Rationales for conquest

Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis, 9/20/2025

As we discussed earlier (The infamous Requerimiento), bringing Christianity to pagan natives was one of the official rationales for Spanish conquests in the New World. For the Catholic church’s representatives among the invading forces, there no doubt was a genuine desire to save souls. For others, it was the lure of controlling land and profiting from slave labor. Some might have claimed it was the preordained destiny of Spain to conquer new worlds. Conquerers have always tried to put some kind of gloss on their projects to subjugate other peoples for personal or national gain. There may even be some benefit for the conquered people. The Spaniards at least ended the widespread Aztec practice of human sacrifices. But that was only a byproduct of the real motivations for the conquest of Mexico and other territories in the New World: the lust for riches and the control of new lands and peoples. To my mind, the oddest thing about the human lust for wealth and power is that it seems to be insatiable. The more some people gain of both, the more they want or think they need. It’s no different today.

Building a barca from scratch

We don’t know exactly what kind of boats the Spaniards built at the Bay of Horses or how they did it. The vessels were all wrecked and lost on the coast of Texas two months later. According to Cabeza de Vaca, it seemed impossible to build boats “…because we did not know how to make them, nor had we any tools, iron, forges, oakum, pitch, or rigging. In the end, out of all the many things that would be needed, we had none, nor did anyone know anything about their fabrication.” That is bound to be an exaggeration. Any such expedition into an unknown wilderness at that time would have had enough means and talent to at least build rafts for river crossings, fortifications if necessary, and even crude shelters for a settlement, as originally planned. Not to mention, the soldiers and horsemen had to maintain their fighting gear. Building boats was a new challenge, but building other items of wood and metal would have been routine.

   Functionally, these barcas were probably a much-simplified version of the Spanish bergantín, a type of coastal vessel that would have been very familiar to explorers of that period. Nautical historian Steve Harris has proposed and modeled their most likely design, based on the resources and talents they had available, the capabilities they needed for sailing and rowing them, and the advice of other nautical experts on Spanish boats of that period (The Narváez Expedition Barca, 2019. Nautical Research Journal, 64 (3): 209-224.) We do know that the five boats were crowded with 242 men, their gear, and food, and they sat very low in the water. Days later, they raised the sides somewhat with planks salvaged from native canoes.

   The historical illustration in the previous post shows them building planked vessels, and that would not be unrealistic even under primitive conditions. Builders in the Middle Ages commonly used the technique of “riving” planks out of logs with hand tools. At St. Marks in 1528, they had virgin long-leaf pines that grew over 100 feet tall, up to three feet in diameter, even far up the trunks. Long planks about 3 inches thick could be split from those logs with simple wooden mallets and wedges. There are plenty of videos online that illustrate the method.

The Narváez expedition “barcas”

"Having lost [track of] their ships and exposed to death by starvation, the people of Panfillo de Narvaez build boats with admirable ingenuity on the beach of Ante." (From History of the Royal Spanish Navy)

How did a bunch of desperate, debilitated soldiers build good seagoing boats in a hostile wilderness? In Cabeza de Vaca’s account*, written with input from three other survivors, he claims that, at first, they didn’t have any of the knowledge or tools to do it. Not to mention, many of the men were sick, wounded, and half-starved. Even so, they managed to build five, ~40-ft vessels that carried about 250 men and their equipment some 800 miles along the Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas—a very impressive feat. They called their escape vessels barcas, Spanish for “boats”, but didn’t describe their construction. Nonetheless, historians have interpreted the term barcas in various ways, sometimes translating them as barges, rafts, and even boats made of horsehide! Could the word refer to rafts at all? In the last few lines of chapter 17, CdV mentions one of their barcas that carried Narváez away, and balsas or rafts that they later improvised to cross some smaller body of water. They did distinguish between those two terms, and so the escape barcas were evidently not rafts. There are many other reasons why clumsy log rafts would not be feasible for such an 800-mile voyage along the open Gulf Coast. As for horsehide boats? Out of the question. They did make horsehide bags for carrying water, but they soon rotted. All of this might seem like a rather nerdy focus on one detail, but it's a good example of translators and historians looking at the same word and coming up with different interpretions of how some major event was accomplished.

As for the Narváez men being totally unprepared and unqualified to build such boats, it seems like Cabeza de Vaca was trying to make their achievement—impressive as it was—sound a bit more heroic. Spanish expeditions to the New World recruited people with all kinds of knowledge, skills, and experience. Even though only one of the Narváez party, the Portuguese Álvaro Fernández, was identified as a carpenter and sailor by trade, many others had practical talents they could put to good use. After all, every soldier and horseman had to repair and maintain his own weapons and tack gear. No doubt in their hometowns and villages, they had seen all kinds of constructions, including small boat building. It was all done with manual labor, and young people grew up helping with it. Still, designing and constructing a seagoing 40-ft. (12-meter) was not trivial. We’ll say more about how they might have done it in the next post.

While these desperate men were not so elegantly dressed as the Spaniards in this illustration, they built their escape boats remarkably well.

*Read a copy of the CdV’s account of 1555, with its parallel translation here:

https://exhibits.library.txstate.edu/s/cabeza/page/larelacion