[The following essay was first published in 1983 as an afterword appended to a reissue of Cyclone Covey's 1961 translation of the Relación. Pilkington argues that the literary importance of the Relación outweighs its historical significance, stressing that its racial themes, allegorical style, and parable of the human spirit have come to characterize American literature.]

“How shall a man endure the will of God and the days of the silence?” asks the narrator of Archibald MacLeish's poem Conquistador. This is the kind of riddle that Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca might have posed himself during the eight years he roamed the coastal marshes and mountains and deserts of what is now the American Southwest. Like the great conquerors he marched by “a king's name,” discovered a “famous country,” and suffered “unknown hardships.” But the only enemies he fought and subdued were his own body and will. Cabeza de Vaca's conquest lay in the realm of the spirit rather than that of territory and treasure.

The historical significance of Cabeza de Vaca's wanderings with three companions over six thousand miles and eight years cannot be doubted. The Spaniards' adventures in the uncharted lands to the north ignited considerable greed and ambition when the wanderers appeared in Mexico City in 1536. The tales the travelers brought back with them—tales in which they insisted they had seen evidence along their route of “gold, antimony, iron, copper, and other metals”—were listened to with growing excitement. These stories, no doubt greatly exaggerated as they passed from person to person, soon revived rumors of the Seven Cities of Cíbola and eventually prompted the Coronado expedition, as the Preface to this book points out. The adventures of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, then, were the first link in a chain of events that resulted in the Spanish colonization of the Southwest.

But Cabeza de Vaca's more lasting significance has been literary and cultural, not historical. The report he published in 1542 under the title La Relación has fascinated and puzzled readers for centuries. A backward glance at that work reveals that Cabeza de Vaca was not only a physical trailblazer; he was also a literary pioneer, and he deserves the distinction of being called the Southwest's first writer. His narrative turned out to be a prototype of much American writing to come; it is, without question, the most remarkable product of the Spaniard's eight-year odyssey.

La Relación possesses many of the attributes of a good novel—especially its subtle presentation of character and its dramatic tension, which is a natural outgrowth of the true storyline. Its scope, as befits its function as a “report,” is broad enough to include much information about the country through which the wanderers passed—the variety of its climate, its flora and fauna, the customs of its natives. Cabeza de Vaca was apparently an interested observer, even under the most extreme conditions, and his descriptions of man and nature in the pre-European Southwest are helpful to historians, anthropologists, and other present-day scholars. The facet of the narrative that has intrigued readers down through the centuries, however, is less easily defined. La Relación's laconic style often conceals more than it reveals, but it is the recurring understatements that prove most suggestive in their implications. I want to discuss briefly a few of those implications.

Though Cabeza de Vaca was by birth a European, his narrative was shaped by the exigencies of a new and strange environment, and it seems to me a peculiarly American document. One of its underlying themes, for example, is the physical and emotional struggle for an accommodation between races—a conflict that has never been very far removed from the American consciousness and one that has always been a factor in the works of our best and most vital writers; further, the narrative leans decidedly toward the metaphysical; and finally it is couched in an allegorical framework (for Cabeza de Vaca it was also a structure of reality) that has often been employed by American writers, great and obscure. In these ways La Relación points to the forms and thematic concerns of important segments of later American literature.

Cabeza de Vaca's attitude toward Indians—his increasing sympathy and admiration for the native Americans he met along his route—is the crux of the work's racial theme. The history of the Spanish in the New World shows that they, like other colonizing groups, were arrogant and often brutal in their relations with the Indian population. Cabeza de Vaca, when he began his great adventure, must have had in him something of the conquistador's haughty view of the Indian. He was, after all, an aristocrat, and his grandfather, Pedro de Vera, had cruelly suppressed the Canary Islanders and, in so doing, incurred the denunciation of the Church. But after eight years among the native Americans, Cabeza de Vaca's attitude toward them had changed to one of kindness and (within the limits of his time and place) understanding.

Though the modern reader may find a touch of condescension in Cabeza de Vaca's advice to his king concerning the native Americans, it is nonetheless worth quoting: “to bring all these people to Christianity and subjection to Your Imperial Majesty, they must be won by kindness, the only certain way.” As he progressed in his journey, the Spaniard became more and more aware that the native Americans, despite their (to him) bizarre customs, were indeed human beings who, like himself, responded to friendliness and charity. Part of this recognition was perhaps the result of his natural compassion for human misery and suffering, which he had an opportunity to observe firsthand as the sick of village after village were brought to him for treatment. But apart from pity, he approved of the Indians of the interior for their admirable physical and mental traits.

It is revealing that the Indians, in reciprocation, came almost to worship the four Spaniards. Cabeza de Vaca comments that, at the end of their journey, Alcarez, the slave-hunter, had told the assembled Indians that the wanderers were Christians like himself and his men; the Indians refused to believe him, for

we had come from the sunrise, they from the sunset; we healed the sick, they killed the sound; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed, horsed, and lanced; we coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone.

This, in succinct contrast, was the difference between men who had learned a great lesson during their eight years of hardship and privation—the lesson of brotherhood and human kinship—and officials fettered by the colonial mentality.

La Relación, then, in its account of racial difference, and of the misunderstandings and conflicts engendered by that difference, anticipates much later American writing. It is a forerunner, in another sense, because of the unmistakable spiritual quality it radiates. It is perhaps a critical commonplace, but an essential one, to insist on a fundamental distinction between European and American letters. In general, European literature, fiction in particular, excells in the recounting of the minutiae of life, in depicting manners, social and political, whereas American books are often concerned with ultimates—with a person's relationships to God, to the universe, and to his own soul. Most works of American literature, says W. H. Auden, “are parables; their settings, even when they pretend to be realistic, symbolic settings for a timeless and unlocated (because internal) psychomachia.” Cabeza de Vaca's narrative was ostensibly composed as a chronicle of physical ordeal, but many readers who have searched for its deeper meanings have detected a corresponding odyssey of the spirit, have seen in it a kind of true-life “parable.”

The element of spirituality in the work that immediately snares the reader's attention is the Spaniards' activities as faith-healers among the Indians they met along the way. Cabeza de Vaca included in La Relación a catalogue of miracles of healing that he and companions supposedly performed. Some commentators have claimed the “miracles” were not genuine; the Indians were lying, the argument runs, when they said they were cured, or perhaps their ailments were psychological in origin and the Spaniards managed to relieve them by means of what we would now call the self-fulfilling prophecy. Others have been more charitable in their interpretations.

One of the most interesting explanations is contained in a curious little book by Haniel Long, called Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca (republished under the less fortunate title The Power Within Us). Long's Whitmanesque theory is certainly provocative. It is his belief that Cabeza de Vaca found in the wilderness the secret of tapping that reservoir of power that is in each of us, a power few of us are ever able to exert. By being stripped naked, spiritually as well as physically, the Spaniard was thrust “into a world where nothing, if done for another, seems impossible.” He recognized, at the close of his journey, that “the power of maintaining life in others lives within each of us, and from each of us does it recede when unused.”

Whether or not the reader accepts Long's latter-day transcendentalism, he must admit the difficulty of explaining the “miracles” in purely rationalistic terms. They seem in any case to have had a profound effect on the one who performed them. Cabeza de Vaca's experiences elevated his spirit to a domain above the physical landscape around him and contributed to the near mysticism—or perhaps it was only a kind of fevered asceticism brought on by hunger and pain—into which he apparently lapsed. The knowledge of human suffering and its psychological, if not physical, alleviation seemed to expand and alter his vision of life; it chastened him, taught him humility, and encouraged his spiritual growth—growth which paralleled with almost calculated artistry his geographic progress.

One of the recurring motifs of American literature is the voyage of exploration, of physical and spiritual discovery, the journey to the interior, in which the dominant figure is man isolated—alone in the wilderness, alone with himself. This thematic and structural device appears with great frequency in our writing. Voyages and journeys of discovery, Harry Levin suggests (in The Power of Blackness), “have served as real and imaginary vehicles for our literature from John Smith to Ernest Hemingway.” Levin's claim is demonstrably true, but we must look earlier than the English Captain Smith to find the first account of the American journey inward; Cabeza de Vaca's La Relación is, in fact, the prototype for such accounts.

La Relación's similarity to the canon of American writing suggests that our literature is what it is because, given the nature of our national experience, it could be nothing else. The exploration and settlement of vast tracts of “empty” land are crucial components of the American's (and especially the Westerner's) heritage, and these historical facts have had to be examined and interpreted in works of a truly national character. A convenient medium for their dramatization, then, has been the journey of discovery. As a literary convention it allows the writer to juxtapose the objective dangers of physical isolation with the subtle and sometimes more demanding trial of spiritual isolation.

The American journey of discovery ends in one of two ways: in hope or in bleak despair. In recent times, as the world has grown progressively darker, it has usually concluded with the latter, with its course leading nowhere. What the modern wanderer normally discovers is a blank, the spiritual equivalent of the nihilistic landscape through which he has trekked. In the case of Cabeza de Vaca, however, rescue seems to have found him a wiser and nobler person than he was when he began. The Spaniard did not rage and storm at fate for casting him ashore among savages and the elements. He accepted the abuse and suffering forced upon him, and as a result he grew and learned. The land fascinated him, and more importantly he came to acknowledge his kinship with the native Americans. It is fitting that he became the first American—his citizenship having been forged in the crucible of pain and privation—to experience and report a sequence of events which, with variations, runs in a continuous stream through our literature.

Three English translations of Cabeza de Vaca's narrative have been published. Thomas Buckingham Smith's, completed in 1851, is available in Spanish Explorers in the Southern United States (1970), edited by Frederick W. Hodge. Fanny Bandelier's was brought out as The Journey of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (1905). Cyclone Covey's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, first published in 1961, is the most recent translation. For the present-day reader it is also the most accessible. Covey's translation is thoughtful and balanced, avoiding an archaic tone as well as twentieth-century colloquialisms. The editor's internal notes are welcome help in orienting the reader to modern placenames and landmarks. As I have tried to show, Cabeza de Vaca's narrative is one of those works essential to a proper understanding of American literature and culture. All students of that literature and culture ought to read and reread it.