How an enslaved, shipwrecked African became the US's first great explorer

Nearly 500 years ago, a Moroccan man walked thousands of miles from Florida to the Pacific Coast, becoming the first known outsider to see the American West.

In 1528, a man from Morocco washed up on the coast of present-day Texas, more dead than alive. He had spent the previous month adrift in the Gulf of Mexico alongside a group of Spanish sailors on a flimsy lifeboat lashed together with tree trunks, horse hide and what was left of their tattered clothes. When a storm stranded the castaways on a barrier island near Galveston, they unwittingly became the first people from the Old World to enter the American West – and when they did, they were each starving, exhausted and naked.

In the weeks that followed, the shipwrecked survivors began dying, one by one. Many succumbed to hunger, others to the elements and some to attacks from Indigenous tribes. Of the roughly 600 men who had set sail from Spain a year earlier on this ill-fated expedition to conquer present-day Florida and the Gulf Coast for the Spanish Crown, only four survived: three Spanish captains and, somehow, the enslaved Moroccan.  

During the next eight years, the man would become the party's de facto leader, and embark on one of the most remarkable survival journeys in exploration history. And yet, we don't even know his real name.

Known variously as Esteban de Dorantes, Esteban the Moor or – most commonly – Estevanico, this enigmatic individual was one of the first documented Africans, Arabic speakers and Muslims to step foot in what is now the United States, arriving nearly 40 years before the first European settlement. Between 1528 and 1536, he walked roughly 2,250 miles (3,620km) west from Florida to the Pacific Coast of Mexico, completing what is widely believed to be the first recorded crossing of North America in history and predating Lewis and Clark's overland expedition to the Oregon Coast by nearly 300 years.

Along the way, Estevanico was captured by Native Americans, learned their languages and became a healer before journeying an additional 1,300 miles (2,090km) south with the three other shipwreck survivors from the Gulf of California to Mexico City. He then embarked on a separate 1,500-mile (2,415km) odyssey north, and became the first known non-Native American to enter modern-day New Mexico and Arizona.

"Estevanico is one of the most extraordinary, yet overlooked, figures in the early history of what would become the American Southwest," said Dr Hsain Ilahiane, an anthropologist and professor at the University of Arizona, who has spent years studying the explorer. "He helped open routes, trails and geographic knowledge that later informed Spanish incursions into [the present-day American West]."

Still, most people have never heard of him – even in the US.

Now, as the US celebrates its 250th anniversary and looks back on its origins, a growing number of museums, tours and monuments around the country are now highlighting his little-known legacy.

Since Estevanico left no written records, historians have pieced together his life largely through the surviving accounts of the Spanish survivors who travelled beside him. He was born in the early 1500s in Azemmour and enslaved by Spanish nobleman Andrés Dorantes de Carranza, who brought him on Spain's Narváez expedition to the Americas. Since Muslims were forbidden from travelling to the New World on official Spanish expeditions, Dorantes baptised him, renaming him Estevanico.

The 600-person, five-ship voyage set sail in June 1527, and it was a disaster from the start. Some 140 men deserted the expedition during a stop in Santo Domingo, and while resupplying in Cuba, a hurricane sank two ships and killed 50 more sailors. The crew eventually tried to sail to Mexico, but storms blew them into modern-day St Petersburg, Florida, in April 1528.

The expedition's leader, Panfilo de Narváez, then ordered Estevanico and several hundred men to march north to explore Florida's interior. After slogging some 300 miles (480km) through mosquito-infested swamps to what is now Saint Marks, Florida, and getting........

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