Journey of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Four men out of three hundred walked out of the wilderness eight years later. Cabeza de Vaca was wrecked on the Gulf coast in 1528 and spent eight years crossing the continent on foot, enslaved, starving, and finally revered as a healer, before reaching Spanish territory in Mexico. The first European account of the interior of North America, and by far the strangest.