Cabeza de Vaca and the Moon

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• Cabeza de Vaca and the Moon
• Donald W. Olson (bio)

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This depiction, titled Cabeca de Vaca in the Desert, appeared in the October 14, 1905, issue of Collier’s magazine as the first of ten illustrations by Erederic Remington in a series called “The Great Explorers.”

The sixteenth-century odyssey of Álvar Núũez Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow survivors from the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition has been the subject of books, scholarly analysis, and various translations of the original Spanish accounts throughout the centuries since the events took place. The expedition, originally planned as an exploration to discover new world resources for Spain, instead resulted in Cabeza de Vaca’s capture and lengthy stay among groups of indigenous people. His story is enthralling as well as a unique source of ethnological and anthropological information. Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación, the narrative of his experiences, appeared first in 1542 and then, in a subsequent edition with slight changes, in 1555.¹ Based on clues in the text that allow a variety of interpretations, scholars have disputed both the route followed by Cabeza de Vaca and the dates of the events between his shipwreck and his journey’s end in Mexico City. In a passage often studied for its chronological implications, he described the phases of the Moon, with specific mentions of the month and day but without giving the year. The purpose of this note is to use astronomy to offer a new explanation for this lunar passage and to identify the year which matches this description.

In April 1528, five ships under the command of Narváez reached the west coast of Florida. Disasters followed, with the three hundred members of a land expedition becoming permanently separated from the support ships and eventually forced to slaughter their horses for food. The Spaniards constructed improvised rafts to leave Florida by sea and planned to travel along the Gulf [End Page 375]

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The makeshift raft carrying Cabeza de Vaca and other Spaniards was cast ashore on the Texas coast in November 1528. This illustration of the scene appeared in Elbridge Gerry Littlejohn’s Cabeza de Vaca and La Salle, Volume 1 of the Texas History Stories series (Richmond, Virginia: B. F. Johnson Publishing Company, 1901).

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Coast to reach Spanish settlements in Mexico at the Río Pánuco, which they mistakenly believed was nearby. After a voyage that became increasingly difficult, five rafts landed on the Texas coast. Historian Donald E. Chipman pointed out that the “history of Texas, as recorded by a European observer, begins with the recollections of Cabeza de Vaca on November 6, 1528,” when the makeshift raft carrying him and other Spaniards was cast ashore by the waves onto an island near the west end of Galveston Island. Eventually only four survivors remained alive: Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, the enslaved Africanborn Estevanico, and Alonso Castillo Maldonado. After remarkable adventures and traveling by foot through more than 2,500 miles in South Texas and northern Mexico, the four surviving castaways finally reached Mexico City on July 23, 1536.²

Regarding the path followed by Cabeza de Vaca and the others during their wanderings, Chipman noted that

Other than the date on which Cabeza de Vaca arrived on the soil of the future Lone Star State, the site itself being an island, and that this same isle beached another of the five rafts, little else is agreed upon by those who have attempted to trace his experiences from on or near Galveston Island to Mexico City in 1536 … The literature dealing with the route followed by Cabeza de Vaca – above all the portion of it that was within Texas – is considerable in volume and, as implied, controversial in nature.

Scholars also dispute the chronology of noteworthy events between 1528 and 1536. For example, the reunion of the four survivors at a location known as the River of Nuts, probably on or near the lower Guadalupe River and a seasonal food source for their indigenous captors, is variously dated...