Welcome to Cabece de Baca.

Episode 7, Naked in the New World. I'm Brandon Seal.

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's men spent a fitful first night on Galveston Island.

They had been the crew of one of a five-raft flotilla that had drifted along the northern rim of the Gulf of Mexico without food and largely without water for the last few weeks.

The remaining four rafts were nowhere to be seen, and it wouldn't have been unreasonable

to assume that they'd just been swallowed up by the gulf.

Cabace de Vaca had all but given himself up for dead just the night before, only to be

awakened by his raft crashing onto the Galveston shoreline.

Most of his men were so weak by that point that they could only crawl onto the beach.

Yet it wasn't the trauma of their voyage or the state of near starvation in which they found

themselves that kept Kavese de Vaca's men up that first night. No, it was that the last thing

they had seen as light faded was 100 Native Americans armed with man-length long bows turning their backs on them.

Their intentions unclear.

Kavisa de Vaca had assured his men that the Indians were going to bring them aid.

But the expeditionary's last few encounters with natives had given them little reason for hope.

In each previous instance, their efforts

at diplomacy had been rewarded by violent assaults, and so most of the men, probably, expected

the same from the Caboques, as the natives of Galveston Island called themselves. As expected,

the Cavalkes did return to the beach the next morning.

Yet to the surprise of the more skeptical expeditionaries, they arrived carrying only dried fish and cooked cattail roots.

The expeditionaries devoured it all, everything, so that the Cavokas had to actually return to their village and bring them seconds.

The expeditionaries repaid this kindness with what small gifts they could,

...