"At dawn on a spring day in 1528, a Spanish fleet from Cuba prepared to land an army of conquistadors on the shores of North America," "They had come to find new lands of gold" "It was Thursday the 14th of April, 1528, when they came ashore." "The beginning of the most disastrous of all the expeditions of the conquistadors, and yet one of the great epic stories in the history of the Americas." "The Spanish had called this Florida, the land of flowers," "But they found a strange and evil country," "That summer, over 300 conquistadors struggled through these swamps," "Their leader, Panphilo de Narvaez, was arrogant and incompetent," "They had no interpreters, Their food supplies ran out," "And worse, they were picked off by hostile tribes," "The last survivors of those native peoples are still here, the Seminole," "They have fiercely defended their independence ever since," "So you are the only Native American people within the USA who never submitted..." "Right." "The only tribe to never sign a treaty of submission." "The elements of Florida, a very, very good ally." " The elements of Florida, a very good ally?" " Right." "Snakes and alligators, Europeans worried more about them." "Again, these people had no knowledge of Florida." "Narvaez had been licensed by the King of Spain to discover and conquer Florida," "He hoped to find cities here with large populations and gold" "Instead, he found a poor landscape totally unsuitable for colonisation," "But he pushed his army on further into the nightmare," ""If only Narvaez had come here to seek the well-being of the Indians, "" "one Spaniard wrote, "and not to wade through their blood to gain ill-gotten wealth, "" "But his capacities did not come up to his dreams," "With autumn coming on, the expedition was on the point of collapse," "Hoping now just to save their lives, they struggled down to the sea below Tallahassee," "But there was no sign of their ships," "The fleet had given them up for dead" "They're starving, disillusioned, and Narvaez weighs up the situation." "He thinks the Spanish settlements in Mexico are only a few leagues down the coast." "In fact, they're 1,000 miles." "So he decides to build boats to escape." "And on the 22nd of September, nearly 300 survivors set sail in five barges." "(THUNDER)" "In terrible weather, they tried to sail across the Gulf of Mexico, past the Mississippi," "Narvaez himself was never seen again," "We would know nothing of this story, but for the captain of one of the barges, a young Spanish gentleman called A lvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca," "Cabeza de Vaca wrote a remarkable account of his adventures and with it we set out to follow him across the Gulf of Mexico, to find out which way wind and tide might have taken him that autumn," "He was coming out of this part of Florida," "The green arrows indicate the current and speed and, as you see, it gets pretty swift." " Along the Mississippi delta." " The arrows show the predominant direction?" "The predominant direction of the current." "0ccasionally, a lot of fronts come through, push the wind offshore and those tend to be very strong winds that'll push offshore." "The predominant wind is from the southeast." "That's interesting." "When they pass the Mississippi mouth, they get caught up in a storm coming from the north that blows them right out to sea and nearly drowns them, in fact." "They mention that." ""In the end," says Cabeza de Vaca," ""we commended ourselves to God and the dangers of the sea," ""And there was not a man among us who did not think that death was certain," ""None of us had any idea of havigation," ""For six weeks we were lost," ""eating rotten maize, drinking sea water, which drove some men mad" ""I was at the helm that night, I had prepared to die," ""And then, in the darkness, we heard breakers," ""We were near land"" "It was the 6th of November, 1528," "At dawn, they came inshore," "But the boat capsized in the surf," "Too weak to swim, some of the men were drowned" "They found themselves on a windswept shore unseen before by white men," "Galveston Island, Texas," "How far up do you think they went?" "You know, given how weak he was, I don't think he probably went much further than you're going." "0ne of them climbed an oak tree to see where they were," " I can see it!" "I can see the bay!" " Yeah." "I think they guessed the island was about half a league wide." "Maybe a mile and a half or so." "That would be about right, would it?" " At the widest point." " Yeah." "And then they could actually, on a good, clear day like today, see the mainland across the bay." "And you recognise that you're on an island." "But the island was inhabited by Karankawa Indians." "They were hunter gatherers and they only came here during the fall." "They usually left at the end of February and the beginning of March and would return to the mainland and..." "But this was what you might call their winter residence, like the New Yorkers go to Florida." ""We had expected to be sacrificed," says Cabeza de Vaca," ""But when the Indians saw our misery they sat down with us and began to weep, too," ""Those uncivilised, savage men were sorry, for us," ""And they shared what little food they had"" "You know, you look at all these great expeditions of the conquistadors and the terrible events that happened in the New World, Pizarro and everything else." "And here is a story where the man begins here on this spot" " to become the other, doesn't he?" " Exactly." "And it's the Indians who give him the first clue to this transformation, isn't it?" "They cry for him and he realises the common humanity, don't you think?" "They saw people destitute, in pain." "They were moved by compassion to help them and aid them in the process and so they saved Cabeza de Vaca, to their own detriment." "It's..." " They were exterminated in the end." " They were." "The Karankawas began to die of European diseases that same winter," "They vanished for good in the course of the 18th century," "But they kept Cabeza de Vaca alive with the food of the island" "That's razor sharp." "So there's an oyster bed running all the way down this little inlet?" "Yes, and there are places out here where there are oysters for several miles and, during low tide, they're exposed, probably at the time when they harvested them." "I don't know how many people they were trying to feed, but I wouldn't starve." "The expedition had been scattered to the winds," "The men from another barge were slaughtered by Indians up the coast, one group reduced to eating their dead shipmates," "But Cabeza de Vaca survived on oysters and roots," "This plant..." "This is a cattail." "And this is probably what he was speaking of when he said that he was breaking those nuts off to eat." "It is like a nut." "Extraordinary." "It was easy pickings." "They could just walk out and pick it up and there are acres and acres of oysters that are exposed at low tide." "But of the 300 men who left Florida, only four would survive," "(TANN0Y) Please do not walk or stand in front of any vehicle while the vessel is approaching... (MICHAEL) The Karankawas were nomadic, In the spring, they crossed over to the mainland" "And they took Cabeza de Vaca with them," "They had thought him a superior man, but with no skills, he was an extra mouth to feed and he became their slave," "He was brutally treated, but they kept him alive," "After five or six years of that life, Cabeza de Vaca decided he'd had enough." "It was time to escape." "Not out to sea, but into the interior." "The interior of Texas at that time was completely unknown to the outside world" "But during those years, Cabeza de Vaca had got to know many of the nomadic tribes who lived inland" "Some of them he describes for the first time," "Coahuiltecans, Tonkawas, Atakapan," "But that was not all, He'd also discovered that one of the coastal tribes had sheltered three other survivors of the shipwreck, who were still alive," "They met up and made their break for freedom," "Their plan was to walk 1,000 miles to Mexico City," "They couldn 't go south because of hostile tribes," "So they decided to walk to the Pacific, but which way?" "It used to be thought that they took a northern route through New Mexico and A rizona, down into Spanish Mexico," "But there's another possibility - that they crossed the Rio Grande near the sea and turned west inside Mexico," "The clues are in Cabeza de Vaca's book, 0ne of the few copies to survive is in San Marcos, and there I met Don 0lsen," "So this is an original copy of Cabeza de Vaca's story?" "Yes, it is." "And the page we're most interested in, in the research we did, is page 40." "There are four physical clues, all that happen on the same page here." "There's a mountain of seven leagues, which would be 20 or 21 miles long." ""Una sierra de sieta leguas." Yes." "And the stones there were like scoria of hierro." " Iron slag." " Iron slag." "Down near the bottom of the page, he finds some trees." "Pines with pinones." "And there again you see the pinones." "And the words that really catch our eye down there are right there." "That means their shells were very thin." "So this is a very particular kind of pine tree." "A very particular kind." "The other two clues are much harder." "He says, "They gave us many small sacks of margarita and alcohol molido."" "Now, those are minerals." "People before us have translated that word, or transcribed it, I should say, as margarita, which can mean pearls or pearl mica, which is abundant in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico and they've used this to support the northern route." "If you look closely, do you see what I see?" "That word is not margarita." " The second R isn't the same as the first R." " It's not." "It has a descender down to the left which prints very faintly." "You see it there?" "If you look closely, you see it's actually margaxita with an X." "Margaxita." "What does that mean?" " What that means is iron pyrites." " Iron pyrites." "So the Spaniards walked into a land rich in minerals," "To follow them, we crossed the Rio Grande and entered the desolate landscape of horthern Mexico," ", searching for Cabeza de Vaca's route into unknown America," "Just over there." "(READS SPANISH)" ""We marched along, mountain range seven leagues long."" "They walked the whole length of this sierra in one day." "They were the first Europeans to walk across the continent," "They gave us the first account of the people here," "But it's never been traced on the ground" "Maybe we can ask them about the pine trees." "Do you want to roll your window down?" "(SPEAK SPANISH)" "Much of his story, is still misunderstood because we don't know for sure what route he took," "We're looking for the pinones with very, very thin shells." "If we knew his route, then his account might begin to reveal a lost history, of these lands," "And now, as then, local knowledge is all," " The old man knows about them." " (THEY SPEAK SPANISH)" "Muchas gracias." "Gracias." "Bye-bye." "Goodbye." " So the old man knew about them?" " Yeah." "Fantastic." "Great." "We're on the right track." "The old herder had sent us on to a dried-up river bed and there were the pine trees," " So this is one of them?" " Yeah." "It's amazing to think that paper shell pinon was only identified by science in 1979." "And how easy to imagine the Spaniards feasting on the kernels," " There's still some on the floor." " Yeah." "It was the best food they'd had for days," " This year is not... was not a good season." " Yeah?" "When they're still green, you just grind them up, make a ball and eat them," "If they're dry, eat them with the shells too," "(CRUNCHING)" "You see how thin it is." "That's what Cabeza de Vaca's talking about." "That's what the Indians here used as food along with the nopal cacti that we passed on the way." "But to clinch his route, we needed to find his mountain of iron," "The locals sent us up a place called Mercado, the hill of wealth, 5,000... more than 5,000 feet up the mountain." "Cabeza de Vaca says the people here smelted metals," "They gave him a worked copper bell," "There are copper deposits here and there's also a huge quarry," "It's golden brown with iron ore," "Strewn with pyrites and iron slag," "So this whole vast excavation here has been done for the iron?" "Yes, they've dug out this, made the hole." "Then some rocks have fallen in from the sides." "(MICHAEL) Some of the other clues you might be able to help on, as a geologist." "They find something, which everybody argues over." "They call it alcohol molido, powdered alcohol, which some people say could be stibnite, lead sulphide." "There's also black manganese around the outside here." "It's called pyrolusite." "The Indians used it as paint." "And that's exactly what Cabeza de Vaca says," ""A black powder used by Indian women to paint their faces, "" "0K." "I found it." "Hey, we've got some manganese here." "Fantastic." "So you think this could be it?" "Well, it's the kind of manganese we call pyrolusite and it sure comes off black." "Wow." "Brilliant." "I left Monclova feeling sure Cabeza de Vaca had come this way," "He wasn't moving through the nomadic peoples of central Texas," "He was among the settled communities here in north Mexico," "People who lived in houses, worked metals and had long-distance trade," "The ancestors of today's people," "The next few weeks, he tells us, they walked 300 or 400 miles across dry plains into barren mountains," "They were heading northwards now, back up towards the Rio Grande," "But they weren't wandering aimlessly," "They spoke the languages and moved from one community to another on ancient trails, which now crossed and recrossed a great river," "These trails are marked on US military, maps from the 1850s, 0ne of them was called the Great Comanche Trail," "Going back down into Mexico, it met the Rio Grande at the Grand Indian Crossing," "These trails can be thousands of years old, maybe even used by the first migrants over 12,000 years ago," "We took an expert guide with us, Linda Walker, and team archeologist Bob Mallouf." "And all along the trail, we found places where human beings had once lived" "Cabeza de Vaca's journey had begun to reveal the vanished map of ancient America," "The sheltered part and it probably ran further out." "This is one of the better pictograph sites that we've come up to." "You can see that they're all over this panel." "(B0B) Those are beautiful pictographs." "Late prehistoric pictographs." " What's late prehistoric?" " 500 AD to as late as 1550." "0n the basis of art size." "We could still make out the finger marks of the artists," "What are they depicting?" "This looks like something with legs." "Uh, it..." "They're difficult or impossible, as a rule, to interpret accurately, although a lot of people try. 0h." "So could any of these be religious in significance?" "We can probably assume that they practised certain kinds of shamanistic religion." "Certainly with healers and this sort of thing." "This was the kind of religion that Cabeza de Vaca and his friends encountered along this route." "And they thought Cabeza de Vaca was a shaman." "They went to him to become healed and they would go to him just like people would go to a medical doctor today and it's possible that could have saved their lives." "What's the lifestyle of these people?" " Well, they're..." " (LINDA) Hard." "There wouldn't have been great hospitality at the table in the evening." "(B0B) We have hard archaeological evidence that they would eat just about anything they could get their hands on." "Bob's hard evidence came from the ancient human excrement in the rubbish dumps on these camp sites," "When Cabeza de Vaca said they were eating worms and spiders, he wasn't telling lies," "The Spanish gentleman was tasting the life most humans had lived since the Stone Age," "That night we found a campsite overlooking the desert," ", on the great prehistoric route into Central America," "The place was an abandoned Indian settlement," "We found grinding holes, just as Cabeza de Vaca describes," "These are probably 2,000... 3,000 BC to as late as 500 AD." "See they're very tapered..." "So you have a wooden pounder and pound the seeds or whatever you used inside." "Seeds, mesquite beans, things like that they would ground." "They would ground up in these and powder them to make meal." " Wonderful." " These are good examples." "Cabeza de Vaca says these holes were used to grind mesquite beans to make the hallucinogens for the Indian ceremonies," "He also describes the way they cooked food" "(LINDA) Look at that." "Boiling the water with hot stones from the fire," "That is hot." "I've never seen that done." " 0oh." " There we go." "So they do this because they don't have ceramics." "They don't have..." "They can't put a pot on the fire to heat water." "Probably because they moved about frequently." "Pottery is not very conducive to a lot of movement in this country especially, because it's so rocky and it's easily broken." " So where are the teabags?" " Come on." " English breakfast or Earl Grey?" " I don't know." "(LINDA) You guys are supposed to be the experts on this, Michael." "As Cabeza de Vaca said, "How diverse and strange are human beings and their ways, "" "The four men had now reached the very, middle of the continent," "But did they still feel like conquistadors?" "Did Cabeza de Vaca, the gentleman?" "He had the chance to see this world before it was destroyed by the conquistadors and exploiters who followed" "But how much he leaves unsaid" "(LINDA) Some burritos?" "(MICHAEL) Yeah, that'd be great, thanks." "0ne thing that I keep wondering about as we're travelling in the footsteps of Cabeza de Vaca is that he's away for seven or eight years..." "You've got some?" "Great." "...and he tells us all sorts of fascinating things about the Indians, but he never speaks about his or any of his friends' relationships with the women." "I don't think he would have lived that long in a native society without having taken on a woman and I suspect it wasn't one that was just a short-term scenario either." "It was probably the first infusion of Spanish blood into America." "You can bet he wouldn't mention it, though." "It would have caused him problems with the Church probably." "He had to write this to the audience that were now feeding him, which was Spain." "And he doesn't want them to think that he just ditched Spanish values and went native." "And went, "These values that I was raised with I've now decided are suspect."" "No, I don't think he could do that, but I concur with you." "I think there was an unwritten story there." "And so they continued, following the sun, across the ridges of the Sierra Madre," ""Though we could speak six Indian languages," says Cabeza de Vaca," ""we found 1,000 differences in their ways of speech," ""But we were always understood and kept our authority with the Indians," ""Though still naked, shedding our skin twice a year like snakes, "" "(LINDA) This is a tenaha." "This would hold water year round." "It can be anywhere as deep as ten feet, or as shallow as a foot and a half, but there's always water there." " (MICHAEL) And it's good water?" " Good water." "(TRADITl0NAL F0LK MUSIC PLAYS)" "And we finally reached the little town of San Carlos," "Enrique." "Hi." "How are you?" "Good to see you." "We finally made it." " Do you want a beer?" " I'd love one." "(SINGS IN SPANISH)" " A thrill." " Yup." "You know what?" "It was sure fun." "It had been fun, but it had also told us more about Cabeza de Vaca and the man he was becoming," "Something has happened to him." "He has been transformed somehow." "He is no long either an Indian and he is no longer a Spaniard and a Christian." "He is a new man." "You speak of him as a man situated in between those two cultures." "I suppose, in a sense, he's the first modern man, in a way." "Do you think?" "He had er..." "learned something that very few Spaniards knew, that the Indians were human beings." "And many in Spain didn't want human beings at that time." "They wanted slaves." "Everywhere on their journey now, they were treated as people with powers, people who could heal," "To we modern people, this is the least believable part of his story," "And even in his day, he was accused of fantasising," "And worse, claiming supernatural powers," ""The Indian healers do their cures like this," he says," ""By blowing on the sick person and then using their hands to cast the illness out," ""We did the same, but with the sign of the cross, praying to God to make them better, "" "And he did" "(W0MAN SPEAKS SPANISH)" "(TRANSLAT0R) This is the sacred heart of Jesus." "He appears to me when I cure the sick." "0h, and this, this is my protection against the evil spirits who can harm me." "Absolutely wonderful mixture of Christian symbols and yet the way of working with them is much more traditional and Mexican." "It touches back to what was the religion of the whole of the Americas in ancient times, this sort of shamanistic religion." "In a sense, Cabeza de Vaca was the first person to try and cross the boundary between the two and use them both." ""It pleased God to give them health," says Cabeza de Vaca, as a 16th-century, man would" ""In the future," he wrote to the King of Spain, "these lands will be brought to the true faith," ""And though my story, may be difficult to believe, I assure Your Majesty it is the truth, "" "And however we might explain it, thousands of Indians clung to them now, asking for their blessings, walking with them through the wilderness," "The natives were astonished that Cabeza de Vaca and his friends could walk for a whole day without needing food, "But by then," says Cabeza de Vaca," ""we were so inured to suffering that we felt no fatigue."" "Their guides now led them towards another great native trade route across the Americas - the Shell Trail, which came down from the pueblos of A rizona and New Mexico all the way to the Pacific," ""We saw many towns now," says Cabeza de Vaca, "built by civilised people,"" "They were near the ruined city of Casas Grandes," "This astonishing place was once a centre of the shell trade," "The archaeologists found a ton and a half of shells in these warehouses." "Shells for grinding up, for use as decoration on the face of the walls." "Shells for personal adornment, necklaces, bracelets." "Shells like the pink spondylos, which was used for religious rituals all the way along the Pacific coast down to South America." "This place was abandoned a century before Cabeza de Vaca's day." "But the commerce and the trade routes on which it was carried still continued." "Winter was coming on now as they climbed out of the plains," "Their last hurdle, the immense fissured landscape around Copper Canyon," "0ne of the biggest native groups in the Americas still lives here, the Tarahumara," ""The people here are the most open and intelligent folk I met, " says Cabeza de Vaca," ""Their women more modestly and better dressed than in any other part of the Indies we'd seen, "" "The Tarahumara are descendents of the peoples who once spread all over the high plains of horthern Mexico," "They have borrowed from the Europeans only a handful of useful things - the violin, the goat, the apple tree and the metal ploughshare," "A plow..." "There are no roads through their lands, You still have to go on foot," "They call themselves the people who walk straight," "And they mean in their hearts, as well as with their feet," "By now Cabeza de Vaca had seen the first signs of the Spanish presence, an Indian wearing a sword hilt as an amulet," "His world was not far off," "This is where we'll be sleeping tonight." "And jolly comfy it looks, too." "He knew now he must leave the Indian world" "But however much he wanted to, he also knew that what he was leaving behind had true worth," "Reading his account, I think that he remained a Christian gentleman," "He still believed in the civilising mission of Spain, but he was no longer a conquistador," "If you had to explain to somebody what it is about this life that is so good, what would the things be that they think are so valuable?" "(SPEAKS SPANISH)" "He had understood that the peoples of the Americas were human, too," "As the Tarahumara would put it, Cabeza de Vaca had learned to walk straight," "He said, "What's good about life is that there's goat shit." ""There's goat droppings and that's good," ""because we put it on the land, so that the corn will be born to make tortillas with," ""to make pinole with and to make tesguino with."" "I said, "Why do you make tesguino?" He says, "To have a fiesta."" "So that you can dance this special dance they do all night, so that God will bring water." ""Why do you need water?" He says, "So that the corn... will be born."" "There's the circle." "If we kept asking, it would go round." " Fantastic." " (SPEAKS TARAHUMARA DIALECT)" "(B0B) They don't walk straight any more." "So people like me, we don't walk straight any more?" "He says, "Not hardly at all." "Sorry."" "But how would Cabeza de Vaca use his knowledge on his return?" "The odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca was drawing to its close," "That winter they came down forested canyons towards the Pacific," "After more than 2,000 miles, he was about to reenter the world he'd once known," ""We came down into a wonderful landscape, " he says," ""fertile with rivers, forests and fields," ""Nowhere in the world, in our eyes, could be so rich and beautiful," "(CALLS 0UT IN SPANISH)" "Cabeza de Vaca ran into Spanish slave hunters," "It's a moment which has been portrayed in novels and films," "(YELLING)" "And so Cabeza de Vaca met his old self the man he'd been all those years before," "They threatened to enslave his Indian companions and to kill him, but he stood his ground and forced them to let him and his Indians go," "And finally, nearly ten years after he left Cuba, he walked like a ghost into the town of Culiacan, to the astonishment of the local Spanish colonists," "They had been the first people to walk across the continent," "They'd seen things no outsider had ever seen," "But there's no happy ending to his story," "When he got back to Spain, he argued for benevolent rule in the Americas," "But he was ruined by his enemies and he died a pauper," "His only legacy, the book of his adventures," "While he'd been lost, the world had changed as never before," "The conquistadors had carried their swords from Florida to Chile," "Their bravery, and their greed had led them to Lake Titicaca and to the heights of Machu Picchu," "And the cost?" "Ancient civilisations overthrown," "Tens of millions dead from European violence and disease," "And the plundering of the natural world of the Americas," "(M0NKS CHANTING)" "Back in Spain, these events woke the conscience of the age and people now began to question the justice of conquest," "All the great civilisations had treated people not of their own colour or creed as alien," "But now, in Catholic Spain, these assumptions were questioned" "Did the Indians have human rights?" "What does it mean to be human?" "In 1550, the King's counsellors gathered here in Valladolid to listen to two great figures of the age, the Dominican Las Casas, speaking for the Indians, and the philosopher Sepulveda, for the mission of imperial Spain," "This is where the debate was held." "It's quite a moment in the history of the world." "The first time that principles of universal human rights and global justice were worked out took place here." "Sepulveda concluded by saying this - that human beings are not equal, that some are superior to others and that the inhabitants of the New World were natural slaves because they were barbarous and inhumane." ""How can it be doubted that they have been justly conquered" ""by our most humane nation, which excels in every kind of virtue?"" "Las Casas spoke second." "Staggered in, an enormous pile of documentation, 40 years of research." "The King's counsellors' jaws must have dropped." "Must have thought he was going to talk for days and he did." "He talked for five days." "And the nub of his argument was this - that the conquests in the New World were wrong and had to be stopped, that the only way was peaceful conversion through love and kindness." ""There's no nation on earth," he said," ""no matter how savage, cannot attain humane civilisation." ""All the peoples of the world are human beings." ""And the definition of a human being" ""is that we are all rational things." ""We share the same faculties of will and capacities and understanding." ""We all take pleasure in goodness." ""The war against the natives of the New World is wrong" ""because it is unjust to wage war against our fellow humans." ""And all the peoples of the world are human."" "(BELL RINGS)" "The King listened He ordered a stop to the conquests while the issue was debated further," "But he couldn 't stop history, 0n the ground, the conquests continued, driven, as ever, by the lust for gold" "And what of the conquistadors themselves, the men who won the New World" "What did they think, looking back?" "He died in..." "Stuart Sterling's ancestor was one of them," "He fought in the battles in Peru, saw Atahualpa dead, married an Inca princess," "But he had blood on his hands," "He wrote this extraordinary document, which he addressed to King Philip II." "0n his deathbed, aged 78, he addressed to the King a remarkable confession," ""I, Captain Mancio Seirra de Leguizamo, make this my last will and testament." ""Firstly, for the peace of my soul, I declare for many years now" ""I have wanted to speak to His Catholic Majesty, to King Philip." ""I wish Your Majesty to understand the motive that moves me to say this" ""is the peace of my conscience, because of the guilt I share." ""For we have destroyed, by our evil deeds, such a government as was enjoyed by these natives" ""and now they have come to such a pass that these natives, from doing no evil," ""have changed to people who now do no good." ""And so I have unburdened my conscience." ""There is nothing more I can do to alleviate these injustices, other than by these words," ""for I'm the last to die of the conquistadors.""