From the Annals of Incredible Exploration – In 1528, the eighty survivors of the Narváez expedition washed ashore on an  island off the Texas coast.  Panfilo Narvaez had participated in the conquest of Mexico with Hernan Cortes and was seeking his own fame in leading an expedition to the gulf coast.  He was no Cortes, however, and through a series of blunders in exploring the interior of Florida about 250 of his men were forced to build rafts in an attempt to return via the Gulf Coast to Mexico.  The flotilla made its way towards the Mississippi where most of the rafts were lost in storms and rough seas.  Some members of his ill-fated expedition managed to land in Texas.  Most of them died of disease, starvation or were killed by the hostile coastal tribes.  Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca nearly died but later made it to the mainland and worked as a trader and healer for several years with native groups before discovering that three other men – the slave Estevanico, Alonso Castillo Maldonado, and Andrés Dorantes de Carranza – had survived and were living as captives on the shores of Matagorda Bay.  He joined them and they all ultimately decided to escape and attempt to return to Mexico overland.  These “four ragged castaways” became the first non-native Americans to return from Texas.   Their remarkable journey took them across present-day west Texas and northern Mexico and ended when they arrived at the Spanish outpost of Culiacán near the Pacific in 1536. Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his amazing odyssey in his Relación detailed valuable ethnographic, geographic, and biotic information on Texas.