The drowned man represents any number of mythological or epic
historical figures, and we'll go through them one by one. First
off is the name the villagers assign him: Esteban. Who is this
Esteban? As it turns out, Esteban is another name for
Estevanico, a slave from the early 1500s who was supposedly the
first man born in Africa to set foot in the Americas. Estevanico
(or Esteban) became a legendary figure in Latin America, and was
later given a set of incredible skills – he mastered dozens of
languages, knew everything about medicine, was even considered
by some to be a deity, or so the story goes. When the women of
the village call the drowned man Esteban, they might very well
be referring to this Estevanico. (At the end of the story, the
women imagine a captain speaking of Esteban's village "in
fourteen languages" (12). This may be a reference to the myth
that Estevanico spoke so many languages fluently.) When the
oldest women calls the drowned man Esteban, Márquez writes that
some of the younger women ho