ht 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.

On October 30, about the time of vespers, Cabeca de Vaca, who happened
to be in the lead, discovered the mouth of what seemed to be an immense
river. There they anchored among islands. They found that the volume of
water brought down by this river was so great that it freshened the
sea-water even three miles out. They went up the river a little way to
try to get fuel to parch their corn, half a handful of raw corn being
the entire ration for a day. The current and a strong north wind,
however, drove them back. When they sounded, a mile and a half from
shore, a line of thirty fathoms found no bottom. After this Narvaez with
three of the boats kept on along the shore, but the boat commanded by
Castillo and Dorantes, and that of Cabeca de Vaca, stood out to sea
before a fair east wind, rowing and sailing, for four days. They never
again saw or heard of the remainder of the fleet.

On November 5 the wind became a gale. All night the boats drifted, the
men exhausted with toil, hunger and cold. Cabeca de Vaca and the
shipmaster were the only men capable of handling an oar in their boat.
Near morning they heard the tumbling of waves on a beach, and soon
after, a tremendous wave struck the boat with a force that hurled her up
on the beach and roused the men who seemed dead, so that th