Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca.

Episode 5, The Gulf. I'm Brandon Seal.

242, mostly naked men and five very crude rafts floated along the coastline of the Florida Panhandle in late September 1528.

They were packed in almost 50 men to a raft with just enough room for each man to lay down if he didn't mind rubbing shoulders with his neighbor.

They didn't dare venture far from the shore in their 30-foot-long vessels,

since those vessels rode barely six inches above the waterline and wouldn't have fared well in open seas.

To the extent they could, the flotilla of rafts stayed in waist-deep shallows,

carried along by their sails that they had fashioned out of their shirts and pants.

For the first seven days of the Niveivice Expeditionaries Gulf Voyage, things went surprisingly well.

A couple of days in, they came into possession of some abandoned canoes that some terrified natives had left behind when they saw them.

The expeditionaries lashed these canoes to their rafts like outriggers, which gave

them more stability and helped buoy them a few more inches above the waterline. And they also found

that when those natives had abandoned their canoes, they had left behind some dried fish, which was a

welcome addition to the expeditionary's already tiresome diet of corn and dried horse meat.

Yet as the rafts plotted along through October of 1528,

there were growing reasons to be concerned.

All along the coast, smoke signals began to rise up,

as the tribes began to warn their brethren of the starving,

grabby gangs of men floating toward their

shores. As a result, most of the natives pulled back their lodges and supplies back into

the interior, denying the expeditionaries any chance to reprovision. Accordingly, the corn and

horse meat on the rafts soon began to run out. And then an even more serious problem

...