Chronicle of the Narvaez Expedition

The expedition’s dwindling supplies and difficulty exploring the Floridian interior become severe as many men fall ill. Extricating themselves from the dire situation is exacerbated by the fact that they have no idea where the ships are. Ill health and lack of supplies are only worsened by the Apalachees’ scorched earth and guerilla tactics. The demoralized Europeans are hungry, thirsty, wounded, exhausted, and have found little to nothing of any value to them.

Readers may question another episode highlighting Cabeza de Vaca’s leadership skills. He mentions that some of the horsemen want to leave the group and fend for themselves, since they can travel quicker without being encumbered by those on foot. Nevertheless, Cabeza de Vaca convinces them not to desert. It is possible that this did not occur, though if Narváez was too sick to lead, then as second-in-command, de Vaca would have had the authority to command the horsemen to remain, perhaps even threatening them with a loss of honor should they abandon the expedition. As pointed out earlier, losing honor was no trifling matter among the conquistadores. Cabeza de Vaca would also have been able to resort to military punishment—making a return to Spain difficult, for example.

It is surprising that the expedition resorts to building boats to sail to Pánuco (modern Mexico), rather than march back south to their disembarkation point or overland to Mexico. This decision highlights how desperate and weak they were, and how difficult the terrain and skirmishes with the Indigenous people were. During the construction of the boats, Cabeza de Vaca makes several comments that are perplexing, underscoring that he is writing from memory and also might be exaggerating certain difficulties for dramatic effect. In Chapter 8, Cabeza de Vaca reports that no one knew how to build a boat, though, a few lines later he mentions that one of the men is a ship’s carpenter—someone who would have had at least a rudimentary knowledge of shipbuilding. Cabeza de Vaca recounts also that another man volunteered to make other materials needed for their boats—bellows, nails, etc.—identifying him as a smith. Possibly Cabeza de Vaca means that there was no one who had been previously worked as a shipbuilder. Either way, building seaworthy craft under the conditions they were in would be nigh impossible even for a master shipbuilder, so the episode illustrates the ingenuity and resourcefulness of the conquistadores—they built boats that could weather the sea and were large enough to hold 50 men from whatever was on hand: trees, their shirts (sails), their armor and weapons, horsehair, etc.

In Chapter 9, Cabeza de Vaca’s makes an important statement about the Indigenous dwellings the expedition encounters. He describes the dwellings as permanent, meaning that their inhabitants were not nomadic. Historians and anthropologists divide Indigenous Americans into sedentary, semi-sedentary, or non-sedentary groups: Sedentary people build permanent dwellings and do not migrate, semi-sedentary people build dwellings that are easy to put up or take down to migrate to different areas in search of food, and non-sedentary people have very simple dwellings and never remain in any one spot for long. Cabeza de Vaca provides important clues to the pre-colonial demographics of Florida and the southern border region of the United States and northern Mexico, especially since his account is our only evidence that some of these peoples existed.

The Narváez expedition failed in every sense of the word. When Narváez tells Cabeza de Vaca that he has no orders and to simply push onwards after losing contact with the other three vessels, we can see the peril facing the Europeans—the situation has become so dangerous that no one can be expected to aid another. We also see Narváez’s lack of organization—a detail which is detrimental to Narváez but beneficial to Cabeza de Vaca. Despite the loss of three of the boats and the difficulty in maintaining contact with one another, Cabeza de Vaca maintains a clear head and seeks for orders from his commanding officer. However, Narváez, by providing no orders to his subordinate, admits failure and relinquishes command.

Chapters 9 and 10 again illustrate the difficulty the men of the expedition and Indigenous people have dealing with each other. Often, the groups are friendly at first, but do not remain so. Of course, Indigenous behavior here mirrors that of the conquistadores: Both vacillate between being peaceful and warlike, as the Spanish were never in agreement about how to treat Indigenous people.