Vol. 64, No. 3 Autumn 2019 210
Plata Province. A revised account of his writings was published in 1555. In late 1539 Apalache Indians led members of the de Soto expedition from their winter camp (now identifi ed in downtown Tallahassee) to the forge where the vessels had been built in 1528. T e spot where the vessels were constructed was less than a day’s travel from the de Soto winter camp, and he used the same area to receive supplies from his ships. In the seventeenth century, the Spanish built a fort near the site.
Aſt er visiting the State Park in 2007, I found that historians disagreed on what type of vessels the Narvaez expedition had built. Some writings on the subject suggest that the vessels were just raſt s, but some historians feel these may have been a more sophisticated type of vessel or a type of barge. A Mexican movie in the 1980s depicted raſt s, but I found no reports of any models and only one drawing
(on the internet) of a small sailing craſt
depicting how the artist thought a Narvaez vessel may have appeared. T is craſt would have held only twenty to twenty-fi ve men and Cabeza de Vaca stated that each of the fi ve vessels held between forty-seven and forty-nine men.
2. An array of test model options for working out the form of the barcas.
reached a bay near the junction of the Wakula and St. Marks rivers and determined to build vessels and try sailing to Mexico.
T is is all related in survivor Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative. It took about six weeks to build the fi ve vessels, which then were launched and made their way along the coast until the two surviving vessels were wrecked on what is now thought to be Galveston Island, Texas. Only a few men survived and were enslaved by Indians there. Eventually, only four men made it overland to Spanish settlements in Mexico in 1536. Cabeza de Vaca went back to Spain in 1537 and wrote a report of the expedition (it was a royal expedition and he was second in command). An account was published in 1542 but by then de Vaca was in South America, Governor of the Rio de la
When I presented my model of the Emmanuel Point shipwreck galleon to the archaeology museum at the University of West Florida in March 2008, I discussed the vessels of the Narvaez expedition with Dr. Greg Cook and Dr. John Worth. Dr. Worth is an expert on medieval Spanish and has many contacts at the Spanish archives. He is currently translating documents on the 1559 de Luna expedition to Pensacola. I asked him if it would be possible to translate an original Spanish edition copy of de Vaca’s account and look at it from a standpoint of an expert in Spanish maritime terms to get a better sense of what was built.
Surprisingly, Dr. Worth was able to obtain a copy of Cabeza de Vaca’s original hand-written account of the expedition written in 1537. He found quite a lot of references to the vessels and their construction. De Vaca used the word balsa (Spanish for raſt ) to describe raſt s that the expedition built to cross rivers. De Vaca states that when the expedition initially
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