The Moor's Account (20 page)

W
ITH THE ORDER PASSED DOWN
, the captains retired, and I was left alone. I took off my clothes and went into the river, as naked as the day I was born. Had I been asked what I was doing, I would have said that I was going for a swim, but no one in the camp asked. No one cared—each man was worrying about his own ability to survive the fever. The water was very cold; I felt a shudder running through me, numbing all the pain in my body. The current carried me away from the bank, and I did not resist it. Soon, the voices of the soldiers faded, and the only sound I could hear was that of my own breathing, as calm as in times when my life had been free of the troubles of conquest.

I had put my life in the hands of others and now here I was, at the edge of the known world, lost and afraid. All along, I had told myself that I did not have a choice, that I had been the one to put myself into bondage and I had to accept this fate. Somehow I had also convinced myself that my redemption could only come from some force outside of me—that if I were useful to others, they would save me. What a terrible thing to believe. I had to stop playing a part in my own misery. I had to save my own life. Time passed, and a feeling of tranquility settled inside me, as if some old, nagging question had at last been answered. The hair on my chest uncoiled, the goose bumps faded. I rubbed one foot against the other, feeling the hardened edge of the heels and the soft surface of the blisters that had formed under my toes.

At length, I felt the water pulling me with greater force downriver. I stood up and saw that I had drifted well apart from the others, so that I could no longer see the camp. I could walk straight into the green wilderness and disappear forever, a free man once again. But I would have to go alone into the unknown. Where should I go? East toward the rising sun or west toward the bay? Neither alternative seemed safe to me, as I had no provisions and no weapon with which to hunt or defend myself. Here, in the Land of the Indians, I was as much of an intruder as the Castilians were—and I would be treated the same. Even if I survived, naked and alone, in the wilderness, I would never be able to return to my family, my people, and my hometown. So I made my way back to the camp. There had to be another way. There was always another way.

E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING
, we marched toward the Bay of Oysters. Their misery had silenced the men afflicted with fever, but the healthy among us were quiet out of a renewed awareness of all the dangers we faced. Thus the noise of the wilderness grew in our ears: the chirping of birds, the buzzing of mosquitoes flying in thick clouds, the rattling of snakes in the bushes, the melancholy calls of strange creatures, even the fluttering of a grasshopper on a leaf—all of these added to an unbearable cacophony that was a torment to us all. But in spite of the heat, our pace was good and when the ground turned sandy we looked at the horizon, hoping to see the ships in that shallow bay. It was a wild hope, yet strangely our disappointment was all the more intense.

The beach was quite large. It was possible now to separate the sick
from the healthy in order to limit the spread of the disease. There was a decent supply of food: oysters from the reefs, of course, but also crabs, seaweed, and waterfowl. And, past the line of bushes that bordered the beach on the west side, there was wild grass for the horses.

Narváez waited until the men had eaten their dinner before he stood up to address them. Amigos y compañeros, he said. From the beginning of this enterprise, your bravery and your patience have been a credit to Castile. We have had a few setbacks because of the heat and the terrain, but mostly because of the deceitful nature of the Indians. They have misled me. Their minds are as devoid of honor as their bodies are devoid of clothes. I know that this expedition has been difficult. Some of you are sick. Some are tired. Some may even wish you had not decided to join.

From the back came the voices of the men. Aye, they said. Aye.

But remember: the conquest of New Spain was not accomplished in two months. It took two years. Two years! Imagine if those soldiers had given in to despair—México would not be under Christian rule and they would not be the richest men in the empire today. But they did not give up and nor will you. La Florida is a large territory. Once we regain the ships, and we have had time to resupply ourselves with all that we need, we will find a better place to land. Remember that those who risk the most, but remain steadfast in the face of hardship, will gain the most in the end.

But how will we get to the ships?

This question exercised the men for the greater part of the evening. Some wanted to remain in the bay until the ships came looking for us. But, even with the addition of oysters and crabs to our rations, our reserves of food were limited. What would we eat if the ships did not come for weeks or even months? Others proposed that we march past the bay, keeping the ocean in our sight, until we reached the port of Pánuco. But this, too, seemed perilous because too many of the men were afflicted with fever and would not be able to march for such a long distance.

After a while, everyone fell silent, pondering the fact that either of the alternatives offered was impossible. The beach, which had seemed to us such a welcome sight, now felt like nothing more than the little corner of the new world where we would all die. Yet we were sitting under a canopy of stars, so bright and so close that it seemed to us we could reach out and touch them.

There is another way, I said. We can build rafts.

All eyes fixed themselves upon me. So accustomed were the Castilians to my silence—one or two of the lieutenants might even have thought me deaf and dumb—that only shock greeted my pronouncement. But my idea had already been spoken. It could not be unheard.

We cannot build rafts, Cabeza de Vaca said after a moment. It would be too—

Dorantes interrupted him. No. Estebanico is right. This might be the only way we have of leaving the bay. Miruelo said that we were only fifteen leagues by sea from the port. If we sail westward, we cannot fail to reach it. We have carpenters, do we not?

Nárvaez called upon Fernándes, the man whose hammer he had borrowed to torture the Indians, and put the question to him. Fernándes replied that he could indeed build rafts large enough and sturdy enough to carry all of us into the ocean, and that there was plenty of wood nearby, but that such an undertaking was impossible because he would need tools the porters had lost in a swamp, when they were attacked by the Apalaches.

We can make the tools, I said.

Suppose you have the tools, Dorantes said to Fernándes, how long would it take you to build the rafts?

It depends on how many men we commit to it.

Por Dios, Narváez said. All of the men. All the healthy ones. How long, then?

Three weeks. Maybe.

But what about the horses? Cabeza de Vaca asked.

We cannot take them, Dorantes said. The horses are too heavy for the rafts and too weak to endure another sea voyage.

It is not fair to ask the horsemen to give up their horses, Cabeza de Vaca said. The horses are all they have.

Is it fair that five of them tried to desert me? Narváez replied sharply.

The treasurer, whose contingent had been home to two of the deserters, lowered his gaze and did not reply.

If we are going to reach Pánuco, Narváez said, everyone has to make sacrifices. We can eat the horses for sustenance.

He was right, I thought. We were too weak to work the long hours it would require to build the rafts and we needed to be fed somehow. We all
loved horses and could not have conceived of slaughtering healthy ones for the sake of food. But this was another disgrace we were willing to take upon ourselves in order to escape from the bay.

T
HE PLAN WAS AMBITIOUS
, complicated, dangerous—but it was a plan. And for two days, there was no word from Narváez about it. He prayed with the commissary in his tent, ate his meals alone, and took long walks along the beach, followed at a respectable distance by his page and three of his men. He seemed always to be in deep thought, weighing the possibilities that had been presented to him: stay in the bay and hope that the ships dare to come in its shallow waters; venture on land yet again, looking for the port; or build rafts and try to reach the ocean, from which we could either sail to Pánuco or be seen by some passing ship or other. But perhaps I was wrong; perhaps he was not considering the proposals at all but was instead contemplating the failure of his expedition. Was he thinking about Cortés—the lucky, cunning Cortés—who had found unbelievable riches and become famous?

At last, Narváez issued the order: we would build rafts and go to Pánuco. It gladdened my heart to hear him agree to the plan and I began to feel a kind of purpose I had not experienced in a long time. It seemed to me, too, that Dorantes had had enough of his adventures under the command of Narváez, and that, when he reached Pánuco, he would make his way back to Seville. I swore to myself that, once in Seville, I would find a way of returning to my people; I would make in reverse the journey I had made five years earlier. This was how I went from the complete despair of uncertainty to the feverish dream of a new beginning.

In our company was a blacksmith from Bilbao, a man by the name of Echeverría, who said he could make all the tools we needed if we helped him build a forge and provided him with a pair of bellows. For an entire morning, Echeverría searched the beach around the Bay of Oysters for the most suitable spot, and, having finally found it, he had us gather stones to build the forge. We had no leather with which to make the bellows, but Gonzalo Ruíz, the soldier who had lost an eye to his confrontation with the Indians, had the idea of using horse skin.

With the forge ready, Narváez ordered the soldiers to turn in whatever metal they had. One by one, they took off their helmets, untied their breastplates, stripped off their chain mail, tossed their stirrups and spurs
onto the pile. Dorantes even threw into the fire the marked scales he had brought to weigh gold.

If one of the soldiers was reluctant to part with his protection, the commissary spoke to him. You are here at the service of His Majesty and His Holiness, he would say. It would be a grave sin to disobey their delegate in this province. Besides, you can still keep your sword.

Inevitably, the soldier would remove his armor and add it onto the pile. The sound of steel against steel startled the seagulls and sandpipers that had been foraging along the shore and they departed in a great flutter of wings.

Echeverría fashioned a dozen crude axes and saws for our company. Meanwhile, Fernándes, the carpenter, took a group of men inland to look for raft wood. He selected pines and cedars, which were light enough to float but heavy enough to carry our weight, marking each tree he wanted with a cross, carved at eye level, on its trunk. As soon as the first axes came out of the forge, the men began to cut down the trees, stripping them of their branches and carrying them to the beach, where Fernándes trimmed them to equal lengths. The logs were added to one of five piles. (Narváez had decided that Fernándes should build five rafts, each carrying the same people who had come off the five ships.)

In order to tie the logs together, we needed more rope than the lengths we still had; Cabeza de Vaca suggested that we use horsehair. Every time a horse was slaughtered, its mane and tail was washed, brushed, and braided in long pieces. Much to my surprise, the horsehair rope turned out to be quite sturdy. The oars were made of cypress wood, which we procured from trees half a league inland. As for oakum, a Greek settler collected the pitch of some pine trees and mixed it with ground tree leaves into a thick paste, which he spread between the logs.

Because I had worked with fabric in Seville, I offered to cut and sew pieces of cloth together to make the sails. I walked around the camp, collecting flags, sheets, shirts, vestments—all the extraneous fabric I could find, even handkerchiefs. The result was a great jumble of colors, textures, and shapes. When I unfurled the first sail and it caught the wind, I stood back to admire it. No sailcloth I had seen before looked quite like it, yet my heart filled with boundless pride.

During the five weeks it took to build the rafts, we fed on the oysters from the bay and on horsemeat, but every few days, Narváez and his men
went on a raid to Aute, in order to pick the ripened corn from the field behind the village. Much of the corn he brought back was saved, because we needed to build stocks of food for the journey to the ocean. It was difficult to know exactly how long the journey to Pánuco would take, but Narváez managed to collect enough corn for a week.

The first horse to be slaughtered belonged to one of the deserters—this was a direct order from Narváez, and though the soldier was brought to tears by the idea, he had to surrender the reins. Then the captains' horses were taken one by one behind the big boulders, where they were butchered. And so there came the dreadful day when poor Abejorro's turn came. Dorantes took him for a long walk on the beach, and then I gave him some of the fruit he liked and took him to the river for a drink and cooed to him and rubbed his nose and his neck, but no matter how long I delayed it the moment came anyway. The butcher took the reins from me and disappeared behind the rocks. Then there was the long, dreadful sound of Abejorro's last breath. And the stream of blood that ran toward the ocean swelled once again.

We finished building the five rafts just as the fall season began. The winds were strong and it had not yet begun to rain. The first boat, under the command of Narváez, was for him and the men closest to him. Having ridden horses and received better rations for the last few months, they were some of the strongest and healthiest among us. They also had the best sails, for these were made with the governor's standards and tent, which were the largest pieces of canvas to be found. (Gentle reader, if I point out these details, it is not because I was jealous or resentful, but simply because I wish to be as precise as I can about the conditions under which we left La Florida.)