Paul Schneider · 2006 · survival

Paul Schneider's account of the Narvaez expedition, which landed four hundred men in Florida in 1528 to conquer it. Eight years and five thousand miles later, four of them walked out of the hills in western Mexico. In between they were slaves, cannibals, arms dealers and finally faith healers - whatever it took to keep going west.

1. 1
   Havana

   Narvaez assembles five ships and six hundred people to do in La Florida what Cortes did in Mexico. A hurricane and desertions in the Caribbean have already cost him a quarter of them before he sights the coast.

2. 2
   Tampa Bay

   He marches three hundred men inland on 1 May 1528 and orders the ships to meet him further along the coast - a decision that separates the army from its supplies and its escape, and is never undone.

3. 3
   Apalachee

   The great town they have been promised turns out to be forty houses and no gold. The Apalachee shoot at them from the trees for weeks, and the army starts back toward a sea it has no boats on.

4. 4
   Bahia de Caballos

   They eat the horses and build five rafts out of hides, stirrups and their own shirts, with no carpenter and no idea how to caulk them - and put out into the Gulf with two hundred and forty men aboard.

5. 5
   Galveston Island

   Past the mouth of the Mississippi the rafts scatter. Cabeza de Vaca's grounds on an island the survivors name Malhado, where the winter kills most of the rest and the living eat the dead.

6. 6
   South Texas

   Years as slaves of the Karankawa and the Mariames, hauling wood and eating spiders and prickly pear - by now four men left out of four hundred, one of them Esteban, a Moroccan slave, and all of them going nowhere.

7. 7
   The Sierra Madre

   They escape west and something changes: they are taken for healers, and crowds follow them from village to village. The four cross the mountains with hundreds of people walking behind them.

8. 8
   Culiacan

   They walk into a party of Spanish slave-catchers taking the people who had been protecting them - and Cabeza de Vaca argues with his own countrymen about it, which is the strangest turn in the book.

9. 9
   Mexico City

   Eight years after Tampa Bay they reach Cortes's capital with nothing but the story, and Cabeza de Vaca writes it up for the king - the first account of the interior of North America by anyone who crossed it.