It was the evening of the twenty-first of September, 1528. Five of the oddest looking boats ever launched on any sea were drawn up on the shore of La Baya de Cavallos, where not a horse was in sight, though there had been twoscore a fortnight ago. On the morrow the one-eyed commander of the Spaniards, Pamfilo de Narvaez, would marshal his ragamuffin expedition into those boats, in the hope of reaching Mexico by sea.
"We shall tell of it when we are grandfathers—if the sea does not take us within a week," said Andres Dorantes with a sigh. "I think that God does not waste miracles on New Spain."
"Miracles? It is nothing less than a miracle that this fleet was built," said Cabeça de Vaca valiantly. And indeed he had some reason for saying so.
Narvaez, with a grant from the King which covered all the territory between the Atlantic and the Rio de los Palmas in Mexico, had staked his entire private fortune on this venture. He had landed in Baya de le Cruz—now Tampa Bay—on the day before Easter. The Indians had some gold which they said came "from the north." Cabeça, who was treasurer of the expedition, strongly advised against proceeding through a totally unknown country on this very sketchy information. But Narvaez consulted the pilot, who said he knew of a harbor some distance to the west, ordered the ships to meet him there, and with forty horsemen and two hundred and sixty men on foot, struck boldly into the interior.
It was an amazing country. It had magnificent forests and almost impassable swamps, gorgeous tropical flowers and black bogs infested with snakes, alligators and hostile Indians, game of every kind and dense jungles into which it retreated. There seemed to be no towns, no grain-land and no gold-bearing mountains. The persevering explorers crossed half a dozen large rivers and many small ones, wading when they could, building rafts or swimming when the water was deep. After between three and four months of this, half-starved, shaken with swamp fever, weary and bedraggled, they reached the first harbor they had found upon the coast they followed, but no ships were there. Whether the ships had been wrecked, or put in somewhere only to meet with destruction at the hands of the Indians, they never knew.
Narvaez called his officers into consultation, one at a time, as to the best course to pursue in this desperate case. They had no provisions, a third of the men were sick and more were dropping from exhaustion every day, and all agreed that unless they could get away and reach Mexico while some of them could still work, there was very little chance that they would ever leave the place at all. But they had no tools, no workmen and no sailors, and nothing to eat while the ships were a-building, even if they knew how to build them. They gave it up for that night and prayed for direction.
Next day one of the men proved to have been a carpenter, and another came to Cabeça de Vaca with a plan for making bellows of deerskin with a wooden frame and nozzle, so that a forge could be worked and whatever spare iron they had could be pounded into rude tools. The officers took heart. Cross-bows, stirrups, spurs, horse-furniture, reduced to scrap-iron, furnished axes, hammers, saws and nails. There was plenty of timber in the forests. Those not able to do hard work stripped palmetto leaves to use in the place of tow for calking and rigging. Every third day one of the horses was killed, the meat served out to the sick and the working party, the manes and tails saved to twist into rope with palmetto fiber, and the skin of the legs taken off whole and tanned for water bottles. At four different times a selected body of soldiers went out to get corn from the Indians, peaceably if possible, by force if necessary, and on this, with the horse-meat and sometimes fish or sea-food caught in the bay, the camp lived and toiled for sixteen desperate days. A Greek named Don Theodoro knew how to make pitch for the calking, from pine resin. For sails the men pieced together their shirts. Not the least wearisome part of their labor was stone-hunting, for there were almost no stones in the country, and they must have anchors. But at last the boats were finished, of twenty-two cubits in length, with oars of savin (fir), and fifty of the men had died from fever, hardship or Indian arrows. Each boat must carry between forty-five and fifty of those who remained, and this crowded them so that it was impossible to move about, and weighted them until the gunwales were hardly a hand's breadth above the water. It would have been madness to venture out to sea, and they crept along the coast, though they well knew that in following all the inlets of that marshy shore the length of the voyage would be multiplied several times over. When they had been out a week they captured five Indian canoes, and with the timbers of these added a few boards to the side of each galley. This made it possible to steer in something like a direct line toward Mexico.
On October 30, about the time of vespers, Cabeça de Vaca, who happened to be in the lead, discovered the mouth of what seemed to be an immense river. There they anchored among islands. They found that the volume of water brought down by this river was so great that it freshened the sea-water even three miles out. They went up the river a little way to try to get fuel to parch their corn, half a handful of raw corn being the entire ration for a day. The current and a strong north wind, however, drove them back. When they sounded, a mile and a half from shore, a line of thirty fathoms found no bottom. After this Narvaez with three of the boats kept on along the shore, but the boat commanded by Castillo and Dorantes, and that of Cabeça de Vaca, stood out to sea before a fair east wind, rowing and sailing, for four days. They never again saw or heard of the remainder of the fleet.
On November 5 the wind became a gale. All night the boats drifted, the men exhausted with toil, hunger and cold. Cabeça de Vaca and the shipmaster were the only men capable of handling an oar in their boat. Near morning they heard the tumbling of waves on a beach, and soon after, a tremendous wave struck the boat with a force that hurled her up on the beach and roused the men who seemed dead, so that they crept on hands and knees toward shelter in a ravine. Here some rain-water was found, a fire was made and they parched their corn, and here they were found by some Indians who brought them food. They still had some of their trading stores, from which they produced colored beads and hawk-bells. After resting and collecting provisions the indomitable Spaniards dug their boat out of the sand and made ready to go on with the voyage.
They were but a little way from shore when a great wave struck the battered craft, and the cold having loosened their grip on the oars the boat was capsized and some of the crew drowned. The rest were driven ashore a second time and lost literally everything they had. Fortunately some live brands were left from their fire, and while they huddled about the blaze the Indians appeared and offered them hospitality. To some of the party this seemed suspicious. Were the Indians cannibals? Even when they were warmed and fed in a comfortable shelter nobody dared to sleep.