Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, an explorer, soldier and writer, was born around 1490 in Jeréz de Frontere in southern Spain. His parents were Francisco de Vera and Teresa Cabeza de Vaca. As a young man Cabeza de Vaca chose a military career, serving in campaigns in Navarre and in Italy. In 1513 he entered the service of the Duke of Medina Sidonia.

In 1527 he was appointed treasurer of Panfilo de Narvaez's ill-fated expedition to Florida. The expedition set sail from San Lucar de Barrameda, Spain on June 17, 1527 with 600 colonists and soldiers and five ships. After the loss of two ships and sixty men in a hurricane, the party arrived at St. Clements Point, near the entrance to Tampa Bay on the west coast of Florida in April of 1528. Narvaez sent his fleet up Florida's Gulf Coast while the remaining men traveled through the Florida panhandle searching for gold. Several months later the men tried unsuccessfully to rendezvous with the ships near Apalachee Bay. The ships searched for the men for ha year and then sailed back to Spain.

Looking to the sea as the means of escape, Narvaez ordered Cabeza de Vaca to supervise the construction of five barges. In late 1528, south of the Mississippi Delta, the barges were swept out to sea by the river's current and separated in a storm. Cabeza de Vaca managed to get his barge to shore at Galveston Island, Texas, where he met up with the other survivors. Two officers of the expedition, Alonso del Castillo Maldonado and Andres Dorantes, set out with the other survivors for the Texas mainland. Cabeza de Vaca, ill with a fever, followed later after recovering his strength. Unable to find the other Spaniards, he wandered through northeast Texas for four years, surviving by trading with the natives and gaining a reputation as a healer by performing Catholic rites over the sick along the way.

In 1533 Cabeza de Vaca finally met up with the surviving Spaniards who, by this time, consisted of only the two officers and Dorantes' Moorish slave, Estevan. All the other Spaniards were dead or had been enslaved by the Natives. In 1535 the men accompanied by American Indian guides, traveled north and across Texas into present-day New Mexico, heading toward Spanish settlements in Mexico.

The men reached the Rio Grande at Rincon (sixty miles north of Las Cruces, New Mexico), where they crossed the river and headed south into Chihuahua, Mexico. They reached the Gulf of California, passed through the Sierra Madre, and finally met up with a Spanish slave-hunting party in north central Mexico. After resting for a few weeks, Cabeza de Vaca proceeded to Mexico City, arriving in July of 1536. He reported to Mexico's governor, Antonio de Mendoza, that he had heard of rich native cities north of where he had wandered. This fueled the Spanish search for the so-called Seven Cities of Gold.

Back in Spain in 1538 he contributed to the official report on the fate of the Narvaez expedition. He declined to join Hernando de Soto's expedition to Florida because he did not want to be second in command.

In 1540, as reward for his service in North America, Cabeza de Vaca was appointed governor of the Rio De la Plata colony in present-day Paraguay. Late in 1541 he arrived at Santa Catarina, an island off the coast of Brazil. Crossing to the mainland he traveled 600 miles inland to the capital of Asuncion, arriving in March of 1542 after a journey of four months. Finding the colonists short of supplies and oppressed by royal officials, he immediately instituted reforms, which lead to conspiracies against him.

In September of 1542 he led 400 Spanish soldiers and about 800 Guariani up the Paraguay River to Puerto de los Reyes, where they were forced to turn back. Returning to Asuncion in April of 1543, Cabeza de Vaca was imprisoned by his enemies. In 1545 he was sent back to Spain in chains, charged with malfeasance. He was eventually cleared of wrongdoing and remained in Spain the rest of his life, serving as royal magistrate in Seville.

In 1542, his account of his adventures in North America, Los Naufragios (The Shipwrecked Ones), was published. His eight-year journey from Florida to the Gulf of California was the first known crossing of the North American continent.

Cabeza de Vaca died in 1564.

Source: Carl Waldman and Alan Wexler. Who Was Who in World Exploration. NY/Oxford: Facts on File, 1992;