture back into the Gulf of Mexico on five dubious watercraft of their own construction.

After a few weeks of drifting west along the northern Gulf Rim, the Mississippi River scattered the flotilla

and eventually

tossed Cabez de Vaca's raft onto Galveston Island, or perhaps nearby Follett Island, but we'll stick

with Galveston for convenience. There on Galveston Island, the expeditionaries had been discovered

by a hundred or so natives, Cavalas, they called themselves in their own language,

who were so moved by the old worlders pitiful condition that they actually cried when they saw them.

They had mercy on them

and actually physically carried the exhausted expeditionaries

on their backs to their village on the other side of the island

where they fetid the 40 or so survivors with food,

...