The outstanding instance of a Negro’s heading in exploration is that of Estevanico (or Estevanillo, or Estevan, that is, Stephen), one of the four survivors of the ill-fated expedition of De Narvaez, who sailed from Spain, June 17, 1527.  Having returned to Spain after many years of service in the New World, Pamfilo de Narvaez petitioned for a grant, and accordingly the right to conquer and colonize the country between the Rio de las Palmas, in eastern Mexico, and Florida was accorded him.[1] His force originally consisted of six hundred soldiers and colonists.  The whole conduct of the expedition—­incompetent in the extreme—­furnished one of the most appalling tragedies of early exploration in America.  The original number of men was reduced by half by storms and hurricanes and desertions in Santo Domingo and Cuba, and those who were left landed in April, 1528, near the entrance to Tampa Bay, on the west coast of Florida.  One disaster followed another in the vicinity of Pensacola Bay and the mouth of the Mississippi until at length only four men survived.  These were Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca; Andres Dorantes de Carranza, a captain of infantry; Alonzo del Castillo Maldonado; and Estevanico, who had originally come from the west coast of Morocco and who was a slave of Dorantes.  These men had most remarkable adventures in the years between 1528 and 1536, and as a narrative of suffering and privation Cabeza de Vaca’s Journal has hardly an equal in the annals of the continent.  Both Dorantes and Estevanico were captured, and indeed for a season or two all four men were forced to sojourn among the Indians.  They treated the sick, and with such success did they work that their fame spread far and wide among the tribes.  Crowds followed them from place to place, showering presents upon them.  With Alonzo de Castillo, Estevanico sojourned for a while with the Yguazes, a very savage tribe that killed its own male children and bought those of strangers.  He at length escaped from these people and spent several months with the Avavares.  He afterwards went with De Vaca to the Maliacones, only a short distance from the Avavares, and still later he accompanied Alonzo de Castillo in exploring the country toward the Rio Grande.  He was unexcelled as a guide who could make his way through new territory.  In 1539 he went with Fray Marcos of Nice, the Father Provincial of the Franciscan order in New Spain, as a guide to the Seven Cities of Cibola, the villages of the ancestors of the present Zuni Indians in western New Mexico.  Preceding Fray Marcos by a few days and accompanied by natives who joined him on the way, he reached Hawikuh, the southern-most of the seven towns.  Here he and all but three of his Indian followers were killed.

[Footnote 1:  Frederick W. Hodge, 3, in Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States, 1528-1543, in “Original Narratives of Early American History,” Scribner’s, New York, 1907.  Both the Narrative of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and the Narrative of the Expedition of Coronado, by Pedro de Castenada, are edited by Hodge, with illuminating introductions.]