Estevanico

Estevanico (c. 1500–1539) is a Berber and one of the first known native Africans to reach the present-day continental United States.

He is known by many different names, but is commonly known as Esteban de Dorantes, Estebanico and Esteban the Moor.

Enslaved as a youth by the Portuguese, he is sold to a Spanish nobleman and taken in 1527 on the Spanish Narváez expedition to establish a colony in Florida.

He is one of four survivors among three hundred men who explore the peninsula.

By late 1528 the group has been reduced to eighty men, who survive being washed ashore at Galveston Island after an effort to sail across the Gulf of Mexico.

He travels for eight years with Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado across northern New Spain (present-day U.S. Southwest and northern Mexico), reaching Spanish forces in Mexico City in 1536.

Later Estevanico serves as the main guide for a return expedition to the Southwest.

Spaniards believe that he was killed in the Zuni city of Hawikuh in 1539.

That is only speculative, however, because the two Indians who report back to Friar Marcos de Niza had not seen him killed but only assumed he had been.

He is considered a "discoverer of New Mexico."

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