text: In July 1536, near Culiacán in present-day Sinaloa, the survivors encountered fellow Spaniards on a slave-taking expedition for New Spain.  As Cabeza de Vaca wrote later, his countrymen were "dumbfounded at the sight of me, strangely dressed and in the company of Indians. They just stood staring for a long time." The Spaniards accompanied the survivors to Mexico City. Estevanico later served as a guide for other expeditions. Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain, where he wrote a full account, especially describing the many indigenous peoples they encountered. He later served the colonial government in South America.
  Representation in other media
  The Moor's Account, a 2014 novel by Laila Lalami, is a fictional memoir of Estebanico, the Moroccan slave who accompanied Cabeza de Vaca as one of the four survivors of the expedition. He is known as the first black explorer of America. Lalami explains that nothing is known about him except for one line in Cabeza de Vaca's chronicle: "The fourth [survivor] is Estevanico, an Arab Negro from Azamor." It was a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. A Land So Strange, a 2007 historical narrative by Andrés Reséndez, retells the journey for a modern audience using primary sources by Cabeza de Vaca and the official report. Esteban: The African Slave Who Explored America, a 2018 nonfiction biography by Dennis Herrick, dispels centuries of myths and inaccuracies about the African. The Gentle Conquistadors, a 1971 children's novel by Jeannette Mirsky and Thomas Morley, gives a somewhat fictionalized account of the expedition.