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