Lafayette (LA) Daily Advertiser, January 26, 1999

Spanish seamen were first to flirt with Acadiana coastline

by Jim Bradshaw

That version of history overlooks one or two things:

• There were 18, not 13, original colonies, since the French began to settle in Louisiana. The Spanish were in Florida, New Mexico, Texas, and Arizona well before 1733, when the British got to Georgia, the last of the"original" 13.
  
• The colonial history of the United States began in the Spanish Caribbean, not along the Atlantic. Spain had explored from the Atlantic (Ponce de León, 1513) to the Pacific (Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, 1543) long before the British tried to settle Jamestown (1607).
  
• Santo Domingo was the first permanent city founded by Europeans in the Americas, dating from 1496. It became the base from which Spain explored and conquered Central and South America.
  
• Frenchmen settled on the Acadian peninsula (1604) and established a presence in what would become the United States (Penobscot, Maine, 1613) early in our colonial history.
  
• Spanish explorers from the Caribbean and French trappers and traders from colonial Canada had already seen half the country before British explorers began pushing across the mountains toward the Mississippi River.

It might be said that south Louisiana's colonial history began with Anton de Alaminos, who first traveled to the New World on Columbus' second voyage. Alaminos was not a great conquistador, but he was the man who would lead the first Europeans to the Mississippi River and, maybe, to Acadiana.

By 1518, Alaminos was a man of wide experience. He had been a pilot for Ponce de León's quest for the fountain of youth (1513), was wounded by Indians in Florida while piloting a ship for Francisco Hernando de Cordoba (1517), and piloted Jean de Grijalba's exploration of the western Gulf (early 1518).

In 1518, Alaminos was Spain's best Caribbean pilot. He wanted to find out if there was a link between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific and he found a willing backer in Francisco de Garay, who had come to the Indies with Columbus in 1493 and became rich as governor of Jamaica. Garay equipped a small fleet of three or four ships to sail the coast of the Gulf from one end to the other. It went to sea in late fall or early winter 1518.

Alonso Alvarez de Pineda commanded the fleet, and Alaminos was chief pilot. They hoped to find the same thing that Columbus was looking for on his first voyage: a short ship route that Spanish merchants could use to trade with China.

The explorers first landed on Florida's lower west coast, where the natives gave them rough treatment. The Spaniards left quickly and sailed around the Gulf as far as Rio Pánuco in Mexico, where Hernándo Cortés founded the town of Tampico.

On the way, they sailed past the mouth of the Mississippi River and noted its waters pouring into the Gulf. It was the time of Pentecost, so Pineda named it Rio del Espiritu Santo, River of the Holy Spirit. Pineda sailed upstream for about 20 miles, counting 40 Indian villages along the banks, and spent more than a month inside one of the river inlets, careening and cleaning his ships and trading with the (apparently friendly) natives.

The explorers fought Indians all along the shore of what would become Texas and were badly beaten at a place called Chila, near the mouth of the Pánuco River. Pineda was among those who were flayed and killed, their skins hung in Aztec temples as trophies. The natives burned all but one ship. The survivors arrived at Veracruz "ill and very yellow and with swollen bellies." They eventually reported on their journey to their backer, Garay, who got a grant from the king for the territory traversed by Pineda -- including what is now Louisiana. He named the area Amichel.

The next sea voyage of any consequence that may have touched on Acadiana came in 1527, when Pánfilo Narváez wrangled permission from Spain's King Carlos V to colonize a wide and largely unexplored segment of the Gulf coast. He sailed from Sanlucar de Barrameda in Spain on June 17 with 600 people in five ships. Upon sailing, Narváez gave himself the title "Governor of Florida, Rio de Palmas (the Rio Grande) and the River Espiritu Santo (the Mississippi)."

He spent 45 days in Santo Domingo, where he acquired another ship but lost 140 men to desertion. He picked up two more ships in Cuba, but a hurricane struck while he was there, sinking both the new ships and killing 50 men.

Narváez and 400 men made a fresh start in late February 1528. After weathering several storms, they landed on May 1 in western Florida, where Narváez decided to send his ships ahead to look for a good harbor. He thought that he was only 10 or 15 leagues from Pánuco (later renamed Tampico) on the coast of central Mexico. (A league is commonly figured as 2.6 miles.) He was in fact 1,800 miles away from the town. He and 300 of his men would march west along the shore and meet the ships later.

On June 15, the expedition reached an Apalacee Indian village near today's Tallahassee, Fla. They stayed 25 days, most of the time under attack, since they had taken a chief as a hostage. The Apalacee were the best bowmen the Europeans had ever seen. Their 6-foot oak bows were so stiff that no Spaniard could bend one. The Indian archers picked off the white men by shooting through the joints and other small gaps in the Spaniards' steel armor.

Leaving the Apalacee village, Narváez wandered westward for nine days, fighting Indians as he went. The Indians waged hit-and-run warfare against him, striking suddenly, then disappearing into the forest. Spanish casualties mounted, provisions and heavy weapons were lost or left behind. Finally, Narváez sent scouts to the coast, hoping to find his ships and get away to sea. The ships weren't there.

All he could do was to build new boats and try to reach Mexico, even though there was not a single shipbuilder among his men and they had only their hands and their knives to work with.. Deerskins and hollowed logs were turned into a forge. Spurs, stirrups, and crossbow iron were smelted into nails, axes, and crude saws. Lines and caulking were twisted from palm fibers and horse hair. Shirts were patched together to form sails. One horse was killed every three days for food. Working this way, they built five boats, each about 35 feet long. Each boat was crowded with between 45 and 50 men when they set sail at the end of September 1528.

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the survivors of the expedition, wrote afterward, "When clothing and supplies were loaded, the sides of the barges remained hardly half a foot above water; and we were jammed in too tight to move. Such is the power of necessity that we should thus hazard a turbulent sea, none of us knowing anything about navigation."

Narváez and his band sailed safely past the mouth of the Mississippi on the last day of October, 1528. He noted that "fresh water ... came into the sea continually and with great violence." But, one-by-one, the pieced-together boats sank, disappeared at sea, or were wrecked on the shore -- where the crews starved to death or were killed by Indians. The boat commanded by Narváez slipped its anchor and was pushed out to sea one windy night. He was never heard from again.

Another boat commanded by Cabeza de Vaca may have been off the coast of Acadiana when it capsized on Nov. 8. Most of his crew struggled ashore, where they managed to light a fire and parch some corn. Friendly Indians gave them food, then the Spaniards put to sea once again. The boat overturned again the next day, several more men drowned, and the survivors lost all of their remaining possessions.

Cabeza de Vaca and the survivors of his barge made it ashore, but were "naked as they were born, with the loss of everything we had." Indians found them and built fires that saved the Spaniards from the November cold, then took them inland to their village. The next day, Cabeza de Vaca was reunited with captains Andrés Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo, whose barges had also capsized not too far away and who had also been found by the Indians.

Eighty of the Spaniards eventually made it ashore on an island they soon christened La Isla de Mal Hado, Bad Luck Island.

Only 15 of them were alive by winter's end. Cabeza de Vaca wrote, "Five Christians quartered on the coast came to the extremity of eating each other. Only the body of the last one, whom nobody was left to eat, was found unconsumed."

Eventually, all but four of the shipwrecked Spaniards would die. The survivors were Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso del Castillo, Andrés Dorantes, and Dorantes' black slave, Esteban. They lived among the Indians on Bad Luck Island for six years before they were able to begin an incredible overland trek to Mexico.

Most historians say that Bad Luck Island was probably Galveston Island or one nearby it. A minority opinion, however, is that Cabeza's shipwreck could have been on the Louisiana coast.

For example, Donald E. Sheppard writes in "Cabeza de Vaca's Journey," "Cabeza de Vaca's raft wrecked on Chandeleur Island, a very large island at the time. Most of his companions would be stranded and die just west of the Mississippi River, but Cabeza would survive to spend the next five years on the island and nearby mainland, living among Natives at various villages. ... He would then flee west, across the Mississippi River, to Donaldsonville, finding several other survivors there, then, with two others, he stopped by Opelousas then headed for Mexico, Spain's nearest outpost on the continent."

If that account is true, Spanish explorers trekked through south Louisiana sometime in the early 1530s.