Estevanico (1500-1539) was an enslaved Moor who took part in the 1527 expedition to Florida and in a fatal 1539 expedition to the American Southwest.
Biography[]
Mustafa Azemmouri was born in Azemmour, Morocco in 1500, and he was enslaved as a youth by the ruling Portuguese and sold to a Spanish nobleman. In 1527, he accompanied Panfilo de Narvaez's expedition to Florida, but he, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Andres Dorantes de Carranza, and Alonso del Castillo Maldonado were the only four survivors of the 300-man expedition by 1528. The four men began an eight-year journey from Galveston in Texas back to Mexico City in New Spain, returning in 1536. Later, Estevanico served as the main guide for a return expedition to the American Southwest. In 1539, he was killed in the Zuni city of Hawikuh.