Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca washes ashore in Texas - November 6th, 1528

On this day in 1528, Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca became the first European to set foot on land that would later become the state of Texas.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hello and Welcome to This Day in History Class,
a show that explores the past one day at a time.
I'm Gabe Louzier, and in this episode, we're talking about
a botched attempted Spanish conquest that left a group of

(00:23):
humbold explorers stranded in Texas. The day was November six.
Spanish explorer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca became the first
European to set foot on land that would later become

(00:46):
the state of Texas. Notable, though it was, his arrival
was also unintentional. Cabeza de Vaca and his crew had
been trying to sail from Florida to Tampico, Mexico, but
when bad weather blew them off course, they wound up
shipwrecked along the Texas coast instead. Things hadn't gone well

(01:08):
for the crew in Florida, so when they set sail,
they did so aboard five makeshift rafts. Two of the rafts,
including the one captained by Cabeza de Vaca, washed ashore
on present day Follett's Island, just off the coast of Texas.
This means the captain about eighty or ninety other Spaniards

(01:28):
and at least one enslaved African Man were the first
to reach the lone Star state from foreign shores. Cabeza
de Vaca, which means cow's head in Spanish, was born
in Harez de la Frontera in the south of Spain.
The year of his birth is unknown, but is thought
to be sometime between fourteen seven and four two. He

(01:53):
joined the Spanish Army as an adult and was later
appointed the treasurer and first lieutenant of an expedition to
Mexico in fifteen twenty seven. The head of the expedition
was the conquistador Ponfilo de Narvaez, who left Spain that
summer with five ships. He and his fleet had been

(02:14):
authorized by Charles the First to settle and colonize the
region between Florida and present day Tampico, Mexico. After spending
the winter in Cuba, the expedition landed on the Florida
coast in April of fifty eight, and it's here that
Narvaez made the fatal error that got Cabeza de Vaca

(02:36):
and the rest of the crew shipwrecked. Narvaez decided to
send three hundred men and about forty horses inland to
scout the lands to the north while his ships and
the rest of the crew continued on to Tampico. Narvaez
was under the mistaken impression that he and the others

(02:57):
would only have to hike about thirty or four party
miles before making it to the rendezvous point in Mexico,
but in reality the actual distance along the coast was
fifteen hundred miles. In effect, Narvaez had just stranded himself
and three hundred others in the wilds of the Florida Peninsula,

(03:18):
cut off from their ships and with just enough food
to last a few weeks. After four months of wandering,
more than fifty men had died, so the survivors decided
to take their chances at sea. With just one carpenter
in the group, the best they could manage were five
flimsy wooden rafts with sails made from their own shirts

(03:41):
and trousers. Each raft was loaded with fewer than fifty men,
plus about six horses, which were killed for food on
every third day at sea. The overloaded rafts had to
be sailed close to shore, as they only rose about
six inches above the water. They launched the rafts on September,

(04:04):
hoping to reach the closest known Spanish settlement before their
food ran out. The first month of the voyage passed uneventfully,
but then winds kicked up and the raft spent a
full two weeks battling the waves. During the storm, the
five rafts lost sight of each other. Three of them,

(04:25):
including the one captained by Narvaez, were lost at sea.
The other two eventually landed along the Texas coast, with
the raft captained by Cabeza de Vaca being the first
on November six. Unfortunately, life on land didn't prove much
easier than life on a raft. By spring of fifteen

(04:46):
twenty nine, Cabeza de Vaca and fourteen others were the
only ones left alive of those who had made it
to shore. A year later, the survivors parted ways, with
a few men remaining on the i land where they landed,
and most of the others heading down the coast towards Mexico.
As For Cabeza de Vaca, he went to the Texas mainland,

(05:09):
where he eked out a living by trading medical treatment
to the Native American population and exchange for food. Two
years later, in fifteen thirty two, Cabeza de Vaca finally
decided to make a break from Mexico. On his way
down the coast, he came across the three surviving men
who had left for Mexico and the spring of twenty nine,

(05:32):
but apparently never got there. Instead, they had been enslaved
by a Native American tribe. Cabeza de Vaca met the
same fate, and the Spaniards became known from then on
as the Four Ragged Castaways. Reunited with his countrymen, Cabeza
de Vaca finally learned the fate of the rest of
the Narvaez expedition. All of them were dead. Many had drowned,

(05:57):
others died of starvation or exposure, and the rest had
been killed by Native Americans. Of the original three hundred
who set to shore in Florida, only the four Ragged
Castaways remained, representing a one and a half percent survival rate. Eventually,
in the summer of fifteen thirty four, the four men

(06:19):
were able to escape captivity and flee south toward the
Rio Grand. Two years later, they finally arrived in Spanish
occupied Mexico City, having walked barefoot from Texas for about
twenty four hundred miles. Cabeza de Vaca later published an
account of his grueling eight year odyssey titled Simply Relasion

(06:43):
or Account. The book included the first written descriptions of
the region's landscape, flora, fauna, and people. In this way,
Cabeza de Vaca is not just the first European to
reach the land that would one day become Texas, he
was the first historian as well. I'm Gabe Lousier and

(07:07):
hopefully you now know a little more about history today
than you did yesterday. If you have a second and
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send them my way at this Day at i heart
media dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show,

(07:31):
and thank you for listening. I'll see you back here
again tomorrow for another Day in History class. For more
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