CABEZA DE VACA, ÁLVAR NÚÑEZ (ca. 1490–ca. 1559).Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, an early explorer and first historian of Texas, was born in Jerez de la Frontera, an Andalusian province in the south of Spain near Cádiz. The precise year of Cabeza de Vaca’s birth cannot be determined, but it was within the “birth window” of 1487–92. The origin of his surname (“Cow’s Head” in Spanish) is not known, but it assuredly did not come from an alleged ancestor named Martín de Alhaja and his heroics at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in central Spain in 1212. That story, repeated by the author of this entry in The New Handbook of Texas (1996) and many others, is unquestionably apocryphal.
Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez
Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. Courtesy of Lencer. Image available on the Internet and included in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.
Orphaned before his teenage years, Cabeza de Vaca joined the Spanish army as an adult and fought with distinction at the battle of Ravenna in Italy in 1512. His military service to the Spanish crown then and later during a brief civil war in Spain (May 1520–April 1521) won him appointment as treasurer and first lieutenant in the 1527–28 expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez.
