Galveston: A History of the Island

Chapter 4

4 THE FIRST white men to set foot on Galveston Island and encounter the Karankawas must have been a sorry sight. There were forty of them, nearly naked, nearly starved, and completely delirious. They washed ashore in a storm in the early morning hours of November 6, 1528. They were Cabeza de Vaca and the remnants of the illfated expedition of Don Panfilo de Narvaez. The expedition had started out in Florida five months earlier with three hundred men and forty horses, and this pitiful collection was all that remained. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was in his mid-thirties when the Spanish fleet set sail from Cuba to conquer the Florida peninsula. His family traced its ancestry (and its ludicrous name) to a humble shepherd who carved a place in Spanish history by showing the troops of King Sancho ofNavarre a shortcut through the mountains north of Seville. The shepherd's name was Martin Alhaja and he marked the mountain pass with the skull of a cow-cabeza de vaca-thus enabling the Spanish to rout the Moors during the Reconquest of 1212. As a reward, the king gave Martin Alhaja the noble name of Cowhead. In the centuries that followed, the family distinguished itself as builders, civil servants, and explorers. Cabeza de Vaca's paternal grandfather led the conquest of Grand Canary Island in the late 1400s. By 1500 the island of Cuba had become headquarters for Spanish conquistadors. Cortes had sailed from Cuba in 1521 to conquer the Aztecs of Mexico (which he called New Spain). Six years later, 26 Gary Cartwright Charles V gave permission for an expedition to conquer and populate the region from the Rio de las Palmas in northeastern Mexico to the Isle of Florida. The Spanish greatly underestimated how much territory this included, or what an incredible effort would be required to conquer and populate it. Don Panfilo de Narvaez, who financed the expedition out of his own pocket, was appointed its governor and commander in chief. The emperor appointed Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca as royal treasurer to the expedition, a bright young man with a head for numbers, a gift for command, and an extraordinary measure of faith and courage. On April 7, 1528, after seven weeks at sea, the fleet sighted the landlocked Bay of Espiritu Santo. The vessel commanded by Cabeza de Vaca landed at St. John's Pass, just north of St. Petersburg. In all, four ships, four hundred men, and eighty horses survived the crossing. Fifteen years earlier Ponce de Leon had discovered and named the mainland of Florida, but now it was the task of Don Panfilo and his compadres to claim it in the name of the crown. But the cove where they landed was not the sheltered bay their pilots had charted. The real bay (Tampa Bay) was just to the south. The smart move would have been to stay with the ships and explore the coastline until they found suitable anchorage, but the governor was impatient to start marching north. He had been in Mexico a few years earlier and heard tales of enormous treasure somewhere north of Vera Cruz. Don Panfilo didn't know where he was, but his heart told him he was close to the cities of gold. At worst, he figured, it was only a few days' march to the Spanish settlement of panuco. This was a tragic and monumental error in his geography. The Spanish expedition was standing on the coast of Florida and the village of Panuco (now Tampico) was on the northeast coast of Mexico, more than half a continent away. Ignoring the advice of his senior officers, Don Panfilo and the main body of the expedition started overland, trooping over dunes, sand flats, swamps, and marshes. They had carried only two pounds of hardtack and a half-pound of bacon per man, and after a week their rations were depleted and they lived on fruit from dwarf fan palms. At the end of the second week they discovered an Indian village on the banks of what was probably the Withlacoochee River. The Indians seemed friendly enough. They led the starving Spaniards to fields of ripe corn and gave them water. Falling to their knees, the conquistadors thanked God, though it didn't occur to GALVESTON 27 them to thank the Indians. Their real mission was gold, the Spaniards managed to convey. The...