At first the local Karankawa Indians, hunter-gatherers who never had much in the way of a surplus, tried their best to aid the various groups of strangers who washed ashore. But it was November, winter was approaching, and many of the castaways died of exposure and disease. Relations with the Indians soured considerably after it was discovered that some of the Spaniards living in a camp on the beach had resorted to cannibalizing the remains of their former comrades. They soured further when a mysterious disease the Spanish were suffering from spread to the locals. Narvaez disappeared one night while sleeping alone in the last workable boat, and his designated deputy was murdered by a disgruntled rival. By mid-winter only a hundred were left in the army; by spring, there were only a few dozen, spread out in small groups along the Texas coast from Galveston to Matagorda Bay.

Among those living on Galveston Island were about a dozen who felt healthy enough by June of 1529 to continue making their way west on foot. They didn’t get far, however, before they were enslaved by some rough tribes who migrated between the pecan groves of the Guadaloupe River valley and the prickly pear forests near the Mexican border. Years went by in captivity—1529, 1530, 1531—and their numbers dwindled until only three were left, two Spaniards named Castillo and Dorantes, and a black Arabic-speaking Moroccan named Esteban. Twice, the three of them tried to escape while their captors were harvesting prickly pear fruits, but twice their plans were foiled.

Meanwhile, Cabeza de Vaca, whom they had left for dead in Galveston, managed to recover and was making a good living as a peddler. He traveled from tribe to tribe over a broad swath of Texas and perhaps Arkansas, trading seashells, flints, face paint and the like. It wasn’t a bad life, spending his summers on the road and winters in a snug hut with his friends the Charruco. But by 1532 he, too, was ready to make one last effort to get home and traveled down the beach, where he happily reunited with the other three survivors—though like them, he was quickly enslaved.

These last four members of Narvaez’s grand army of conquest made their escape from the prickly pear forests one night under a full moon. They were aided in their getaway by a friendly tribe called the Avavares, wanderers who specialized in selling wood for making bows to Indians who lived in treeless areas. But they didn’t remain with the Avavares long, as they were now determined to jump quickly from tribe to tribe until they got to the Spanish outposts in Mexico. Over the course of the next year they lived with dozens, perhaps hundreds, of different tribes, and their story slowly veered from the merely horrifying into the truly bizarre.

How it all began is a bit murky. Cabeza de Vaca mentions being pulled aside by a local shaman and told that even the rocks have magic, so he, too, must have power, and that he’d better start using it to heal the sick or he wouldn’t get any more food. The message was clear, and Cabeza de Vaca mumbled a few Latin prayers he knew from his youth. He made some motions of the cross over the sick man, mixed in a bit of shamanism he’d seen along the way—some shaking and blowing—and, lo and behold, the patient was cured.

Word of the healing spread like wildfire among the tribes living in the vicinity of the Rio Grande. People came from all around to be touched and healed by the wandering holy men, holding out infants, showering them with gifts of food and other items. In one town, a man was apparently raised from the dead; in another, the blind regained their vision.

      Later, Cabeza de Vaca humbly credited God for the miracles that he and his companions claimed to have performed, but at the time they threw themselves wholeheartedly into their new role of shamans, which turned them from hapless captives into protected deities.

The four traveled now with a huge entourage of followers, who were in the habit of raiding the food stores of each new village they entered. This traveling medicine show was a high stakes game, and more than once the situation threatened to get out of hand. Still, it got them all the way to the Pacific Ocean and then down to the Spanish frontier, where they ran into a band of Spanish slave hunters in search of fresh labor for the mines. Cabeza de Vaca tried to protect his congregation from being rounded up, but it was no use. After eight years of wandering, the four travelers were back in “civilization,” and many of their followers were promptly rounded up and put in chains.