SOURCE: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Boise State University, 1991, pp. 1–51.

[In the following study, Wild argues that Cabeza de Vaca's account of the years he spent lost and near death in North America has many elements of the modern novel and that the explorer masterfully blends factual events with literary devices to win favor for himself and gain support for his conviction that Native Americans were more likely to be conquered with a loving Christianity than the conquistador's sword.]

I. INTRODUCTION

Recounting his adventures on an unknown continent, Cabeza de Vaca passes on a story he heard in an Indian village:

They said that a little man wandered through the region whom they called Badthing [Mala Cosa]. He had a beard and they never saw his features distinctly. When he came to a house, the inhabitants trembled and their hair stood on end. A blazing brand would suddenly shine at the door as he rushed in and seized whom he chose, deeply gashing him in the side with a very sharp flint two palms long and a hand wide. He would thrust his hand through the gashes, draw out the entrails, cut a palm's length from one, and throw it on the embers. Then he would gash an arm three times, the second cut on the inside of the elbow, and would sever the limb. A little later he would begin to rejoin it, and the touch of his hands would instantly heal the wounds.

(90)

A chilling or preposterous tale, depending on one's viewpoint, but in any case a colorful one.

In one way of looking at it, the purpose of literature is to transport us, to make our hair stand on end as it takes us out of the humdrum of everyday events and into the realm of the unexpected. That may seem an overstatement in an age that often glorifies the trivia of daily affairs, yet it has held true for the ages. The hunter of prehistoric times coming back to regale his clan with stories of adventures was a predecessor for more sophisticated tales of historic times. Approaching Canaan from the wilderness of Paran, Moses sent men to spy out the Promised Land, and their return with stories of giants amazed the children of Israel. Odysseus's frustrated travels balanced with his wily deeds have sparked people's imaginations through the centuries. As have the tales of travelers from Marco Polo, Columbus, Hakluyt, and Lewis and Clark.

Such is not solely the province of travel's Golden Age, when blank spaces on the map teased men to abandon home and test their mettle in unknown lands. The fairly recent filling in of the charts has not eliminated the possibilities, only made them more complex. True, W. H. Hudson's protagonist escapes into the jungle and has some high times among strange circumstances, but that is only the physical surface of what the author is getting at. Green Mansions, most of all, and most movingly, is the story of a man's evolving values and emotions. And one can ditto this increasingly emphasized element of psychic explorations paralleling the confrontation of the physical from James Fenimore Cooper, through Edgar Allan Poe, down through Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, to Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, and Edward Abbey.

This says much about literature in America. Along with other recently settled nations, it has been a country getting to know itself largely through territorial discovery, and therefore, as Janis P. Stout reminds us, “American literature is … characterized by journeys, even obsessed with journeys” (ix). With that as a given, it should be emphasized that those journeys can be both inner and outer, that they can take place in cities as well as in wilderness. As happens in the work of contemporary Western American writer Wallace Stegner, this often involves a dual reevaluation, of men's accommodations with each other and with the landscape, sometimes long after the last coyote has been chased over the hill. Furthermore, if, as Mary Austin claims, the best regional literature is that “which has come up through the land, shaped by the author's own adjustments to it” (101), we, then, especially in the adjustment-demanding American West, must have regional literature par excellence.

But there's a danger here. Given our cultural preferences, our enthusiasms can push us into regional chauvinism. We can be enthusiastic to the point of blindness. Pioneer diaries of sore passages across the wild plains and fearsome Rockies to oneiric California may be studded with cliff-hanging episodes of Indian attacks and buffalo stampedes. They may, in other words, be valuable to historians as well as thrilling to the general reader. But are historical documents literature? We in the West happily tend to confuse one with the other—a confusion that has led Western critic William T. Pilkington to thump of Texas:

The state's “literary record” prior to 1920 is not really literature at all. It is a collection of historical documents and narratives. … Texas libraries and research depositories are rich in first-person accounts of exploration and adventure. … From a literary standpoint, however, the bulk of these writings is merely a tedious chronicle of everyday life and experiences—grist for the historian's mill perhaps, but scarcely sustained achievements of the creative imagination.

(Imagining Texas 1-2)

Clearly, Pilkington is making a distinction between the records of history and the artistry that goes into the making of more sophisticated works. We can, of course, hope for both at once. Significantly, Pilkington goes on to mention some of these exceptions (2). At the top of his list is Cabeza de Vaca, whose Adventures serves as an example of Western American writing worthy both for historical importance and literary achievement. That will be the following argument, one that in its course concerns not only a close look at the Adventures but some thoughts on its relationship to Western American letters.

The approach touches on areas that most scholars considering this early Spanish official, shipwrecked and a hero by default, have overlooked. It's impossible to say precisely why over the four hundred years since the publication of the Adventures the book has been a favorite of historians and all but ignored artistically. To back up the statement, most literary histories give Cabeza de Vaca but passing notice, if that. Perhaps the oversight has something to do with the nature of fame. In the sixteenth century, Cabeza de Vaca and his little band of survivors became the first Europeans to cross an unknown continent, and that overriding fact has outshone more subtle aspects of the book. We feel comfortable categorizing, placing things in pigeonholes—and then in keeping them there.

Yet additional factors may apply: ethnic pride combined with literary prejudice. In the main, the United States inherited its literary tradition from England. New England, and more generally the Northeast, passed on the literary tastes as the nation spread across the continent. Up until the last few decades, other contributing literatures have tended to be downplayed—an anomaly for the American West, a land of many cultures.

So, as one might guess from the foregoing, our task with Cabeza de Vaca will be not simply to summarize what has been said about him historically but to revivify his work and let it stand in a new light as regards Western American literature.

II. CABEZA DE VACA'S LIFE

Though much remains that we'd like to know about Cabeza de Vaca, there's little problem summarizing the major events of his life (c. 1490—c. 1560). He was born, as were many Spanish explorers, in southern Spain. His very name—Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca—comes with a twist of historical romance to it. In 1212, during Spain's long efforts to shake off Moorish rule, a shepherd on Cabeza de Vaca's mother's side won the day for the Christian army. He showed the way to King Sancho de Navarre's troops by marking an unguarded pass through the Sierra Morena with the skull of a cow. In thanks for the help leading to the Spanish victory at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, the king bestowed the name Cabeza de Vaca, or Head of a Cow, on the lineage. It could have been pride at this background that moved Cabeza de Vaca to prefer the matronymic (Hodge 3). Searchers of indexes and card catalogs should be aware of this point. Some scholars doggedly stick to Núñez, while along with most of the public others use the more colorful term.

However he is known, Cabeza de Vaca came from good repute on his father's side as well. Pedro de Vera, Cabeza de Vaca's paternal grandfather, also brought military laurels to the family. During Spain's early years of expansion, de Vera played a major role in the conquest of the Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa. Following in this tradition, the young Cabeza de Vaca served in several Spanish military campaigns, at Ravenna, Tordesillas, Villalar, and elsewhere, earning a reputation for loyalty, honesty, and modesty—virtues we should keep in mind when considering his Adventures.

As to the most important years in Cabeza de Vaca's life, in 1527 he sailed from Spain, elevated to the position of treasurer and second in command of an expedition to the New World. Thus he began the journey that would make him famous. As with so many other sallies into the new lands, this campaign was bent on repeating the fabulous strike-it-rich successes of Cortéz, who some years earlier had conquered Mexico, ravished the treasure trove of Montezuma, and set Spain abuzz. An “otro México”—another Mexico—that was the cry of the European invaders. But also like so many others, this expedition would end in disappointment and disaster. Cabeza de Vaca would be one of only four survivors in a force of 300 hope-filled conquistadors.

Following his shipwreck and remarkable return to civilization after wandering for eight years, Cabeza de Vaca sailed for Spain and was awarded the governorship of a colony on the Río de la Plata, in what is now Paraguay. Here he ran into difficulties. Details are sketchy, but apparently the rough-and-ready Spanish settlers, greedy for spoils, appreciated neither their new leader's honesty nor his sense of justice for the Indians. The colonists revolted, arrested their governor, and sent Cabeza de Vaca back to Spain. There, the Council of the Indies convicted the aging man of malfeasance and banished him to Africa. Whether or not the sentence was carried out and whether or not Cabeza de Vaca finished his years broken-hearted and in poverty are matters under dispute. As is the date of his death (Bishop 288-90; Covey 14-15; Hallenbeck 19-20; and Hodge 8-9).

III. SOME BACKGROUND FOR THE ADVENTURES

Before following Cabeza de Vaca's zigzags from the palmetto tangles of Florida's west coast, along the coastal underbelly of North America and across the deserts of North America into Mexico, it might be well to consider certain features of his book's context. As is true of many a document that has come to us through the centuries, the Adventures has something of a tangled bibliographic history. First published in Spain (1542) as La Relación (The Relation), the story went through various reprintings in European languages, sometimes with varying content, and under various titles. The edition used here, translated and prefaced by Cyclone Covey, is one of the most recent and widely available in English. It has a further advantage. Its text does a good job of helping the reader by smoothly working in material from various editions while providing some historical guidance. Further bibliographical comment may be found in the edition's preface (15-17), in the editions of Bandelier (xx-xxii) and Hodge (10-11), and in Long's Interlinear (x-xi).

We need, too, to deal with other obscuring factors concerning this famous travel book. Scholars still are at loggerheads over Cabeza de Vaca's exact route, as the differences in maps attempting to trace it illustrate (Bishop 32; and Hallenbeck 307). That's an understandable consequence of a man who floundered for years, unassisted by notes, calendar or compass, suffering pain and hunger, lost, naked, enslaved, pursued by enemies, often on the verge of hopelessness and death. Then, reaching the Spanish settlements, he tried to reconstruct his experiences from memory. The result is a book that in places leads the husband of weary translator Fanny Bandelier to lament: “Many parts of chapters and also whole chapters are so confused that it is impossible to follow the original more than remotely, and paraphrasing had to be resorted to … It is as if the author, in consequence of long isolation and constant intercourse with people of another speech, had lost touch with his native tongue” (xxii). Yet given the circumstances of the book, the wonder of it is the general accuracy of the Adventures, a volume remarkable for rich details that have delighted geographers, biologists, anthropologists, and other students of the American West.

Still, we need to be cautious. We already have praised Cabeza de Vaca for his honesty. As we shall see later, other of his admirers have made him out to be something of a wilderness saint who brought the sweet lights of reason and brotherhood into the darkness of savagery, a savagery applying as much to his fellow conquering Spaniards as to the soon-to-be-conquered Native Americans. Despite his acknowledged virtues, also as we shall see, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca could be a gentle schemer, not at all averse to adjusting his account in order to shape the Adventures to his advantage. The list goes on. Struggling to combine the “somewhat contradictory codes of the knight and the Christian gentleman,” notes Covey, Cabeza de Vaca could be overly enthusiastic and naive, at times quixotic (14). Which is to say that, whatever his assets, he was, like most of us, not a saint but a man. And this, too, contributes to the complexity of his writing.

Cabeza de Vaca's times can be characterized by flux, uncertainty, and wild imaginings. Columbus had just discovered a whole new world. What lay out there across the sea from Europe was anybody's guess, and most of the guesses were wildly optimistic. Ancient and wonderful myths rooted deep in the European psyche seemed about to appear embodied on the horizon: Isles of Flowers, Isles of Witches, Isles of Fallen Angels … One could go dizzy with the speculations (Jones 6). Skimming the Venezuelan coast past the mouth of the Orinoco, a heady Columbus wrote that up the river “I believe in my soul … the earthly paradise is situated” (8). Columbus was not necessarily speaking metaphorically. For many an explorer the Earthly Paradise was an actual place confirmed by legend and awaiting discovery. Gold, pearls, and emeralds would abound, free for the taking. Nuggets stumbled on here and there, even a few flawed pearls, could fuel already steaming fantasies. True, some men also saw spiritual potential. They viewed the New World as a tabula rasa on which humanity could work out the equations of freedom, liberty, and justice long troubling the European mind (Gurian 1-2). Certainly the early history of our own nation bears this out to a degree. Still, it's not too much to suggest that the urge for quick riches often won over idealism. In large part, a hilarity of greed ruled the imagination.

Adding to the effervescence, anarchy threatened Spain's new and fabulous world of endless possibilities matched by unleashed desire. It wasn't only that, as with men on our own Western frontier, Spanish opportunists felt themselves so far from the centers of legal power and the constraints of traditional society that gentlemen turned pirates, plundering the land, the Indians, and each other in a Darwinian scramble for loot. Nor was it chiefly that, having recently driven the infidel Moors from Spanish soil, the former soldiers of holy battles now turned their self-righteous energies on the equally unbelieving—and perhaps, it was thought, soulless—Indians, whom the technologically superior newcomers precipitously enslaved, raped, and worked to death in their new mines. Or that, more generally, the banner of winning glory for the crown provided a handy excuse to maim, cheat, and wallow. The roots of lawlessness went deeper.

The Reconquest of Spain that had driven out the Moslem unbelievers also purged Spain of the Jewish and Arab administrators who had kept the country's public machinery turning. Now the Spanish crown scrambled to sort out the reins of control. Much of the problem lay with Spanish noblemen, a brawling lot of gentlemen climbing over one another to fill the power vacuum. Turned loose in a new land, they aspired for grand empires of their own, to win kingdoms large enough to rival the king's authority back home. To this flux, add jealousies within the Church, conflicts between the wealthy and the poor, debates between the idealists and the greed-driven, as well as territorial oglings from England and France, and you have, as Mexican historian Carlos Fuentes puts it, an “infinite capacity for intrigue” (32).

Looking across the sea to the welter of his western flank, the Spanish king eventually put on iron gloves. Pizarro, champion of the silver-rich Andes, was beheaded in Peru. Cortéz, grandiose conqueror of the Aztecs, spent his last days safely reduced to poverty. Columbus came home in chains—as did Cabeza de Vaca on his second return to Spain. The cloak-and-dagger atmosphere helped shape the Adventures. Emerging from years of danger in the unknown with a wealth of information in his head, the chronicler faced a new kind of jeopardy as he put pen to paper.

Though today we think of him in heroic terms, consider his situation. Since everyone knew that riches lay out there for the taking, explorers were supposed to return triumphant, their pockets full of gold and their mouths full of stories of more gold waiting for their panting fellows. Instead, Cabeza de Vaca had been the second in command of an expedition that failed dismally. The four survivors stumbling back to civilization after years of misery had little to show for their efforts or for the lost investment in men, ships, and horses. Traditionally, explorers reported to the king on their exploits. Now Cabeza de Vaca faced an uncertain future, perhaps ignominy, perhaps the dungeon. How could he relate his adventures in such a way as to rescue in words what his lack of success seemed about to doom? How could he thereby assure himself a brighter prospect, perhaps an appointment from the crown as the leader of another expedition? Then there was the problem of his idealism. How could he express his ire over the exploitation of the Indians—a politically touchy subject—without suffering the brickbats of the powerful exploiters? And lastly, how could he write a report that would stir the interest of a king assaulted by bureaucratic reports? It was a dicey game Cabeza de Vaca was playing with his pen. Though we can't know what was going through his head, his text itself shows a certain calculation, a certain way of assembling the truth.

This is not to say that Cabeza de Vaca was a rank opportunist. It is not to say, either, that the Adventures can't stand firmly apart from its background, on its own as a work of literature. It is to say, however, that Cabeza de Vaca was a man trying to save his hide while telling an honorable semblance of the truth. Lastly, he had what writers crave: good material. All this, combined with his own natural talents as a writer, had much to do with the historical and literary complexities of the Adventures.

IV. SYNOPSIS OF THE ADVENTURES

Cabeza de Vaca blends such intricacies into what at first appears to be a straightforward account of his travels. It divides into five general sections: 1) the voyage from Spain to the New World; 2) the ill-fated invasion of Florida; 3) the attempt to reach civilization by sailing jerrybuilt craft along the Gulf Coast; and 4) the trek across what is now the American Southwest toward the Spanish settlements in Mexico. In the fifth and final section, the chronicler describes his arrival back in civilization and the ironic aftermath of his travels.

First, as was customary, Cabeza de Vaca dedicates his book to the King of Spain, Charles V (25-26). Though the tribute is short, its subtleties point toward others to come. Straight off, the wanderer makes no bones about returning empty-handed. His motives were wholesome and blessed by royal authority, he's quick to remind his sovereign—no rapscallion rebel's tale, this—and his heart full of “diligence and fidelity” to “Your Majesty” (25). But the will of God, beyond man's understanding, sometimes thwarts even those men of the best intentions. Thus, Cabeza de Vaca figuratively throws himself at his king's feet, as an honest man who has suffered through no fault of his own. And thus, though not appearing to make excuses, he has provided an excuse.

The writer then establishes the nature of the following work—a tale of wandering “lost and miserable over many remote lands” (25), and so the Adventures joins not only travel literature but the subgenre of el caballero desbaratado, as it's known in Spanish, or “the distressed gentleman,” stories of the lost, the shipwrecked, and the kidnapped generated as the age of exploration created its share of unfortunates (Henríquez-Ureña 45).

So the author attempts to gain a toehold on his king's attentions. More generally, Europeans were eager to read about strange events in the strange places then being discovered. Beyond that, rulers had special need for intelligence about their partially known empires. Cabeza de Vaca's toehold then becomes a foothold, for empty-handed as he is, his account may save the day. It's of “no trivial value” (26), he promises to his lord, for it may prove helpful in subduing the still unconquered lands and in the course of things bring their inhabitants to the true religion. Whereupon, the writer, ever careful of his authority, assures the king that through all his trials he was thinking ahead, making “a point of remembering all the particulars” (25). Now he recounts these details truthfully, with no exaggeration, strange as the following events may seem (26).

It's a modest, but for that, a disarmingly effective introduction for what follows.

After his plea, Cabeza de Vaca wisely dispenses with the obvious. He spends a mere four pages describing his Atlantic voyage and the provisioning of the fleet in Santo Domingo and Cuba in preparation for the conquest of uncharted Florida (27-31). Such details would be familiar enough to the king. Yet even this early on we catch a glimpse of Cabeza de Vaca's calculating hand. For he begins to drop hints that all is not well with the expedition, that the endeavor will be ill-starred. Upon arrival in Santo Domingo nearly 150 men desert, an indication of unrest and troubles ahead. He also shows himself emerging as the leader who, later, despite his commander's foolhardiness, rescues what he can from disaster. For a hurricane blows up, destroying two ships sent off under Cabeza de Vaca on a side trip for supplies. He makes much of the storm's fury, a fury augmented by supernatural forces. Abandoning ship and taking refuge on land, he describes the horror of it:

We wandered all night in this raging tempest without finding any place we could linger as long as half an hour in safety. Particularly from midnight on, we heard a great roaring and the sound of many voices, of little bells, also flutes, tambourines, and other instruments, most of which lasted till morning … Nothing so terrible as this [hurricane] had been seen in these parts before.

(29)

That should get the king to listening. And how could he think that even a loyal servant could have overcome such odds? To back up his truthfulness, Cabeza de Vaca reminds Charles that “I drew up an authenticated account of [the hurricane] and sent it back to Your Majesty” (29). Thus careful bureaucrat Cabeza de Vaca begins leaving what we'd call today “a paper trail.” To further bolster his position, he shows himself giving orders, taking charge, and making the best of a bad situation, while he shows the pilot hired to guide the ships to Florida so inept as to run the vessels aground off the coast of Cuba (30). All this, the impossible circumstances, the eerie noises of the storm, the taking charge, the insistence on documenting his veracity, and the colorful writing foreshadow coming developments.

With the second section (31-45), it becomes clear that with Cabeza de Vaca's tale we're getting at least two concurrent stories. The most obvious story concerns what the king expects, a report on the progress of events as the Spaniards encounter strange places and strange peoples. The second consists of psychological insights, in this section on the governor of the expedition, its commander Pámfilo (or Pánfilo) de Narváez. Later, the writer will turn his attention on himself as he wanders and wonders. For he will at times be so flabbergasted, so poorly equipped by his culture to handle totally new experiences, that the line between reality and phantasm eventually blurs. To jump ahead a bit from this point, in the Adventures we have many of the elements—the relationship of the natural to the psychic world, themes of isolation, and what Harry Levin calls the exploration of the “wilderness within” (9)—that will hypertrophize into American letters.

Yet Cabeza de Vaca's immediate aim is not literary display. In the development of the Adventures, his task is not only to inform the king but to convert him. A plunge into complexities at the outset, however, might put the royal reader off and shake his confidence in the storyteller. Therefore, Cabeza de Vaca builds on a realistic base, on things readily understandable to the king. The writer's departure from them is gradual and organic, slowly launching off into the speculative only as the events themselves become ever more bizarre and incomprehensible.

For instance, on the surface the account of the landing on Florida is nothing more or less than a report. As would any good journalist who remembers the five W's, Cabeza de Vaca gives the particulars of the landfall: the date, who went ashore, and what they found. As it turns out, they didn't find much. The Indians had fled at the sight of the approaching ships, leaving their poor possessions behind for the invaders to paw through. But Cabeza de Vaca is an illusionist. Despite the gloomy news—i.e., the “conquest” of a mere fishing village—in the very second paragraph of the section he inserts what he knows will perk up Charles's ears. The Spaniards find “a gold rattle,” an indication perhaps of more precious metal over the next hill. As the story progresses, whatever the setbacks, Cabeza de Vaca keeps feeding in mention of such finds. Just as they lure on the expedition, they keep the reader reading on. The ultimate irony in this respect will be that the reader has been hoodwinked to the end. For in the end, Cabeza de Vaca discovers not hoards of gold, but something else entirely. So he manipulates his audience.

Meanwhile, he has more immediate business to tend to. Then, as now, good bureaucrats were sticklers for detail. Cabeza de Vaca confirms his reputation as a good bureaucrat by recording the ceremony by which the Spaniards took possession of the country in the name of the king (31). This ritual, diligently performed throughout the conquests, involved exhibition of credentials and the reading aloud of official documents. It might strike us as a somewhat farcical performance, these men sawing the air before the surrounding wilderness, with perhaps a few curious natives peeking out from their hiding places at the show. But the official validation was an assurance to the bureaucratic mind, which felt ill at ease unless things were done “by the book.” No doubt Cabeza de Vaca's description of the ceremony was a comfort to a king suspicious that things might be getting out of hand off there in the wilds of the New World.

In fact, things were getting out of hand in the New World, badly so on this expedition. Cabeza de Vaca chooses not to say so out-right and thereby risk seeming like yet another malcontent complaining to his king about the failings of his superior. Instead, he does what is far more effective: he shows us the expedition slowly falling apart.

Sticking to the details, to the facts, he describes the little army making its foray inland, into the endless palmetto thickets. And here they go, Governor Narváez, Cabeza de Vaca, soldiers, and “six horsemen, who could hardly have done much good” in those jungly conditions (32), so the writer lets drop. If, in the pages to come, the Indians will be dogging the intruders, shooting arrows at them out of the bushes, Cabeza de Vaca begins shooting his own arrows at Narváez. The writer slowly reveals his leader's poor judgment, contrasting it with his own good qualities. Yet he refrains from reciting the Governor's sullied past. Years earlier, when sent from the island of Cuba to rein in a headstrong Cortéz basking in his Mexican triumph, Narváez found his small army quickly won over by the outnumbered and fast-talking Conqueror of the Aztecs. He also found himself imprisoned by the very man he was sent out to arrest. But Cabeza de Vaca, being a gentleman, makes no mention of this sordid background. He didn't need to. No doubt the king was well aware of it. So the writer sticks to the immediate facts, sufficient of themselves.

Yet the headstrong Governor commits a blunder so gross that a loyal subject can't hold his tongue before his king. Reaching Tampa Bay, Narváez gets it into his head to march overland, while sending the ships on to a rumored port up the coast (32-35). Cabeza de Vaca rightly protests the decision as foolhardy, for the ships are the soldiers' source of supply, their refuge and link to civilization. The band faces a trek of unknown length, through clinging thickets and sucking marshes full of lurking Indians. When Narváez waves the reasonable objections aside, Cabeza de Vaca, sniffing catastrophe in the wind, demands that his protest be officially recorded.

It's a heated scene, one worthy of a dramatist's pen. The intractable Narváez shows himself still more haughty by refusing the request of his second in command. Digging in his heels before the folly, Cabeza de Vaca storms: “I answered that I felt certain he would never find the ships again” (35).

The words do more than confirm Narváez's stupidity while asserting Cabeza de Vaca's good judgment. They are prophetic, another example of foreshadowing, and a prediction that will come true in more ways than the reader at this point suspects. Not only will the explorers never see the ships again. Over the next fifty pages or so we'll see the slow decimation of the group as the 300 Spaniards succumb to hunger, disease, drowning, and Indian attacks, until only four survive. The incident also serves as an early hint, with many more to come, of the false goals the Spaniards are pursuing. Greed and lust for power, the reader slowly begins to see, have derailed the Europeans from higher aims.

Meanwhile, worthy journalist and faithful servant of the crown that he is, Cabeza de Vaca records the inevitable. The invaders have found some gold and some iron, and, hearing marvelous tales to accompany them, are lured on. For the Indians are quick to catch on. Apalachen, they keep ranting, pointing north, is where the Spaniards should go. The city is brimming with gold and everything else one might desire (33). With this description glowing in their heads, the soldiers slog on. So the gap between the driving urge and reality widens. Weighted with armor, the Spaniards flounder across rivers as Indian arrows whizz around them. Even in the relative safety of their night camps, misery is their lot. They're reduced to gnawing on palm trees for food (36). Finally, they start eating their horses. When at last they sight the fabled metropolis of Apalachen, the impetuous Governor orders an attack. Hot for the promised plunder, the storming cavalry and infantry find only “forty low, small, thatch houses.” The lusty but hungry invaders content themselves with taking prisoners and ransacking a cornfield (39).

It's downhill from here on out as conditions get ever more hellish. Floundering about and striking for the sea in hopes of locating their vessels, the Spaniards wade chest deep across a lake choked with fallen logs. Miffed now by the army's depredations, the Indians press their guerrilla warfare on the struggling Europeans with an armor-piercing firepower that can bury an arrow “half a foot in a poplar trunk” (42). Malaria and dysentery lay one third of the force low. In such straits, “death,” says realistic Cabeza de Vaca, seems “the one foreseeable way out” (45). But at last getting some good sense into his head, Narváez asks the most reliable man around, Cabeza de Vaca, to find the sea. This he dutifully does.

What to do now? No ships are in sight. The men have no food. Behind them, irate Indians are nocking their arrows. The soldiers are dropping one by one. They decide to build their own fleet and sail away from their troubles toward Pánuco, the northernmost Spanish outpost on the Mexican coast.

A hilarious idea in retrospect. As the crow flies, the coast of Mexico lies some thousand miles from Florida. Yet in that hazy dreamworld of geography and dizzy hopes, the desperate, dysentery-ridden wanderers think safety lies much closer. So in a continuing theme, the gulf between dream and reality widens.

From the beginning, the project has elements of an opéra bouffe. The notion of sailing away strikes Cabeza de Vaca as “impossible, since none of us knew how to build ships” (45). Forced to it nonetheless, the men construct bellows for a forge and fashion their swords into nautical hardware. Catching the swing of expediency, they twist palmetto fiber into oakum and gather pine pitch for caulking. They braid ropes from horse tails and sew their own clothes into sails. At last, they have five ragtag “barges,” as the writer calls them (46). Commending itself to God, the forlorn hope turns its back on land and launches off into the watery unknown.

The plan is to play it safe and, since no one knows where Pánuco is, to skim along the coast toward their illusory goal. Even at that, they're sailing toward calamity. The overloaded barges ride “hardly half a foot above water,” and the men are jammed in “too tight to move” (47). While passing on such information, Cabeza de Vaca slips in that his barge leads the waterborne expedition. Even his leadership, however, can't abrogate circumstances he didn't create. For weeks they sail westward along the Gulf Coast, riding out a storm, making dashes onto land for fresh water, to be greeted by hails of missiles. Finally, maddened by their condition, the men begin to drink salt water. With the master stroke of a short sentence, Cabeza de Vaca spares his king the “superfluous” details and sums up their plight: “Our thirst was killing us; the salt water was killing us” (48).

One sunset, however, the travelers come upon a calm bay. This time, the inhabitants seem friendly, and the ravaged band decides to risk a night ashore. The prospects look good, for cooked fish and jars of water await the famished men in the nearby village. Guests and hosts feast and exchange gifts. But during the night the Indians fall upon the Spaniards, and the harried wanderers make a mad dash for their barges. So the harassment from man and nature continues, depleting the ranks of the derelicts (49-52).

Often in the Adventures, just when things seem at their worst, they get worse still. This time, nature stirs up trouble within the band. Miraculously, the five barges have stayed together all the way to the mouth of the Mississippi River, where, to their amazement, the soldiers find that they can dip fresh water from the sea. Yet the great outflow stymies progress, carrying the Spaniards away from land and scattering the craft. Reduced by the troubles to seek advice from his second in command, Narváez asks Cabeza de Vaca what should be done—a turnabout from his haughtiness. As happens, though, when the Governor and his lieutenant get head-to-head, their opposing values rise bristling to the surface and sharp words follow. Ever concerned for the welfare of the group, Cabeza de Vaca recommends they try to stick together. The selfish Governor, happening to have “the healthiest and strongest men” in his barge, declares that it's every man for himself, “that it was no longer a time when one should command another; that each must do as he thought best to save himself; that that was what he was doing now” (53). So the moral bankruptcy of Narváez is complete as he rows off, never to be seen again.

In contrast, Cabeza de Vaca takes the only other barge in sight under his wing, though it's soon lost in a storm. Cabeza de Vaca sails on, his men slumped over and only “God's great mercy” (54) keeping them afloat as their leader struggles to remain conscious at the tiller. Assisted by a divine hand, they bob past the mouth of the Mississippi River. Days go by. Then a great wave belches them up on a shore (54-55). They're on the Texas coast now, on Galveston Island. An attempt to relaunch the barge fails. The boat flips and sinks, drowning more men and scattering the meager supplies.

So ends the sea journey, and the land journey begins with a handful of destitute men cold and naked, weeping at the edge of the wilderness before them (57).

In a sense, a good writer is a master of deceit, leading his audience through the labyrinths he creates to surprise openings on the other side. In such deception lies much of the pleasure of reading. So far, the Adventures, as an official report to the king was expected to do, has chronicled the events of a campaign, in this case following the worsening plight of a failing expedition. However, this apparent journalism, this recitation of the “facts,” as Cabeza de Vaca presents them, also is slowly turning into a vehicle for something else. It's the structure on which Cabeza de Vaca is building toward unexpected ends. For so far, much has been going on beneath the surface details as the Adventures encourages the reader toward concepts and conclusions he doesn't yet perceive. We might pause at this dramatic low point in the travels to consider what the levels behind the details have been revealing and how they are preparing us for things to come.

The farther the Spaniards, conquest blazing in their heads, get from their civilization, the more they fail. They make enemies of the Indians; unable to live off the land, they run out of food; they have only delusions about where they are. They are, in short, lost in the full sense of the word. The implication is clear: the assumptions of these brave but floundering men won't work in the unfamiliar circumstances of the New World. As we shall see, this axiom will apply both physically and spiritually.

As does many a calculating writer, Cabeza de Vaca embodies the problem in characters. The chief example, of course, is Governor Narváez. Bullheaded and greedy, Narváez swaggers into the jungle with sword drawn. As a result, his fortunes skid and at last plummet toward his own demise. Together with the other members of the campaign, Cabeza de Vaca slides toward misfortune along with him. Yet we've noted that as Narváez's prospects decline, Cabeza de Vaca's leadership grows. If this account is nothing more than a writer's attempt to put himself in a favorable light with his king, we have transparent self-serving and political fawning. Yet, as we shall see, the wanderer's good intentions are not enough to spare him further sufferings. Narváez dies, and Cabeza de Vaca returns penniless. Both of them have failed. But they have failed for different reasons: Narváez because of character flaws, Cabeza de Vaca for lack of understanding. In this way of looking at it, the rest of the Adventures will be the story of a conversion. It will document Cabeza de Vaca's spiritual growth as the scales fall from his eyes and he achieves an enlarged view of the New World. Through his account, he passes along this unexpected discovery to his king as an alternative approach to the prevailing plunder.

As holds true of many conversions, this one will be a painful progress involving a good deal of shedding, both literal and figurative. Blistered by the harsh sun, the Spaniards will shed their very skins (92). We've already seen the Spaniards depleted in number, their supplies gone, their weapons converted into hardware for escape, and then the barges themselves lost. Now the unfortunate huddle on Galveston Island, bereft not only of food, warmth, and clothing, but of hope. They are physically and spiritually reduced. They will suffer more stripping. They will be enslaved, beaten, lost on a continent. Along with that stripping will go some of their Old World notions, notions of riches, of enslaving “inferior” races, of what it means to be successful—much of the baggage they left Spain with. With that, too, will go the divergence of dream and reality, for they will find in their experiences of the new land that the two are, if not the same, then similar, that they are walking through a land in which dream and reality often are indistinguishable.

Ironically, their humiliation leads to their development in a way that could never happen in a place of drawn swords. Values have turned topsy-turvy. We shall see Cabeza de Vaca reduced to eating straw in order to survive (118)—but, then, having worked his way through that adversity, striding right along across a hallucinogenic landscape, buoyed by his wild circumstances and now hardly caring about food—at least so he says (120). It's a story designed to open the king's eyes. Yet as we shall see, it's also a story of one illusion traded for another, a phenomenon entirely appropriate in those phantasmagorical lands. And just as one watches a mirage form a sharp image, then quickly dissolve, one might also wonder how deep, how lasting, and how consistent Cabeza de Vaca's conversion was.

As to illusions, now begins the most illusion-filled, most colorful, and popularly remembered fourth section of the account, the long wandering back to the Spanish settlements. The word “illusion” should be used with some care, for it denotes the appearance of things not actually present. So far, Cabeza de Vaca has described things altogether real enough: attacking Indians, hunger, men dying of thirst. Now uncertainty thrives as the order of civilization extended into the wilderness breaks down. From here on out, Cabeza de Vaca will not always be sure of what is real or unreal, of what is actually there before him and is not. As his European orientation falters, he is left bewildered, unable to integrate his new experiences completely into his past way of viewing the world. So this is the section most filled with uncertainty and speculation, a climate in which the miraculous is possible.

For that reason, it is the most interesting part of the Adventures. Even the “facts” become mushy. Up until now, we can pretty well trace Cabeza de Vaca's route along the Gulf Coast, even to the extent of identifying some of the rivers. From now on, it will be difficult to pin down his looping progress. To complicate matters, we also don't know why the Spaniard dallied, why he stayed so long in Texas, lingering among the Indians until striking out for Pánuco in September of 1534 (84). Arriving in northern Mexico in March of 1536 (126), he took roughly a year and a half to complete the journey—not at all surprising in that he was afoot and had only a vague notion that he should follow the sun westward. Still, we shouldn't celebrate more than what exists in his physical feat. Cabeza de Vaca didn't cross the continent in the sense of walking from Boston to San Francisco. He crossed it at its narrowing waist, where North America tapers down into Mexico. Even that, however, was a feat, and one wonders how many Spaniards from other shipwrecks, bent on the same goal, were swallowed up in the bowels of the continent.

For starters on this bizarre tour, the first thing to step out of the wilderness is a band of a hundred warriors, armed with bows and sporting ornaments hanging from their ear lobes. They appear a fierce lot to the naked and helpless Europeans and “looked like giants to us in our fright” (56). But the Spaniards are lucky. Recognizing the plight of the newcomers, the Indians actually weep for the strangers' suffering (Bishop 66). The warriors build fires to warm their guests along the path to their village. Then, ominously, the Indians begin dancing. Remembering past experience, Cabeza de Vaca laments that “we waited the hour they should make us victims.” To his relief, in the morning the Indians serve up fish and roots, treating their guests in “every way hospitably” (58).

The flush of optimism will be short-lived. In the next few chapters, stragglers arrive from other shipwrecked barges. The news is gloomy. Some of the scattered men have resorted to cannibalism. And the Indian village where the survivors now gather turns out to be a deceptive refuge. To serve breakfast to distraught travelers is one thing; to feed uninvited guests for an indefinite time quite another. The Indians have trouble enough feeding themselves. The Spaniards begin dying of starvation. Simply getting enough to eat will become a major concern in the pages of the Adventures. At the moment, trouble piles onto trouble. The Indians, too, begin to die, probably from the dysentery brought by the soldiers. Only fast talking by “the Indian who kept me” prevents the warriors from killing the remaining Spaniards. Cast up into this mess, wracked by hunger, fear, and disease, the Spaniards dub this first resting place on their land journey the “Island of Doom” (60).

Not a propitious beginning. But quick shifts typify the book, as Cabeza de Vaca alternates between personal experiences and descriptions of the lands and peoples he sees in his travels. He is both the intimate diarist and the journalist, and in literary terms this keeps the story moving along.

For he no sooner finishes the lugubrious “Island of Doom” passage than he launches into a discussion of the Indians' way of life (61-63). He describes the natives' weapons, their customs, their dress, their mat huts, their constant battle with hunger. One might posit that this is more than a worthy anthropological summary long before the science of anthropology existed. For one thing, such details as “the women cover some parts of their persons with a wool that grows on trees [Spanish moss]” (63) shores up the writer's credibility as an observant reporter. Such believable reporting counted with a king craving accurate information but often offered mares' nests by his informants off in the New World. For another, the facts of the new circumstances, colorful and widely different from those of European civilization, are interesting in themselves, sure to keep the reader reading on.

Then, too, the careful reader should watch for hints that Cabeza de Vaca drops, seemingly just in passing. Often he will develop them into larger themes later on, as is the case with the supernatural. Something else, though, besides an alluring style and a sure expository hand is at work here. Cabeza de Vaca has just shown us, simply in passing, that the Indians were “shocked” to hear that some of the Spaniards straggling in had resorted to cannibalism among themselves (60). He's planted the seed for things to come. For now he gives us further evidence in these anthropological paragraphs that the Indians are not soulless savages to be raped and enslaved at the conquerors' pleasure. They are human beings with the emotions of people everywhere. He describes their funeral rites and the social harmony springing from their traditions. He ends the passage, significantly, with a comment on their generosity. When long separated acquaintances meet, they sit down and weep, then “the one who is visited rises and gives his visitor all he has” (63; Bishop 66).

Cabeza de Vaca calls this a “remarkable” custom (63). However, one might guess there's another message beneath the surface, that there's a quiet irony intended here. After all, one does not lecture his king on morality. Instead, Cabeza de Vaca shows an Indian openhandedness that contrasts with the Spaniards' rapaciousness in the New World. So, slowly, Cabeza de Vaca builds his case with his king. It will end when the chronicler faces an example of wrongdoing to Indians so hideous that he abandons restraint and directly condemns the Spaniards for their viciousness (127). By then, however, the reader is well prepared for the message.

For all his humanity, Cabeza de Vaca is no Pollyanna. He's already shown that his hosts, suspecting that the shipwrecked men brought disease, have tried to kill them. And in the future, when the Indians are cruel, mean-spirited, and mendacious, he will say so. They have, in other words, virtues and shortcomings similar to those of “civilized” men. Furthermore, whatever his sympathies for the Indians, he remains a loyal subject of his king. For he stands solidly behind the goal of imposing Spanish rule on the inhabitants of the new lands. His argument is for a gentler way of doing it.

In the next twenty pages or so (64-83), the writer takes care of housekeeping details in the progress of his story. Gathering up a number of events, this is a somewhat bumpy transition to his impending journey west. From Spaniards newly arrived from their wrecked barges, Cabeza de Vaca pieces together as best he can what has happened to the members of the expedition. Most of them are dead. Various Indian tribes along the Texas coast have captured some, “constantly kicking, cuffing, and cudgeling” their new slaves (68). Cabeza de Vaca suffers a similar fate. Underfed and naked, he's forced to grub roots until “My fingers got so raw that if a straw touched them they would bleed” (66). So the long fall of the former Spanish gentleman to misery. Though not stated directly, again the message is clear. The hubristic European dreams, tested against the realities of the New World, have come to this. The irony is complete: the conquerors have become the conquered.

Usually the Spaniard to take the initiative, Cabeza de Vaca temporarily escapes his master to wander among the inland tribes. He ranges perhaps as far north as Oklahoma, making a living as a trader in sea shells, mesquite beans, and flint for arrowheads. It was a fairly good life. The escapee got to see the country and received decent treatment “because,” the European wrily adds, “they liked my commodities” (67). Still, in light of their general suffering and homesickness, one puzzles why the Spaniards lingered in the area for six years. Anticipating the issue, Cabeza de Vaca gives what may strike us as a feeble explanation. He claims that he kept urging flight, while the others, fearing the wilderness, vacillated (67 and 70). His loyalty to his fellows prevents him from fleeing on his own. The upshot is that he delivers an ultimatum to the other three survivors. Either they leave with him or he'll try to reach Mexico alone (11 and 82). The ploy works. In September of 1534, Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso del Castillo, Andrés Dorantes, and Estevan (also Estevanico or Estebanico), Dorantes' slave brought over from Spain, commended themselves to God and, as the chronicler puts it, “made our break” (84; Bishop 87).

On second thought, perhaps the reluctance to do so was perfectly rational. Look at the odds. By now it must have dawned on the four that they didn't know where they were going or how far they had to go. They were afoot, unarmed in hostile country. If they'd been badly treated by the coastal Indians, would their reception be any better among strange tribes? And then there was the nagging problem of food. Even their cruel masters had suffered hunger. How could these four, naked fugitives get enough to eat while traveling? Lastly, rivers, swamps, and bays lay in their path. The Spaniards couldn't swim. Chances were that they'd starve, be murdered, or drown long before they saw Mexico. Given the circumstances, any other outcome would seem miraculous.

The miraculous, however, is exactly what happened. Not in any wishy-washy figurative sense, but literally. A series of miracles occurred that, continuing throughout their travels, kept the four out of harm's way and brought them to safety. In terms of skillful writing and plotting, the miracles are the great coup of the Adventures. Though remaining inexplicable today in an age of skepticism, as indeed they were even in an age of faith, they form an organic part of the tale. In literary terms, they serve the whole purpose of Cabeza de Vaca's account, becoming the sine qua non in the artful book, generating an aura that suffuses the whole work.

Though intricate in consequences both for the immediate survival of the writer and the shape of his book, the story of the supernatural occurrences is fairly simple in the telling. The Indians had traditional healing rites which apparently proved less than satisfactory. As Cabeza de Vaca observed them: “Their method of cure is to blow on the sick, the breath and the laying-on of hands supposedly casting out the infirmity” (64). For reasons not explained, before Cabeza de Vaca's escape his captors demand that their slaves try their hands at healing the sick by the Indian method. It's a dangerous situation, both for the time being and for the future. Most immediately, at the Spaniards' refusal, the Indians begin starving them. Survival certainly doesn't lie in that direction. Yet if they try to cure and fail, their masters already have shown themselves ready to express their displeasure through beatings, whimsical tortures, even murder. Finally, throwing up his literary hands in a gesture of helplessness, Cabeza de Vaca writes: “Hunger forced us to obey, but disclaiming any responsibility for our failure or success” (64).

The gesture of helplessness is important. A Roman Catholic addressing his staunchly Roman Catholic king, a king who, furthermore, counted powerful clergy among his advisors, Cabeza de Vaca can't come across as a layman dabbling in black magic. In that Inquisitional age men had been dressed in the devil-painted sanbenito and put to the torch for less suspicious activities. So Cabeza de Vaca does what many a writer does when in a bind. He mumbles in hopes of having things both ways. On the one hand, he states that he didn't believe in the cures to begin with. On the other, with his constant references to God, he has strained to show himself a man of Christian piety and a loyal member of the Catholic Church. Now, compelled into what he doesn't want to do, he tries to put a Christian spin on the ball in order to avoid the Church's scowls. He follows the Indian practice of laying-on of hands but is sure to report that he included a Pater noster and an Ave Maria—all the while desperately praying for his own deliverance from this mess (64 and 85).

To his confounding, it worked. Worked so well that the Indians shower the newly endowed magic-makers with gifts (65). The news spreads throughout the country that these marvelous strangers can cure any malady (89). The ability, or at least the belief in the ability, becomes at once the carte blanche and the safe-conduct pass of the four escapees. Thus, their seemingly impossible trip becomes possible, for wherever they go, performing cures from village to village, they're not only welcomed but provided with food, guides, and shelter. Eventually, their fame swells to such proportions that they're declared divine, “children of the sun” (89 and 106). Excited Indians in droves of thousands throng after them (107). Thus, the trip of the four men back to civilization is turned from a danger-fraught flight into something resembling a royal progress.

Understandably so. For the Spaniards not only cured the run-of-the-mill misfortunes that afflict people everywhere. In one case, Cabeza de Vaca reports raising the dead. Note, in this theologically ticklish situation, how careful the writer is to establish the fact that he is dealing with a corpse and not a comatose patient. On the lookout for corroboration, he backs himself up with a witness: “I found [the patient's] eyes rolled up, his pulse gone, and every appearance of death, as Dorantes agreed” (88). After praying intensely over the corpse, the Spaniards leave—to hear some time later that the man is walking about, eating and talking with his friends. Little wonder that news of such deeds spread like wildfire to ease the path of these wanderers (89).

Other cures involved not so much divine intervention as the application of methods familiar to European readers. Careful to make the distinction, Cabeza de Vaca again shores up his credibility. He may take all the credit he can from the amazed Indians, but he's not a man to try to dupe his European readers. In one case, an Indian suffers from a wound that has left an arrowhead lodged near his heart. Playing the surgeon, Cabeza de Vaca opens the man's chest with a flint knife and probes for the object. After much spilling of blood, he extracts the arrowhead and stitches up the patient. No miracle certainly in European terms, but the Indians are astounded by the operation. So astounded that they flock to see the arrowhead, then send it relic-like on a tour of the surrounding country (110).

Though such fame eased the way of the travelers, it should not be supposed that the renown always made their journey easy. As a sign of respect and honor, the Indians give the four a copper rattle (108), a standard of their power that they made wise use of, dramatically bearing it at the head of their train. The Indians also showered their benefactors with more mundane gifts, skins and food. Such things, however, are not readily transportable by men afoot, and as they made their southwestern progress through mountains and deserts toward northern Mexico, they suffered the famine and thirst that their hosts, for all their generosity, could not alleviate. At one point, probably in New Mexico, each Spaniard was forced to make do with “a handful of deer tallow a day” (117). At another, more than likely in parched southeastern Arizona, famine reduced the travelers, along with the natives of the country, to eating “powdered straw” (118). Miracles eased their passage, but they did not exempt the four from the harshness of the land.

Though one can put the miracles down to mass hysteria or some other such psychological phenomenon, most scholars believe that some such events nonetheless took place (Bandelier xvii-xix; Burlingame 365-68; and Pilkington, My Blood's Country 74-75). Much to his credit, Cabeza de Vaca is so careful throughout the Adventures to establish himself as a trustworthy reporter minding his journalistic p's and q's that we accept the strangest of happenings as at least verging on the possible. As far back as the description of the hurricane accompanied by the sounds of voices and bells in the wind (29), he has readied his readers to understand that they are entering a land of weird happenings. Here, reality can blend into the stuff of dreams. Later, the Indians swear to the story of Badthing, the demon with a blazing brand who terrifies their nights (90). Real devil or phantasm, the phenomenon has taken on reality in the Indians' lives.

Europeans, too, participated in the blurring of dream and reality. The New World, as discussed, was a place in which the Spanish invaders expected—even longed for—the thrills of the unexpected. As they probed the continents, they met strange peoples, bizarre plants and animals, the unlikely made flesh. Subtly, Cabeza de Vaca matches the expectations with his descriptions. As a parallel to the miracles, he salts his text with indications of silver, pearls, gold, and emeralds—promises of greater treasures beyond (31, 33, 108-09, 119, 124, 129, and 133). If the Spaniards, inheritors of a medieval tradition rich in fantastic happenings accepted as fact, can believe in whole cities of gold lying ahead, surely accounts of a few inexplicable cures can be taken in stride. In this way, the physical wonders in the Adventures nicely parallel and fortify the supernatural.

But as does many a major event developing in the hands of a deft writer, they do more than convince. As an integral part of the plot, they serve larger ends. They make Cabeza de Vaca, despite the failure of the Narváez expedition, appear especially worthy before his king, for the miracles indicate divine blessing on Cabeza de Vaca's journeyings. So they encourage the king to lend an ear to the traveler's promotion of gentler ways toward the Indians.

Typically, Cabeza de Vaca wins over by accretion of detail rather than by loud lectures. At first shrugging his shoulders over the strange powers granted him and his companions, he suggests, then emphasizes, that the success of the curing is due to intervention by God (64, 85, 87, and 133). And, anticipating cries of black magic from the lips of irate Christian clergy, he shows that he has used the miraculous gifts, as best a humble layman could, to strengthen the Church by encouraging the Indians toward Christianity (120). Cabeza de Vaca has turned a potentially heretical circumstance into a sign of Godly favor on his travels. He writes:

[The cures] caused great admiration and moved us to further gratitude to our Lord, Whose demonstrated mercy gave us a conviction that He would liberate us and bring us to a place where we might serve Him. I can say for myself that I had always trusted His providence and that He would lead me out of my captivity; I constantly expressed this to my companions.

(87)

And, if God has thus chosen to bless such a devout member of the Church, then the entire journey, together with its account, takes on the aspect of providential blessing. In short, God was smiling on Cabeza de Vaca. Ergo, the king should, too.

In theological terms, it all makes perfect sense. Yet often in an imperfect world, theological rectitude can use the help of temporal advantages. This, too, Cabeza de Vaca supplies. For his preaching to the native peoples does more than win souls. It takes war-like tribes capable of wrecking Spanish armies and turns them into peaceful—one might add, malleable—subjects of King Charles. As to this aspect of his preaching: “We left all the land in peace” (120). This, we should remember, spoken to a king even then worried by an overseas empire embroiled in a Spanish-Indian warfare draining his treasury. Again the message comes clear: Though reduced to eating powdered straw, the conquerors have accomplished through spirituality what eluded them in aggression. The sword won't work, but the cross will. Kindness pays off. In such a way, Cabeza de Vaca allays the fears of Church leaders, showing them how they can have an expanded role in the Conquest. And he assures King Charles that his plans for the New World can be part of God's larger plan for all humanity (133). So Cabeza de Vaca's presentation flatters both king and clergy.

Such lessons are implicit as the tale unfolds. However, Cabeza de Vaca doesn't let his case rest on implication alone. Following the writer's saw of “Show, don't tell,” he objectifies the message, ending with a sharp drama. For added impact, this drama occurs immediately after the fervent peak of the journey, the long-awaited reunion of the travel-weary and homesick Spaniards with their brethren.

After the trials of the desert, the four swell with hope. Heading south down a valley into northern Mexico, they enter a land of prosperity. Now the dwellings are permanent, made of earth. They're full of corn, beans, and cotton blankets excellently worked. And to top things off, the inhabitants load down their guests with turquoise, coral, and emeralds. Yet to heap joy on joy, the delighted travelers take note of a sword buckle and a horseshoe nail stitched into an Indian ornament (122). The first sign of Europeans ahead! Accompanied by happy Indians, the four dash on, full of anticipation. Turning through these final pages of the Adventures, one feels the buoyancy of a long journey rushing toward a eupeptic conclusion.

Yet hopes are being raised only to be dashed. For turning the corner from wilderness into civilization, the brimming travelers run into a band of grim Spanish horsemen. They're ransacking the countryside, enslaving any Indians they can run down (125). Around them the land lies devastated, for the natives have fled into the mountains, leaving their fields to go to ruin. Now the horsemen eye Cabeza de Vaca's happy followers as a windfall of slaves for the taking. At this, Cabeza de Vaca flies off the handle with anger (127). The contrast—and the tragic irony—of the two confronting groups hardly could be greater. So Cabeza de Vaca tugs at his king's sleeve: “Clearly, to bring all these people to Christianity and subjection to Your Imperial Majesty, they must be won by kindness, the only certain way” (123). Rarely passing up the warming effects of flattery, Cabeza de Vaca adds a few pages from his last: “We are thankful to our merciful God that it should be in the days of Your Majesty's dominion that these nations might all come voluntarily to Him who created and redeemed us. We are convinced that Your Majesty is destined to do this much and that it is entirely within reason to accomplish” (133).

It is impossible to know how much of Cabeza de Vaca's account is fact, how much, if any, imagined. Surely, in other exploration books of the time one is not surprised to find fantastic material obviously injected to satisfy the readers of the day. It bears repeating that what convinces about Cabeza de Vaca's record is his understated tone, that of a journalist dutifully writing down the events around him. In his preface, translator Covey calls the book “an unvarnished, soldierly account” (10). The doubting Thomas could posit that the tone, too, is a ruse, a device to disarm the reader while heaping fabrication at his feet. In counter argument, one can point to geographic and botanical passages that have proved out when followed by scholars. So cantankerous people could argue back and forth. But in one way of looking at the book, factual validity is not the issue. There are other kinds of truth. Historicity aside, Cabeza de Vaca joins many a writer in creating a work of art by presenting his material, factual or not, to achieve the desired effects.

Not that he was writing a novel. In 1542, the novel as we have come to think of it did not exist. There were books of tales and romances, but those landmarks in the development of the novel—Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605) and Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740)—lay far in the future. Nevertheless, though not a novel, the Adventures makes good use of fictive techniques to move its readers. Thus the Adventures stands both as an historical account and as a work of art (Pilkington, “Epilogue” 145-51; Pilkington, Imagining Texas 2; Pilkington, My Blood's Country 65-77; and Pilkington, “The Southwest” 496-98).

Another device beyond the consistent tone is Cabeza de Vaca's parallelism, often rendered with sharp contrasts, as when hope tumbles into sorrow, escape ends in slavery. We've already mentioned the pairing of the miracles with physical riches. More subtly, the writer pairs objects to signal larger issues. Early on in the story, the army invading Florida sucks in its breath at finding a gold rattle (31)—the first sign of riches ahead. Nearly a hundred pages later, nearing the end of the journey, the writer spies the buckle and nail that trigger another sharp but quite different emotion (122). While the delineation of character among the four adventurers is far short of what most modern writers in our age of psychological focus would make of it (11 and 120), Cabeza de Vaca draws both on descriptions of the landscape, his own suffering, hopes, and relations with the native peoples to take the reader through a full range of emotions.

The chronicler offers a balance of events and personalities to create what Pilkington calls “dramatic tension” (“Epilogue” 146), together, we might add, with its release, as with the conflict with Narváez or, at the story's highest moment of hope, the meeting with the slave-taking Spaniards. Yet the main feature of the Adventures besides the sheer wonder of its material is the atmosphere of irony, the incongruities between the expected and actual results that keep turning and turning on themselves. The bold army is reduced to a handful of naked travelers. The would-be conquerors of the Indians themselves become the Indians' captives—only to do a turnabout as powerful curers. Desperate to leave the savagery around them, the plodding foursome confronts a civilization of slave owners. But the central, and largely unspoken, irony lies in the success of human kindness in a Spanish Empire given over to failure through violence. At least that was Cabeza de Vaca's perception of the situation. That such kindness rarely works for long in a world given over to violence may be yet another irony that the writer didn't intend.

V. INFLUENCE OF THE ADVENTURES

Calculating the sway of a figure over time is a task of less than scientific exactness. Understandably, absorbed scholars can wax overly excited, seeing evidence where little exists of their subject's power suffusing the ages. On the other extreme, a writer's influence can be so widespread and enduring—launching concepts that float on the cultural air, to be absorbed into the thinking of others as their own centuries later—that they lose their original identity. Nonetheless, we're on sure ground to say that Cabeza de Vaca's adventures stirred the exploration frenzy of his time. He was the first to cross the terra incognita to the north of Spain's settlements in the New World, and his report of their potential riches fired imaginations, spurring exploration into what is now the United States. Clearly, De Soto's long trek across the southern United States and his discovery of the Mississippi River owe much to Cabeza de Vaca's initial probe. De Soto all but begged Cabeza de Vaca to come along as second in command (Cabeza de Vaca 12; and Hallenbeck 19).

Other figures frequently celebrated in schoolbooks similarly leapt to their saddles. Estevan became a guide for Fray Marcos, who headed north from Mexico into the Pueblo Indian country of the American Southwest. Marcos, in turn, served as the forerunner of the massive penetration north into the Great Plains by Coronado (Pilkington, “Epilogue” 141). Pilkington credits Cabeza de Vaca with setting off “the chain of events that ultimately prompted the colonization of the Southwest” (My Blood's Country 69). Although it becomes more difficult to measure the influence of the narrative as it spread through translations, it seems reasonable to envision explorers of other countries also taking fire with the Adventures, as do armchair explorers today. Once in the air, the Adventures stayed there.

“Go, litel book,” said Geoffrey Chaucer. Yet if an author launches a volume with heart full of bright, statistics-defying hope that it might influence other men's thinking for ages to come, he has no control over its uses once it leaves his hand. As to the Adventures, we have noted the parallelism of religious with temporal riches, the signs of gold, copper, and emeralds that Cabeza de Vaca held out as counterparts to the possibilities of spiritual riches in the new land. The reader can guess which feature fascinated most of Cabeza de Vaca's avid followers. The tale of discovery ignited far more greed than spiritual kindling (Pilkington, “Epilogue” 145). “The great irony,” writes Covey of the book-length moral pitch to King Charles, “is the scale of the brutality with which the lesson was violated” (Cabeza de Vaca 14). Beginning even before Cabeza de Vaca's travels, Church and state both initiated spurts of reform, such as the Laws of Burgos (1512), directing better treatment of native peoples. But whatever the sporadic idealism thereafter, in the distant New World voraciousness tore through principles thrown in its way (Henríquez-Ureña 15-20). Centuries later, the legacy has left Latin America churning in a morass of dictatorships, poverty, and racial strife (Fuentes 9-15).

Given the juggernaut course of human nature that rarely changes according to the niceties of literature, the partial failure of the Adventures in this respect hardly can be put down to Cabeza de Vaca. Yet if he inadvertently fueled imaginations to renewed conflagrations of avarice, his account also has fired creative imaginations (Rodenberger 623). Though not mentioning Cabeza de Vaca, critic Harry Levin argues in The Power of Blackness that the prime realities for American writers have been two wildernesses—the physical wilderness whose exploration led to confrontation with the psychic wilderness (9). More recently picking up on the theme, the Harper American Literature points to “a new type of hero” developing in the American offshoot of European letters as the probing of the continent evolved, one who joins “physical survival” with “spiritual rebirth.” The textbook cites Cabeza de Vaca as an early example (McQuade 7; Pilkington, My Blood's Country 75-77). Cabeza de Vaca's book came roughly a century before the highly metaphorical writings of the first settlers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Remembering Cabeza de Vaca, we might recall their heartfelt references to the “howling wilderness” beginning outside their doors, together with their concerns for the wilderness howling inside the human breast. As their earlier counterpart in this respect, Cabeza de Vaca becomes recognizable in hosts of characters developed by such major writers as Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and continuing down through Hemingway to Edward Abbey. In literature, at least, we seem to be confirmed dualists, constantly rubbing the physical against the spiritual.

And what better locale for this to take place than in the American West? In that land of great spaces, Cabeza de Vaca was not only physically but spiritually “the Southwest's first writer” (Pilkington, “Epilogue” 146). As to the early wanderer's role in Western American letters, we might recall a recent comment by Wallace Stegner on the relationship of that region and its literature:

Whatever it might want to be, the West is still primarily a series of brief visitations or a trail to somewhere else; and western literature, from Roughing It to On the Road, from The Log of a Cowboy to Lonesome Dove, from The Big Rock Candy Mountain to The Big Sky, has been largely a literature not of place but of motion.

Trying to capture America in a sentence, Gertrude Stein said, “Conceive a space that is filled with moving.” (23)

Moving, always moving, always dreaming of something beyond the horizon. No doubt that has much to do with Cabeza de Vaca's dreaminess—and with ours.

Though all this hardly is mathematically quantifiable, one might note first the general influence of a Spanish explorer whose deeds are celebrated by just about every schoolboy's history book. Cabeza de Vaca—this first trekker across an unknown continent—touches a peculiarly American chord in us, and for decades we've been listening to it reverberate. Not only listening but writing about him and making him our own with children's books, poems, novels, a filmstrip. Yet whatever the dispensation that gives writers of literature the license to fly off on their own wings, studying a few varied examples of how far they have flown in the uses and abuses of the historical Cabeza de Vaca perhaps can help measure his continuing grip on us, even in a nuclear age. And can help measure us, too, in a nuclear age.

Attesting to the historical interest in Cabeza de Vaca that serves as a base for more imaginative flights, Bishop and Hallenbeck each offers a precisely written scholarly comment on the Spaniard's adventures and route. In more popular accounts, Terrell retells the Adventures, as does Clissold, who at times gets carried away with his enthusiastic perception of a man “ever to the fore in eagerness of spirit” (70). Slaughter's Apalachee Gold: The Fabulous Adventures of Cabeza de Vaca freely uses the novelist's liberties in creating his version of the story. Thus embroidered, the factual material on Cabeza de Vaca begins to bleed over into fiction, a phenomenon of the historical figure slowly transmogrifying into myth.

For all that, Oakley Hall's admittedly fictive rendition, The Children of the Sun, follows the historical Cabeza de Vaca closely for much of his journey, while impressing with the depth of psychological insights into the characters conjured by the novelist. Yet how far can the novelist stretch and keep touch with the facts? For instance, Cheaves' Child of the Sun somewhat airily lauds Cabeza de Vaca's “altruism toward the Indians” and the Spaniard's success at “stopping the vicious practice of slave-hunting and trading in Mexico” (“Prologue” n.p.n.)—sanguine claims that can leave us believing more than the facts warrant.

Clearly, some of the above books swing some distance from essentials in order to turn a figure to their own ends. Perhaps that's what myth is supposed to do, to serve the needs of a culture. In doing so, however, it can pervert history. Both Panger's novel Black Ulysses and Franco's filmstrip The Adventures of Cabeza de Vaca, in telling the story through Estevan's eyes, assume that the slave was a black man. Whatever the intention, the evidence seems quite clear that Estevan was an Arab, not a black (Cabeza de Vaca 141; and Hallenbeck 101).

Those who maintain that history should serve as the hand-maiden of whimsy, if not of commercial success, may be taken with the Adventures as rendered into a portfolio of paintings by Ted De Grazia. Others may shiver a bit at the familiar garishness of a style that, appearing again and again not only on canvas but on the ash trays, candy bowls, and key-chain ornaments of tourist traps, has made the artist a household name throughout the Southwest.

But, hey, let's have some fun. That's what Dartmouth professor Walter Henderson did with his publication of The New Argonautica. Its subtitle reveals more than most of what is to follow: An Heroic Poem in Eight Cantos of the Voyage Among the Stars of the Immortal Spirits of Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Francis Drake, Ponce De Leon & Nunez Da [sic] Vaca. This starry voyage, mind, is served up in some ten thousand lines of lighthearted heroic couplets. A sampling:

So Leon asked their story, from the launch,
And promised worthy use, his heart being staunch
And his eyes practised.
                    “Tell me all that needs
That I may trim my soul to Argo's deeds.
It flies before a wind that, as I live,
Cries on the preparation you can give,
And only you. Tell me, while this light lasts,
And the great oars lie tranquil, and no blasts
Of blackness blow on us”—with fingers shy
He tingled Vaca's arm—“and presently,
Being no more cast for it than the antique boy
Was cast for maiden comforts hid from Troy,
I too shall steer adventures. I shall coast
Suns lovelier even than these, and make my boast
'Twas you that taught me.”
                    “Prosperous fame prevent!”
Da Vaca answered. “Hear, and rest content.
Fill up your font with this, ambiguous well!
Here is clear truth in every syllable.”

(134)

Maybe not poetry to last the buffeting of the ages but an admirable accomplishment in gentlemanly grace.

Some of the above books are reputable studies based on years of assiduous scholarship, others flights propelled more by the whimsy of their authors than by interest in the past. Whatever their effect in leading us to understand or misunderstand the historical Cabeza de Vaca, one little volume has done more than any other to put modern flesh on Cabeza de Vaca's old bones.

In 1936, Haniel Long published the Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca, often reprinted and in the edition used here entitled The Marvelous Adventures of Cabeza de Vaca. Strictly speaking, this is not an interlinear, a text with material inserted among lines already written. Rather, it's an interlinear in the metaphorical sense. Long retells the sixteenth-century journey the way he imagines Cabeza de Vaca would have told it—had the traveler been free of the political dangers swirling around him. At the outset, Long is straightforward about his view of the wanderer's intentions:

My account of Nuñez is not the account he sent the King, apart of course from the actual facts. But I believe it to be the account he wished to send the King. I preserve the core of his narrative …, and I try to show what, quite plainly, was happening to the spirit of the man. That is, I allow him to speak as though unafraid of his King and his times. I wish him to address us four hundred years later, in this world of ours where human relation is still the difficult problem, and exploitation the cancer

(viii)

Accordingly, what we get here is a Cabeza de Vaca shedding caution to speak out boldly in his efforts to convert Charles V. But we get more than the Adventures stripped of flattery and circumlocutions designed to avoid offense while currying favor. We see Cabeza de Vaca become a new man. For Long's version focusses on spiritual matters, on the “mystical feeling” of an individual who through his travels in the wilderness discovers religion as a personal “reality of which he had never dreamt” (ix). Somewhat like a St. Paul bent on persecution while he follows the road to Damascus, in the wilds of America Cabeza de Vaca sees a “light” (1) and is struck by “the shameful record of our relations with the Indians” and is moved by “man's inhumanity to man” (xii). And somewhat like the newly converted St. Paul, the newly converted Cabeza de Vaca determines thereafter to lead a virtuous and radically different life: “I shall teach the world now to conquer by gentleness, not by slaughter” (xiii).

Consequently, as often happens to the newly converted, Cabeza de Vaca enters a higher realm. Eschewing the spirit-eroding complexities of European culture (9), he now hears a sweet music as he wanders across the deserts (1 and 7). His nakedness and hunger mean little to him, for he now thrives not on earthly comforts but on “a drunkenness” of the spirit (23). The scales fall from his eyes, and he finds himself “treating all human beings alike” (29). With this new attitude he treks buoyantly along, dispensing his healing power to the “simple Indians” (16).

As is any writer, Long is free to make of Cabeza de Vaca what he will. Yet one should caution that little evidence exists for such a blithe portrayal of the adventurer. According to his own testimony, the Spaniard did make much of his cures. He did preach to the Indians. He did earnestly espouse their kindlier treatment. Yet, at least as he represents himself in the Adventures, this was not accompanied by a wholesale rejection of his loyalties to European culture or of his faithfulness to Church and state. After all, Cabeza de Vaca did not remain among the Indians in a state of wilderness sainthood.

Quite to the contrary, his goal was to return to European society, and he saw his curing powers as a miraculous blessing sent from heaven “to bring us out of such a melancholy and wretched captivity” (Cabeza de Vaca 125). Whatever sweet light might have infused him throughout his adventures, he's not at all above inserting constant reminders to the king of the potential riches in the land, or of how to use religion to conquer it (97 and 133). The duality has not gone unnoticed by others (12-14). If Cabeza de Vaca were equivocating to his king to achieve morally higher ends, well enough, though prevarication hardly is a saintly quality. Neither is the wanderer's admitted hoodwinking of the credulous Indians to inflate his fame and increase his power over them (106, 110, 113, and 120).

What actually was going on in Cabeza de Vaca's mind when he wrote the Adventures no one can say for sure. It does seem reasonable to suggest, however, that the Interlinear tells us more about the yearnings of Haniel Long—the son of a missionary and a thoroughgoing idealist in troubled times (Powell, Southwest Classics 109-19)—than it does about Cabeza de Vaca. And it may tell a good deal about the longings of our times, too.

For the message in Long's version of Cabeza de Vaca as a high-minded luftmensch is clear: The simple life is best. Love conquers all. These are alluring sentiments in an age buffeted by the complexities of mass starvation, world wars, pollution, and other tangles of seemingly insoluble problems. Bewildered by it all, we take refuge in nostrums. Rigorous-minded in other respects, some scholars, just as buffeted as the rest of us in these respects, have found Long's appeal irresistible (Burlingame 360; Powell, Books 188; and Powell, Southwest Classics 111). Still, if there's any credence to the theory that the variety of a book's tug down through the centuries is some measure of its richness—of its ability to speak in different ways to different times—Long's visionary retelling of the Adventures serves as evidence of Cabeza de Vaca's continuing appeal to our imaginations.

Works Cited and Other Sources

Adorno, Rolena. “The Negotiation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios.” Representations No. 33 (Winter 1991): 163-99.

Austin, Mary. “Regionalism in American Fiction.” English Journal 21 (1932): 97-107.

Bandelier, Adolphe. “Introduction.” The Journey of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. By Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Trans. Fanny Bandelier. New York: Allerton, 1904. v-xxii.

Bishop, Morris. The Odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca. New York: Century, 1933.

Burlingame, Robert. “More Than We Had Thought: Cabeza de Vaca, Haniel Long, and Our Day.” Southwest Review 53 (1968): 360-73.

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Clissold, Stephen. The Seven Cities of Cíbola. New York: Potter, 1962.

De Grazia, Ted Ettore. De Grazia Paints Cabeza de Vaca. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1973.

Franco, José. The Adventures of Cabeza de Vaca Told by Esteban the Black. Filmstrip. Mount Vernon, NY: World Heritage, 1979-1980.

Fuentes, Carlos. Latin America: At War with the Past. Montreal: CBC Enterprises, 1985.

Gurian, Jay. Western American Writing: Tradition and Promise. De Land, FL: Everett, 1975.

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Henderson, Walter Brooks Drayton. The New Argonautica: An Heroic Poem in Eight Cantos of the Voyage Among the Stars of the Immortal Spirits of Sir Walter Ralegh, Sir Francis Drake, Ponce De Leon and Nunez da Vaca. New York: Macmillan, 1927.

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———. Imagining Texas: The Literature of the Lone Star State. Boston: American Press, 1981.

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———. “The Southwest.” A Literary History of the American West. Eds. J. Golden Taylor and Thomas J. Lyon. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1987. 496-514.

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———. Southwest Classics. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 1982.

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