In November 1528 about eighty Spaniards and an African, the survivors of the Narváez expedition, washed ashore on an island in the Gulf. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca named it the Island of Ill Fate. He wrote that two peoples lived there, the Capoques and the Han, who spoke different languages. The Han are known only from his account. The Handbook of Texas reports that most scholars take them for Atakapans, probably ancestors of the Akokisa, since hañ means house in both Atakapa and Akokisa.
The first winter
Cabeza de Vaca wrote that the islanders met the cold, starving Spaniards with fish and roots and carried them from fire to fire. The cold came on, the roots and fish gave out, and the Spaniards died. Five who were quartered on the coast ate each other, and he said the islanders were so appalled that they would have killed the Spaniards had they seen it from the start. Of eighty men, fifteen were still alive.
Then, in his account, the islanders fell sick in the stomach and about half died. Believing the strangers had killed them, they agreed to kill the survivors. An islander who kept Cabeza de Vaca spoke against it. If the Spaniards had such power, he said, they would not have let so many of their own die, and so few were left that they could do no harm. The others listened.
Healers and a trader
The islanders then wanted the Spaniards as healers and withheld food until they agreed. Cabeza de Vaca made the sign of the cross over the sick, breathed on them, and said a Paternoster and an Ave Maria. When those he prayed over said they were better, he wrote, the islanders fed the Spaniards and gave them hides. The castaways included Estevanico, a Moroccan man from Azamor who had been enslaved by Andrés Dorantes in Spain.
He also wrote that the islanders worked him hard and treated him badly, that he pulled roots from the water until his fingers bled, and that he left for the mainland. There he became a trader, carrying seashells and shell beads inland and bringing back hides, red ochre and flint. In his words he was "no longer a slave." He spent nearly six years in the country. He wrote that the islanders loved their children above all other people, and that the death of a child was mourned for a full year.
Which island
The Handbook says the island's location has been debated heatedly since the 1920s. Harbert Davenport and Joseph Wells proposed in 1918 that Malhado was San Luis Island, in the Brazosport area, because Cabeza de Vaca gave its size as half a league by five and Galveston Island, at twenty-seven miles, is far longer. In 1990 plaintiffs in a federal case in Galveston argued that Malhado was Galveston Island, and the court found the argument unconvincing. In 1536 Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, Castillo and Estevanico reached Mexico City.
You can stand on either candidate shore. Galveston Island State Park spans the island to West Galveston Bay, and Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge lies on the coast east of Freeport, the Brazosport side.