An essay I wrote about Esteban was published Jan. 15 and can be seen at http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2019/01/15/escaped-slave-discovered-am...
     Please be advised that I did not write the rather misleading headline or select the illustration. However, publication of the essay will help spread the word about how Esteban must have been a remarkable person, and hopefully it will help repair his reputation and restore his place in America's early history.

The Wolofs, kidnapped from their home in West Africa, led the first African slave revolt against Spanish rule in the Caribbean. Sources seem fairly evenly divided between 1521 and 1522 for the start of the revolt. I went with the more conservative estimate of 1522 in the book on page 31. In either case, it would have been only a few years before Esteban arrived on Hispaniola, so as a slave himself he was bound to hear about the island's slave unrest.

Among many unanswerable questions about the Narváez expedition is an uncertainty about whether the ship the conquistador purchased on Hispaniola was a caravel.
      In his account, Cabeza de Vaca mentions that Narváez purchased an additional “ship” at the Santo Domingo port. The assumption is that it was a caravel, because that was a principal vessel in those days.

Missionaries to the Caribbean printed a special edition of the Bible in 1794 to use in converting African slaves to Christianity -- but omitted any parts about freedom, equality, or resistance.

Esteban, Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, and Castillo escaped from the Karankawa Indians after about five years and made their way across the continent and to Mexico City. But there was another Spaniard, Lope de Oviedo, who was left behind on Malhado Island -- either because the others assumed he must be dead or considered it too dangerous to return to Malhado and rescue him.

The map linked to on this blog entry is the first one that shows all the Americas as being one continent and not connected to any other landmass. From page 23 in the biography, this map was published about eleven years after Esteban left Mexico City to find the rumored rich Indian cities to the north, occupied by what are now known as the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico.

Whenever I read any mention of Esteban, I was struck about how almost every reference was negative, even though no European ever reported seeing the bad acts attributed to him.
     I began to wonder. Why was all the evidence cited against Esteban based on assumptions and nearly 500-year-old negative hearsay? And why were there so many differing and increasingly dramatic versions of his death? I no longer necessarily believe the conventional wisdom that Zunis killed him the day after they first met him.

For an up-to-date schedule of presentations, often including a slide show and booksigning, check out the "presentations" link here on the Esteban website.  If you have any questions about the book, simply write to me on the website's "contact" tab at the top of the site or here.

 African involvement in the early history of the Americas and Mexico goes back further than most people realize. Click HERE for a comprehensive article about Africans, both free and slave, in Mexico, North, Central, and South America in the 1500s and 1600s.

Most Arabic scholars, although they usually but not always revert to the Spanish name of Esteban, use a different name when they start writing about the man whose fame is growing in North Africa because of his Morocco connection.