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After the interminable voyage, after the crossing of the vast ocean that formed the hyphen that is often used between African and American, after the greasing with palm oil to disguise the travails of the trip, came the tentative first steps on the new land. The Africans arrived still tottering uncertainly after the weeks and months at sea. Scramble or auction followed, complete with separation from shipmates. The new life in America had begun. In it, Indian, African, and European formed a tightly wrought tapestry, one so intricately woven that it is often impossible to distinguish which threads belonged to which group. The Africans were landed without regard to their home cultures. European groups, however, each made landfall in a different area of the country; they came on ships that had the fragility of walnut shells for different reasons: some for adventure, others to flee religious persecution, and still others in search of fortunes. Spanish, English, Dutch, and French—the arrival story for each group of settlers was as different as their relationships with the Indians and with the Africans.

The first to arrive were the Spaniards. They had a long familiarity with the African continent from their more-than-seven-hundred-year occupation by North African Moors. They also had a tradition of slavery. African slaves sailed with Columbus and had been in the hemisphere since 1492. Others entered Mexico with Cortés and accompanied the conquistadores throughout the central and southern regions of the hemisphere. African slaves were a part of the ill-fated expedition of Lucas Vásquez de Ayllón to the Carolina coast in 1526. After a wreck, they rebelled, settled among the Native Americans, intermarried, and disappeared with no trace.

A year later, in 1527, the Spanish arrived more permanently on the North American mainland on an Easter Sunday and named the place Pascua Florida in honor of the day. They set out in search of gold and riches, which they hoped would rival those found in Central and South America. With them was the first African known by name to step foot ashore on the North American continent: Estebán Dorantes, the slave of Andrés Dorantes. Estebanico, or Estebancico, as he is sometimes called, was from Azemmour in Morocco and had been a slave in Spain. He followed his master to the New World as part of the 1527 expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, who landed near Tampa, Florida, with four hundred men bent on conquest. De Narváez, though, was not a good leader. His bad decision to separate his men from the provisioning ships was the first step in a saga of mishaps. His tactical errors were compounded by encounters with hostile Indians. Nature also terrorized the expedition in the form of alligators, mosquitoes, and snakes. Then there was a hurricane. The ships were destroyed, and the survivors were reduced to using what timber they could salvage to build a raft and sail along the Gulf of Mexico in hopes of reaching Mexico. They landed near Galveston, Texas, and there, under the leadership of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, set out to walk to Mexico. Astonishingly, eight years later, four of them actually arrived in Mexico and amazed the viceroy with their tales of the southwestern portion of the country. Estebán Dorantes was one of the four.

After initially being enslaved by some of the Indians, Cabeza de Vaca’s group began to move through the country. The four lived on nuts, rabbits, spiders, and the juice of prickly pears and learned to forage in the new land. Times of famine alternated with times of plenty, depending on the terrain and the welcome of the various native peoples that they encountered. During the eight-year odyssey with the Cabeza de Vaca band, Estebanico, the first African seen by the Indians of the interior of the country, became accustomed to the ways of the Indians and was regarded by them with wonder. A remarkable linguist, he rapidly acquired many of the Indian languages and proved to be a leader of the group