Margen
In 1528, a Spanish expedition of some 300 men landed in Florida looking for gold. Everything went wrong: disease, hunger, shipwrecks. From that disaster, four men ended up washed ashore on the Texas coast. One was Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, from Jerez.
What followed is one of the most astonishing journeys ever told: eight years walking through the interior of North America. Cabeza de Vaca survived as a slave, then as a trader between tribes, and finally as a wandering healer whose reputation travelled from village to village ahead of him.
In 1536, Spanish horsemen in northwestern Mexico came across four unrecognisable figures who spoke Castilian. They had crossed the continent on foot.
Cabeza de Vaca told it all in 'Naufragios', the first great European account of inland North America. And he wrote it with a sympathy for the native peoples that was vanishingly rare in his time.