The first Europeans known to have set foot on the shores of Tampa Bay came not as settlers or surveyors but as an invading army, and that army marched into one of the great catastrophes of the entire age of conquest. Panfilo de Narvaez landed near the bay in the spring of 1528 with hundreds of men and a royal commission to conquer Florida. Within a year nearly all of them were dead, and the four who somehow lived spent eight years walking across a continent into one of the most extraordinary survival stories ever written.
Narvaez was a veteran Spanish conquistador, born in Castile around 1470, and he came to Florida already notorious. He had helped Diego Velazquez conquer Cuba in the 1510s, a campaign remembered for its massacres, one of which the priest Bartolome de las Casas witnessed and condemned. In 1520 the crown sent Narvaez to Mexico to arrest the insubordinate Hernan Cortes; Cortes routed him instead, and Narvaez lost an eye in the fighting. His expedition carried something worse than soldiers: an enslaved man sick with smallpox, and from that landing the first great epidemic swept the mainland, killing Native people by the millions. Tall, red-bearded, harsh, and inflexible, Narvaez was a man around whom catastrophe seemed to gather. In 1526 he secured from Charles V the title of governor and adelantado of La Florida, with the right to conquer and settle the Gulf coast from Mexico to the Florida cape.
The expedition sailed from Spain in June 1527 with five ships and roughly six hundred people, soldiers, settlers, friars, and the wives of some of the men. Among its officers was Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, who served as the expedition's treasurer and chief justice and who would become its immortal chronicler. The venture was cursed early: wintering in the Caribbean, it lost two ships and some sixty people to a hurricane off Cuba, with Cabeza de Vaca surviving only because he was ashore. When the fleet finally beat its way to the west coast of Florida and made landfall near the entrance of Tampa Bay in mid-April 1528, it formally claimed the land for Spain. By long local tradition the landing and the first Catholic Mass in Florida are tied to the Jungle Prada site on Boca Ciega Bay in present-day St. Petersburg, though the exact spot, as with de Soto's later landing, is debated.
At the bay Narvaez made the blunder that doomed them all. Lured by Native accounts, perhaps deliberately misleading, of gold in a northern province called Apalachee, he split his force. He marched roughly three hundred men and forty horses inland on foot, and ordered the ships to sail up the coast and meet the land party at a harbor ahead. Cabeza de Vaca argued against dividing the expedition from its supplies and its escape; he was overruled. The land party and the ships never found one another again. The marchers struggled north through swamp and pine flatwoods, harried by the peoples whose country they had invaded, and reached Apalachee, near present-day Tallahassee, to find not a golden city but a small town of corn and more hardship.
Starving, sick, and trapped against the northern Gulf coast near Apalachee Bay, the survivors made a desperate gamble at a place they named the Bay of Horses. With a single carpenter among them, they improvised a shipyard: they rigged bellows from deerskin to smelt their stirrups, spurs, and crossbows into nails, saws, and axes; they wove rope from horsehair and palmetto fiber, caulked the seams with pine pitch, sewed their shirts together for sails, and made water bags from the whole hides of their horses, which they ate, one every third day. They built five crude rafts, and in September 1528 about two hundred and fifty men put to sea, each raft so overloaded it rode barely six inches above the water.
The Gulf destroyed them. The rafts coasted west and were scattered by storms and the great outflow of the Mississippi, which shoved them back out to sea. By the account that survived, Narvaez, aboard one raft with the strongest men, refused to tie his craft to the others or take on the weaker, telling them each man was now on his own, and his raft was blown out into the Gulf and never seen again. The governor of Florida simply vanished into the water.
Of the roughly three hundred who had marched inland from Tampa Bay, only four survived the entire ordeal. Two rafts wrecked on the Texas coast near Galveston Island, which the survivors aptly named the Island of Misfortune, and through a brutal winter of starvation, enslavement, and, among some of the desperate, cannibalism, the company dwindled to a handful. Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the captains Andres Dorantes and Alonso del Castillo, and Dorantes's enslaved North African, Estevanico, endured eight years among the Native peoples of the Southwest, sometimes captives, sometimes famed as healers, before reaching Spanish slave-catchers in Sinaloa in 1536 and, at last, Mexico City. A fifth man of the expedition, Juan Ortiz, had stayed behind near Tampa Bay and would be found alive by de Soto in 1539.
Cabeza de Vaca turned the disaster into one of the foundational books of the Americas, La Relacion of 1542, an account that grew, remarkably, into an argument for treating Native peoples with humanity. The Narvaez expedition itself was a failure so total it is nearly forgotten, but it holds one permanent distinction in this archive: it brought the first documented Europeans to Tampa Bay, eleven years before de Soto and three hundred and seventy years before the fort that guards its mouth.