Of the hundreds who came ashore with Pánfilo de Narváez on this bay in 1528, four men lived to cross the continent. Two are remembered now: Cabeza de Vaca, who wrote the book, and Estevanico, the enslaved African who would die seeking the Seven Cities. The other two were the captains Andrés Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo, and the eight-year ordeal does not happen, and is not recorded, without them.
Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, from Béjar in Spain, and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, from Salamanca, sailed as captains in the Narváez expedition that made landfall near Tampa Bay in the spring of 1528. Dorantes brought with him an enslaved North African he owned, the man history remembers as Estevanico. Both captains marched inland with Narváez and the main body, and both were among the desperate company that, finding no ships waiting on the coast, built barges and put out into the Gulf in a doomed bid to reach Mexico.
The Gulf broke the expedition apart. The barges were scattered and wrecked along the Texas coast, Narváez was lost, and the survivors were reduced to a handful, enslaved or tolerated by the coastal peoples through brutal winters. It was on that shore that the four who would finish the journey came together: Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, Castillo, and Estevanico. For years they were held separately and reunited by chance and design, until they slipped away together and began moving west.
Across more than three thousand miles and roughly eight years, the four survived as the country's peoples allowed, and increasingly as healers whose reputation ran ahead of them. Castillo in particular is credited in the accounts with early cures that gave the men their strange standing as medicine-bringers. In 1536 they reached Spanish slave-catchers in northwestern Mexico, and then Mexico City. There the three Spaniards, Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, and Castillo, together prepared a report of all they had seen for the Crown. That document, the so-called Joint Report, is lost, but it was drawn on by the chronicler Oviedo, and it stands behind Cabeza de Vaca's own famous narrative. The survivors' account is not one man's memory but, at its root, three men's.
Their story curls back into the larger history of the conquest. The viceroy Antonio de Mendoza, electrified by the survivors' report of populous lands to the north, wanted them to guide an expedition there; Dorantes was meant to lead it, and when the plan faltered, it was Dorantes's slave Estevanico who was sent ahead with Fray Marcos de Niza in 1539, to his death at the Zuni town of Hawikuh, helping ignite the Coronado expedition. Dorantes and Castillo themselves stayed in New Spain, both marrying into wealth and living out their lives in Mexico. They never returned to the Florida bay where their ordeal began, but they had landed there, and survived it, and carried its first long report of the American interior back into the world.