The Moor's Account

In the spring of 1528, the Narváez⁵ expedition landed on the coast of La Florida. While examining fishing nets in a deserted village, Mustafa¹ found a rough yellow pebble. His master Dorantes² snatched it and brought it to the governor.

Narváez⁵ — one-eyed, helmeted, vain — declared it gold and tortured captive Indians until they confirmed a wealthy kingdom called Apalache. He then split the armada: ships would sail to the port of Pánuco while three hundred men marched inland.

The young captain Castillo⁴ objected — they had no maps, no supply line — but Narváez⁵ insulted him into silence. Cabeza de Vaca,³ the expedition's treasurer, supported the march. The ships sailed away. Three hundred souls entered the wilderness, chasing a kingdom built from a tortured man's confession.

Weeks of marching brought them through alligator-infested swamps, across rivers where a horseman drowned, and past Indians who shot arrows from invisible positions. When scouts reported sighting Apalache, the company surged with hope.

Cabeza de Vaca³ led a raiding party that took the town without resistance. They entered triumphantly — and found fifty thatched huts, fields of corn, and no gold whatsoever. The commissary observed gently that people in straw houses do not possess gold. An Indian cacique led warriors in relentless attacks.

Mustafa¹ took an arrow in the thigh. That night, soldiers dragged women from the temple. The women who remained began to drum and mourn, their keening reaching every corner of the stolen town, forcing every man who tried to sleep to reckon with what had been done.

After the burned village of Aute offered no refuge, the company retreated to a coastal bay. Fever consumed dozens. Deserters tried to flee with their horses. In the silence of a condemned camp, Mustafa¹ proposed what no one else had dared: build rafts and sail to Pánuco.

The idea was adopted. A blacksmith built a forge from stones and horse-skin bellows; soldiers surrendered their armor to be melted into crude tools. Horses were slaughtered for food and braided-hair rope — including Abejorro, Dorantes's² beloved mount.

Mustafa¹ sewed patchwork sails from flags, vestments, shirts, and handkerchiefs, fabric that caught the wind like prayers stitched from rags. Over five weeks, the carpenter Fernándes directed construction of five rafts. They sailed in early fall — two hundred and fifty skeletal men on boats held together with horsehair.

The rafts crept along the coast under tattered sails, plagued by rancid water and dwindling corn. On one island, Narváez⁵ destroyed Indian canoes for gunwale wood, provoking an attack at the next village — generous hosts turned violent after hearing of the destruction.

Then the rafts reached a mighty river whose current threatened to capsize them. Dorantes² called out for Narváez⁵ to throw lines between the vessels. The governor refused. The time for orders was past, he declared; each raft should save itself.

A storm struck that night, driving the vessels apart in the darkness. Narváez⁵ and his page were swept out to sea and never seen again. The rest drifted alone across the gulf, their quarrels drowned by thunder, each man wrestling with the weight of his own approaching death.

Mustafa's¹ raft wrecked on a barrier island. Of thirty-nine survivors, many were too sick to walk. When the soldier Ruíz¹³ refused to approach the island's Indians, Mustafa¹ walked to the Capoque village with Diego,⁷ the carpenter Fernándes, and Father Anselmo⁹ — the young, stuttering friar beloved for his fiddle-playing and gentle graveside prayers.

The Capoques gave them food and shelter. Cabeza de Vaca's³ raft had also wrecked nearby. That winter, a bowel disease devastated both groups, killing over a hundred and twenty Capoques and nearly all the Castilians.

Ruíz¹³ reappeared from the island's far side to confess he had eaten his dead companions. The Indians recoiled in horror. By spring, only twelve men from Mustafa's¹ group survived. They bartered their last possessions for passage to the mainland.

On the mainland, rivers claimed two of their party. A cobbler named León, found alive near a lagoon, later boasted about raping Indian women in Apalache; Mustafa¹ attacked him and was pulled off. They fell in with the Carancahuas, who demanded menial labor for food.

When León stole provisions and blamed Mustafa,¹ the Indians beat him. Later Mustafa¹ caught León stealing again; the Carancahuas killed him. Then came the cruelest blow. A pregnant woman dreamed that Diego,⁷ Dorantes's² gentle younger brother, had harmed her unborn child.

Without trial, her husband slit Diego's⁷ throat. Dorantes² caught his brother's⁷ body as he fell, cradling Diego's⁷ head while blood pooled between them. Three more Castilians were killed for taboo violations. Only Dorantes,² Castillo,⁴ and Mustafa¹ remained.

Dorantes² fled the Carancahuas without warning, leaving Mustafa¹ and Castillo⁴ to escape alone. They found him living with the Yguaces. Among this tribe, Mustafa¹ befriended Chaubekwan,¹⁵ a healer who dressed as a woman and taught him indigenous medicine — how to grind roots, prepare poultices, and weave ceremony into treatment.

When the Susola cacique fell ill with crippling back pain, Mustafa¹ recalled the traveling healer who had treated his own father¹⁰ with hijama in the Azemmur marketplace years ago. He heated a cup, placed it on the cacique's back, and told a long, distracting story while the cure took hold.

The cacique recovered in days. Word spread among neighboring tribes. At the River of Prickly Pears, the four survivors finally reunited — Cabeza de Vaca³ had lost his Indian wife and child to fever — and began healing together.

They found shelter with the Avavares, led by the generous cacique Tahacha.¹⁶ The shaman Behewibri watched Mustafa¹ warily but grew curious about his remedies. Behewibri's daughter Oyomasot⁶ was another matter — fierce, independent, contemptuous of every rule imposed on Avavare women.

She made weapons in secret and wandered the woods alone. Mustafa¹ first spoke to her while she struggled with a rope in a mulberry tree; when he tried to help, she scolded him for breaking it. He fell in love watching her stand in the rain after her mother berated her — feet sinking in mud, spine unbowed.

Tahacha¹⁶ decreed the four survivors should marry Avavare women. Dorantes² married Tekotsen, Castillo⁴ married Kewaan, and Mustafa¹ married Oyomasot.⁶ On their wedding night, she traced the scar on his neck and asked how he got it. He told her everything.

Oyomasot⁶ urged Mustafa¹ to accept invitations from distant tribes. She composed rhyming cures patients could remember; Dorantes's² brother-in-law Satosol¹⁴ served as flamboyant translator. Each tribe they healed sent guides to escort them to the next, and the custom became unstoppable.

Their following swelled from dozens to hundreds to twelve hundred. They crossed mountain ranges into the Land of Corn, where tribes lived in permanent mud-brick towns with cultivated fields of corn, beans, and squash. One cacique gifted Dorantes² five hundred carved deer hearts.

The four were called the Children of the Sun — strangers from the east with miraculous powers. Mustafa¹ sensed danger in their growing fame, a tower of trust that could topple at any moment. He told Oyomasot⁶ this would end badly. She told him he worried too much.

While gathering herbs, Mustafa¹ spotted a shard of glass beneath a cactus and spoke the word before he could stop himself. Cabeza de Vaca³ followed bootprints to five Spanish horsemen. It was January 1536 — eight years since La Florida.

The soldiers' officer, Alcaraz, listened to their story and announced his intention to enslave their Indian followers. The four survivors argued — they had promised these people safety — but Alcaraz held firm. In Culiacán, the alcalde Díaz offered smooth assurances while corralling hundreds of Indians in a horse run.

Oyomasot⁶ warned the women to flee at night, but those who tried were caught and returned. Despite months of argument, the survivors could not free the people who had followed them. The empire's appetite swallowed every promise they had made.

In the capital, Bishop Zumárraga dressed the survivors in loincloths and presented them at mass as living saints of peaceful conversion. The viceroy¹⁷ collected their Joint Report over two months — Mustafa¹ was never asked to testify. Cabeza de Vaca³ departed for Spain.

Dorantes² courted a wealthy widow; Castillo⁴ did the same. Repeatedly, Mustafa¹ asked Dorantes² for the freedom papers he had promised. Dorantes² refused five hundred pesos from the viceroy¹⁷ and rejected an offer from the famous Cortés — not to free Mustafa,¹ but to keep him.

Each refusal posed as generosity. Oyomasot⁶ told Mustafa¹ to stop asking: freedom could not be requested, only seized. In the quiet of their room, Mustafa¹ began writing his own account — the story the empire would never record, the truth the officials would never hear.

When the viceroy¹⁷ proposed a mission to find the legendary Seven Cities of Gold, Mustafa¹ saw his opening. He persuaded Dorantes² that sending his slave north would yield a claim to undiscovered riches. Dorantes² agreed. Mustafa¹ departed with two friars, a hundred Aztec porters, his pregnant wife, and his greyhounds.

He arranged to travel ahead of the friar Marco, promising to send back crosses of varying sizes — large for wealth, small for poverty. He frightened the younger friar with embellished tales of cannibals until the man refused to continue.

At each town, Mustafa¹ dispatched his remaining escorts bearing a cross slightly smaller than the last. By the time he reached Hawikuh, a Zuni town whose mud walls glowed orange in the sunset, his final ten porters carried a cross the size of one hand.

Free of every Castilian companion and imperial escort, Mustafa¹ sat with the Zuni cacique Ahku and told him the truth: armed white men were approaching. He proposed an audacious counter-fiction — send messengers to the friar claiming the Zunis had killed Estebanico.

The news would deter the empire. The slave name would die; the man would live. While Ahku deliberated with his elders, Mustafa¹ lay in the tall grass outside the town walls with Oyomasot,⁶ his ear against the mound of her belly, listening to their unborn child's heartbeat.

He would return to Avavare country, following the rhythms of the land his wife's⁶ people had known for centuries. The story of their journey would be their child's inheritance — not gold, not empire, but truth in the form of a tale well told.