North African Americans are Americans with origins in the region of North Africa. This group includes Americans of Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia. People from North Africa have been in the United States since the sixteenth century. Some of the early explorers who accompanied the Spanish on their expeditions in the United States were North Africans, a group that also contributed to the settlement of some Spanish colonies of that country. As of 2008, the North African population in the United States exceeds 800,000 people. North Africans in the U.S. can be of Egyptian, Moroccan, Algerian, Tunisian, and Libyan. Sometimes Canarians are also included in this group, because of the geographical location of the Canary Islands in North Africa, and the partly North African ancestry of their population (the Canarians are generally of predominant European ancestry with some Berber extract) are also considered North Africans (although politically are Europeans, and linguistically, being Spanish, Hispanics). History The first centuries of a North African presence in the U.S. is related to the Spanish colonial period in the Southern part of the present-day United States. Moroccan presence in the United States was rare until the mid-twentieth century. The first North Africa who came to the current United States was probably the Azemmouri or Estevanico’s slave, a Muslim Moroccan pilot boat of Berber origin, who participated in the Pánfilo de Narváez's ill-fated expedition to colonize Florida and the Gulf Coast in 1527. Only Azemmouri and three of his comrades survived during the eleven-year-long of journey of 5,000 miles from Florida to the West Coast, ending the tour in Texas. In 1534, they crossed the geographic south of the United States until Arizona, being also, later, one of four men who accompanied Marcos de Niza as a guide in search of the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, preceding Coronado. He was also the first explorer who entered an Indian village. Later, in 1566, forty years before Jamestown, the Spanish founded the colony of Santa Elena. The colony grew for over twenty years until it was invaded by the British in 1587. Many of the Santa Elena colonists were Moriscos and Jews. Ethnically, many of the Santa Elena colonists were Muslims of Berber origin and Sephardic Jews, recruited by the Portuguese Captain Joao Pardo in the thick Galician mountains of northern Portugal in 1567, i.e. less than a year before the climax of the Inquisition