Shipwrecks and Commentaries

"Yes. This is an account of the first ever European, or I should say European and African, expedition to North America. Picking up on our ‘lost’ theme, an expedition of about 300 Spaniards and their African slaves landed at Tampa Bay in 1528. There were only a handful of Africans. I have found evidence for four, but there were almost certainly more. They knew so little about where they were that they assumed they were at Matagorda Bay in Texas. Everything went wrong and shipwreck, disease and Indian attacks left only four of them still alive – three noblemen and an African slave. At that time America was populated by between one million and 18 million Indians – the estimates vary that much. Anyway, these four went native and became Indian shamans. As a result of their status they were able to travel up the Rio Grande to North Mexico and then west to Arizona, south to the Gulf of California and to New Mexico where they ran into some conquistadors going in the opposite direction. This must have been one of the most incredible meetings in history. Fifty lost Spanish conquistadors on horses in the bush in New Mexico and out of the bush come 600 Indians led by three blonde men and a black man. He was temporarily equal. When they got back to Mexico City where the Spanish were based nobody remembered to free him. His name was Esteban Dorantes, originally from West Africa, enslaved in North Africa where he’d learned Arabic, brought to Spain and then to America where he learnt a number of Indian languages. He was clearly, reading between the lines of the Cabeza de Vaca account, the one who negotiated the men’s relationship with the Indians and who was relied on to sort things out. De Vaca has no motive for aggrandising Dorantes and yet he is present when anything important is happening and was obviously highly able. That the first ever crossing of North America was led by a black man, and that he led the expedition through Louisiana, Alabama and Texas, is the political irony of the century. Once they were back in Mexico City the viceroy put him in charge of an army of Mexicans and he led them back up into Arizona. Then he disappears. There is some suggestion that he was so taken with the Mayo (Indians of the Mayo River) women that he hid away from the other Spaniards and took a few Mayo wives. In 1622 a mixed-race man called Aboray was lord of a lot of Mayo lands and was rumoured to be Esteban’s son, but … well, who knows?"