Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish conquistador who lived among the Karankawa for several years in the 1530 and wrote a memoir, made no mention of cannibalism except for ritualistic consumption of deceased relatives in the form of funeral ashes "presented in water for the relatives to drink." Cabeza De Vaca admitted that he and his fellow survivors had committed acts of cannibalism of their own, eating their dead in order to survive after shipwrecking off Galveston Bay. The Karankawa people were shocked at the Spanish cannibalism, which they found to be repugnant. Whites never actually witnessed an act of cannibalism, and second and third-hand accounts are of disputed credibility.