Estevanico, aka Mustapha al-Azemmour

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Since we are going to
Morocco in November, I decided to pick an episode about Morocco.

(00:25):
I only kind of got there. I chose somebody who's
been on my list for a while who probably was
born in Morocco, but this story mainly takes place other
places in the West. He's usually called Estevanico, also spelled
Estebonico because V and B have very similar pronunciations in

(00:50):
Castilian Spanish. That though, is a diminutive form of estevon
which English speakers usually say more like. People have used
that diminutive for him, which they also would have used
for children, because he was enslaved. I put the name

(01:11):
Estevanico in the title of the episode because that's what
he is usually called in the United States and other
predominantly English speaking countries, and I wanted people to be
able to find the episode if they were looking for it.
But we are not going to call him that. We
don't know exactly when or where estevan was born or

(01:36):
what his name was from birth. Estevan is probably the
name that he took or was given when he converted
from Islam to Christianity. In Morocco, he is more often
known as Mustafa Asimore or Mustafa al Asimore. Mustapha is
an Arabic name. It means chosen, and it's one of

(01:57):
the names of the prophet Mohammed. Mustafa also has some
phonetic similarities to the way that Estevan is usually pronounced
among Arabic speakers, and Asimore is the name in Morocco,
where he's believed to have been from, so that is
where the name that he's usually called in Morocco comes from.
Estevon became a translator and a guide and was probably

(02:20):
the first person of any race from outside of the
Americas to enter what is now Arizona and New Mexico.
That happened in fifteen thirty nine, so earlier than a
lot of people imagine Europeans or Africans being in the
United States what is now today at all. Like Tracy

(02:43):
just said, we don't know exactly when or where Estevon
was born. Really, we know almost nothing about his early life,
but there are some pieces that we can put together
based on where he lived and what other people wrote
about him later. A major source of information is the
relation of Alvar Nunez Cabeza Devaca, which chronicled a Spanish

(03:06):
expedition to Florida that we will be getting to in
a bit, and based on the Relacion and the timeline
of that expedition, Estevon was probably born in the very
early fifteen hundreds. Cabeza Devaca, which is a title that
he inherited meaning cow's head, describes Estevan as a native
of Asimore, but it is possible that he was born

(03:29):
somewhere else and then brought to Asimore later on. Asimour
is on the coast of Morocco, southwest of Casablanca. Its
population in the sixteenth century was predominantly a Mezik also
known as Berber, and also predominantly Muslim. Some translations of
the Relacion and some books about Estevon describe him as

(03:51):
a Moore, which was a general term for Muslims in
Spain and northern Africa, including Arabs and converts from the
Iberian Peninsula. But the word Moro was used in Spanish
during Esevon's lifetime, and that's not what Kabeza Devaca called
him Cabza. Devaca used the Spanish word for black, along
with the word ala rabe, which in this context probably

(04:14):
meant that he spoke Arabic. Morocco was a multi lingual society,
and in addition to Arabic, Estevan likely would have spoken
in Amazik language as well as some Portuguese or Spanish
or even both. Yeah. The fact that some accounts describe
him as a more means sometimes he's also depicted as
having kind of an Arab appearance, but he's pretty consistently

(04:38):
described in accounts from the time as black uh If
he was from asimor that gives us some other clues,
but also some questions about his early life. There was
a lot of turmoil and instability in Morocco in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including multiple changes in ruling dynasties,

(04:59):
a plague, and a series of severe droughts. Multiple kingdoms
on the Iberian Peninsula had also started to coalesce into
modern Spain, and the Reconquista, or the Spanish reconquest of
that peninsula from Muslim kingdoms, had ended in fourteen ninety two.
Spain and Portugal both expelled their Jewish and Muslim populations,

(05:22):
and that led to large numbers of refugees arriving in
Morocco and other parts of Northern Africa. Spain and Portugal
also tried to establish or take control of ports and
trading routes in Northern Africa, including Asimar, which had become
a tributary of Portuguese King Juu the Second in fourteen

(05:43):
eighty six. That's a lot going on, and on top
of all of it, Northern Africa was also facing ongoing
threats and trade disruptions from the Ottoman Empire to the east.
In this environment, slave traffickers captured people from Morocco and
from farther south in Africa and sold them for profit,

(06:04):
and according to sixteenth century chronicles and eyewitness accounts, the
situation was so dire that people in Northern Africa surrendered
themselves to Spanish and Portuguese slavers or to merchants who
were willing to take them across the Strait of Gibraltar,
Knowing that the law in Spain and Portugal required slaves
to be fed, clothed, and housed, and that the likely

(06:26):
alternative in Northern Africa was starvation and death. We really
don't know whether Estevan was captured, or if he was
in such a desperate situation that enslavement seemed like his
only alternative for survival, or possibly if he entered into
something that he thought was going to be more like

(06:47):
a temporary indenture rather than permanent enslavement. Regardless, though, by
around fifteen twenty two, he was being enslaved by minor
Spanish noble Andreas Dorantes de Carranza. While Dorantes was technically
part of the nobility, his family was poor, and in

(07:07):
fifteen twenty seven he joined Panfilo de Narveez's expedition to
the Americas with the hopes of gaining fortune and status
for himself. King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor Charles
the Fifth, known as King Carlos the First in Spain
had appointed Narvaez governor of Florida, which at the time
covered all of what is now the Southern Us, stretching

(07:29):
west to what's now Texas. Narvaez was going there to
conquer and colonize it, and he chose Dorantes as captain
of his infantry, and when Dorantes joined the expedition, he
took Estevon with him. Estevan at this point was probably
in his mid twenties. If Estevan was Muslim, which does

(07:50):
seem likely given what we know about him, he would
have had to convert to Catholicism in order to accompany
Drantes on this expedition. At this time, under Spanish law,
only Africans who had converted to Christianity and assimilated to
Spanish culture, who were known as Latinos, were allowed to

(08:10):
be taken to the Americas and the Caribbean. That policy
actually changed right around this time, as Spanish authorities came
to believe that Ladinos were too independent and too hard
to control, so instead they allowed only bosales, or Africans
who did not speak Spanish and had not converted. The

(08:30):
term bosales also included people who were trafficked directly from
Africa to the Caribbean or the Americas without being brought
through Spain first. So much about Estevan's life up to
this point is completely unclear or the source of speculation,
including when he got to Spain, how long he was

(08:52):
there before Derontes joined this expedition, when and under what
circumstances he converted to Christianity, and whether he can continued
to think of himself as Muslim afterward, and we don't
really know the details of his experience at the beginning
of the expedition. At that point, Panfilo de Narveez, Andreas
Dorantes de Serranza and other Spanish men on board didn't

(09:15):
have much reason to take notice of Estevon or any
other enslaved person who was with them, so for a
while after the convoy set sail on June seventeen, fifteen
twenty seven, we know that Estevon was part of the
expedition and generally where the convoy was going, but we
know almost nothing else. Pamfilo de Narveez already had some

(09:37):
experience on these kinds of expeditions. He had been one
of the first Spanish people to arrive in Jamaica, and
then he was part of Spain's efforts to conquer the
island of Cuba. In fifteen twenty he had been dispatched
to Mexico to capture her Non Cortes, who had been
charged with treason. Narvaez was supposed to replace Cortes as

(09:59):
governor of Mexico, but this campaign was unsuccessful. Cortes defeated
Narvaez in battle and imprisoned him for two years, and
Narvaez lost an eye. It was only after Narvaez was
released after all of this that he was appointed governor
of Florida and tasked with this second expedition, a decision that,

(10:23):
with the benefit of historical hindsight, I find questionable. This
expedition did not go any better than Narvaez's first one had,
As was the case for Spain's other expeditions to the
Americas around this time, conquistadors had to fund everything themselves,
and they had to recruit their own men. Narvaez was
able to raise a fleet of five ships and recruit

(10:45):
about six hundred men. They set sail on June seventeenth,
fifteen twenty seven, with the wives of some of the
married men and some enslaved people also on board. But
their Atlantic crossing was difficult, as atlantic cross things generally
were in the sixteenth century. People died along the way,
and about one hundred and forty men deserted as soon

(11:07):
as they arrived at Santo Domingo on the island of
Hispaniola in August. From there, the fleet continued on to Cuba.
The Spanish did not have a word for hurricane. It
comes from the carib language and it had not made
its way into the Romance languages yet. But after they
arrived in Cuba, they endured a series of powerful storms.

(11:32):
At one point, when the weather seemed clear, Narvayas sent
two of his ships to another port to pick up
supplies that were waiting for them there, and then another
storm blew in, wrecking both of those ships and scattering
all the supplies that they had loaded and destroying them.
Crews on the remaining ships threatened to mutiny if the

(11:52):
fleet tried to leave the waters around Cuba, so they
did not depart for the Gulf coast until February twenty
five of fifteen twenty eight, at which point they were
hit by still more storms along the way. Things did
not improve once they started trying to voyage over land,
and we will talk about that after we pause for

(12:14):
a sponsor break. On April fifteenth, fifteen twenty eight, Pamfilo
de Narvaez and his expedition arrived on the Gulf coast
of Florida, just north of what is now known as

(12:35):
Tampa Bay. Tampa Bay is almost directly north of Havana, Cuba,
and in good weather these ships should have been able
to make that crossing in about four days, but it
had taken them almost two months due to a series
of storms that sort of blew them all over the
Gulf of Mexico, and they had to also sail around

(12:58):
and try to evade them. Also, at one point most
of the ships got stuck on a sandbar. A lot
about this is unclear, but it doesn't seem like the
area north of Tampa Bay is where they wanted to
be or where they thought they were. Based on what
happened after this, it seems like Narvaez might have been
aiming for the River of Palms in Mexico known as

(13:21):
the Soda la Marina River today that marked the western
boundary of Florida, and it was roughly two hundred and
fifty kilometers or one hundred and fifty five miles north
of an established Spanish settlement that was Panuco, established by
Hernan Cortes in fifteen twenty two. It would have made
sense for Narvaez to want to start off within the

(13:41):
territory that he'd been appointed to govern, but also relatively
close to an existing Spanish outpost. While this obviously wasn't
the first Spanish expedition to arrive in this part of
North America, Spanish knowledge of its geography was still really limited.
Unlike some other expeditions. They also had no local people

(14:03):
with them to help them out. Earlier in the sixteenth century,
her Non Cortes and cartographer Alonso Alvarez de Pineda had
each made maps of the Gulf coast, which obviously would
have been kind of limited, but we don't know whether
Narvaez had access to either of them at all, or
whether he had any other charts or maps of the area.

(14:25):
Even with all of that in mind, though Narvaez was
nowhere near the River of Palms or Panuco, he was
on the opposite side of the Gulf of Mexico, more
than a thousand miles away from that. He was also
very wary of the indigenous peoples living there. His purpose

(14:47):
was to explore and colonize, which would mean at some
point he would have to conquer or ally with the
region's indigenous peoples. But he also knew that one Ponza
de Leon had been attacked on his expeditions to Florida
and had died after Kaluza defender shot him with an
arrow in fifteen twenty one, so, especially since many of
Narvaez's men were exhausted and sick, he wanted to be cautious.

(15:12):
They spotted a village near the coast, which probably belonged
to the Tocobaga, and sent a small party to try
to negotiate with them. Narvaez's men were given some fish,
which seemed like a gesture of goodwill, but the Tocbaga
seemed to have seen them as a threat. They fled
during the night and apparently spread the word about the

(15:33):
new arrivals, and so for a few days it didn't
seem like there were many indigenous people around. This probably
gave Narvaez the impression that the indigenous peoples in the
area would not be particularly dangerous. And then not long
after that, somebody pulled up a gold object in a
fishing net. So Narvaez thought that he was facing an

(15:54):
indigenous population that would be easy to pacify, and now
an abandoned village that his expedition could occupy and a
nearby source of gold. Gold was one of the reasons
for Spain's efforts to colonize the Americas, so Narvaez thought
he had gotten things off to a very good start.
Now none of that lasted. Narvaez already had a reputation

(16:19):
for cruelty and brutality against indigenous peoples. Friar Bartolome de
la Casas, who is sometimes described as one of the
first European advocates for the rights and protections of indigenous peoples,
had previously denounced Narvaez's treatment toward the indigenous peoples of Cuba,
including a massacre carried out by Narvaaz's men during the

(16:40):
conquest of the island. When the Tocobaga resumed contact with
the Spanish and objected to their insistence that the land
belonged to Spain, Narvaez had their leader's nose cut off
and had the party's war dogs attack his mother. And
it turned out there also wasn't any gold nearby the
peace that they found in a fish may have even

(17:01):
been something that washed up from a Spanish shipwreck, which
was also probably true of other pieces of gold that
they came across from time to time. The Tocobaga eventually
convinced Narvaez that they did not have any gold, but
they told him that another tribe, the Appalachi did Appalachi
territory was north of where the Tocobaga lived, Narvaez decided

(17:25):
that he should split up his company to investigate. He
would send to the boats ahead while he and about
three hundred men continued on foot through Appalachi territory. He
thought that the River of Palms was not too far
away and that they could all rendezvous there. As they
journeyed north, Narvaez and his party on land faced difficult

(17:48):
inhospitable swampy terrain. Many of them got malaria, something that
may have been introduced to the Americas by Europeans and
the enslaved Africans that they brought with them, and it
turned out that Tocobaga had been strategic in sending narvaas
to the Appalachi. The Appalachi were armed with longbows that
were capable of piercing the leather cloth and chain mail

(18:11):
armor that most of his men wore. The Appalachi developed
tactics that were particularly effective against Narvaez's force, including ambushes
and removing their arrowheads when shooting at soldiers wearing chain mail,
so the arrow shafts would break against the rings and
drive long splinters of wood into the soldier's bodies. I

(18:33):
think there's kind of an imagined image of the Counkistador
wearing full plate armor, and that is not what overwhelmingly
these guys were in. And what they were in was
easily pierceable by these longbows. Since Narvaas had sent his
ships on ahead, the company had no easy way to

(18:55):
escape from the Appalachi, and they also had no way
to send for any kind of supply reinforcements. Meanwhile, they
were all so off course that they never made that rendezvous.
The ships looked for Narvaas and his party for about
a year before they started running low on food and supplies,
and they ultimately left. After a summer that was full

(19:19):
of extreme heat, illnesses, deaths, and very effective attacks by
the Appalachi, narva Has decided their best means of escape
would be to build boats and go westward along the coast.
Over the span of about six weeks, they killed their horses,
eating their meat and using their hides to make things
like water skins and their manes and tails to make rope.

(19:43):
The men melted down their armor to make nails, and
they made sails from their clothing. The resulting boats were
more like rafts with slightly built up sides and a tiller.
They were powered by sails and oars. They were also
barely big enough to hold all of the men that
needed to get onto each one of them, so once

(20:03):
somebody got aboard, there was nowhere to move. Once they
had taken a place, they still were not sure how
far they needed to go to get to territory that
Spain was actually occupying, but they thought that they had
traveled roughly seven hundred miles or eleven hundred and twenty
five kilometers over land since they had arrived in Florida.

(20:26):
There have been innumerable attempts to trace the journey of
all of this over the centuries, and there's a lot
of disagreement in all of the various maps, but they
had probably gone closer to two hundred and fifty miles
or four hundred kilometers. It is hard to know the
distances for sure. They were measuring things in leagues, and

(20:48):
they were also estimating a distance that had involved a
lot of backtracking and detours because of the terrain. They
set sail aboard these rafts on September twenty second, fifteen
twenty eight. They were mostly able to stay out of
range of the Appalachi's bows, but now they were facing
sea sickness, dehydration, starvation, and the unrelenting sun. They did

(21:13):
manage to go in the right direction, skirting along the coast,
but when they reached the outflow of the Mississippi River,
the force of the currents scattered the rafts and pushed
them out to sea. They regrouped, but as they approached
what is now known as Galveston Island, a storm swamped
or capsized most of the rafts. At some point during

(21:33):
all of this, Narvaez's raft was blown out to sea,
and he almost certainly drowned or died of exposure or dehydration.
These presumed to have died at that point by some means,
only about eighty sailors finally made landfall on an island
near modern Galveston. It might have been Galveston Island, it

(21:54):
might have been a neighboring island. They nicknamed this Ela
de Malajado, or the Island of Misfortune. At first, the
survivors got some assistance from the Karankawa people, but the
Spanish survivors apparently lost the Karankawa's sympathies after some of
them turned to cannibalism over the winter. That winter was

(22:18):
obviously difficult By April of fifteen twenty nine, there were
only fifteen survivors left from the three hundred or so
men who had started the trek to the River of
Palms over land. One of those men was Estevan, and
another was his enslaver Andres Dorantes de Sarranza. These survivors

(22:39):
made various attempts to continue on to Spanish controlled territory,
but none of them got very far. Then in the
summer of fifteen twenty nine, they and other survivors started
to be captured and enslaved, some by the Karankawa and
some by other indigenous tribes in the areas. Over the
next few years, some of the expeditions survivors died, others

(23:03):
essentially assimilated into the tribes that had captured them. There
were various escape attempts, and at first none of them
was successful. The Spanish captives and Estevan rarely saw each other,
and for a while they did not really have any
way to communicate. According to Cabesa Devaca's account, he eventually

(23:23):
convinced his captors to let him work as a trader,
and that allowed him to travel to some extent and
gave him away to relay messages to the others. The
only time they were all in the same place at
the same time was when multiple tribes came together for
the Prickly pear harvest. Esvon Andres Dourrantes de Sarranza, Alonzo

(23:46):
de Castillo Maldonado and Alvar Nunez Cabesa Devaca had various
contact with one another in fifteen thirty two, and they
planned to meet during the Prickly pair harvest in fifteen
thirty three. That meeting did happen, but they were not
able to escape. They tried again in fifteen thirty four,
and this time they were successful, and that was largely

(24:09):
thanks to Estevan. We said earlier he was already multi
lingual before being enslaved in Morocco. He had learned more
languages during his time in North America, including learning shared
trading languages and a trading sign language. He was able
to negotiate safe passage and shelter with a trader that

(24:31):
Kabza Devaka's Relacion describes as being from the Avavare tribe.
That is not a tribe that is mentioned outside of
this document, so we do not know exactly how to
identify these people today, but it is possible that this
is something that Estevan and the other survivors had started

(24:51):
planning during that Prickly Pair harvest in fifteen thirty three
and had been working on for a year until they
did it. There are a lot more references to Esseevon
in the relacion after this point, and we will get
into that after we pause for a sponsor break. Estevan

(25:14):
Andreas Toronto State Toronto, Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado, and Alvar
Nuniez Cabza Devaca are sometimes described as the four Ragged Castaways.
When they had first set sail from Spain in fifteen
twenty seven, they had been on radically different social strata.

(25:36):
Esdevin was black and enslaved, while Cabza Devaca was the
second in command of Penfeo di Narvaz's expedition. Cabeza Devaca's
Relacion makes it clear that at the start of the
voyage he was a typical conquistor. He was going to
the Americas hoping for fortune and glory, and he was
also viewing the Spanish as superior to Africans and indigenous

(25:59):
peace peoples. But by the time they escaped from their
indigenous captors. In fifteen thirty four, things were much different.
Cabes and Nevaca had been through the experience of being
enslaved himself. He had also been given shelter and care
by people of multiple indigenous nations while also being enslaved
and forced to work for some of those same peoples.

(26:22):
He had started to realize that the indigenous peoples they
were encountering were not one monolithic group of from the
Spanish Catholic mindset pagans and barbarians. He had contact with
at least twenty different indigenous tribes and nations during his
journey around the Gulf and into Mexico, and each one
was its own people. He also developed a deeper religious

(26:45):
faith during his time in captivity and the journey that followed.
His relation followed that progression and became a document not
just of their journey, but also of the land they
traveled through and the peoples they encountered, with far more
empathy toward indigenous people at the end of the account
then at the beginning. Yeah, I'm not suggesting that he

(27:06):
suddenly became a perfect person, but he definitely started seeing
other non Spanish Catholic people as more human than before.
It would be a stretch to say that the three
Spanish men ever saw Estevan as their equal, but when

(27:27):
they escaped from their captors, it was immediately obvious that
his knowledge and skills were going to be critical to
their survival. They still had hundreds of miles they needed
to travel through unfamiliar territory. His facility with languages meant
that he could negotiate passage through these territories of multiple
different tribes and trade on the group's behalf. In general,

(27:51):
Estevan also seemed to be just more at home with
the indigenous peoples than the Spanish men were. For example,
on their first night with the Avavari tribe, he joined
in their dancing while the others just watched. The people
that they encountered often seemed more willing to negotiate with
him than with the others. Various articles about the four

(28:15):
ragged castaways described them as smoothing their passage through native
territories by pretending to be faith healers or medicine men,
but pretending is kind of an oversimplification. Details on this
are very fuzzy, and the primary sources recounting this voyage
are contradictory, but at some point an indigenous person was

(28:37):
sick or injured, Kabeza Devaka or one of the other
men prayed over them, using Christian prayers and making the
sign of the Cross. At some points, they may have
also used some kind of other treatments, either something that
would have been used among Spanish conquistadors or something that
they had seen indigenous people do. Over time, seems like

(29:00):
Cabeza Devaca thought they really were healing these people, or
really that God was healing them through them. This was
something he had to be really careful in how he described,
given that they were not priests, and this was the
kind of thing that the Spanish Inquisition would not look
favorably on at all if they ever managed to make

(29:21):
it back home. Eventually, somebody, either one of this foursome
or someone indigenous started calling them the children of the
Sun or the sons of the Sun. The four ragged
castaways continued west and south for months, and over time
they built up an indigenous following. It's not always clear

(29:42):
how much of this alleged faith healing Estevan did, because
contemporary accounts sometimes call him Durrantes, being the name of
his enslaver, but over time, as they acquired a large
group of indigenous followers, it seems like the three Spanish
men used Estevan as an intermediate between themselves and that group.

(30:02):
This was both because he was the one who best
knew their languages and because doing so gave them an
air of mystery that helped maintain this idea that they
were healers with divine powers. In the spring of fifteen
thirty six, more than eight years after Narvaez's expedition first
arrived on the Gulf coast of Florida, the four ragged

(30:25):
castaways ran into a group of Spanish slavers in Nueva Galacia,
confirming that they were finally back in territory that was
actively being occupied by Spain. They made their way from
there to Mexico City. While in Mexico City, Estevan met
Juan Garrido, known as the Black Conquistasor, who had been

(30:45):
born in the Kingdom of Congo and had been part
of multiple Spanish expeditions in the Caribbean and the Americas.
At this point, once all four men had recovered from
having made this incredibly arduous journey, the three Spanish men
but not Estevan were questioned about what they had been through.
They made the territory they had traveled through sound wealthier

(31:08):
than it actually was, fueling rumors of the Seven Cities
of Cibola much later also called the Seven Cities of Gold.
So Antonio de Mendoza, Viceroy of New Spain, wanted them
to travel north again, back in the direction they had
just come from, to look for this wealth and to
claim it for Spain. He also wanted them to gather

(31:29):
information for Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who was planning an
expedition as well. Understandably, Andreas Durrantes, Alonso de Castillo Maldonado,
and alvar Nuniez Cabza Devaca all said no, thank you.
Dorantes did discuss doing this with the viceroy, but ultimately
declined that offer. Castillo got married to a rich widow,

(31:53):
and Caveza Devaca went to Spain. He was hoping that
he would be named governor of Florida and then he
could come back and he could succeed where Pomfio de
Narvaez had failed. That did not work out for him, though,
because by the time he got back to Spain, Hernando
de Soto had been authorized to conquer Florida, Cameza Devaca

(32:14):
became governor of some of Spain's territory in South America instead.
He obviously has a whole story beyond this that we
are not getting into. Estevon, though may not have had
a choice. He had not exactly been treated as a
freeman during that journey across what's now Texas in northern Mexico,
but over time he had been treated less and less

(32:36):
like a slave. It is not fully clear whether he
was considered to be enslaved or free after their arrival
in Mexico City, but from this point documents were more
likely to reference him as Estevon than Estevanico. And when
he was tasked with accompanying Franciscan Friar Marcos Deniza on
an expedition north, he was given explicit instructions to follow

(33:00):
Marcos's orders. Those kinds of instructions would not have seemed
necessary if he was enslaved. At the same time, it
seems as though Derante's approval was needed for Estevon to
go on this expedition, something that would not have been
necessary if he was free. So there's some conflict here. Apparently,

(33:21):
Derantes originally refused, and then he agreed to letting Estevont
go on this travel only after having irritated the Viceroy
by refusing to go on this expedition himself. It seems
like he was kind of trying to smooth things over fire.
Marcos's expedition departed on March seventh, fifteen thirty nine. It

(33:41):
consisted of Marcos, another Franciscan friar, Estevan, and about one
hundred enslaved indigenous people who had been promised their freedom
in exchange for their participation. A Stevan's role was similar
to what he had done before. He was working as
a scout, a guide, and a translator and negotiator with
all the indigenous tribes they would encounter. A couple of

(34:04):
weeks after they left Mexico City, Marcos sent Estevan to
scout ahead. Estevan was to update Marcos on his progress
by sending a runner back with a cross, with the
size of the cross corresponding to the value of what
he had found. This sounds like a wild way to communicate,
but it is what it is. Some sources conclude that

(34:24):
this was because Estevan and the others with him could
not read or write. But as we talked about in
our recent episode on Ballpoint Pens, writing on this kind
of expedition would have actually been incredibly cumbersome. Okay, we
need you to keep up with an ink well quills,
your paper might get wet or following apart. Although Estevon

(34:47):
was supposed to wait after sending word back to Marcos,
he kept on pushing ahead. First, though, he would make
arrangements for Marcos and the rest of the party to
be fed and provisioned and care for at each of
the sou he came to. Marcos kept struggling to catch
up as Estevan kept sending back a series of crosses,

(35:07):
each one bigger than the last. Finally, in May of
fifteen thirty nine, a runner reached Marcos and told him
that Esseevon was dead. According to Friar Marcos, Estevon and
many of his party were killed by the Zuni outside
the city of Cibola, which Estevon had managed to reach.
It's believed that Estevon was somewhere in what is now Arizona,

(35:29):
but there is debate over exactly where. Marcos never made
it to that location. Himself. Yeah, there's a lot of
discussion of exactly which pueblo might have been being described
as the city of Cibola. There are no eyewitness accounts
of Estevan's death, and accounts from later on in the
sixteenth century are wildly contradictory, including contradicting what Marcos wrote down,

(35:55):
which was pretty straightforward. Francisco Vasquez de Coronado claimed that
este Von had a reputation for inappropriate relationships with indigenous women,
and the Zuni had killed him after he had demanded
women and turquoise from them. Coronado said this when he
was about to face charges over his own behavior with

(36:17):
indigenous people, so there's some speculation that he said this
to try to distract from what he was being accused of.
Hernando de Alarconde claimed that the Zunis killed Esteban because
they did not want him to reveal their location to
the Spanish. Zuni anthropologist Edmund J. Ladd, writing in the

(36:38):
twentieth century, concluded that the Zuni had probably heard about
the expedition through indigenous trade networks, and that they just
did not trust the Spanish. According to Zuni tradition, Estevan
had sent a gourd rattle decorated with red and white
feathers to the Zuni leader to introduce himself. The Zuni
leader recognized this rattle and became became angry, and he

(37:01):
ordered Estevon not to enter the town. When Estevon approached anyway,
they killed him. While all of the sixteenth century accounts
and most modern historians agree that Estevon was killed by
Pueblo in Peoples in the spring of fifteen thirty nine,
there are a few modern historians that proposed something else entirely,

(37:24):
which is that Estevon worked with one of the Pueblo
in peoples to fake his own death and then he
escaped from enslavement by the Spanish. There isn't really concrete
support for this, but it is an interesting idea. Today,
the Panfilo da Narvez expedition is known primarily for its
spectacular failure and the long journey of its four survivors

(37:49):
that then paved the way for Coronado's expeditions into what
is now the American Southwest. There has been less focus
on Estevon until much more recently. One possible connection to
Stevon that continues in Pueblo culture today is a catsina
or a spirit being who was depicted as having black skin.

(38:10):
I don't want to get into a ton of detail
about this because this is sacred Pueblo and cultural knowledge.
Some sources have described this catsina straightforwardly as a representation
of Stevon, although others note that there were catsinas depicted
with black skin before he had contact with any pu
blow In peoples. There is also a saying among some

(38:34):
pueblo In peoples, as reported by doctor Joe S. Sando
of Hamo's Pueblo, that quote, the first white man our
people saw was a black man. Uh, and that is Estevon.
Do you have listener mail? I have listener mail. It
is from Heather. Heather wrote, Hello, Holly and Tracy. I
started writing this email before I even finished listening to

(38:55):
the behind the scenes episode on Beatrice Kenner and Mildred
Smith's side note. Shout out to those ladies for all
the great work they did to make that time of
the month more bearable. I wanted to write to share
that I had similar memories and feelings when I read
are you there, God, It's me Margaret. I'm a few
years younger than you, ladies, and I probably read the
book around my late elementary years, maybe going into middle school,

(39:17):
which would have been very late nineteen eighties early nineteen nineties.
The copy I read also had references to the belted pads,
and by that time I felt like the adhesive ones
were pretty ubiquitous, and I also had my mother explain
the belts to me. It made me feel like the
book was out of date and silly, and I never
really wanted to read Judy Bloom anymore as an adult.

(39:38):
I feel bad about that, because obviously Judy Bloom is amazing.
I also find it pretty funny that just the day
before this episode came out, my son, who was sixteen,
had his girlfriend over to our house. It's his first girlfriend,
and she needed a tampon. I was outside and she
made him text me that she needed one, which I
found hilarious. Everybody just needs to get over any squeamishness

(39:59):
about periods. They are everywhere. Ha ha ha As Pettax,
I am attaching a picture of my dog's Nellie and Malcolm.
Nellie is red and white and is an eleven year
old Welsh Springer Spaniel. This is a different breed than
the English Springer that most people know most people think
she's a Brittany or a cocker, but to me, she's
just a precious angel. Baby Malcolm is an eight year

(40:20):
old black and white English Springer Spaniel, the Springer breed
that most people know. He's not the smartest boy, but
he would literally die for me, and that's all I
could ever ask for. Thanks for reading this email. Have
a wonderful day, Heather. Thank you so much for this email. Heather.
Thank you for these very cute dog pictures. They look
like they are sitting in a kitchen, very patiently but

(40:42):
also eagerly awaiting a treat. I love this story about
getting a text about needing a tampon, and it reminded
me a story of a story that has been passed
to me from my mother, which is that my mom
was one of five four girls in a boy and
their neighbors across the street also five children, four boys

(41:05):
and a girl. So the joke was that each of
the moms would just count every night. As long as
they each had five children, everything was okay. So one
day my mom was helping her mom unload the groceries
that had just been brought in, and one of the
boys from across the street was there helping. He was

(41:28):
passing the things to my mom from inside the bag
and then was like, that's it. I'm done by. And
my mom was like, there's obviously something in that bag still,
and he was like, nope, nothing left in this bag,
nothing at all. Bye, and mom went. And being a
household that contained, you know, a mother and four sisters,

(41:54):
it was an industrial size box of paths and I
don't know. That story makes me laugh every time I
think of it. Thank you so much again, Heather for
this email and the dog pictures. If you would like
to send us a note where at history podcast dot
iHeartRadio dot com, and you can also subscribe to our

(42:17):
show on the iHeartRadio app and anywhere else you'd like
to get your podcasts. Stuff you missed in History Class
is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.

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Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Estevanico, aka Mustapha al-Azemmour