Source ID: 243
Author: Vaca, Cabeza de
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Published: 1528-01-01
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Online link: #http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/cdv/rel.htm#
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Race described: Spanish, Indian
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Narrative of the Narvaez Expedition
Author: Vaca, Cabeza de
Primary project: 1
Collection: 0
Published: 1528-01-01
Medium: 0
Full text? 1
Online link: #http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch/cdv/rel.htm#
Primary doc? 1
Published in: 159
Race described: Spanish, Indian
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57 Timeline Entries
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ON 17 JUNE 1527, Governor Pámfilo de Narváez left the port of San Lúcar de Barrameda authorized and commanded by Your Majesty to conquer and govern the provinces which should be encountered from the River of Palms [the Río Grande] to the cape of Florida.
ON THAT DAY the Governor hove in with a brig he had bought in Trindad and, with him, a pilot by the name of Miruelo, who had been hired because he claimed he had been to the River of Palms and knew the whole northern coast. The Governor had also purchased
THAT SAME DAY [April 14] the comptroller Alonso Enríquez ventured to an island in the bay and called to the Indians, who came and stayed with him quite a while, trading fish and venison for trinkets.
The day following--Good Friday--the Governor debarked
THE DAY FOLLOWING, the Governor resolved to explore inland, taking the Commissary [Fray Suárez], the Inspector [Solis], and me, together with forty men, including six horsemen, who could hardly have done much good.
We headed northward until about the ho
ON SATURDAY, May 1--the day of this dispute--the Governor ordered two pounds of buscuit and a half pound of bacon rationed each man who was going with him; and so we took up our march into the interior. Our total force was 300, of whom 40 were horsemen. T
ON SIGHTING Apalachen [which was probably situated on or near the west bank of the Apalachicola], the Governor ordered me with nine cavalry and fifty infantry to invade the village.
The Inspector [Solis] and I accordingly marched in, to find only women
THE TERRAIN we had suffered through since first landing in Florida is mostly level, the soil sandy and stiff. Throughout are immense trees and open woods, containing nut varieties, laurels, a species called liquid-amber 39 [sweet-gum], cedars, junipers, l
TWO HOURS after we arrived in Apalachen, the Indians who had fled returned in peace to ask the release of their women and children. We released them. The Governor, however, continued to hold one of their caciques [chiefs], whereupon they grew agitated and
SO WE marched on for eight days, meeting no resistance until we came within a league of our immediate objective. Then, while we ambled along unsuspectingly, Indians surprised our rear. An hidalgo named Avellaneda, a member of the rearguard who had already
THE NEXT MORNING [August 3] we quit Aute and made it to the place I had just visited. The journey was extremely arduous. We did not have horses enough to carry the sick, who kept getting worse every day, and we knew no cure for the disease [undoubtedly ma
IT WAS His will that next day one of our men should come saying he could make wooden pipes and deerskin bellows. Having reached that point where any hope of relief is seized upon, we bade him commence. We also instigated the making of nails, saws, axes, a
THE HAVEN we set out from we gave the name Vaya de Cavallos [Bay of Horses]. [Twelve years later, Indians led a detachment of De Soto's expedition to this cove of Apalachicola Bay, where scattered charcoal, hollowed-out logs that had been used for water t
IT WAS the will of God, Who often shows His favor in the hour of total despair, that as we doubled a point of land at sunset we found ourselves sheltered in calm waters [apparently near Pensacola]; and many canoes of big, well-built Indians--unarmed--came
NEXT MORNING [October 28] I broke up thirty of their canoes, which we used for fire; the north wind, which raised yet another storm, confined us to land in the cold. When the storm subsided, we returned to sea, navigating three days [three or four, says t
WITH MORNING came Indians in many canoes [twenty--Joint Report], calling on us to give up our two hostages. The Governor replied that he would when the Indians brought the two Christians.
Five or six chiefs were distinguishable in the array of natives,
THE GOVERNOR did not want to stop there but went into a nearby bay dotted with islets. The other barges joined him, and we found we could take fresh water from the sea, the river emptying into it in a torrent.
To parch corn--which we had eaten raw for t
OUR TWO BARGES continued in company for four days, each man eating a ration of half a handful of raw corn a day. Then the other barge was lost in a storm. [The Joint Report says this loss occurred the day after the two barges joined.] Nothing but God's gr
AFTER WE ATE, I ordered Lope de Oviedo, our strongest man, to climb one of the trees not far off and ascertain the lay of the land. He complied and found out from the treetop that we were on an island. [This was Galveston Island.] He also said that the gr
AS THE SUN ROSE next morning, the Indians appeared as they promtsed, bringing an abundance of fish and of certain roots which taste like nuts, some bigger than walnuts, some smaller, mostly grubbed from the water with great labor.
That evening they came
THAT VERY DAY, I saw an Indian wearing a trinket which I knew we had not given. Inquiring whence it came, we learned from our hosts' signs that it had come from men like ourselves, who bivouacked farther back. At this, I sent two Christians, with two Indi
WITHIN A FEW DAYS of the departure of the four Christians, the weather turned so cold and stormy that the Indians could not pull up roots; their cane contraptions for catching fish yielded nothing; and the huts being very open, our men began to die.
Fiv
THE PEOPLE we came to know there [Capoques and Han, as identified later in the narrative] are tall and well-built. Their only weapons are bows and arrows, which they use with great dexterity. The men bore through one of their nipples, some both, and inser
THE ISLANDERS wanted to make physicians of us without examination or a review of diplomas. Their method of cure is to blow on the sick, the breath and the laying-on of hands supposedly casting out the infirmity. They insisted we should do this too and be
AFTER Dorantes and Castillo returned to the island [from the Han oyster-eating season on the main], they rounded up all the surviving Christians, who were living somewhat separated from each other. They totaled fourteen. As I have said, I happened to be o
NOW I HEARD HERE how Dorantes and the eleven with him had left the island of Malhado [around late April, 1529) and stumbled upon the barge in which the Comptroller and the fnars had sailed, bottom up on the seashore [at the mouth of the San Bernardo, acco
FIGUEROA recounted [to Dorantes, Castillo, and the eight or nine men with them there on the peninsula] how he and his three companions had got as far as that place [Matagorda Bay] when two of them [Fernández, the Portuguese sailor, and Astudillo, the nati
THE REMAINING [eight] Christians prevailed on the Indians to receive them as slaves. [The Joint Report says that they first lingered with the fishing and blackberry-picking Indians who did not migrate with the group who had Figueroa, the priest, and the y
THUS ENTHRALLED to their custom, they take life, destroying even their male children on account of dreams. [Obedience to dreams, according to Dorantes in the Joint Report, is the one superstition of these people. He said he had witnessed the killing or bu
AT LAST, [on the fourth visit, in November 1532] I got him off, across the strait, and across four large streams on the coast [Bastrop Bayou, Brazos River, San Bernardo River, and Caney Creek]; which took some doing, because Oviedo could not swim.
So we
TWO DAYS after Lope de Oviedo departed, the Indians who had Alonso del Castillo and Andrés Dorantes reached the place we had been told of, to eat pecans. These are ground with a kind of small grain and fumish the sole subsistence of the people for two mon
WHEN THE six months I had been biding my time were up, the Indians proceeded to the prickly pears thirty leagues away [the vicinity of San Antonio], and the moment to execute our escape plan drew nigh. [This migration must have occurred in August 1533.] W
THE SECOND DAY after our juncture with the Anagados [i.e., on 22 September 1534], we commended ourselves to God our Lord and made our break. Although the season was late and the prickly pears nearly gone, we still hoped to travel a long distance on acorns
THE VERY EVENING of our arrival, some Indians came to Castillo begging him to cure them of terrible headaches. When he had made the sign of the cross over them and commended them to God, they instantly said that all pain had vanished and went to their hou
A CROWD OF lndians came to Castillo next morning bringing five sick persons who had cramps. Each of the five offered his bow and arrows, and Castillo accepted them. At sunset [after all-day treatment, or postponing treatment to evening?] he blessed them a
THE AVAVARES and the tribes we had left behind related an extraordinary experience which, in our equivalent of their vague way of counting, seemed to have occurred fifteen or sixteen years before.
They said that a little man wandered through the region
ALL THE INDIANS of this region are ignorant of time, either by the sun or moon; nor do they reckon by the month or year. They understand the seasons in terms of the ripening of fruits, the dying of fish, and the position of stars, in which dating they are
EATING THE DOGS seemed to give us strength enough to go forward; so commending ourselves to the guidance of God our Lord, we took leave of our hosts, who pointed out the way to others nearby who spoke their language.
Rain caught us. We traveled the day
FROM THE ISLAND of Doom to this land, all the Indians we saw have the custom of not sleeping with their wives from the time they are discovered pregnant to two years after giving birth. Children are suckled until they are twelve, when they are old enough
ALL THESE [plains] tribes are warlike, and have as much strategy for protection against enemies as if they had been reared in Italy in continual feuds. When in a part of the country where enemies might attack, they place their houses on the skirt of a scr
I SHOULD LIKE TO catalog the natives and their languages all the way from the Island of Doom to the farthest Cuchendados.
Two languages are found on the island: those spoken by the Capoques and Han.
On the mainland over against the island are the Char
EVERYWHERE they produce a stupor with a smoke [of, presumably, peyote cactus, imported from tribes of the Río Grande valley and southward], for which they will give whatever they possess.
They drink a yellow tea made of leaves from a holly-like shrub [I
AFTER PARTING from our weeping hosts, we went with the others, who had come to visit, and were hospitably received in the latters' houses. They brought their children to us to touch their heads and gave us a great quantity of mesquite bean flour.
The me
LEAVING THESE INDIANS, we proceeded to the next village, where another novel custom commenced: Those who accompanied us plundered our hospitable new hosts and ransacked their huts, leaving nothing. We watched this with deep concern but were in no position
WE TRAVELED in that region through so many different villages of such diverse tongues that my memory gets confused. They ever plundered each other, and those who lost were as content as those who gained. We attracted more followers than we could employ or
FROM HERE [on the Pecos in the vicinity of Carlsbad, New Mexico] we went along the base of the mountains [via the Río Peñasco and then the Elk Creek fork]., striking inland [northwestward] more than fifty leagues, at the end of which we came upon forty or
FROM HERE the manner of receiving, us changed, in that those who came out to greet us with presents did not get despoiled or their houses rifled; rather, when we got to their houses, they themselves offered us everything they had, including the houses, an
FROM NOW ON, the natives, when apprised of our approach, did not throng out on the trail to welcome us as heretofore, but we found them [in an attitude of extreme dread and supplication] sitting in their houses facing the wall with bowed heads, their hair
AFTER THE TWO DAYS of indecision, we concluded that our destiny lay toward the sunset and so took the trail north only as far as we had to in order to reach the westward one, and then swung down until eventually we came out at the South Sea. The seventeen
IN THE TOWN where the emeralds were presented us, the [Pima] people gave Dorantes over 600 opened deer hearts, which they always kept in great supply for food. So we called this place the Town of Hearts (Pueblo de los Corazones). [It stood at or near Ures
A FEW DAYS farther on [thirty leagues, according to the Joint Report] we came to another town [Soyopa] where rain was falling so heavily that we could not cross the swollen [Yaqui] river and had to wait fifteen days. [The Joint Report says Christmas came
WHEN WE SAW for certain that we were drawing near the Christians, we gave thanks to God our Lord for choosing to bring us out of such a melancholy and wretched captivity. The joy we felt can only be conjectured in terms of the time, the suffering, and the
AFTER FIVE DAYS, Andrés Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo arrived with those who had gone for them; and they brought more than 600 natives of the vicinity whom the Indians who had been escorting us drew out of the woods and took to the mounted Christians,
THE ALCALDE MAYOR happened to know of the Narváez expedition and, hearing now of our return from it, rushed that very night to where we were, and wept with us amid praises to God our Lord.
He provided for us handsomely. In behalf of the governor, Nuño d
As SOON as these Indians got home, all the inhabitants of that province who were friendly to the Christians and had heard of us, came to visit, bearing beads and feathers. We commanded them to build churches with crosses; up to that time none had been ere
WE STAYED IN Sant Miguel until May 15, the reason being that the devastated and enemy-ridden hundred leagues between there and Compostella, where Governor Nuño de Guzmán resided, required a convoy, which took time to arrange. Twenty mounted men escorted u
AFTER TWO MONTHS' rest in Mexico City, I wanted to get back to these kingdoms but, when about to embark [at Veracruz] in October, a storm blew up which capsized the ship, and she was lost. So I decided to stay on for the winter, a boisterous season in tho
I NEED TO CLEAR UP what happened to the ships of the Narváez expedition and the people who remained in them. The reason I have not touched on this before now is that we were uninformed until we reached New Spain, where we found many of the individuals who