Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was born at Jerez de la Frontera in Andalusia about 1490; the year is uncertain and the day is not recorded. His grandfather Pedro de Vera had conquered Gran Canaria; the surname came down his mother's line. Orphaned young, he served the Duke of Medina Sidonia and was wounded at Ravenna in 1512. In June 1527 he sailed as royal treasurer with Pánfilo de Narváez's expedition to conquer Florida. Narváez landed near Tampa Bay in April 1528, lost his ships, and led his men west along the Gulf coast on rafts they built themselves; in November the survivors were thrown ashore on an island off Texas that Cabeza de Vaca called Malhado, the island of misfortune. For some six years he lived among the peoples of the coast, first as a slave, then as a travelling trader in shells and hides, and as a healer whose prayers and breath were sought across the country. In 1534 he escaped west with Andrés Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo and Estevanico, an enslaved Moroccan, and in 1536 the four walked into a party of Spanish slave hunters near Culiacán, followed by hundreds of Indigenous companions. Back in Spain he wrote his account for Charles V, printed at Zamora in 1542. By then he was adelantado of the Río de la Plata; he crossed overland from the Brazilian coast to Asunción, passing the Iguazú Falls on the way, and tried to stop the settlers' abuse of the Guaraní. In April 1544 Domingo Martínez de Irala's faction arrested him and sent him back to Spain a prisoner. The Council of the Indies sentenced him in 1551 to lose his offices and serve in exile at Oran; the sentence was later eased, and he spent his last years in Valladolid, poor and ill, publishing the account again in 1555 with the Comentarios on his governorship. He died about 1559. No likeness of him made in his lifetime is known.

In November 1528, trying to relaunch their raft off Malhado, the castaways were rolled by a wave that drowned three men and took the boat and everything in it. The islanders who had fed them the day before found them naked and freezing on the sand, sat down among them, and wept aloud for half an hour.