In the 1520s and 1530s, a man named Esteban de Dorantes, known as Estevanico, walked across the deserts of what is now Texas, New Mexico and Arizona – decades before the English founded Jamestown in 1607 and a full century before the Pilgrims reached Plymouth in 1620.
Born in Azemmour, on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, he had been enslaved and taken to Spain and then across the ocean. In an ill-fated journey in which most people perished, Estevanico survived. He learned various Native American languages and became one of the first people from the Old World to cross the southern interior of the future United States.
