Narvaez called his officers into consultation, one at a time, as to the best course to pursue in this desperate case.  They had no provisions, a third of the men were sick and more were dropping from exhaustion every day, and all agreed that unless they could get away and reach Mexico while some of them could still work, there was very little chance that they would ever leave the place at all.  But they had no tools, no workmen and no sailors, and nothing to eat while the ships were a-building, even if they knew how to build them.  They gave it up for that night and prayed for direction.

Next day one of the men proved to have been a carpenter, and another came to Cabeca de Vaca with a plan for making bellows of deerskin with a wooden frame and nozzle, so that a forge could be worked and whatever spare iron they had could be pounded into rude tools.  The officers took heart.  Cross-bows, stirrups, spurs, horse-furniture, reduced to scrap-iron, furnished axes, hammers, saws and nails.  There was plenty of timber in the forests.  Those not able to do hard work stripped palmetto leaves to use in the place of tow for calking and rigging.  Every third day one of the horses was killed, the meat served out to the sick and the working party, the manes and tails saved to twist into rope with palmetto fiber, and the skin of the legs taken off whole and tanned for water bottles.  At four different times a selected body of soldiers went out to get corn from the Indians, peaceably if possible, by force if necessary, and on this, with the horse-meat and sometimes fish or sea-food caught in the bay, the camp lived and toiled for sixteen desperate days.  A Greek named Don Theodoro knew how to make pitch for the calking, from pine resin.  For sails the men pieced together their shirts.  Not the least wearisome part of their labor was stone-hunting, for there were almost no stones in the country, and they must have anchors.  But at last the boats were finished, of twenty-two cubits in length, with oars of savin (fir), and fifty of the men had died from fever, hardship or Indian arrows.  Each boat must carry between forty-five and fifty of those who remained, and this crowded them so that it was impossible to move about, and weighted them until the gunwales were hardly a hand’s breadth above the water.  It would have been madness to venture out to sea, and they crept along the coast, though they well knew that in following all the inlets of that marshy shore the length of the voyage would be multiplied several times over.  When they had been out a week they captured five Indian canoes, and with the timbers of these added a few boards to the side of each galley.  This made it possible to steer in something like a direct line toward Mexico.