Among the four men who survived the destruction of the Narvaez expedition and walked across the future American Southwest was an enslaved North African. His name comes down to us as Estevanico, and his life, beginning in Morocco and ending at a Zuni pueblo in what is now New Mexico, traces one of the most astonishing arcs in the early history of the Americas. He passed through Tampa Bay in 1528 as another man's property, and he belongs in this archive both for that and for the explorer he became.
Estevanico was born around 1500 in Azemmour, a port on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, in years when drought and famine drove many into slavery and the Portuguese were raiding the Moroccan coast. Taken into the Iberian slave trade, he was baptized a Christian in Spain before 1527 and became the property of Andres Dorantes de Carranza, one of the captains of the Narvaez expedition. When that expedition landed near Tampa Bay in April 1528 and marched to its doom, Estevanico marched with it, an enslaved man with no say in the venture that would, against every probability, make him a figure of history.
When the Narvaez expedition was annihilated on the Gulf, Estevanico was one of only four men to survive the entire eight-year ordeal, alongside the chronicler Cabeza de Vaca, his enslaver Dorantes, and Alonso del Castillo. Wrecked on the Texas coast and scattered among the coastal peoples, the four were at times enslaved themselves and at times revered as healers whose reputation ran ahead of them from village to village. Estevanico proved the most adept of them all at languages, at reading unfamiliar peoples, and at the diplomacy of first contact, and he commonly went ahead of the Spaniards to make the first approach to each new community. By the time the four reached Spanish Mexico in 1536, having crossed the breadth of the continent's southern interior, he had become an explorer in every sense but the legal one: he was still, in the eyes of the law, a slave.
His survival did not buy his freedom, and it led directly to his death. The survivors' reports of populous lands to the north electrified Spanish Mexico with dreams of the Seven Cities of Cibola and their rumored gold. In 1539 the viceroy sent an expedition north under the friar Marcos de Niza to find them, and Estevanico, the most experienced traveler available, was sent ahead as guide and advance scout, ranging far in front with a party of Native companions while the friar followed behind. He pushed up through what is now Arizona and into New Mexico and reached the Zuni town of Hawikuh. There, in the early summer of 1539, the Zuni killed him. The reasons are uncertain and the sources hostile, Coronado's men later repeated a claim that his death owed to his demands and his conduct toward Native women, an accusation that may say more about his accusers than about him. He did not live to see that there was no gold at all; the fabled cities of Cibola were the pueblos themselves.
Estevanico is often called the first African to set foot in what is now the United States. The honest version is more precise, and this archive insists on the precision. Free and enslaved Africans had come with earlier Spanish ventures; the free African Juan Garrido had landed in Florida with Ponce de Leon as far back as 1513, so Estevanico was not literally first. What he was, beyond dispute, is among the earliest Africans known in the present-day United States, the first known person of African descent to explore the American Southwest, and one of the first people of any origin to cross the southern breadth of the continent. He entered the record as one man's property and left it as an explorer whose name is still spoken when his enslaver's is forgotten, which is its own kind of justice.