Seven or eight years only, it is true, had passed since this same luckless leader so ignominiously had failed in his errand from Cuba to arrest Cortez, but the Spaniards, besides annihilating the Mexican Confederacy, had founded some settlements towards the north, and it was these, their knowledge of distance being necessarily hazy, that the unfortunates expected to reach. After many days of weary toil and suffering, they passed the mouth of the Mississippi which Pineda, about twenty years earlier, had discovered and named the Rio de Espiritu Santo. No Holy Spirit was it to these baffled wayfarers, for its strong current brought confusion and separation. The boat of Narvaez reached land, the fate of two is not mentioned, while the remaining two, one of which was commanded by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, who had filled the once important office of treasurer to the expedition, drifted away together. After several days a storm threw these apart also and each was driven along haphazard, yet always keeping towards the land. Cabeza's craft finally beached itself on the wide sandy shores of an island, called by those who eluded the breakers the island of ill-luck, Malhado. Here were natives who treated the castaways in a friendly way, and their fortunes seemed to slightly brighten; it was but a rift in the cloud. Attempting to proceed, their boat was capsized in the surf, and disappeared on the wide bosom of the Gulf. After a few days some men from one of the other boats, which had been thrown on another part of the island, joined Cabeza's party, raising the total number to forty. It was now November of 1530, and here begins the remarkable experience which Cabeza de Vaca afterwards wrote down as well as he could remember it. The account is vague in its details, giving rise among eminent students to a number of different opinions, as to Cabeza's exact route.[33] The island Malhado was either Galveston or some other along the north coast of the Gulf of Mexico between this and the mouth of the Mississippi. Bandelier places it at the mouth of the Sabine. [Illustration: Alarçon's Ships in the Tidal Bore, Mouth of the Colorado, 1540. Drawing by F. S. Dellenbaugh.]