Welcome to Cabeza de Baca.

Episode 24, The Ideal Conquest.

I'm Brandon Seale.

From the minute that Alvar Noyes Cabece de Baca,

Alonzo Castillo, Andres Dorantes, and

Esteban, the Black Arab from Azenmore, had walked into that Castilian slavers camp in April

of 1536, it was clear that there was no way they were ever really going to go back to the Native

American world.

Yet these four expeditionaries hadn't yet fully re-entered the Castilian world either,

and this started to really bother the slavers.

First off, the expeditionaries refused to put any clothes on.

It would be months, in fact, before they could even tolerate the feel of clothes on their skin again.

Second, it also took them a few weeks before they could even fall asleep on a bed, preferring

to just curl up on the hard ground like a dog.

Third, they still insisted on carrying around their ridiculous so-called insignia of authority,

which to the slavers just look like a couple of dried-out

gourds. Fourth, and this starts to get to the real issue, it unsettled the slavers to see the

way that the natives followed around and hung on every word of their four children of the sun,

as they referred to the expeditionaries. And fifth, and worst of all, the expeditionaries had made

no attempt to hide their opposition to the slaver's business. And in fact, they'd actively

prevented them from rounding up the 600 natives who had generously brought the slaver's food

at the expeditionaries' request. And so the slavers decided that they needed to get rid of these four guys.

...