accomplishment of Cabeza de Vaca and his three companions compensated their untold sufferings, the world eventually became the wiser in more ways than one. The northern continent had been penetrated from shore to shore; the waters of the Mississippi and the bison of the plains were now first seen by white men; and some knowledge of the savage tribes had been gleaned for the benefit of those who should come after. There is no blatant announcement of great mineral wealth—a mountain with scoria of iron, some small bags of mica, a quantity of galena, with which the Indians painted their faces, a little turquoise, a few emeralds, and a small copper bell were all. Yet the effect of the remarkable overland journey was to inspire the expedition of Coronado in 1540; and it is not improbable that De Soto, who endeavored to enlist the services of Cabeza de Vaca, may likewise have been stimulated to action.

After the three Spaniards returned to Mexico they united in a report to the Audiencia of Española (Santo Domingo), which is printed in Oviedo's Historia General y Natural de las Indias (tomo III., lib. XXXV., ed. 1853). In April, 1537, they embarked for Spain, but the ship in which Dorantes set sail proved to be unseaworthy and returned to Vera Cruz. Invited to the capital by the Viceroy Mendoza, Dorantes was tendered a commission to explore the northern country, but this project was never carried out.

Cabeza de Vaca, in reward for his services, was appointed governor, captain-general, and adelantado of the provinces of Rio de la Plata. Sailing from Cadiz in November, 1540, he reached Brazil in March of the following year. Here he remained seven months, when he sent his vessels ahead to Buenos Ayres and started overland to Asuncion, which he reached in March, 1542, after a remarkable experience in the tropical forests. But the province seems to have needed a man of sterner stuff than Alvar Nuñez, for he soon became the subject of animosity and intrigue, which finally resulted in open rebellion, and his arrest in April, 1543. He was kept under close guard for about two years, when he was sent to Spain, and in 1551 was sentenced to banishment in Africa for eight years—a judgment that does not seem to have been carried out, for after serving probably a year or so in mild captivity at Seville, he was acquitted. He died in 1557.

Of the subsequent career of Castillo little is known. He returned to New Spain, became a citizen of the City of Mexico, married a widow, and was granted half the rents of the Indian town of Tehuacan.

Dorantes, as has been stated, for some reason did not carry out the plan of exploring the north, perhaps because of the projected expedition of Coronado, the way for which was led by Fray Marcos de Niza in 1539 with the negro Estévan as a guide. Dorantes served Mendoza in the conquest of Jalisco, and married Doña María de la Torre, a widow, by whom he had a large family. One of his sons, Balthasar, sometime king's treasurer of Vera Cruz, was born about the middle of the century, and on the death of his father inherited an encomienda that produced an income of five thousand pesos a year. Another son, Gaspar, inherited the encomienda of the pueblos of Ocava; and another, Melchior, "an encomienda of Indians and of very good rents."

Of Estévan there is somewhat more definite information. Well on the road toward the north in 1539, he was sent ahead by Fray Marcos to report the character of the country and its people, and with rattle in hand and accompanied by many Indians of the present Gila River region, entered Háwikuh, the first of the Seven Cities of Cibola. Here Estévan and most of his Indian followers were put to death by the Zuñis; those who escaped fled to Fray Marcos, whose life was threatened but who saved himself by regaling the natives with the contents of his pack.

There was another survivor of the inland expedition of Narvaez—Juan Ortiz by name. This Spaniard, who had been enticed ashore by the Indians of Florida, led practically the life of a slave, like his countrymen on the Texas main, until 1539, when he was rescued by De Soto, but he died before the expedition returned to civilization.

The Relación of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca was first printed at Zamora in 1542, and with slight changes was reprinted, with the first edition of the Comentarios on the Rio de la Plata, at Valladolid, in 1555. The editio princeps was translated into Italian by Ramusio, in the third volume of his Navigationi et Viaggi (Venice, 1556), and this was paraphrased into English by Samuel Purchas in volume IV. of Purchas His Pilgrimes (London, 1613, pt. IV., lib. VIII., cap. 1). The Naufragios (or Relacion) and Comentarios were reprinted at Madrid in 1736, preceded by the Exámen Apologético of Antonio Ardoino, who seemed to feel it his duty to reply to an Austrian monk named Caspar Plautus, who, in 1621, under the name Philoponus, published a treatise in which he maintained that laymen like Cabeza de Vaca should not be permitted to perform miracles. This edition of the narration of Cabeza de Vaca is included in volume I. of Barcia's Historiadores Primitivos de las Indias Occidentales, published at Madrid in 1749. The Naufragios of Alvar Nuñez, from the edition of 1555, appears in volume I. of Vedia's Historiadores Primitivos de Indias (Madrid, ed. 1852). The letter to the Audiencia of Española, "edited" by Oviedo, has already been alluded to. A "Capitulacion que se tomó con Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca," dated Madrid, 18 Marzo, 1540, is found in the Colección de Documentos Inéditos del Archivo de Indias (tomo XXIII., pp. 8-33, 1875). A Relación by Cabeza de Vaca, briefly narrating the story of the expedition until the arrival of its survivors in Espíritu Santo Bay, with his instructions as treasurer, is printed in the Colección de Documentos de Indias, XIV. 265-279 (Madrid, 1870). The most recent Spanish edition of the more famous Relacion reprinted in the following pages forms a part of volume V. of the Colección de Libros y Documentos referentes á la Historia de América (Madrid, 1906), which also contains the Comentarios.

The single French translation was published as volume VII. of Henri Ternaux-Compans's Voyages (Paris, 1837), from the edition of 1555, while the Commentaires form volume VI.

In 1851 a translation of the edition of 1555 into English, by (Thomas) Buckingham Smith, under the title The Narrative of Alvar Nuñez Cabeça de Vaca, was published privately at Washington by George W. Riggs; and shortly after Mr. Smith's death, in 1871, another edition, with many additions, was published in New York under the editorial supervision of John Gilmary Shea and at the expense of Henry C. Murphy. It is this edition of the Narrative that is here reprinted. A paraphrase of the 1851 edition of Smith's translation appears in Henry Kingsley's Tales of Old Travels (London, 1869). The first fourteen chapters of W. W. H. Davis's Spanish Conquest of New Mexico (Doylestown, Pa., 1869) are also a paraphrase of the same work. Chapters XXX.-XXXVI. of the 1871 edition of Smith, somewhat abridged, were printed in an Old South Leaflet (Gen. Ser., No. 39, Boston, 1893). A "Relation of what Befel the Persons who Escaped from the Disasters that Attended the Armament of Captain Pamphilo de Narvaez on the Shores and in the countries of the North," translated and condensed from the letter published by Oviedo, is printed in The Historical