Of the men who came ashore at the mouth of Tampa Bay with Pánfilo de Narváez in the spring of 1528, almost none lived. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was one of four who did, and the only one who wrote it down. His account is the first European book about the interior of what would become the United States, and the journey it describes begins on this bay.
Cabeza de Vaca sailed as the royal treasurer and chief law officer of the expedition the emperor licensed Pánfilo de Narváez to lead into La Florida. The fleet left Spain in 1527, wintered in Cuba, and made landfall near Tampa Bay in the spring of 1528. There Narváez made the decision that doomed them all: he marched roughly three hundred men inland in search of a golden province called Apalachen, and sent his ships up the coast to find a harbor and wait. The land party and the ships never found each other again. Cabeza de Vaca, who argued against the plan, went with the marchers.
What followed was a slow catastrophe. The inland march found hunger and hostility instead of gold, and when the survivors straggled back to the coast there were no ships. Trapped, they killed their horses for meat and hide, melted down their stirrups and crossbows for tools, and built five crude barges to try to coast their way to Mexico. They put to sea in September 1528. The Gulf scattered and swallowed them; Narváez himself was blown out to sea and never seen again. Cabeza de Vaca's barge washed up, near present-day Galveston, in November. Of the hundreds who had sailed, a few score were left, and a hard winter killed all but a handful.
For the next eight years Cabeza de Vaca lived in the country he had come to conquer, first enslaved by the coastal peoples, then surviving as a trader and, improbably, a healer whose reputation spread ahead of him. With three companions, the captains Andrés Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo, and an enslaved North African named Estevanico, he walked across the southern half of the continent, more than three thousand miles, until in 1536 the four of them stumbled into a party of Spanish slave-catchers in northwestern Mexico. They were the only members of the Narváez expedition to cross the continent and live. A fifth man, Juan Ortiz, survived by remaining near Tampa Bay, and would be found there eleven years later by de Soto.
Back in Spain, Cabeza de Vaca wrote his Relación, printed in 1542 and again in 1555. It is the first European account of the inland peoples, animals, and landscapes of North America, the first written description of the bison and the opossum, of a Gulf hurricane, of nations no European had seen. It is also, unusually for its moment, a book whose sympathies bent toward the people he had lived among; he returned to the Americas as a governor in South America and was undone partly by his insistence on restraining abuses of native peoples. For Mullet Key, the importance is simpler and closer: the long, strange American story he set down began with a landing on this water, and his is the first voice to carry word of the bay's mouth back across the ocean.