In November 1528, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca and roughly 80 survivors of the failed Panfilo de Narvaez expedition to Florida washed ashore on a barrier island the Spanish called Isla de Malhado, "Isle of Misfortune," after their makeshift rafts foundered in the Gulf. Historians still dispute whether Malhado was Galveston Island itself or nearby Follets/San Luis Island, but Texas markers have long identified Galveston as the traditional site. The stranded Spaniards were taken in, and later enslaved, by local Karankawa-speaking bands. Over roughly six years of captivity on the mainland coast, Cabeza de Vaca survived by working as a trader, ferrying goods such as shells, hide, red ochre, and flint between coastal and inland Native groups, and later as an itinerant healer credited with curative powers, which won him freer movement. In 1534 he and three companions, including the enslaved African Estevanico, escaped and walked overland across Texas and northern Mexico toward Spanish settlements, an ordeal Cabeza de Vaca later chronicled in his "La Relacion." No structure survives from the event; the site today is marked by roadside historical markers in Galveston, including a 1966 Texas Historical Commission marker on 21st Street and a 1967 Texas Highway Department marker, both erected to commemorate the earliest recorded European presence on the Texas coast. The markers draw heritage tourists and are used in local interpretation of Galveston's colonial-era and Karankawa history rather than any ongoing functional use.