Welcome to Cabeza de Baca.

Episode 10, He Who Has a Why can endure anyhow.

I'm Brandon Seal.

Lope de Oviedo hadn't left Galveston Island since he'd been shipwrecked there in November of 1528.

Maybe he had crossed over to the mainland a few times with the natives who kept him as something between a slave and a ward.

But mentally, he was stuck on the island of ill fate, as his companion, Cabez de Vaca called it,

and he couldn't be convinced to leave.

Oviedo had been one of only a handful of men on Cabesse de Vaca's raft,

who could even stand up after their harrowing two-month-long drift through the Gulf of Mexico,

during which they survived on a handful of corn a day and almost no fresh water.

Nevertheless, after they were thrown on to Galveston Beach, it was Oviedo who mustered up the strength to scale a tree and then go exploring for several miles.

It was Oviedo, in fact, who had first found the native Cavoque village, where he, Cabeza de Baca, and the rest of the men on the raft,

found a refuge during that first winter. But that first winter saw 75 or so of the surviving 90 Navice Expeditionaries on Galveston Island die of a mysterious stomach disease, along with half

of the Cavoques as well who had taken them in.

And as if watching most of his companions die by expelling their guts out wasn't bad enough, there were additional horrors.

Five of the expeditionaries had refused to go live with the natives, resolving to make it on their own there on the beach.

It was only a matter of weeks before they had to resort to cannibalism,

shocking the Kaboquez and nearly leading to the executions of the other remaining surviving expeditionaries.

Then slowly, over the next few months,

Oviedo watched as the Kabokz turned from gracious hosts to indifferent

neighbors to actively hostile masters, once the expeditionaries had worn out their welcome and

become little more than useless extra mouths to feed. Then, in the spring of 1529, the mysterious illness

...