The famous landing on Tampa Bay is de Soto's, in 1539. But eleven years earlier a larger army came ashore on the same water under Pánfilo de Narváez, and where de Soto's expedition merely failed, Narváez's was annihilated. Of the men who waded onto this bay in April 1528, four would live. Their survival is the reason the landing is remembered at all.
Narváez held a royal license to conquer and govern the Gulf coast of La Florida. His fleet, battered by desertion and a hurricane in the Caribbean, reached the Florida coast and worked down to a bay that the scholarship places at or near Tampa Bay in April 1528. He went ashore with his officers, among them the treasurer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and the captains Dorantes and Castillo, raised the standards of Spain, and formally took possession. The men found an abandoned native town nearby and, in it, a few gold trinkets, enough to convince Narváez that wealth lay inland, in a province the local people called, or were understood to call, Apalachen.
What happened next was the decision that destroyed the expedition. Against the strong objection of Cabeza de Vaca, Narváez split his force: he would march the main body, some three hundred men, north overland in search of Apalachen, while the ships coasted along to find a harbor and meet them. It was a catastrophic misjudgment of a coast no European had mapped. The land party and the fleet never found one another again. The ships searched, gave up, and eventually sailed away; the marchers were left on foot in a hostile country with no way home.
The inland march found hunger, swamp, and the arrows of the Apalachee rather than gold. Staggering back to the Gulf, the survivors killed their horses for food, forged crude tools from their weapons and stirrups, and built five makeshift barges in which they tried to coast their way to Mexico in the autumn of 1528. The Gulf scattered and drowned them. Narváez was blown out to sea and lost. A few washed up on the Texas coast, where cold and starvation killed nearly all who remained. Out of the hundreds who had landed on Tampa Bay, exactly four crossed the continent and reached Spanish Mexico in 1536: Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, Castillo, and the enslaved African Estevanico. A fifth man of the expedition, Juan Ortiz, survived by remaining here on the bay, and was found alive by de Soto's army eleven years later.
The Narváez landing matters out of all proportion to its failure. It was the first European attempt to march into the interior of what is now the United States, and its sole inheritance, Cabeza de Vaca's account of the survivors' eight-year ordeal, is the first written description of that interior and its peoples. That entire foundational text of American history opens with an army wading ashore on this bay. When de Soto came in 1539, he came knowing the story of Narváez, and looking, near this same shore, for the lost survivor Juan Ortiz. The two landings are the twin beginnings of the written record of Tampa Bay, and Narváez's came first.