The Moor's Account

Two men are swept away during a river crossing, leaving only 10 survivors. They come across Léon, a man from Cabeza de Vaca’s camp who reached the mainland by canoe shortly after arriving on the island. Dorantes reprimands him for not telling Cabeza de Vaca about the canoe and blames him for all the deaths suffered over the winter on the Island of Misfortune. Léon is unphased by Dorantes’s rebuke. In contrast, Friar Anselmo welcomes Léon, and the men take his unexpected reappearance as a good sign.

A few days later, the men encounter a second river and an abandoned raft from their party. There’s no sign of the 49 men who traveled on the raft. The raft reminds Mustafa that their odds of escaping the wilderness alive are slim. Castillo recalls that there was a Moorish woman on Dorantes’s ship who predicted that all the men on the expedition to La Florida would die in the new world.

When the men reach a third river, natives appear and offer to bring them across. When they arrive on the opposite bank, the natives bring another European named Martín. He is one of the five deserters Cabeza de Vaca told them about; he swam from the Island of Misfortune to the mainland.