Galveston Galveston Texas United States
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He will report that a fatal stomach ailment reduced the Karankawa population by roughly one half during his stay, de Vaca; the nature and casualties resulting from this illness are unknown.
After the introduction of the horse by Spaniards, these trade networks will strengthen.
Survivors, including Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, are cared for by the Capoque band of Karankawa.
Storms, thirst and starvation have reduced the Narváez expedition to about eighty survivors when a hurricane casts Cabeza de Vaca and his companions on the western shore of a barrier island.
Historians believe they landed at present-day Galveston, Texas.
For the next four years, Cabeza de Vaca and a steadily dwindling number of his comrades will live in the complex indigenous world of South Texas.
Only fifteen of the survivors of the Narváez expedition live past the winter on 1528-29.
The explorers call the island Malhado (“Ill fate” in Spanish), or the Island of Doom.
They had tried to repair the rafts, using what remained of their own clothes as oakum to plug holes, but they had lost the rafts to a large wave.
In the spring, the men travel along the Colorado River, walking through the deserts of modern Mexico, New Mexico, and Texas.
As the number of survivors of the Narváez expedition dwindled, they had been enslaved for a few years by various native tribes of the upper Gulf Coast.
Because Cabeza de Vaca had survived and prospered from time to time, some scholars argue that he was not enslaved but was using a figure of speech in his later writings.
He and other noblemen are accustomed to better living.
Their encounters with harsh conditions and weather, and being required to work like native women must have seemed like slavery.
The tribes to which Cabeza de Vaca had been enslaved include the Hans, the Capoques (a branch of the Karankawa), and the Coahuiltecs.
Traveling mostly with this small group, Cabeza de Vaca, traveling on foot, explores parts of Texas as well as the northeastern Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila, and possibly smaller portions of New Mexico and Arizona.
By 1532, only four members of the original Narváez expedition survive: Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and Estevanico, the enslaved Moor.
They head west and gradually south, hoping to reach the Spanish Empire's outpost in Mexico.
Union Major General Gordon Granger lands at Galveston, Texas, on June 19, and informs the people of Texas of the Emancipation Proclamation (an event now celebrated each year as Juneteenth).