In 1536, Spanish slavers in northern Mexico met a barefoot, sun-baked man in animal skins who spoke perfect Spanish and was followed by hundreds of indigenous people who revered him as a healer. This episode tells the story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, grandson of the brutal Canary Islands conqueror Pedro de Vera, who joined the 1527 Narváez expedition to La Florida as royal treasurer and watched it collapse through desertion, hurricanes, and a fatal decision to march inland chasing rumors of gold at Apalachee.

The conversation follows the survivors as they melted their armor and stirrups into tools, built rafts with horsehair rigging and shirt sails, were swept out by the Mississippi’s current, and wrecked on the Texas coast. It covers his enslavement by coastal tribes, his reinvention as a neutral trader and then a faith healer alongside Dorantes, Castillo and Estevanico, his confrontation with slaver Diego de Alcaraz, his 1537 return and the book La Relación, and his later attempt as governor in Asunción to outlaw the abuse of Guaraní women, which ended in his downfall.

• Why Cortés’s 1521 conquest fueled the gold fever that doomed Narváez
• Malhado, the island of doom, where 80 castaways became 15
• Estevanico, recognized as the first Black explorer of North America
• The wooden crosses strategy that protected villages from Spanish patrols
• Iguazú Falls, the rancheadas, and La Relación as a foundational text of Chicano literature