Archers harassed Narvaez’s people any time they were in small groups or away from their stronghold in the village center. “The Indians made war on us continually,” remembered a survivor, “wounding the people and the horses when we were at the places where we went to get water, and doing this from the lagoons and so safely that we could do them no harm.” All of this might have been tolerable had there been any sign of gold or other precious goods to make it worth putting up a fight. But there was none.

Morale, already low, collapsed. They had marched across Florida to Apalachee on the premise that there was gold to be had and civilization to spread. Now here they were, after only a few months, hunkered down in a burned-out town in the middle of nowhere, getting shot at by naked giants every time they turned their backs for a moment or two. The Apalachee “were beginning to wound their people,” the survivors later recalled. It was a quagmire, and everyone smelled disaster. After three weeks of this, Narvaez, now racked with chills and fevers from a strange malady that was sweeping through the ranks, decided to retreat to the sea.

As bad as things were up to that point, the march to the Gulf of Mexico was worse. Their captured Apalachee “guides” led them through one swamp after another. When they were chest deep in the middle of God knows where, in the midst of a tangle of hurricane-downed trees, the Apalachee attacked from both sides. Swords, lances, horses, artillery—the prized, high-tech weapons of the most powerful empire on earth at the time—were all but useless in the situation. Arrows flew in and ripped through any exposed flesh, but whenever a conquistador turned to see who had fired the missile, there was no one in sight. After days of this misery, Narvaez’s great army of conquest limped feverishly into an Indian village called Aute, in what is now St. Marks National Wildlife Refuge, in the corner of the Florida Panhandle.

It felt like the end of the road, and it was. The horsemen talked mutinously among themselves of riding off and leaving the others to their fate. But where would they go? No one knew where the ships were. Meanwhile, the guerilla attacks resumed, and the mysterious disease kept spreading among the men. “We held it to be certain,” remembered Cabeza de Vaca, “that nothing could follow but death.”

Their only hope lay in a plan concocted by one of the lesser members of the expedition. His name is forgotten, but in the darkest hour he approached Narvaez and told him he thought it might be possible to build a makeshift forge and melt down their war materiel to make hardware for boats, in which they might sail along the coast to the Spanish outposts in Mexico. No one was sure how far west that really was, but it was at least a plan, and it invigorated the troops, who set to work immediately. Teams twisted palmetto into ropes, felled trees, made charcoal for the forge, or raided nearby Indian villages for corn. Every three days a horse was butchered, and its hide hung out to dry in the hope that it could be used later for a water bottle. By the end of September, five makeshift boats were finished; and the 242 members of the army who were still alive piled aboard, shoved off and headed toward the sunset.

They stayed as close to shore as possible, but it wasn’t what you’d call a pleasure cruise. The water bottles failed almost immediately, and five men died of dehydration. Others decided they’d had enough and “went native,” choosing to go off with some of the Indians. In one village where they spent the night, their hosts tried to brain them with rocks as they slept. Progress was steady, however, until they rounded a corner to find the mile-wide mouth of the Mississippi, draining the vast continent they had once hoped to conquer. It caught up their measly boats and spit them far out to sea like bits of bad food. A wicked north wind picked up and pushed them out some more, until the coast of America disappeared altogether.

During the night the boats became separated, in part because Narvaez had announced that from henceforth, it was every man for himself. One came ashore at the bottom of Texas on Pedro or Mustang Island, where the local Indians immediately killed its passengers as they crawled up the beach. The other four boats, however, came ashore relatively safely in the vicinity of Galveston, Texas, and the adjacent Matagorda peninsula.