Traditionalist histories claim that slavery started in what is now the United States on or about August 20, 1619, when a British ship appeared in Chesapeake Bay and traded for food "20 and odd" Africans seized from a Portuguese slave ship.
      The White Lion, a British-owned privateer operating under a Dutch flag, "sold" the Angolans to planters of Viriginia's earliest tobacco fields at what is now Hampton, Virginia, less than forty miles from the Jamestown settllement.

For perspective, for the year 1527 that the Narváez expedition with Esteban left Spain to invade Florida, here is a list of some notable events in the rest of the world also occurring in that year:
     1527 ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD

Another unanswerable question— possibly the biggest one— is whether Zunis killed Esteban the day after he arrived at Hawikku Pueblo, in western New Mexico, as most books about Esteban insist.
     Well, maybe. Or maybe not.

A friend proposed that Cabeza de Vaca deliberately kept Esteban in the background in his 1542 book, possibly even with Esteban's knowledge.
      Cabeza de Vaca never mentioned Esteban in the first half of his account about the Narváez invasion of Florida. During their cross-continent trek, Cabeza de Vaca referred to the African slave sporadically by name but usually by simply labeling Esteban as El Negro. He  even credited some of Esteban's achievements to others.

For perspective, the year of 1539 when Esteban arrived in the Zuni village of Hawikku as the first non-Indian to enter New Mexico, here is a list of some notable events in the rest of the world also occurring in that year:
     1539 ELSEWHERE IN THE WORLD

An absurd movie was released in Mexico in 1990 titled "Cabeza de Vaca." A relatively unknown actor, Gerardo Villarreal, played the part of Estevanico (Esteban).  The movie hero-worships Cabeza de Vaca, and the movie doesn't even try to follow the historical record, although it's supposedly based on Cabea de Vaca's chronicle of 1542 and is advertised as "true and amazing adventures." The movie is built primarily on dramatic accounts of events that never occurred.

There's an exhibit in Washington, D.C. about Esteban (Estevanico). He is featured in a historical section about Muslims in America in the 1500s. The exhibit is in America's Islamic Heritage Museum & Cultural Center, and credits Esteban as being the first known Muslim to arrive in what is now the United States. The center opened in 2011.

An essay I wrote about Esteban was published on the national journalism website at  http://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2019/01/15/escaped-slave-discovered-am.../ on Jan. 15 and then republished in the Houston Chronicle and perhaps other daily newspapers.

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 and would have matched the other Narváez vessels.