America's Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women, and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation Paperback Read Online Free PDF Page A

come to conquer Florida and perhaps discover another magnificent New World | 22 \
    Isabella’s Pigs
    empire. But the riches dreamed of in Florida were a myth—fool’s gold.
    This ill-fated army encountered little but hunger, disaster, and misery before disappearing from view.
    Cabeza de Vaca’s extraordinary odyssey had begun in 1527, when conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez was commissioned to try again where Ponce de León had failed. Narváez had earned his stripes with Diego Velázquez and Cortés in the brutal 1512 campaign to subjugate Cuba, described as “the laboratory of the destruction of the New World: slavery, mining, forced conversions, extermination.”13 In 1520, Narváez had been dispatched by Velázquez with orders to arrest an insubordinate Cortés, then beginning his conquest of Mexico. Alerted to the plot against him, Cortés struck first against his fellow Spaniard. The battle left Narváez wounded, broken, half blind, and festering in a sweltering, mosquito-infested Mexican cell. Cortés went on to conquer Mexico, becoming wealthy beyond dreams and inspiring a generation of conquistadors.
    Eventually released from prison, Narváez recovered from his wounds and humiliation, but he still dreamed of finding a civilization the equal of Mexico. Now in his fifties, he left Spain in 1527 with five ships, approximately six hundred men, and a handful of women to serve as cooks and servants. Also on board was Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who acted as “treasurer and chief officer of justice.” The expedition sailed first for Cuba, where Narváez hoped to add fresh provisions, horses, and additional recruits. If the priests who accompanied the expedition had asked for good weather, their prayers went unan-swered. Events in Cuba might have served as a harbinger of what was to come, as a powerful hurricane—a word the Spanish had borrowed from the name of the Mayan storm god, Huracan—struck the fleet, sinking two ships, killing more than fifty men, and convincing many others to remain in Cuba.
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    America’s Hidden Hi Ç ory Narváez pressed on with a single-mindedness that is the hallmark of many successful adventurers. But in his case, it proved to be the foolhardiness of a man so desperate for gold and glory that all caution was abandoned. Led by ship’s pilots who talked a good game about knowing the waters off Florida but seemed as lost as anyone, the expedition, now numbering some four hundred, finally arrived in Florida’s Gulf waters on April 14, 1528, reaching the vicinity of what is now Tampa Bay.
    From the outset of the expedition, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca did not find Narváez an especially judicious leader. And Narváez viewed this fussy “accountant” as a royal spy. In his forties, Cabeza de Vaca was an educated courtier whose family was reasonably well-to-do.
    His name, which literally means “head of the cow,” was an honorific title bestowed, according to family legend, by a grateful king upon an ancestor who, in 1212, had helped the king by marking a secret mountain pass with a cow’s skull, allowing a Christian army to surprise a Moorish enemy. One of his relatives had been a tutor to King Charles I, and Cabeza de Vaca had pulled court strings to secure his appointment. In Cabeza de Vaca’s memoir of the expedition—which must be read with a jaundiced eye, as it is clearly the self-aggrandizing work of a man with an agenda—Narváez is consistently depicted as making poor decisions and ignoring good advice, usually dispensed by Cabeza de Vaca himself. At one point, annoyed at Cabeza de Vaca’s repeated cautions, Narváez suggested that Cabeza de Vaca turn back. The courtier balked at the suggestion that his wariness was cowardice.
    Their first significant dispute came when Narváez divided his forces, again ignoring Cabeza de Vaca’s counsel. Disembarking with about three hundred men and some women, Narváez left the other hundred men on the three ships, with orders