Four horsemen sat on their mounts surveying the Sinaloa River valley in April of 1536. The horsemen didn’t call the land before them Sinaloa, of course. It didn’t even have a name in their language yet, because they were well beyond the borders of New Spain and the northernmost outposts of Castilian settlement.

That was by design. Strictly speaking, these four horsemen weren’t supposed to be doing what they were doing. They were slavers, and by 1536, the enslavement of Native Americans was technically forbidden by their King. That said, the economy of New Spain still depended heavily on it. Castilians who came to the New World and dutifully served their superiors were granted “encomiendas,” huge tracts of land to be worked by the natives who were entrusted to their care. The natives working these encomiendas died at horrific rates, however, and encomienda owners were always in need of replacements.

But by 1536, at least up here along the Pacific Coast of Mexico, the slavers had run out of Indians to enslave. The natives had withdrawn into the mountains, abandoning their homes and fields, preferring starvation to capture. For the last three days, in fact, the four horsemen had roamed all over this beautiful, fertile coast, and found nothing but abandoned corn fields, the natives always seemingly just out of their reach.

And yet on this morning, sometime in April 1536, the slavers couldn’t shake the sensation that they were the ones being followed. So they broke camp and decided to circle back the way they had come.

They rode together, erect in their saddles and alert to any hint of movement behind a bush or up on a ridge when suddenly, and all at once, they spotted a mass moving toward them in the distance. It looked like a group of men. But they were well beyond the range of any other of their countrymen, so they couldn’t be Castilians. And they couldn’t remember the last time natives had mustered up the courage to approach them.

As the mass neared them across the valley, it broke into discrete objects, thirteen of them. They were men, the slavers soon realized. Eleven of them appeared to be natives, with long black hair, tattoos, and simple skins or loincloths. Despite their doubts, these eleven walked straight ahead, towards the very men who had been terrorizing their homelands for several years now. In this, they were inspired by the example of the two strange men in front of them, who were, in truth, the object of the slavers’ attention.¹

One of those two men had skin darker than all the others, darker than a Moor, as dark as the Africans that had just begun to arrive in the New World to replace the dying enslaved natives. Yet the other man walking alongside him was cause for even more curiosity: he looked, well, a lot like the horsemen. His hair and beard were as light as theirs, lighter even, and his skin was seasoned a near-permanent shade of pink, like a Castilian who had been in the sun for far too long. The two were dressed just like the natives, but with some kind of ceremonial gourds around their waists like they thought they were medicine man or something. But what in the world were a black man and a Castilian doing out here? It just didn’t make sense.

Dumbstruck, the horsemen remained stock-still, even as the band of thirteen drew near, until at last, they were in speaking range. In any other circumstance, the four horsemen would have hopped down from their mounts and placed the natives in chains: in any other circumstance, the natives would have fled. Yet they were all held in place, it seems, and at peace by the two bearded men occupying the no man’s land between them.

As surreal as it was for the four horsemen and for the natives, it must have been even moreso for the two bearded men. What should they say now? How could they explain to these four horsemen who they were and what they had seen in the previous decade? It had been almost nine years since they had left the Iberian peninsula; eight years since they had landed in Florida with 300 of their fellow expeditionaries, ninety percent of whom they would leave buried along the Gulf Coast; seven years since they had survived their first winter on Galveston Island; six years since they had been reduced to slavery and scattered amongst the Indians of the Texas coast; five years since one of them had won his freedom by making himself a merchant, only to return himself to slavery the next year in an effort to be closer to rumors of his companions nearby; four years since the four remaining survivors of that original Florida expedition had been reunited in the great South Texas prickly pear ranges; three years since those four had worked up the courage to escape their slavery and make their way overland to New Spain; two years since they had become the instruments for the near-miraculous healings of hundreds, if not thousands of Native Americans, culminating with the resurrection of a hand-to-god dead man and the surgical extraction of an arrowhead from another dying Indian’s heart; and one year since they had found themselves the leaders of possibly one of the largest mass spiritual movements in the history of Native America. Six hundred of their followers in fact were still with them in the next valley over, where they had left them with two others expedition survivors like themselves at least until they could determine how it would go with the slavers’ whose trail they had picked up three days before.

Now, in the faces of the four slavers mounted there in front of them, the black man and the Castilian were looking at the end of their incredible journey. For many minutes, the groups remained, unmoving: Old Worlders and Native Americans staring at each other across an unbridgeable gap. At last, the Castilian-looking medicine man broke the silence and spoke: “My name is Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Take us to your captain.” Andrés Resendez

It was, more or less, Easter 1536. And for all intents and purposes, the man who spoke the words had just come back from the dead. Because everyone knew that Álvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca had died along with all three hundred of the other men on Governor Pánfilo de Narváez’s ill-fated Florida expedition almost a decade before.

In retrospect, their expedition seemed cursed almost from the start. On June 17, 1527, five ships sailed away from Sanlúcar de Barrameda on the Iberian Peninsula and out into the Atlantic Ocean. The ships carried approximately 590 men and 10 women. According to Professor Andrés Resendez, of the 600, “11 percent were letrados (men of letters), including notaries and secretaries (and not counting other professionals like physicians and friars); more than a quarter were merchants and artisans; and roughly a third consisted of men of the sea (sailors, pilots, pages, etc.)” Some of were veterans of the conquest of México or of Jamaica or Cuba. Eighty or so were hidalgos or caballeros of the lower nobility of the Kingdom of Castile. Twenty were couples, looking to start a new life across the ocean in a new land that they called “La Florída,” Florida. (8:04) Six were men of god, Franciscans more specifically, charged with looking out for the spiritual welfare of the expeditionaries and any Native Americans they might meet. Five were captains, military men charged with protecting what was, fundamentally, a private, civilian expedition. And lastly, two executive officers and a scribe rounded out the senior staff, and they reported directly to the expedition leader, a hardened old one-eyed conquistador named Pánfilo de Narváez.²

The only post that Governor Narváez hadn’t yet been able to fill, was kind of an important one: that of chief pilot. But Narváez had a plan. He had just seen a brand new map of the northern Gulf, so he knew that someone out their had first-hand experience sailing that northern rim of the Gulf of Mexico. That experience wasn’t to be found on the Iberian peninsula, however, and so Narváez trusted in his contacts from his decade in the Caribbean to help him find the right person there. No one seems to have questioned him on it.

Because it really was up to Narváez how to staff his expedition. He was, afterall, the one funding it. Some of the mounted noblemen and officers had “bought into” the expedition, selling or mortgaging parts of their estates in exchange for a “share” of the expedition’s future profits. Yet most of the costs – and, to be fair, most of the potential profits – fell to Narváez. And this was the way the Castilian crown wanted it. In exchange for nearly unlimited potential upside, expedition leaders were expected to venture as much of their own personal wealth as they could. All the Crown asked for in return, was its share: traditionally, one-fifth of all the income. ³

To make sure that the crown got this quinta real, as they called this fifth, the King did insist on appointing at least one officer to each New World expedition: the royal treasurer. And the man selected by King Carlos to serve as the treasurer of the Narváez expedition was a trim caballero in his late thirties who had spent his entire professional life in the service of the realm: Álvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca.

Cabeza de Vaca had been born sometime around 1488 in Jerez de la Frontera, where he had a front seat to the most important events of his age. As its name – Jerez of the Border in English – suggests, Jerez had been a border town between Christian and Muslim kingdoms on the Iberian peninsula for nearly three hundred years. Then, after eight hundred years of fighting, on January 2, 1492, Queen Isabella of Castile and King Fernando II of Aragon completed the conquest of the Muslim Emirate of Granada. This marked the first time since before Charlemagne that the Iberian peninsula fell entirely under Christian rule.

Sitting on the banks of the Guadalquivir, Jerez de la Frontera had also borne witness to nearly every expedition of Atlantic exploration that had left Castile in the previous century as well, starting with the discovery of the Canary Islands. Indeed, it had been Cabeza de Vaca’s grandfather, Pedro de Bera, who had completed the conquest of the Canary Islands in the 1480’s. And then again, in January of 1492, just a few weeks after they had conquered Granada, those same Catholic Monarchs agreed to fund Christopher Colombus’s three-ship expedition to reach the East Indies by sailing West. As we all know, on October 12, 1492, that expedition made landfall in the Caribbean, setting off a wave of exploration, conquest, and wealth creation the likes of which Europe hadn’t seen since Roman times.

The impact of this Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula and the so-called Discovery of the Americas when taken together is hard to understate. The closest analogy I can come up with in our lifetimes would be maybe the near contemporaneous End of the Cold War and creation of the internet – that is, if the Cold War had lasted 800 years and the birth of the internet had been accompanied by the dislocation of three or four continents worth of people.

Yet like the birth of the Internet, this moment created a staggering amount of wealth. In the New World, men of modest means but immodest ambition could amass for themselves the kind of dynastic wealth that most men in history can only fantasize about. It was risky, to be sure, but the sons and daughters of 1492 were comfortable with risk and steeped in an ideology of service to their monarchs and to their Catholic faith. They genuinely felt themselves called upon to conquer and convert, for the betterment of themselves, their king, and the world.

And it was the inhabitants of the southern part of the Kingdom of Castile, known as Andalucía, who disproportionately answered this call. The Americas came along at just the right time to absorb Andalucía’s energetic next generation of conquistadors, and the Spanish spoken in the New World today reveals their influence there: In contrast to proper Castilian, New World Spanish – like the dialect of Andalucía in the 16th century – is marked by its preference for the indirect object “le” instead of “lo,” for its use of “ustedes” instead of “vosotros,” and its pronunciation of sibilants “seseo” instead of “ceceo,” which hurts my mouth to even mimic. ⁴

Appropriately then, the principal city of Andalucía at this time, Seville, eventually came to hold the crown-sanctioned monopoly on trade with the New World. Through its ports would pass all the knowledge, all the men, and all the wealth of the Indies. And every ship of this age that sailed to or from Seville had to pass by Jerez de la Frontera, where Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca had been born into a caballero family of minor nobility. He appears to have been the third of seven children, and the first son, though interestingly, he was the only child not to bear his father’s last name, which was “Vera.” Instead, he was given his mother’s last name, which was not uncommon at the time, except that his mother’s last name sounded as funny to contemporary ears as it does to ours: “Cabeza de Vaca,” cow’s head. The legendary source of this peculiar name is an ancestor who marked a hidden trail with a cow’s head for a Castilian army to follow at the famed Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, but the name actually seems to be much older than that. ⁵

Cabeza de Vaca himself would never dwell on the origin of his last name, but he would go out of his way to identify himself with the conquistador grandfather whose name he didn’t bear. For him, his paternal grandfather Pedro de Vera exemplified the ideals of a Castilian conqueror: he was brave, defeating a Canary Island chieftan in personal combat; he was clever, using diplomacy as well as arms to effect his Canarian conquest; and he was dedicated to the Castilian ideal of royal service, even when it brought him little in the way of personal wealth. He was no saint, to be sure. He had been reprimanded for the enslavement and sale of Canary Island prisoners-of-war, against the Crown’s orders, but he later dutifully returned most of his “profits” from this activity, to the satisfaction of the mores of the time at least. Even here, his pragmatism and willingness to know when to back down seemed to model a behavior that Cabeza de Vaca admired. ⁶

Cabeza de Vaca’s parents both died in his youth, but his lineage ensured that he was given the opportunity to rise. In 1502, while still a teenager, he took up a post as a camarero, or steward, in the household of the Duke of Medina Sidonia, one of the most powerful men in Seville. A few years later he was sent to fight in Castile’s wars in Italy. He distinguished himself sufficiently at the sieges of Ravenna and Bologna to be promoted to alferez and royal standard bearer. He saw further combat with the King’s forces during the comunero rebellion back in Seville from 1520-22, after which he returned to the Duke’s household. There he took on roles of increasing responsibility and would eventually be trusted to represent the Duke in certain matters at the royal Court.⁷

Around 1520, Cabeza de Vaca married María Marmolejo, from a prominent conversa family. With the final triumph of Christian forces in the Reconquista, the Catholic Monarchs became increasingly intolerant of other religions, expelling all Jews or requiring them to convert. Those who stayed and converted never quite escaped their Jewish lineage, however, and were widely known as conversos. María Marmolejo came from one of these Jewish families that had recently converted, something which didn’t seem to bother the heritage-conscious Cabeza de Vaca however, perhaps because in his hometown of Jerez de la Frontera, a long history of convivencia had prevailed, a sort of live-and-let-live attitude toward different religions.

Despite having recently wed and despite having advanced well professionally for his age and station, by 1522, Cabeza de Vaca might still have come to believe that he was missing out on the real excitement of his age. Stationed there in Seville, he was able to see firsthand the tidal wave of wealthy new hidalgos returning from Hernán Cortés’s conquest of México. Cabeza de Vaca’s background was actually pretty similar to Cortés. Cortés was just a few years older than Cabeza de Vaca, and had technically been born a hidalgo, one rung down the nobility ladder from Cabeza de Vaca. He had emigrated to the New World in 1504 when he was only eighteen years old and was granted there a small “encomienda” or, an estate that included block of Indian slaves whose labor he controlled. Soon, he began to rise up the ranks of the Castillian administration of the Caribbean. In 1518 – at the age of only 33 years old, he accepted a fairly innocuous mandate from the governor of Cuba to make contact with the Aztec empire in México and went rogue. As soon as he had landed on Mexican shores, he began to forge alliances with native tribes, to extract tribute, and to establish a direct line of communication with the Castilian court, bypassing the Governor of Cuba who had sent him.

The Governor of Cuba soon realized his error and sent an expedition of nearly 1,000 infantry and 80 horsemen to recall Cortés. To lead that expedition, he selected the very same Pánfilo de Narváez we met earlier. The then-fortyish Narváez was an impressive specimen, the archetype of a Conquistador. He was “tall and muscular, with light hair turning to red, a ruddy beard, and a deep, booming voice” “like that of one speaking in a vault” and even his detractors agreed that he was, if nothing else, “courageous.” An experienced captain and leader of men, he figured prominently in the conquests of Jamaica in 1509 and then Cuba from 1511-1514. By 1519, he was the Governor of Cuba’s right-hand man, and had he not been back in Spain on official business when Cortés departed, he might very well have been the one tasked with the expedition to the Aztecs. ⁸

What Narváez couldn’t have known, however, was how strong Cortés’s position had become. In much the same way that Cabeza de Vaca’s grandfather had exploited pre-existing tribal divisions in the Canary Islands to effect his conquest there, Cortés had quickly realized that the Aztec emperor sat atop a crumbling pyramid of disgruntled subject peoples. Cortés presented himself to these oppressed peoples as their liberator, and they welcomed it. They transferred their tribute payments to Cortés, whose revenue stream was then further augmented by the entirely-counterproductive attempts of the Aztec Emperor to pay Cortés so much money that he wouldn’t want to march on his capital at Tenochtítlan. With all of this tribute and treasure flowing in, Cortés had no problem purchasing the loyalty of the men of Narváez’s recall expedition, without Narváez even realizing it. No sooner had Narváez landed on the Mexican coast than his men abandoned him for Cortés banner, then surrounded and captured Narváez in a bloody fight that left him without the use of one eye.

For the next four years, Pánfilo de Narváez wasted away in a Mexican jail cell, while Cortés completed his conquest of México, solidified the favor of the King through enormous gifts, and eventually won for himself the title of Marques of the Valley of Mexico. Finally, after years of personal pleas from Narváez’s wife and some tireless lobbying by his allies at Court, Cortés released the now one-eyed Narváez.

After his release, Narváez returned to Castille and immediately began lobbying for a province in the New World of his own. He had something to prove now, and frankly four years of lost wages to make up for. And he also still had one of the more impressive resumes in the New World and apparently retained enough favor at Court that his proposal was well received. On December 11, 1526, the Crown awarded him La Florída, (22:15) which interestingly did not include the modern-day Florida peninsula but did include the entire northern rim of the Gulf of Mexico all the way down to modern-day Tamaulipas.

Narváez’s grant of power wasn’t unlimited, however. Six Franciscans, as we mentioned earlier, were appointed to go with him, not only to convert the natives to Christianity, but also to ensure Narváez’s compliance with a new Indian welfare law passed in 1526. By 1526, the abuses of the Native population by the conquerors of the Indies and of México had become a topic of concern back at Court, thanks to men like Bartolomé de las Casas. Las Casas was a conquistador who had grown so disillusioned by what he saw that he had given up his encomienda – his estate with its retinue of Indian slaves – and became a Dominican friar, committed to advocating for the humanity and humane treatment of Native Americans. Under the new 1526 law which Las Casas had promoted, Native Americans could no longer be enslaved without a council of friars first agreeing that they had been captured in a “just war.” You can sense the holes in this system already, but it’s important to note this growing concern in contemporary Castilian society for the welfare of the native populations of the Americas. ⁹

Yet there was another, probably even more powerful check that the crown imposed on Governor Narváez: the royal treasurer, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. Though the royal treasurer was technically outranked by Governor and expedition-commander Narváez, he didn’t really report to him. In addition to making sure Narváez paid all of his taxes, of course, Cabeza de Vaca was tasked by the Crown to (and I’m paraphrasing a bit): “…inform us extensively and particularly of every matter, especially of how our commands are obeyed and executed…. of how the natives are treated; ….the teachings of the Indians in the Holy Faith, and in many other things of our service, as well as all the rest you see, and I should be informed of.” As this charge makes clear, Cabeza de Vaca’s job was precisely to be a counterforce to Narváez, to check his ego and undermine any untoward attempts at empire-building. If this sounds like a recipe for contentious office politics, you’re right, but it was a feature, not a flaw of the Castilian system of administration, which always sought to balance the religious, military, and civil authorities vying for power. ¹⁰

So, after receiving his Florida grant in December of 1526, Narváez relocated to Seville to recruit men, purchase ships, and provision his voyage. He eventually accepted 600 men and women into his expedition. Not just Castilians, but Portuguese, Greeks, black Africans and Christianized moors from North Africa, and even a few Native Americans that had emigrated from the New World to the Iberian peninsula signed on. Who could resist the allure of America? And Narváez more than anyone was in a hurry to get there. In early June, he ordered his five ships down the Guadalquivir, taking the crew one last time through the great valley of Andalucía and past Cabeza de Vaca’s home town, Jerez de la Frontera. Which is, incidentally, about where Cabeza de Vaca opens his account. “On the 17th of June of 1527, the governor Pánfilo de Narváez departed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda empowered and mandated by your Majesty to conquer and govern the provinces lying between the Rio de las Palmas and the Florida peninsula.”¹¹

The Narváez expedition’s first stop, about a month or so later, was the Canary Islands, Castile’s first step into the game of Trans-Atlantic conquest won by none other than Cabeza de Vaca’s own grandfather. A month later still, near the end of August 1527, the expedition made port in Hispaniola, the site of Columbus’s first colony. Then soon thereafter, Cuba, where Narváez himself had made his fortune and from which point Hernan Cortés had departed on his expedition to México. Which is to say that every stop along the way seemed designed to remind the Narváez expeditionaries of the deeds of their forefathers, and the spectacular wealth it had created for them and the Crown they served.

Still, it is important to point out, as Professor Andrés Resendez does, that the men on this expedition were not just “gold-crazed conquistadors.” 140 of them bailed in Hispaniola, forsaking the theoretical riches of conquest for the more steady work of a bustling port town. The presence of the ten wives on the voyage reminds us that at least some of these expeditionaries planned to make La Florída their new home. They were, like many later immigrants to the New World, a varied lot seeking opportunity in whatever form it might take. ¹²

Several months ago, I had the pleasure of having dinner with Isabel Benjumea and her father, one Rafael Benjumena Cabeza de Vaca. Yes, you heard that last name correctly, he is a direct blood relative. The phrase that Don Rafael gave me to help understand this ideology, this belief system that drove and inspired so many waves of Castilians to the ends of the earth, was the mandato real, the royal mandate. I suppose it’s related to the idea that is sometimes rendered shorthand as Gold, Glory, and God, but it’s more nuanced than that. These expeditionaries, according to one pair of Cabeza de Vaca scholars, “saw the relationship between religion and empire within the ideological perspective common in his time by which the kingdom of the gospel justified extending the temporal domain of Castile and its kingdoms.” That is, they genuinely believed that by extending the Castilian realm, they were spreading the Gospel, and that by spreading their faith, they were instructing the people they encountered in better way of dealing with the hardships of life. Cabeza de Vaca himself puts the secular and religious aims of the expedition on equal footing, paraphrasing his commission as to “…conquer those lands and at the same time bring [the natives] to knowledge of the true faith and the true Lord and service to Your Majesty.” Of course, there were those who mouthed the language of the mandato real to cloak their own self-interest, and there’s a long tradition in the English-speaking world of holding Spain to account for this in the Black Legend and other pseudo-historical critiques. But somewhere on the spectrum between the possibly cynical Pánfilo de Narváez types and the saintly Bartolomé de las Casas were a lot of regular people that sincerely lived out this ideology. ¹³

Yet by the time the Narváez expedition made it to Cuba, the high-minded mandato real was crashing into hard reality. First, the expedition struggled to find enough supplies in the Caribbean to reprovision. Second, Narváez still hadn’t found an experienced pilot. He decided to divide his forces, so while he went out and searched for a pilot, he sent Cabeza de Vaca ahead with two of the ships to buy what supplies he could in the tiny port of Trinidad, Cuba. The largest city in Cuba at the time had maybe fifty dwellings: Trinidad, from what we know, was smaller than that. And its harbor offered little protection from the elements, something that Cabeza de Vaca and the others of his crew sensed when they pulled in sometime in November of 1527. Then, the sky started doing things none of them had ever seen before. Cabeza de Vaca understates the lead-in here: “The following morning, the weather began to look not good.” Cabeza de Vaca and his sixty-man contingent was about to become one of the first Europeans to experience a New World weather phenomenon that seemed like something out of Revelations. Recall, it was November, the tail end of the hurricane season. Even the laws of nature, the Narváez expeditionaries were about to learn, operated differently in the New World.

Missing the Mark (Z:f3r-f7r)

How the Narváez expedition missed its target by a mere 1,000 miles.

The trans-Atlantic leg of the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition to the New World had played out like a highlight reel of the previous half-century of Castilian conquest: first the expeditionaries had stopped in the Canary Islands, which Cabeza de Vaca’s grandfather had conquered; then Hispaniola, the site of Columbus’s first settlement; and lastly in Cuba, from which Hernán Cortes had launched his conquest of México.

Yet the expedition itself was off to a rough start. By November 1527, it had already lost 140 men to the boom town atmosphere of Hispaniola, which reduced its crew count from 600 to 460. The one-eyed commander of the expedition, Governor Pánfilo de Narváez, still hadn’t managed to find a pilot with actual navigational experience in the northern Gulf of Mexico. And supplies in the Castilian Caribbean were in such high demand that Narváez was struggling to scrape together sufficient provisions to even feed all of his men for more than a few weeks.

So Narváez decided to split up his forces. While he hung back to search for a pilot or maybe just to look for more sources of supplies himself, he dispatched the expedition’s treasurer, Álvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, ahead with two of his ships and sixty men to the tiny port of Trinidad on the southern coast of Cuba.

These are still the early years of Spanish exploration of the Caribbean, recall, and its larger weather patterns remained a bit of a mystery to Europeans. A certain leeriness of sea travel in the late fall had started to take form in Castilian sailors’ minds, however. And when the more seagoing types saw the poor harbor at Trinidad and noted the “no buena” weather indications that morning, they expressed their reservations. Still, most of the sixty men dutifully remained on board when a smaller party, including the man holding the purse strings, Cabeza de Vaca, went ashore to acquire what they could.

Less than an hour after Cabeza de Vaca had disembarked, however, the sky darkened and a North wind picked up. Soon, sheets of rain began to fall. The wind intensified. Then, there was a “mighty roar and a great noise like voices or the sound of bells, flutes, tambourines, and other instruments.” Houses and buildings began to splinter and disintegrate. Cabeza de Vaca and his comrades had to lock their arms and walk linked together eight-men across just to keep from being carried off. Then, Cabeza de Vaca remembers, the winds changed, blowing just as fiercely now from the opposite direction, “contrary winds” it crashing in from all directions at once. Trees were stripped of their leaves, then their limbs, and then finally snapped in half and splintered like matchsticks. The grass even was torn out by its roots. “Never has such a fearful thing been seen [in Europe],” Cabeza de Vaca tells us. ¹⁴

The storm – the first detailed European account of a hurricane – raged all night with apocalyptic fury. And the truth is that those like Cabeza de Vaca who experienced the storm onshore were the lucky ones. The next morning, as Cabeza de Vaca and his entourage tried to return to their ships, they were shocked to discover that they were gone. Just plain gone, along with everyone aboard them. The only evidence that their ships had even existed was a lifeboat they discovered in a tree a mile away and two bloated bodies that washed up 30 miles down the coast!¹⁵

The Narváez expedition was now down to two-thirds of its initial strength, from 600 to 460 to now 400 souls, and it hadn’t even set foot on the American mainland. And not only had they failed to pick up any additional provisions in Trinidad, they had now additionally lost all the provisions aboard the two ships that lay at the bottom of the sea.¹⁶

Cabeza de Vaca and the few survivors limped back to rejoin Narváez and the others with their tail between their legs. Narváez doesn’t seem to have punished Cabeza de Vaca or any of the other officers, though Cabeza de Vaca even ten years after the fact does feel compelled to go on at length about the incident and defend his judgment. He is made the more persuasive by the fact that that man that Narváez had come up with in the meantime to pilot his expedition would prove to be manifestly more responsible for far greater losses in the future.

Somehow or another, in the last months of 1527, Narváez had come across a man who claimed and may actually have had experience sailing the Gulf of Mexico, and whom he immediately hired as his chief pilot. The new pilot didn’t get off to a great start, however. Only three days off the southern Cuban coast, the new pilot grounded Narváez’s ships on some shallow sand banks. After fifteen days of futile efforts, it was only the high tide of a storm that finally dislodged them. They continued around the western tip of Cuba and its northern shore until on March 1, the expedition sighted Havana, where they intended to make one last stop for provisions. Yet another storm struck them, however, and carried them out of sight of Havana and into the Gulf of Mexico. It was as if Nature was conspiring against them or was otherwise impatient to hurry them along to their ultimate destiny. This seems to be what Narváez believed anyway. He decided not to fight fate any longer. He gave up on Havana, he gave up on trying to reprovision and ordered his pilot to point the ships West toward the Rio de las Palmas on the Mexican coast.¹⁷

The storm didn’t break, however. It rained for days at a time, and still they couldn’t seem to escape it. They went whole weeks without seeing the sky. It was the wrong time of year to be a hurricane and the account doesn’t suggest it was nearly so violent, but for fifty days, the Narváez expedition’s ships tossed and turned in the churning Gulf until eventually even the pilots lost any sense of where they were. So disoriented were they that on April 10th, 1528, when they sighted the western coast of the Florida peninsula, they convinced themselves that they were looking at the eastern coast of Tamaulipas, 1,000 miles away.

How had they so badly miscalculated? How to you think you have traveled 1000 miles west when in fact you’ve gone 100 miles northeast?

It is one of the great mysteries of this story, because even years later, the expeditionaries will be arguing over what side of the Gulf of Mexico they landed on. Professor Andres Resendez offers the best explanation that I’ve found for this enormous navigational error. This is an age before before latitude and longitude. And so what sixteenth century Castilian sailors relied upon was for navigational purposes was “dead reckoning.” “Dead reckoning” defines every point as a distance and a cardinal direction from another point. For example, Laredo is 130 nautical miles from San Antonio on a 200 degree heading.¹⁸

Of course, there are three major problems with this method: 1) even a thirty-two point compass is only so accurate over the course of a day, much less fifty days in turbulent seas; 2) speed and distance on the open ocean are incredibly hard to estimate; and 3) your direction of travel does not always match your heading.

Why not? Because the currents on which you are traveling are themselves moving, at a speed and in a direction you can’t accurately measure without a frame of reference. If you have a southeast wind pushing you off your 200 degree course to Laredo, you might have to hold a 180 degree heading just to end up where you want to be. The Narváez expeditionaries had it even more difficult: they were sailing square into the Gulf Stream. The Gulf Stream, as its name suggests, is essentially a river of sea water equivalent to 2,000 Mississippi Rivers rushing west through the straits of Florida. As Professor Resendez points out, the Gulf Stream flows at more than 4 knots, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but 4 knots times 24 hours times fifty days equals almost 5,000 nautical miles! Which is to say that in order to sail 1,000 miles from Cuba to the Mexican coast, you must actually traverse almost 6,000 miles of water. If the Narváez expeditionaries had miscalculated their speed and distance by even 1/6th over the course of fifty days, then, it would have been more than enough to believe that they had crossed the Gulf of Mexico and arrived at their intended destination on the Tamaulipan coast.

Of course, when they spotted the mainland on April 10, 1528, there is one other thing that it feels like they should have picked up on: the coastline was on the wrong side! I mean, as long as the sun is shining, you can tell East from West. And the coastline they were looking for should have been on their West; the coastline they had sighted was on the East. Like I said, it’s really hard to reconcile, except to chalk it up to the entire expedition’s general confusion after fifty days swirling around in the Gulf.

All that swirling around, however, meant that it was not hard for Narváez to convince his men to disembark somewhere near modern-day Tampa Bay when he ordered them to do so on April 12, 1528. Cabeza de Vaca misremembers this date Good Friday in his narrative - it was actually Easter. Cabeza de Vaca also tells us that only 42 of the original 80 horses survived the storm and joined the expeditionaries on land, a number which has always stuck out to me as an oddly precise, particularly given that Cabeza de Vaca is recording this almost a decade later. For that matter, April 12 is oddly precise as well, especially given that he seems to be misremembering which high holy day the 12th was; sixteenth century Castilians took their religious calendar seriously and tended to name geographical features for the Saints days they had been discovered on.

By choosing to remember or misremember the date of their landfall as on Good Friday – rather than on Easter – is Cabeza de Vaca employing a bit of literary license to signal something to the reader? Like suggesting that he and his fellow expeditionaries were symbolically dying or something? Would Easter be too hopeful of a day for a devout catholic in the sixteenth century to have fallen into the kind of misfortunes that Cabeza de Vaca is about to encounter? And what about the number 42? The main Christian or biblical significance that I come up for 42 is that it was the number of wanderings that the Israelites suffered after escaping from Egypt. And indeed, Cabeza de Vaca is about to embark on a series of wanderings to rival that of the the ancient Israelites. Is the number 42 so associated with wandering in his Catholic mind that he’s now projecting this back onto the number of horses who survived their voyage? ¹⁹

I don’t want to make too much of this, but I also don’t think I can overplay how deeply the language and symbolism of sixteenth-century Castilian Catholicism is woven into Cabeza de Vaca’s account. To some readers, it’s off-putting and to others, it’s cause for doubting his reliability. For the near-term, I just want to establish that it is deliberate. Because there is an alternative reason he might be using these kinds of clues: he might be using them to give us signposts as readers, helpful tools for interpreting what he was feeling or enduring at any given moment. And he might be pointing us to some larger purpose that he believes his narrative is fulfilling, in the same way that he and his fellow expeditionaries believed they were serving some larger purpose in coming to the New World to “conquer those lands and at the same time bring [the natives] to knowledge of the true faith and the true Lord and service to Your Majesty.”²⁰

And the first natives they encountered in the New World were right there in Tampa Bay. A small Indian Village sat on the edge of the bay, and seems to have been why Narváez chose to disembark where he did. He and 300 or so of his men, including Cabeza de Vaca, entered the village and tried to open communication. The first encounter seemed promising enough. The natives bravely came forward to Narváez’s men and offered them venison and fish, a welcome gift for the underprovisioned and travel-weary expeditionaries. And yet there’s no indication in the text that Narváez offered any gifts in exchange, which would seem to be a pretty elemental breach of the basic principles of human reciprocity and, well, morality. And it’s not like Europeans were unaware of this custom, Narváez had brought along beads and other trinkets for precisely this purpose.

Cabeza de Vaca suggests that Narváez felt no need and made no effort to reciprocate the natives’ gifts. It’s almost as though he interpreted the gifts as tribute, not as an opening gesture of friendship. Instead, on the very next day, Narváez raised his standard on the Florida shore and read aloud the requerimiento, that official statement of conquest that every conquistador was required to read aloud, claiming the land in the name of the King and offering the natives either the protection of the Castilian crown or, in the alternative, subjugation by it.

But when he read the requerimiento on or around that April 13th, 1528, there no native Americans were around to hear it. Perhaps recalling earlier slaving expeditions and certainly recognizing that this Narváez fellow didn’t understand even basic principles of reciprocal exchange, the natives had cleared out, abandoning their little village on the shore. Of course, they wouldn’t have been able to understand the requerimiento anyway even if they’d hung around: none of them spoke Spanish, and none of the expeditionaries spoke any of the Natives’ languages.²¹

When Cortés had conquered Mexico a decade prior, his greatest strength wasn’t his generalship, but rather his diplomacy, his deal-making ability. He was able to build a coalition of tribes suffering under Aztec domination and begin extracting tribute from them. With new allies by his side and revenue rolling in, he had made himself the de facto Lord of Mexico regardless of what Moctezuma or the Spanish King may have thought of it. Just a few years later in Perú, Cortés cousin, Francisco Pizarro, would re-use the same gameplan perfectly, with the expected results. But Narváez never seemed to appreciate the diplomacy piece of Cortes’ strategy. Recall that it had been Narváez himself who had been sent to recall Cortés from México, with twice as many men and horses as Cortés had under his command. And indeed, he had lost that battle with Cortés precisely because Cortés had outmaneuvered him diplomatically, leveraging his native allies and his revenue stream to buy the loyalty of the men sent under Narváez. And similarly here in Florida, Narváez had so turned off the first natives he met that they disappeared before he could even figure out how to talk to them.

In their haste to flee, the natives inadvertently played a fittingly cruel trick on the man who had refused to exchange gifts with them. They had left behind a “golden rattle” amongst a pile of fishing nets and other unremarkable gear. As you might imagine, the golden rattle fired the expeditionaries’ imaginations. If these natives had left behind a solid gold rattle, then they must surely have carried off infinitely more treasure with them! The let their imaginations run wild with visions of a Floridian Tenochtitlan somewhere further inland.²²

We don’t know the exact details of what the 300 Narváez expeditionaries did next in that Native village on Tampa Bay – I’m guessing they started turning the village inside out in search of more artifacts - but they hung around long enough that eventually the natives came back. This is a pretty remarkable act of courage on the natives’ part, to return to face off against a larger group of aliens dressed in shining Castilian armor with forty-two of them attached to four-legged beasts –malnourished four-legged beasts by this point, but impressive creatures nonetheless. In this instance, the language barrier didn’t hinder them in getting their point across. In Cabeza de Vaca’s words, these natives “made many gestures and threats, and it seemed as if they were telling us to leave the country.”

Cabeza de Vaca really dwells on this point early in his narrative, on the Narváez expeditions’ lack of an interpreter and their inability to communicate with the Florida natives. Cabeza de Vaca’s subsequent experience would of course prove to him the importance of being able to communicate, but here again he might have been thinking of the example of Cortés. Cortés secret weapon in his war of diplomacy, was his multi-lingual native mistress, La Malinche. La Malinche helped him quickly establish lines of communication and understand the political dynamic of the Aztec world. By contrast, Narváez would never have a Malinche and would never even really be able to understand the words of the natives amongst whom they had just landed.

Instead, when the next day some of Narváez’s scouts captured four natives spying on themr on the edges of their camp, he jumped straight into asking them where he might find corn. No small talk, no gifts, no diplomacy, just right into corn. And that may be a surprise to you if you thought he was going to ask for more golden rattles. In part, it’s because his men and especially his horses are hungry at the moment, but raising corn requires cultivation and social organization, and creates an economic surplus that allows those societies to support ruling elites. Corn marked the kinds of societies that Castilians wanted to conquer and a large population whose labor they could exploit. Gold is great, but it’s just a one-time windfall, and twenty percent of it goes back to the crown and the rest probably gets raked by the executive officers of the expedition. But a large, settled, corn-raising society promised generational, dynastic wealth to any member of the expedition who might be awarded a small encomienda of that society that he might rule as his own. THAT is what Narváez was after.

To Narváez’s delight, the four captive Indians responded that they did know where some corn was. They led the expeditionaries back to their own village where they found a few sad heads of unripe corn still on the stalk. It was pretty far from being Floridian Tenochtitlan. Then, just as the expeditionaries were about to blow them off, the natives showed them something else.

At some point in the previous years, several crates of clearly Castilian origin had washed onto their shores and been recovered by the natives in this second village. They seemed to be articles of some reverence to the natives, logically enough I suppose given how strange they would have looked. Then, they gestured to the expeditionaries to look inside. The expeditionaries opened the crates, only to find decomposing, folded-up Castilian corpses staring back at them. It was gruesome, and turned the stomachs of the Franciscan friars, who were also appalled by how the corpses had been dressed up with painted deer skins and brightly colored bird feathers in what had clearly been some kind of native religious ritual. They ordered the bodies burned.

More likely than not, the crated Castilians were the unfortunate victims of a shipwreck elsewhere in the Gulf, carried to Florida by the same Gulf Stream that had deposited the Narváez expeditionaries there. Perversely, finding dead Castilian and tropical style headdresses suggested to the Narváez expeditionaries that they were closer to Pánuco, to the settlements of Northern New Spain than they really were.

And fate left one more cruel enticement for the expeditionaries in the crate: trace amounts of gold. The Narváez retrieved the gold and held it out in front of the Native villagers. “Where is there more of this?” he asked, getting to the point. The natives apparently had little difficulty detecting the expeditionaries peculiar obsession with the shiny stuff, and even less difficulty in detecting an opportunity here to be rid of them. Yes, there’s more of that stuff up North. Way up north. Away from here. Far away from here.

But they may not have been just putting them off. They gave Narváez a name for the great city where so much gold might be found: Apalache. Though it is not a name that conjures images of prosperity today, in learning of Apalache the one-eyed Pánfilo de Narváez believed he had just learned the name of his Floridian Tenochtitlan.

A Land So Strange (Z:f7r-f11r)

How the Narváez expeditionaries marched on their Floridian Tenochtitlán.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 3: A Land So Strange. I’m Brandon Seale.

A strange scene unfolded on April 15, 1528, somewhere near modern Tampa Bay, Florida. Just a day after disembarking, the one-eyed Governor-to-be of the North American mainland, Pánfilo de Narváez, ordered his 300 man expeditionary force to assemble in front of him, for his officers to present their titles, and for the requerimiento to be read aloud.²³

The requerimiento was a pronouncement which Castilian conquistadors were required to read to the inhabitants of any newly discovered lands. In this case, it informed the inhabitants of La Florída that God had chosen King Carlos, the reigning King of Castile, to rule over their lands. They were told that if they behaved well and became Christians, that they would be considered friends of the Castile King and all of his other subjects. If, on the other hand, they refused to do so, then the Castilians would treat them very harshly and carry them off as slaves.It offered a little bit of everything: the threat of conquest, the promise of salvation, and some insights into Castilian civil administration, representing the three aims really of Castilian conquest: military, religious, and civil.

The entire performance was recorded by the Narváez’s notary, with all present serving as witnesses that the natives had been duly informed of their rights. Of course, the natives listening typically did not appreciate the nuances of everything that had just been said, because the requerimiento was almost invariably read in Spanish – or, more properly, Castellano. And as best we can tell, no natives in Florida at this time understood Castellano, or Spanish, or any other European language for that matter. And in this instance, there was another issue with Narváez’s performance of the requerimiento: there were actually no natives around to it. They had fled the day before after attempting (unsuccessfully) to exchange token gifts with the newcomers, a gesture that Narváez had either ignored or missed.

And there’s a third layer of absurdity to Narváez’s reading of the requerimiento in Tampa Bay. He and his men actually had no idea where they were or what land they were claiming. They had missed their intended landing spot by about 1,000 miles, landing on the western coast of Florida instead of the Eastern coast of Mexico. Technically, they were outside the grant that the Crown had made to Governor Narváez.

And yet a small golden rattle found nearby the day before had been enough to fire the imaginations of Narváez and his expeditionaries, and they figured this was as good a spot as any to begin their conquest of La Florída and their march into the history books. When they finally were able to capture some Indians and interrogate them about the origins of the rattle, the Indians redirected them to the North – Apalache, they called it - where, according to the expedition’s treasurer, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, there was rumored to be a “large quantity of Gold” and “a great quantity of everything which we esteemed in everything.”

Because it wasn’t just gold they were after. Corn moreso than Gold symbolized what that Castilian imperialism was about. Inspired by their Roman forefathers, their aim was to discover pre-existing advanced civilizations that they might rule over as overlords, as Cortés had done in Tenochtitlan. In the words of Cabeza de Vaca scholars Rolena Adorno and Patrick Pautz, “the indigenous American peoples formed the infrastructure on top of which Spanish colonies were built.” and it was corn that “served as a clue to finding areas that held the potential for sustaining expeditions and supporting European settlement.”²⁴

On May 1st, 1528, Narváez called a council of his officers. The Governor, Royal Treasurer Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the ranking priest, the expedition’s notary, two executive officers, five captains, and five friars convened to discuss what the expedition should do next.

The council broke down into three camps. Narváez, joined by most of his captains wanted to march inland, and go after his Tenochtitlan in the Florida peninsula. Narváez had learned in Jamaica and Cuba the rewards which might accrue to the bold from his roles in the conquests of Jamaica and Cuba. They certainly weren’t going to realize any profit from sitting on the coast while the provisions which Narváez himself had paid for dwindled. Recall too that the expeditionaries actually still thought they were somewhere in northern Mexico, closer to the great old Mesoamerican city states. This unfortunate misunderstanding had only been strengthened by their discovery nearby of Castillian crates with dead Europeans in them, their corpses decorated with brightly colored, tropical plumage reminiscent of some kind of great Aztec headdress or something. It didn’t seem unreasonable to believe that there might then be another Tenochtitlán somewhere close by.

The Franciscan friars and the ships pilots advocated a different strategy: they wanted to march along the coast while keeping the ships in sight nearby. And they had good justification: How in the world would they reconnect with the ships once they had ventured out of sight of them? Since they didn’t really know where they were, they couldn’t even define a landmark where they could rendezvous. And they also reminded everyone that things hadn’t gone that well for them on ships so far; returning to the sea would be, in their view, to “tempt God.” Yet as logical as marching along the coast sounded, the Florida coastline didn’t really allow for it. Bays and marshes jut inland for dozens of miles, and neither the men nor the horses could live on seaweed and saltgrass. This strategy seems to have been shot down pretty quickly.²⁵

Which left it to Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, the expeditions’ royal treasurer, to articulate the third position, that of everyone getting back on the ships and sailing along together until they could figure out where they were. Here, he really enters his own narrative for the first time, and delivers a pretty powerful condemnation of Narváez’s plan: “the pilots didn’t know where they were…the horses were in no condition to be of any use…and above all, we were going about mute and without knowledge of the language so we couldn’t make ourselves understood by the Indians, nor even ask for what we needed in this land we were entering about which we knew nothing, not what it offered, nor who lived in it, in what part of it we were, and we didn’t have enough provisions to enter in a land we didn’t know…all we could offer the men was a pound of biscuit and a pound of bacon each…and anyway, the land they had seen so far was as unpopulated and poor as any that had been sighted so far in these parts.”

As reasonable as Cabeza de Vaca sounds with the benefit of hindsight, his position actually ran directly counter to a much more powerful precedent that the Castilians held in their minds: that of Hernan Cortés. Just a few years before, Cortés had found his fortune and made his name precisely by leaving his ships behind. Actually, he went one step further: he ordered his ships burned in front of his men, so they would know that there was no turning back!

That was a hard precedent to counter. And as democratic and deliberative as the May 1st council sounds in Cabeza de Vaca’s account, it really wasn’t. Again, Narváez was paying the bills and Narváez was in charge. Narváez ignored Cabeza de Vaca, made his decision. They would march inland, living off the land and the stores of corn they were sure to find along the way to Apalache, where they could replenish their dwindling stores, bring yet another great American empire into the service of the Castilian king, and, God willing, find their fortunes. The council adjourned, and the men moved out to begin making their preparations.

But Cabeza de Vaca wouldn’t let it go: “I, seeing his determination, demanded, on behalf of your Majesty, that he not leave the ships without finding for them a safe harbor, and I asked that the notary record my petition. The Governor responded that the majority of the council was opposed to this course, and that it was not my place to make these kinds of demands. And he asked the notary that he also record that there were no provisions around to support a town nor a port in which to harbor the ships. As such, he was moving on with the men and going in search of a better port and better land.”

If you’re so scared of marching inland, Narváez essentially says, why don’t you stay with the ships.

Narváez had backed Cabeza de Vaca into a corner, and he knew it. Cabeza de Vaca predictably refused the assignment, quote: “I preferred to risk my life than to risk my honor.” He claims that he told the Governor that he didn’t expect him ever to see his ships again, but that he now felt obliged to accompany him anyway and share his fate. Great, Narváez said, happy to put the issue to rest. And the next day, when Narváez’s 300-man overland contingent marched north into Central Florida, Cabeza de Vaca was with them.²⁶

For reasons that will become clear soon, history has not been kind to Narváez for this decision. Very briefly, however, I want to try to defend Pánfilo de Narváez’s decision here, if only for the sake of argument. First, as we’ve alluded to, Narváez had the example of Cortes in Mexico and himself in Jamaica and Cuba to contend with, examples where fortune rewarded the brave. Second, don’t forget that Narváez is footing the bill for this entire production. Every day that his men are on the ships, they were just burning money. He needed to get some revenue streams going. Third, his pilots were actually telling him that they were only 30-40 miles away from the Rio de las Palmas, their original destination in modern-day Tamaulipas. Yes, the coastline was facing the wrong direction, but coastlines meander and he had no real reason to believe that his pilots were as wrong as they were. And fourth, frankly, a different kind of a treasurer on a different expedition could have given Narváez just as much hell had he NOT decided to run to ground rumors of gold and prosperous native kingdoms nearby.

Cabeza de Vaca doesn’t provide his readers with any of these arguments however, because he knows all too well how the inland march will turn out. But the extent to which he belabors this argument with Narváez is a little uncomfortable. It recalls some other points in the narrative where Cabeza de Vaca seems to protest a little too much. Like back in Cuba when he had been left in charge of two ships and 60 men which a hurricane destroyed entirely in the course of an evening. He goes to pretty great lengths to repeat that he had been begged to come ashore and help buy provisions – and thus wasn’t with the ships when the hurricane destroyed them. And there’s also the curious fact that he claims that in addition to being the expedition’s treasurer, Cabeza de Vaca had been appointed alguacil mayor for Narváez, kind of a second-in-command, which wasn’t true. Frankly it seems like kind of a dubious distinction at best, like a deckhand retroactively giving himself the title of First Mate on the Titanic. But it’s a good reminder that Cabeza de Vaca is writing this for some particular purpose, and that it is our responsibility to try to figure out what that purpose is so that we can decide what statements to lend credence to and what statements to question. ²⁷

Now, in Cabeza de Vaca’s defense, other contemporary accounts are not particularly kind to the old one-eyed Narváez either. He was stubborn and he was brutal. A contemporary chronicler – who had also known him in the New World – compared him to a donkey that you had to hit three times because it would forget the first two. After witnessing his persistent and unseemly lobbying for the command of the Florida exhibition, that same chronicler would try to convince Narváez that he really wasn’t made for this. He refused to listen. Hernando de Soto, who passed through Florida 15 years after Narvaez, claimed that Narváez and his men had terrorized the countryside on their march, at one point even cutting off the nose of a local chief. And in some of Bartolomé de las Casas first writings denouncing Indian slavery in the New World, Narváez stands out as a particularly unsympathetic figure amidst a cast of already pretty brutal guys. At one point, after ordering the wholesale slaughter of a group of natives in front of De las Casas, Narváez turned to taunt him: “How does Your Grace like what our Spaniards have done?” ²⁸

Yet he was also “brave in arms as a soldier and skillful as a captain.” And most of the 300 men on his expedition probably realized that stubbornness and brutality on their own have never been impediments to success, however, and so willingly followed Narváez north into Florida starting on May 2, 1528. Forty of the men were mounted, the officers and higher-born whose horses were still alive. The rest slugged along on foot through the Florida countryside. It was oddly empty. For fifteen days, they didn’t see a single Native American. At last, sometime around May 15th, Narváez, Cabeza de Vaca, and the rest of the men stumbled into a clearing where they saw an Indian village with some small plots of corn around it, ripe and ready to harvest. Some of the villagers came out to parley with them. We don’t know exactly what transpired. Maybe the expeditionaries read them the requerimiento or something. Either way, it didn’t go well: “After having spoken to them in signs, they signaled to us in a such a way that we were forced to turn on them.” The Narváez expeditionaries took five or six of the villagers captive after their skirmish, and made them their guides through the unfamiliar terrain of Central Florida. ²⁹

The expeditionaries continued on now through Central Florida for the next several weeks, through the rest of May, and well into June. The natives seemed to have cleared out all around them, however, taking with them everything of value - including their corn. Supplies were running low. At one point, Narváez ordered Cabeza de Vaca to lead a small party to the coast with a young Captain from Salamanca named Alonso del Castillo just to see if they could make contact with the ships. But, in an ominous sign, the Cabeza de Vaca and Castillo came up empty-handed.³⁰

There have been those who contend that Cabeza de Vaca’s account is the first work of Magical Realism, that twentieth century prominently Latin American literary tradition that reveled in mixing the supernatural with the mundane. The next thing that happened to the expeditionaries would seem to confirm this.

One day in mid-June as the expeditionaries were sitting in camp, they heard an eerie, shrieking sound in the distance. As they rushed to their weapons, they realized that it was growing nearer. It sounded almost musical, and seemed to be accompanying by singing. Suddenly, a native lord riding on the shoulders of another Indian wearing a brightly-pained deer hide burst into the clearing, followed by dozens of other natives all signing and dancing like Hare Krishnas. Recall that for the last month, most of the Florida natives had cleared out entirely and made a point of avoiding the expeditionaries. But this lord was something different. He didn’t just appear in camp…he made an entrance! And why shouldn’t something like this have happened? The Narvéz expeditionaries were in a truly New World, a world of apocalyptic storms, of titanic trees rent in two by lightning bolts, of big furry marsupials with their young clinging to them like creepy-little sticker burrs. I mean, for christ’s sake, here on the western coast of Florida which they thought was the eastern coast of Mexico, the sun seemed to be rising in the west and setting in the east. In that setting, a singing-dancing-painted lord seemed just about right.

It’s a reminder too that these sixteenth century men lived in a world where much more was possible, a world that was stranger than we can probably actually imagine, which is something that Nicolas Echevarria’s 1991 movie about “Cabeza de Vaca” captures so well. Theirs was a world where the divine intervened regularly and often without a clear explanation as to why, which incidentally was a worldview that the natives of this time probably shared. And when you accept that the world is unintelligible, unknowable, it makes you much more open-minded to everything in it. For them, that the world was the at least partly unexplainable was proof of God’s role in it, and the corollary idea that his intervention might just as likely be good or evil and that they might never know for sure which. And so, as best we can tell, neither Cabeza de Vaca nor any of the other under-provisioned, tired, and lost expeditionaries unduly questioned the arrival or the motives of this singing-dancing-painted lord.

Something about the native lord’s arrival impressed Narváez as well. It’s as though he instantly respected his boldness and felt more inclined to see him as an equal. Or maybe he was just growing desperate. In either case, he changed his playbook. This time he was the first to offer an exchange of gifts. He gave to the native lord “beads and bells and relics” – something he had not yet done before to the other natives they had met in Florida. It seemed to work. The native lord accepted, and told Narváez his name: “Dulchanchellin.” Then, he settled down his entourage enough so that he and Narváez might be able to hear one another. The two chiefs began to communicate as best they could via signs. Narváez eventually came to understand that Dulchanchellin was a sworn enemy of Apalache and would happily guide the expeditionary to his enemies’ capital! At last! Narváez had his native ally! He was back on track!

Dulchanchellin led Narváez and his men out the next day. They marched on for another few weeks, well into late June. Dulchanchellin initially gifted the expeditionaries a large quantity of corn from his own village (all while careful to keep the expeditionaries from actually entering it), but soon that corn began to run out. In the humid, summer heat, the men’s armor and packs began to wear sores into their backs. The expedition suffered its first death when a horseman was swept off his horse while crossing a stream, just as they also seem to have crossed into more hostile territory. Soon after, a Castilian had an arrow shot at him when he went for water one evening. A few days later, the expeditionaries captured three or four natives that had been waiting in ambush for them. Yet the potential reward justified the hardship. Each day, they were closer to the great Apalache, and even Cabeza de Vaca began to imaging himself “arriving where they had desired and where they had been told there were so many provisions and gold.” Of course, with each day, they were also marching further from their ships, further from their supply lines, and further than ever from their intended destination on the Mexican coast.

The title of this episode is taken from a line in Cabeza de Vaca, but also recalls the title of probably the most readable and perhaps my favorite general history of Cabeza de Vaca, written by friend of the podcast Andres Resendez. For a link to his book and the other sources used in this series, you can check out our website, at BrandonSeale.com.

Apalache (Z:f11r-f16r)

How the Narváez expeditionaries conquered Apalache and then had to flee for their lives.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 4: Apalache.

On June 25, 1528, 300 men under the command of a one-eyed conquistador named Pánfilo de Narváez appeared on the outskirts of a native American village near modern-day Tallahassee, Florida. Narvaez and his men had been guided to this spot by a charismatic native lord named Dulchanchellin, who had convinced Narváez that this village – Apalache! - was the wealthiest in the region.

But now, Dulchanchellin was gone. It seems that he had been more interested in steering the expeditionaries away from his own village than in becoming their allies in a war against Apalache. And even the one-eyed Narváez could tell Apalache was no Tenochtitlan. Despite being the largest community they had yet encountered, it consisted of a mere forty small straw houses scattered amidst a checkerboard of family corn plots. Narváez had been told repeatedly by natives he had captured that Apalache was full of gold and corn and ““a great quantity of everything which we esteemed in everything.” And so he remained committed to conquering this poor village, motivated by the slim hope that it might hold some great hidden treasure, but also by the fact that it apparently did have some corn to offer his hungry men and beasts.

To lead the vanguard of the assault on Apalache, he selected the expedition’s royal treasurer, our very own Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca. Cabeza de Vaca, with a force of fifty-foot soldiers and nine horsemen rushed into the village unopposed, to the surprise of the native women and children and village chief they found there. The other men were out hunting or something, but soon got word of what was happening back in their village and Narváez with the rest of his force managed to enter Apalache just as the native menfolk returned to discover that their town and their families had fallen captive to these alien invaders. Understandably, this made them quite angry, and from a distance they began to shout and gesticulate violently at the conquistadors. Narváez still had no translator, but he had no trouble understanding what they were saying: they wanted their families back. Narváez was happy to obliged them – it meant fewer mouths to feed in the village – but held back the village chief as a hostage, which is also something right out of Cortés playbook from the conquest of México, though again, without Cortés’s finesse.

Predictably, this provoked a response from the natives, who didn’t just want their families back, they wanted their whole village back! And so the next day, the Apalachens attacked the expeditionaries, setting fire to their own lodges which were now occupied by Narváez and his men. Castillian arquebuses and crossbows took a toll, however, and drove back the Native assault. Unphased, the Natives returned again the next day and attacked from the other direction, though with the same result: a few buildings torched, a few native casualties, and a hasty retreat.

During this assault, however, the Narváez expeditionaries captured a few natives, and began to interrogate them: where is the real Apalache? They wanted to know. The Apalache they imagined was a a gold-working, corn-raising civilization – maybe not the size of a full-on Tenochtitlan, but still a civilization worth placing themselves on top of as tribute-extracting overlords. And this collection of straw huts was not it.

Interestingly, not far north of the village the Narváez expeditionaries now occupied were quite a few much larger villages, representing the southeastern edges of the native American “Mississippian culture.” Though provincial by comparison to the great cities of Meso-America, these Mississipian communities were not insignificant. Hernando de Soto’s expedition just a decade later would record a rather sizeable settlement of 200-250 houses just a few miles north of where Narváez and his men were now holed up, something the archaeological record confirms. Some accounts suggest that this native community – which would thereafter be known to Europeans as “Apalache” – may have even had a sort of emperor, ruling over a loose confederation or at least trade network of smaller, outlying communities.³¹

So while the real Apalache might not have lived up to the grandeur of Tenochtitlan, the village Narváez and his men now occupied was perhaps a suburb of it. They were actually on the right trail. Which seems to be why his native captives lied to him and told him that he wasn’t. It apparently wasn’t difficult for them to tell that Narváez meant trouble. So they did what every other native group in Florida would do: they tried to send the Castillians away from their relatives and towards their enemies. Further north are only small, poor villages, they lied. You’re looking at the largest and wealthiest of our communities. BUT, they continued, if you go southwest instead of North, there is a village you should check out. It’s called Aute, and it has lost of corn, beans and squash. And seafood too since they’re so close to the ocean.

After two months of marching through Florida, Narváez and his officers were exhausted and at a loss. Though this village had some corn, deerskins, even a few woven textiles, it clearly couldn’t support them for long. Narváez sent out several scouting parties to reconnoiter the area, which he still thought was the coast of Northeastern México. Those scouting parties each returned without any particularly encouraging leads. Mostly, they found only increasingly bold natives, who had quickly learned the advantages of stealth and surprise against the slow, armored Castillians. Whenever expeditionaries went for water, they were shot at. Scouting parties were followed and foraging parties were ambushed. Soon, supplies began to run out, or perhaps to disappear. And Narváez had to have been getting nervous about the time he had been without contact from his ships.

Retiring to the coast by way of this mysterious new destination – Aute – suddenly didn’t seem like such a bad idea. So, after twenty-five days, sometime in August 1528, Narváez and his men packed up their things and left the village that they thought they had been looking for the last three months, and they left it almost as hungry and poorly-provisioned as they had entered it. And they were pursued closely now by Native Americans, who sensed the their weakness. Native sharpshooters sniped at the expeditionaries from behind trees and across impassable marshes. Every day of their retreat to Aute, a few men fell. Everywhere they went, the expeditionaries felt, the natives were now waiting for them. Which was especially terrifying now to the expeditionaries because they had seen how effect the natives were at long ranges with their longbows, whose arrows they could fire clear through oak trees as thick as a man’s calf. The expeditionaries’ sense of being pursued had the effect of making the natives into terrifying giants, “marvelously well-built, very slim, and with great strength and agility.” Almost everyone in the entire expedition – including Cabeza de Vaca - was wounded at some point on the march back to the coast.³²

Finally, after nine days, they reached Aute. The town had been been evacuated and burned to the ground, though with plenty of ripe corn, squash, and beans left in the field, which temporarily restored the expeditionaries spirits. For two whole days they did nothing but recuperate: eat, tend to their wounds, and try to decide what to do next. Yet their situation was dire, and they knew it. As fearsome as these so-called conquistadors imagined themselves to be, their effectiveness relied on a very complicated supply chain. And the moment that Pánfilo de Narváez cut himself from his ships, he cut himself off from the supply chain. And these expeditionaries were not really equipped to live off the land, particularly in a foreign and “strange land.” Narváez knew that he need to re-establish contact with his ships, to find the coast, and the man he picked to do it was the man who had most vocally advocated for it initially: Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca.

Narváez tasked Cabeza de Vaca with leading a force of fifty foot soldiers and seven horsemen to find the coast. To his command, he attached two younger captains, whose names you should take note of: Alonso Castillo, the son of a doctor from Salamanca whom Cabeza de Vaca had already commanded a scouting party with, successfully, in the previous episode: and Andrés Dorantes, a slightly older, battle-hardened veteran of the King’s wars in Castile. Maybe there was some kind of affinity between the three men that even Narváez could see: it was the second time that he had paired Cabeza de Vaca with Castillo in command of a mission, and Castillo and Dorantes would later be given another command together as well.

They weren’t far from the Gulf. After just one day of marching, Cabeza de Vaca and his scout party struck salt-water. They feasted on oysters that night and “gave many thanks to God for having brought us there.” But the bay they had found was still quite far removed from the open ocean. As far as they could see in fact was only more marshlands and shallow bays, the kind that their deep-drafted transatlantic ships could never enter. And these conditions also made marching along the coastline extremely difficult, if not impossible. With this mixed news, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and their party returned a few days later to the rest of the Narváez expedition camped out in Aute, only to be met by truly terrifying news. A terrible sickness had swept through the camp, dystentary perhaps, killing several dozen men over the course of just a few days. Even Narváez had been laid low, and his prospects seemed questionable. And so even though Cabeza de Vaca’s scouting reports had given the expeditionaries no reason to expect they would find anything once they made it to the coast, it was clear that staying put where they were would do them no good either. And so the expedition resolved to march on to the coast, which Cabeza de Vaca tells us about in pretty dramatic terms in his narrative, paraphrased slightly here:

“The march was difficult in the extreme, because we didn’t have enough horses to carry the sick and because we didn’t know what to do to treat them. Each day they suffered more, and it was a sad and painful thing to see the necessity and hardship we were in. And once we made it to the coast it became clear what little prospect there was of continuing forward – because there was nowhere else to go, and even if there had been, the men could go no further because most of them were sick and the rest were too few. I will leave off here from telling any more, as each may imagine for himself all the things that could happen in a land so strange and so bad and so lacking in anything which we might have been able to use to extract ourselves from it…Yet in that moment something else happened which made everything worse: a large number of the horsemen began to conspire amongst themselves to leave behind the governor and the sick men, who were at that point with strength or power…”³³

This was yet a new threat. Despite all the hardship, shortages, and disease that these men had endured, up until now the Narváez expedition had at least retained its sense of unity. Even Narváez and Cabeza de Vaca’s squabbles had done nothing to damage the overall unit cohesion: their disagreements always remained within the bounds of fair argument. But all that changed now. As the expedition slogged through the Florida marshlands, still menaced on all sides by natives and the natural world around them, the mounted men – principally the “hidalgos and men of good breeding” began to plot to leave the others behind. It was of course as foolish as it was desperate. Their perceived advantage of being mounted was offset by the fact that they had nothing to feed their mounts and that they were more than a thousand miles away from anything worth riding to. Narváez soon found out about their plot, but he couldn’t punish them to the extent he might have liked; he needed their manpower and he needed their horses. 13:03 All he could do, was call a council of his officers to review the desperateness of their situation together, which he did on or around August 4, 1528.: Fully one-third of the expedition was too sick to continue marching, including Narváez himself. The caballeros’ attempted mutiny boded poorly for the officers ability to hold things together much longer. Their ships were still nowhere to be found. Since they had marched inland back on May 1st, three months ago, they had covered 280 leagues, almost 1,000 miles – which is either an exaggeration resulting from their confusion or an indication of how extremely circuitous their wanderings had been. Which is to say, they still had no idea where they were. What in the world should they do?³⁴

We all love stories about scrappy, misfit military units that come together in the face of impossible odds and overcome. Saving Private Ryan, the Great Escape, Band of Brothers, etc etc. Well this is one of those moments. So cue now whatever this song is called. [Whistling]. This misfit band of Castilians, Portuguese, Greeks, Native Americans from México, enslaved Moors from Africa, and countless other places decided to take control of their destiny. These men came from the most advanced civilization in the world after all. Their fathers had completed the 800-year reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. Their brothers had just conquered an empire in México larger than the Iberian peninsula! These were the Go Ahead men of their age, to misuse a nineteenth century term, “Si se puede” men to misuse a twentieth century one.

In this case, the answer to what they should do didn’t come from the officers’ council. It came from one of the men: “The next day, God willed that one of our company came to us an said that he would make some wooden pipes and deerskin bellows.” Then, another man with substantial experience as a carpenter came forward. From there, God’s plan for them unfolded: instead of waiting for their ships, they would build their own watercraft, and brave the waters of the Gulf of México on their own.³⁵

They immediately set to work. They scraped together all the iron they could: armor, stirrups, spurs, crossbows, slave chains, everything. This of course reduced them to a more vulnerable state, more or less on par with the natives who were still picking them off whenever they could, but the expeditionaries gave as well as they took, raiding nearby villages to stock up for their upcoming raft voyage. From their scrapped iron, they were able to forge saws, axes, and other tools, as well as nails, chains, and binders. They felled the many different species of trees surrounding them, ripped them into more usable lumber, and experimented with the relative benefits of different wood for different parts of their craft. From the fibers of nearby palm trees, they made ropes and oakum; pine tar served them as caulk; stones, they decided, could work as anchors or ballast; and their shirts and pants they sewed together into sails.

The expeditionaries also slaughtered a horse every third day and used it to feed the men doing the actual work. This was quite an incentive for the hungry men, one necessitated perhaps by the class-conscious Castilian noblemen’s reluctance to perform manual labor. Additionally, slaughtering the horses served to dismount the mutinous noblemen, reducing them to the same level as everyone else as well. 16:50 And of course, the resourceful expeditionaries made good use of every part of the horse. Their tails and manes they wove into ropes; their meat they dried and jerked; and their hides they scraped and tanned to use as canteens for carrying freshwater on the rafts that were taking shape before their very eyes.

They measured all of about thirty feet long, with their width presumably some fraction of that. This meant that the surviving 242 men or so would each have a space about the size of a yoga mat on which to face the Gulf. And though the logs were lashed together as tightly as the men could manage with their horsehair ropes, they were anything but watertight. They were kept afloat only by the buoyancy of the logs. And only barely. Once the rafts were loaded down with men and provisions, they floated all of about six inches above the water line. This actually made the rafts fairly resistant to storms and swells, since waves just washed over and through them. All things considered, they would prove to be fairly hearty little crafts.

By September 22 – a month and a half after they had started the work – the five rafts were as complete as they were ever going to be. And none too soon either. Forty men had died in the preceding weeks from the mysterious illness ravaging their ranks. Ten more had been killed within sight of camp by natives. And by September 22, they were down to their last horse.

And so, on that same day, 242 shirtless expeditionaries slaughtered their last horse and boarded their rafts. Narváez and a suspiciously non-random selection of the 49 healthiest, strongest expeditionaries made up one crew; another raft captained jointly by Alonso Castillo and Andrés Dorantes carried 48; two other rafts had 49 and 47 respectively; and the last, led by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, carried the remaining 49.

As the Florida shore receded from view, the men observed the horse skulls they left behind on the beach. A later expedition fifteen years later would be able to readily identify the spot from the bones still lying there. The “Bay of Horses” the Narváez expeditionaries called it, a memorable description for sure, if not a bit sardonic. It’s doubtful that anyone was laughing, however. Because as they floated into the surf, a new challenge awaited them: none of the men aboard the rafts knew the first thing about maritime navigation. All the pilots and sailors, recall, had stayed aboard the ships, which had continued in vain searching for the expeditionaries, down near Tampa Bay where they had dropped them off. Narváez, Cabeza de Vaca, and the rest of the expedition were well beyond where anyone thought they were, and only heading further away, drifting west now along the unchartered northern rim of the Gulf of Mexico.³⁶

The Gulf (Z:f16r-f20v)

How the Narváez expeditionaries fared on their return to the Gulf of Mexico.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca: Episode 5: The Gulf. I’m Brandon Seale.

Two hundred forty-two mostly naked men in five very crude rafts floated along the coastline of the Florida panhandle in late September 1528. They were packed-in almost fifty men to a raft, with just enough room for each man to lay down if he didn’t mind rubbing shoulders with his neighbor. They didn’t dare venture far from the shore in their thirty-foot long vessels, since they rode barely six-inches above the waterline and wouldn’t have fared well in open seas. To the extent they could, the flotilla of rafts stayed in waist-deep shallows, carried along by their sails they had fashioned out of their shirts and pants.

For the first seven days of the Narváez expeditionaries’ gulf voyage, things went surprisingly well. A couple days in, they came into possession of some abandoned canoes that some terrified natives had left behind upon seeing them. The expeditionaries lashed the canoes to their rafts like outriggers, which gave them more stability and helped buoy them a few more inches above the water line. They also found that the natives had left behind some dried fish, which was a welcome addition to their already-tiresome diet of corn and dried horse meat.

Yet as the rafts plodded along through October of 1528, there were growing reasons to be concerned. All along the coast smoke signals began to go up, as the tribes began to warn their brethren of the starving, grabby gangs of men floating toward their shores. As a result, most natives pulled back their lodges and supplies back into the interior, denying the expeditionaries any chance to reprovision. Accordingly, the corn and horsemeat on the rafts soon began to run out. And then an even more serious problem presented itself. To store freshwater for their upcoming voyage, the expeditionaries had repurposed horsehides into giant canteens. They had done this, however, without adequate time or chemicals to properly cure the hides. And so, after a few weeks at sea, their horsehide canteens began to rot, contaminating their fresh water. Or at the very least, making it taste like decomposing horse flesh.³⁷

They kept pushing on, however. Most of the men on these rafts still believed that they were just a few dozen miles away from the so-called Rio de las Palmas, the modern-day Soto la Marina in Tamaulipas, México. They sailed the last five days of October without drinking anything. Eventually, some of the men couldn’t take it anymore; five of them resorted to drinking the salt water, and paid with their lives for their mistake. Desperate now, the sad flotilla put ashore somewhere near modern Biloxi, Mississippi, to search for fresh water. They found nothing. As they boarded their rafts, in the distance, they saw a pair of Indians in a canoe. They called to them, signaling that they wanted to trade for freshwater. Lord knows what they would have given for it. The natives wanted nothing to do with these pitiful strangers, however, and began to paddle away.³⁸

According to the expedition’s treasurer, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca: “We felt so abandoned and lost that there wasn’t a one of us who didn’t expect to die at any moment.” It’s one of only a handful of times in the narrative when we will ever see Cabeza de Vaca despairing, and yet he very deliberately refuses to dwell on it or indulge his modern readers’ prurient interest in seeing his suffering: “I pass over this episode quickly because I don’t think there’s any particular need to tell all the miseries and hardships we endured, considering the situation we were in and the little hope of salvation that we had, each one may imagine what could have happened to us.” This is actually a recurring pattern in Cabeza de Vaca, his refusal to dwell on his most hopeless moments. Maybe it’s an indicator of the depth of the trauma it left on him…or maybe it’s just an insight into the psychological tools he used to survive this incredible ordeal.³⁹

Out of a lack of any other options, the Narváez expeditionaries decided to pursue the Indian pair that had fled from them. It was risky, and frankly risked provoking an attack if those natives had any fellow tribesmen nearby who might feel threatened by the sight of a couple hundred sunburned and bearded bags of bones descending upon them. As the expedtionaries rounded a point of land, they suddenly got more than they had bargained for. They were met by a veritable fleet of Indian canoes was heading toward them. These Indians were tall, and well built, yet carried no weapons, perhaps realizing that in their current state the expeditionaries posed them no threat. The natives signaled to the expeditionaries to follow them, which they willingly did. The expeditionaries rowed their way further into the bay and until at last they saw a fairly sizeable native village. They expeditionaries disembarked eagerly disembarked on the beach alongside their guides, and found waiting for them on the shore jars of water and cooked fish.

The village chief came out to greet the visitors. He invited Narváez back to his lodge. The two men and their lieutenants sat together and traded gifts – Narváez was not above trading with the natives as equals at this point, it seems. Yet between the natives’ gracious welcome that afternoon and what happened that evening, something must have happened. Cabeza de Vaca offers no clue as to what provoked the turn of events, but as suddenly and as inexplicably as these Indians had come out to meet the expeditionaries, that night they turned on them. From all sides and all at once, they assaulted their guests. They attacked the sick laying prone on the beach; they burned their own lodges where they had put up expeditionaries to rest; they even threw themselves into a brutal hand-to-hand melee in the chief’s lodge, where a surprised Narváez took a rock to the face.

The confused expeditionaries retreated as quick as they could back to their rafts. Arrows and stones rained down on men, who just a few moments before thought they had finally found relief from the privation of their miserable raft voyage. The fifty healthiest members of the expedition formed a defensive perimeter there on the beach and tried to protect their rafts while the sick and wounded were being boarded, yet the natives continued attacking with such ferocity that the rearguard couldn’t safely leave their positions. And soon, nearly every one of them had been wounded as well, even as they held their line against three different assaults by native warriors.

Something to recall is that the vast majority of Narváez’s expeditionaries were NOT soldiers. Yes, they lived in a violent age, and so like later European settlers on the American continent they were not strangers to conflict, but most of these expeditionaries had no military training and certainly no sense of tactics. And Narváez had just been wounded and seems to have been taken out of the action. And so, in a lull in the fighting following the third attack, when perhaps it seemed like the natives had exhausted their supply of arrows, Cabeza de Vaca and Captain Andrés Dorantes stepped up. They were each veterans of wars in Europe, with experience commanding men in combat, and they devised a plan. Dorantes and two of the other captains snuck off into the darkness, even as the natives had begun to form up for a fourth attack. Before they could launch it, however, Dorantes and his force struck the natives’ rear. It caught the natives entirely off-guard, and undermined their confidence in their own position. Their order collapsed, and they dissolved into the night, leaving the expeditionaries in peace by in disarray.

This entire episode near Biloxi really scrambled the circuits of the expeditionaries, because it seemed to show them how poorly equipped they were for understanding this continent. They couldn’t even trust their ability to read the intentions of friendly-seeming natives. Maybe the whole thing always been a trap for them, but then why would the natives have bothered feeding the Narváez expeditionaries instead of just attacking them on their shoddy rafts. Maybe Narváez had committed some faux paux he didn’t even realize in talking to the chief. We don’t know, and in general, I find Cabeza de Vaca to be curiously unjudgmental about this entire episode. You sort of expect him to either lambast the natives for their treachery or Narváez for bungling the situation. Yet he doesn’t do either. He simply describes what happened, with no color commentary or pejorative language toward anyone. I think this is a clue as to two different things. One is the just utter strangeness of this entire continent to these Castilians. The Aztecs were more similar to Castilian society than these hunter-gatherer bands on the Gulf coast were even to the Aztecs. In that sense, it’s really not a surprise that cultural misunderstandings were the norm, not the exception.

And yet, two, it might be yet another clue as to how Cabeza de Vaca processes things that he doesn’t understand. In sort of a similar way to how he refuses to dwell on traumatic experiences, maybe he refuses to dwell on the really stark cultural differences between himself and the people he meets. Don’t get me wrong, he doesn’t ever really doubt the “superiority” of his own culture, yet he employs the tools of his culture primarily to sustain himself, not as standards by which to criticize the new people he meets. This is why people have referred to him sometimes as the “first anthropologist,” for his ability to observe cultures without immediately judging them by the standards of his own.

This non-judgmental piece of Cabeza de Vaca’s character, I think, is something that really helps keep him sane, however. Because the natives of the Gulf Coast continued to confound the Narváez expeditionaries. A few days after fleeing Biloxi, the expeditionaries came across some different Indians in canoes. Again, they begged the natives for watern: in their frantic retreat to the beach in Biloxi, they hadn’t really had a chance to collect any water for their road. And so the expeditionaries undertook a muddled negotiation with these new Indians in the canoes. Sure, we’d be happy to help, the natives signed back, just give us your jars and we’ll go get you some. This made the expeditionaries uneasy: if they lost their jars, they’d have no way to carry water for the rest of their sea voyage. How about we send some of our people with the pots, they proposed instead. The natives accepted the proposition, but the expeditionaries imposed one more condition. Two natives would need to stay behind as well as hostages for the return of their men and pots. Hostage-exchanges, like gift-giving, seem to be another pretty near universal form of diplomacy, and so the natives accepted, swapping two of their own for two expeditionaries.

That night, the Indians returned with the jars filled with water…but without the two expeditionaries who had gone with them. The rest of the expeditionaries on the rafts were furious, and they demanded their companions be returned to them. Just then, their two Indian hostages tried to throw themselves into the water and swim back to shore, but the expeditionaries managed to hold onto them. More canoes began to appear, however, and threatened to cut off the expeditionaries access to the larger Gulf. The flotilla of native canoes began to encircle them, and soon, began lobbing stones and spears into the tightly massed men on their rafts. What should they do? Fortunately for the expeditionaries, the wind picked up at that moment, and the expeditionaries captured it in their sails and retreated to open waters. Yet it meant leaving their jars of water and their companions behind. A later expedition would discover that they had met a gruesome end. Though to be fair, we hear no more of the expeditionaries’ Indian hostages, and should probably assume that they met their end here as well.

A few days later, sometime perhaps in the first week of November, 1528, they rounded a point and realized that they were looking at the mouth of a massive, massive river. It was, in fact, larger than any they had ever seen, so large that they might at first have thought it was simply another enormous bay. Yet as they reached down into the water and felt the current pushing them violently away from the coastline, they realized that this river’s outflow turned the saltwater fresh for miles all around. After weeks of nearly dying of thirst, they were now suddenly surrounded by more freshwater than they could drink in a lifetime.

The Narváez expeditionaries had just found the Mississippi river. It’s one of the few geographic markers we can pretty certainly identify from Cabeza de Vaca’s account. With some effort, the expeditionaries beached their crafts on a delta island and rested for a day or two, while they filled their bellies with freshwater. Maybe this was that other river that some contemporary maps placed near the present Rio Grande, an allegedly mighty river in its own right. Maybe they were finally within reach of the Rio de las Palmas, or even better, the Rio Pánuco just to the south.

Of course, now they had to cross this river. After filling their jars with water and foraging for a little firewood, the expeditionaries pointed their vessels into the current, trimmed their sails, and took up their oars. They began to paddle. They could see the shoreline across the mouth of the mighty river, but almost immediately, they felt the ocean floor receding beneath them. Up until now, they had kept to the shallows, which not only provided some comfort to the majority of the expeditionaries who couldn’t’ swim, but also allowed them to push their crafts along like gondoliers. That was immediately out of the question for crossing the Mississippi, however. Here, they couldn’t even sound the bottom at all, even with a 180 foot sounding line. While the crews paddled manically, a few probably began to realize that a 180 ft deep wall of water that turned the salty ocean fresh was never going to let a fleet of rickety rafts across.

Just so you can appreciate how wide and how powerful the Mississippi is, the Narváez expeditionaries battled it for two days and nights! Non-stop! It was a Greek, almost Sisyphean torment. Twenty-four hours ago, they were dying of thirst; now, they were flooded with so much water that they couldn’t move. Then, at the end of the second night, a norther blew in, dropping the temperature and pushing against their sails further and further from land.

There’s no telling how far out into the Gulf the men’s rafts were ultimately carried, but suffice it to say they were entirely adrift now in a merciless sea which they had no ability to navigate. When the men on the rafts awoke that third morning, what they saw around them would have been even more terrifying that they had imagined. Not only had they lost sight of land, they’d now lost sight of each other. Cabeza de Vaca records that he could faintly make out the governor’s raft, and perhaps a third on the distant horizon, but that was it.

The men had been on reduced rations for almost the entirety of their two month “sea voyage,” if you can call it that. Now, they were down to just a handful of uncooked corn each day for each man. And the last two days of effort had exhausted what small stores of strength remained in them. Nevertheless, Cabeza de Vaca ordered his men to row toward Narváez’s raft, and managed to draw up within shouting distance. No closer, however; it seems Narváez wouldn’t quite let him pull entirely alongside. Before Cabeza de Vaca could speak, Narváez shot a question to his opinionated subordinate, anticipating Cabeza de Vaca’s own question: “What do you think we should do?” Narváez asked his treasurer.

We should link our rafts together and go after the third raft, Cabeza de Vaca responded, “that our three boats might follow whatever path that God wished to place us on.” Impossible,” Narváez shot back. Their only hope, he said, was to paddle for shore. Forget the third raft. And the fourth and the fifth. If the men on his raft didn’t reach land in a day or two, he said, they would all die of starvation.

Without waiting for a response, Narváez set his men to rowing. Cabeza de Vaca told his men to do the same, and tried to keep up. But the heartier men that Narváez had selected for his own vessel began to pull ahead, though they couldn’t be particularly sure even that they were heading for land. But Cabeza de Vaca could be sure that he and his vessel were falling behind.⁴⁰

“Throw us a rope,” Cabeza de Vaca called out to him, asking to be towed along. “Impossible,” Narváez shot back again. “It will take all of our effort to just to reach shore ourselves this evening.” “What are we supposed to do, then?” Cabeza de Vaca shot back.

Narváez answered Cabeza de Vaca, “This is no time for one man to order another man around; that each man should do what seemed right to him and save his own life, which is what I plan to do.” In short: “every man for himself.”⁴¹

Symbolically and in actuality, the Narváez expedition was no more. Cabeza de Vaca ordered his men to lay down their oars. It was too much to ask of his men to kill themselves rowing after a commander that had just abdicated his command and in a direction that they weren’t even sure promised salvation. There was no point fighting fate or God or whoever was in control at this moment. Some of his men had already begun to pass out from their efforts to reach Narváez’s ship.

And so for three days more, the men on Cabeza de Vaca’s raft drifted along, saying little, resigned to being carried wherever the current might decide. A storm struck on the fourth day, that nearly overturned their raft, yet it merited barely a mention in Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative, so indifferent were he and his companions to their fate by this point. “With little difficulty, one could count our bones, and we looked to ourselves like death itself.” By the end of the fourth day, their bodies began to shut down. “The men began to faint, such that when the sun set, all those in my raft were slumped over on top of one another, with many so close to death that only a few remained conscious.” By sunset on the fourth day, only five of Cabeza de Vaca’s 49-man crew could stand up; by midnight, only Cabeza de Vaca and the skipper remained conscious. Then, two hours after nightfall, the skipper asked Cabeza de Vaca to take the tiller. He was done, he said, certain he would die that very night. Cabeza de Vaca understood the sentiment: “I would have happily taken death in that moment, rather than to see so very many men in so sad a state.” (AP1, 92). Eventually too, Cabeza de Vaca closed his eyes, “resting a bit without resting, as sleep was the furthest thing from my mind.” ⁴²

The Narváez expeditionaries’ time at sea was coming to an end. Not, however, in the manner that any of them would have anticipated. On the next episode, of Cabeza de Vaca.

The Island of Ill-Fate (Z:f20v-f22r)

How the conquistadors became castaways on Galveston Island.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca: Episode 6: The Island of Ill-Fate. I’m Brandon Seale.

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca couldn’t tell if it was just a dream, but “it seemed as though I was hearing the sound of breakers on the beach.” He awoke to the hard logs pressing against his back, a reminder that he was adrift in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico on a home-made raft. When he opened his eyes, all he could see in that grim pre-dawn hour, were the 49 men of his crew piled on top of one another like corpses. Over the previous two months, their sad craft had brought them more than 500 miles, through storms, privation, and attacks from hostile natives, only to meet their match with the mighty Mississippi. The current from the great Father of Waters was so powerful that its current scattered the five rafts of the Narváez expedition all across the featureless Gulf of Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca’s raft had managed to rejoin their commander’s, that of Pánfilo de Narváez, and pulled within speaking distance of him, only for Narváez to tell Cabeza de Vaca that it was every man for himself at this point.⁴³

Cabeza de Vaca had ordered his men to put down their oars. Over the next five days, hope disappeared from that fragile raft and the men’s bodies began to shut down one by one. When Cabeza de Vaca had closed his eyes the night before, he did not expect to ever open them again.

To suddenly hear the sound of waves crashing on the beach seemed almost too good to be true. At first, Cabeza de Vaca refused to let himself believe that he was hearing it. Yet others soon began to point their ears in the same direction, roused from their sleep by the same distant sound. Cabeza de Vaca asked the helmsmen if he was hearing what he thought he was hearing. The helmsman replied that, whatever it was, he was hearing it too.

Those who could picked up their oars and began to row. Someone dropped a sounding line…and found bottom! Forty-two feet, thirty-six feet, thirty, twenty-four, eighteen, twelve, six feet...Just as the first rays of light spilled over the horizon, a wave swelled up beneath the expeditionaries and launched their raft out of the water. Then, as suddenly as they had been lifted, they crashed back down onto terra firma for the first time in a week. The jolt of the raft crashing on the beach brought back to life the rest of the crew, who up until then had lain in the boat “as if dead.” One by one, they rolled out of the raft and into the shallow tide and “crawled on hands and knees,” too weak and confused to be joyful. And to be fair, there wasn’t much on the barren shoreline to give them cause for joy. Just behind the first row of dunes, however, they found freshwater, something which not all barrier islands in the Gulf of Mexico had. They drank eagerly from it, and gathered firewood to bring back to those of their companions who were too weak to crawl off the beach. They soon had a few small campfires going. Just the sight of fire cheered up these weary expeditionaries, but the warmth too did wonders for them against the cold November wind. ⁴⁴

Looking around, Cabeza de Vaca noticed some heavily trampled spots in the beachgrass around them. It looked to him like the bedding grounds of cattle, which gave him some hope that they were perhaps in a “land of Christians.” Maybe even, they had at last landed near the Rio Pánuco, near modern-day Tampico, which had become their destination once they had given up on trying to found their own settlement on the Rio de las Palmas. Of course, the trampled spots might also be the evidence of some other activity – say, foraging for roots – but even that was a sign that some help might be nearby.⁴⁵

Cabeza de Vaca called to one of handful of men from his crew who could stand up. Despite having not eaten a complete meal in weeks, young Lope de Oviedo had been reinvigorated by that morning’s excitement, and exuded an energy that stood him apart, “stronger and tougher than the rest.” Cabeza de Vaca asked him to shimmy up a tree and take a look around to see what clues the land might offer them. Lope de Oviedo obliged, and from up top the tree, he saw land stretching out for about a mile and a half, followed by more ocean. They were on an island, modern-day Galveston Island most scholars believe, or perhaps one of the adjacent islands which are constantly formed and reshaped by gulf currents and hurricanes. Lope de Oviedo also saw some trails. He came down the tree and reported them to Cabeza de Vaca, who asked him to go explore them a bit. Lope de Oviedo took off down one of the trails, and eventually ended up at a small village consisting of just a few primitive Native American huts. They definitely weren’t in a land of “Christians,” but even this humble village, Lope de Oviedo saw, had some food in it, which was more than any of the expeditionaries had back on the shoreline. Cautiously, Lope de Oviedo entered the native village. It was empty. He quickly scooped up a cooking pot, a few dried fish, and a little dog, and beat a retreat back toward the beach.⁴⁶

But not far outside the village, he heard voices. He turned, and saw three Indians with bows and arrows trailing behind him, calling to him. They were tall and tattooed, long lean and muscular, with piercings through the nipples and lips. In short, to a man like Lope de Oviedo whose last few encounters with Native Americans had been anything but positive, they were fearsome. They called to him again, signaling for him to stop. They were more curious than aggressive: the Castilian Lope de Oviedo probably looked unlike any human they had ever seen before.⁴⁷

Lope de Oviedo pretended like he didn’t hear them and raced back to his companions. 6:00 The three Indians followed close behind. As they topped the sand dune overlooking the expeditionaries’ beach head, they stopped, taking in the utterly unexpected sight of fifty starving castaways lying on their beach. The Indians of the Texas coast had, probably, never encountered a European by this point, and so harbored none of the animosity that, say, Florida natives had learned toward the men who had already started raiding their shores for slaves a decade before. These Texas Natives seem to have been struck mostly by the pitiful state of the men before them, who were apparently so completely non-threatening that the three Indians felt comfortable enough to just sit down and observe the sad man-like creatures that the Gulf had spit up onto their shore. The expeditionaries looked back at them, curious, defenseless, indifferent maybe, each group struggling to know what to make of this moment of first contact between European and Native Texas worlds.

Cabeza de Vaca tells us that his raft made landfall on Galveston Island on the 6th of November, 1528. 7:20 This doesn’t quite square with the number of days he has actually detailed in his account up to this point, it should be the 11th or 18th of November, according to Cabeza de Vaca uber-scholars Rolena Adorno and Charles Pautz. Either way, I find the identification of the date of November 6 to be impossibly precise, given that Cabeza de Vaca is writing this ten years later and it’s been months since he’s actually seen an accurate calendar. So recalling our discussion from back in Episode 2, is he signaling something to us here? Is November 6th meant to be taken more literarily than factually? Do you recall our discussion back in Episode 2 where we theorized that Cabeza de Vaca might be using some of the impossibly precise details of his account as signposts to his readers, to mark or emphasize his emotional state at any given moment. Well, I can’t help but note that November 6th is the feast day of St. Leonard, the patron saint of prisoners of War. Maybe Cabeza de Vaca is just so steeped in his religious calendar that he can’t help but misremember the first day of his captivity in the New World as having occurred on the feast day of the Saint responsible for prisoners of war. Or maybe he’s actively fudging details to try to make his account more like the “Lives of the Saints” narratives which were popular in his age, only where he is the Saint in his own account! Does this make him an unreliable narrator?⁴⁸

Offsetting this, however, is the really striking accuracy of many of the details of Cabeza de Vaca’s account, in particularly when he starts recording anthropological details of the peoples he encounters. First, I should confess that it’s really tempting for me to call the natives of Galveston Island Karankawa Indians, after the name that later Europeans would give the inhabitants of the Texas coast two hundred years later. Real historians frown on that, however, noting that Native Americans populations of these regions simply don’t demonstrate the same kind of ethnic continuity that our notions of “Tribes” or “nation-states” assumes. For one, these natives didn’t call themselves Karankawa, they called themselves “Cavoques.” All that said, later accounts of how Karankawas lived in the 1700’s do seem pretty similar to how the Cavoques in 1528 lived. Cabeza de Vaca notes that these Cavoques were ““tall and well-formed”, and that “they seemed like Giants to us.” 9:50 Later Karankawas were frequently observed to be quite tall and described as muscular and lean, with the bodies of expert swimmers that traveled frequently across the narrow bays of the Texas coast. Similar to later descriptions of Karankawas, the Cavoques were master archers, according to Cabeza de Vaca: “They have no other weapons than bows and arrows with which they are most dexterous.” The natives on this part of the Texas coast (both in the 1500’s and the 1700’s) were hunter-gatherers, who apparently occupied the barrier islands seasonally between October and February, where they foraged for fish, turtles, some kind of oysters, and roots. (It was their digging for roots that had probably made the impressions Cabeza de Vaca and Lope de Oviedo had interpreted to be cattle bedding areas.) And all of this is well-corroborated by the archaeological record, most notably by the work done at the Mitchell Ridge site on Galveston Island.

Which is to say that most people find Cabeza de Vaca reliable enough. Even if he is fudging dates a little bit, the more important details and even his explanations for quite significant events make sense. And in contrast to romantic tales of chivalry and conquest that filled Castilian literature at this time, Cabeza de Vaca’s story is anything but that. His is a story of “naufragios,” calamities, the name he gives the second edition of his narrative when published toward the end of his life. And in those calamities, Cabeza de Vaca shows us in sometimes unflattering ways how he and his men responded in order to stay alive.

Case-in-point:

The three Cavoques quickly sent word to the rest of their tribe of 49, wet, starving men (were they even men?) scattered across their beach like slithering driftwood. Frankly the three Indians alone probably could have killed all 49 of them themselves, but for some reason they didn’t. And neither did the other 100 of their tribesmen when they showed up to take in the curious sight.

Mike Caro in his famous book on poker summarizes the playing style of most beginning poker players, “Weak means strong, strong means weak,” that is, people a strong hand like its weak and a weak hand like it’s strong, and think they’re being strategic. Which in my business experience, could also be used to describe most inexperienced negotiators. It’s the simplest form of bluffing, and it’s also usually the most transparent. Incidentally, this could explain Narváez’s failures of diplomacy over the previous weeks. When his expedition showed up at a native coastal village, starving and parched, it’s not hard to imagine how an imperious Narváez overplaying his hand in each of these situations and pissed off the natives who could see with their naked eyes how desperate he really was. Indeed, it may be the best explanation we can come up with for why relations with coastal natives went so poorly for Narváez, particularly when compared with what happens next.

When confronted with 100 armed natives on Galveston Island, Cabeza de Vaca takes a very different approach than Narváez. It’s one that seems obvious in retrospect, but we probably shouldn’t underestimate how hardwired the desire to show strength in moments of weakness is, especially in envoys of the most powerful nation in the world! “We couldn’t’ defend ourselves…so [I] stepped forward and called out to them.” Cabeza de Vaca saw his situation for what it was: There was no point in trying to intimidate the natives, who clearly outnumbered them, or even in trying to organize a defense. “Amongst us all, there was no point in even thinking we could defend ourselves, because we could barely even find six among us who could stand up!” ⁴⁹

And so instead, Cabeza de Vaca openly and plainly confessed his vulnerability to the Cavoques. Of course, he couldn’t speak their language, but somehow, he got the meaning across. Maybe he clasped his hands, maybe he kneeled, maybe he cried, we don’t really know. But somehow, he invited the Cavoques down to the expeditionaries’ sad camp. This of course required some degree of courage on the part of the natives as well, but the scene was interesting enough that they decided to brave it. Cabeza de Vaca offered them gifts – that first universal diplomatic gesture – in this case, bells and beads. Then he tried to explain to them who they were and why they were in the state they were in. Quote: “We tried to reassure them…and ourselves!” Cabeza de Vaca says in a really revealing line. 14:44

In truth, the expeditionaries’ situation probably required very little explanation. They were clearly from somewhere else, they were starving, and they had no way to move on or frankly even to survive the next few days unless the Cavoques decided to help them. And note the difference it makes just by putting it in those terms: no one likes an invader with a bunch of pretension titles and proclamations; but who can refuse a man a meal when he tells you that his life is in your hands?

In short, Cabeza de Vaca was holding a weak hand; and so he played it as weak. It’s the kind of narrative moment that seems immensely credible to me: there’s nothing heroic or self-aggrandizing about it. He doesn’t present himself slashing his way through the enemy hordes like Amadis of Gaul of anything like that. He and his men as in a miserable state, he knew it, and the Cavoques knew it, so he decided to appeal to some universal sense of charity rather than trying to intimidate the natives with the trappings of his supposedly advanced civilization. And it seemed to work. The Cavoques received the beads and bells excitedly, considering themselves to have been made “very rich” by them. As evidence for this, they then gave the expeditionaries arrowheads, items of genuine worth to them and items that were scarce in this part of the state which sat 100 miles or so from any known sources of chert or flint. By means of signs, they told Cabeza de Vaca that they understood the expeditionaries’ situation, that they would return in the morning with food and provisions for the castaways. And with that, they walked away.

At that moment, Cabeza de Vaca had no way of knowing if his strategy had worked. And neither did any of the rest of the men with him. Some were openly skeptical, especially those who had been veterans of the conquest of Mexico. They fully expected the Cavoques to return the next morning and cut their beating hearts out of their chests. Even the more level-headed might have pointed out that the Cavoques on Galveston Island looked quite a lot like the natives who had shot arrows at them in the Florida swamps…and the Biloxi beaches…and from canoes along the Louisiana coast. Do I need to go on?

Of course, what choice did they have? This was Cabeza de Vaca’s real insight. Sometimes, the path of least resistance is the right one. Their fate was in God’s hands now. Or, if you prefer, in the hands of the Cavoques. The morning would tell them what the Cavoques had in store. On the next, Cabeza de Vaca.

Naked in the New World (Z:f22r-f23r)

How the natives of Galveston Island saved the Narváez expeditionaries.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode VII: Naked in the New World. I’m Brandon Seale.

Cabeza de Vaca’s men spent a fitful first night on Galveston island. They had been the crew of one of a five-raft flotilla that had drifted along the northern rim of the Gulf for weeks, without food and largely without water. The remaining four rafts were nowhere to be seen, and it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to assume they’d just been swallowed by the Gulf of Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca had all but given himself up for dead just the night before, only to be awakened by his raft crashing onto the Galveston shoreline. Most of his men were so weak by that point that they could only crawl onto the beach.

Yet it wasn’t the trauma of the voyage or the state of near starvation in which they found themselves that had kept Cabeza de Vaca’s men up that first night. No, it was that the last thing they had seen as light faded was 100 natives armed with man-length long-bows turning their backs on them, their intentions unclear. Cabeza de Vaca had assured them they were going to bring them aid, but the expeditionaries’ last few encounters with natives had given them little reason for hope. In each previous instance, their efforts at diplomacy had been rewarded by violent assaults. And so most of the men, probably, expected the same from the Cavoques – as the natives of Galveston Island called themselves.

As expected, the Cavoques did return to the beach the next morning. Yet to the surprise of the more skeptical expeditionaries, they arrived carrying dried fish and cooked cattail roots. The expeditionaries devoured it all, everything, so that the Cavoques had to return to their village and bring them seconds. When the natives came back, they brought with them their women and children, in what even the skeptical expeditionaries interpreted as a pretty definitive sign of non-hostility.

The expeditionaries repaid this kindness with what small gifts they could, mostly bells and beads which they had brought along for precisely this purpose. And sure enough, the food kept coming. This continued for several days, and the expeditionaries slowly began to recover their strength.

As welcome as the Cavoques’ charity was, however, the expeditionaries had no intention of staying any longer than they had to. They had seen generosity turn to hostility before with native hosts, and they must have sensed how their presence was taxing the resources of the small community living on the island. Plus, they wanted to get home, or at least back amongst their people. The closest Castilian settlement was on the Rio Pánuco near modern-day Tampico. They problem was they had no idea where they were in relation to that. Some thought they had already passed Pánuco; others, thought it lay still further down the coast.

Almost immediately, the expeditionaries set about repairing their humble raft. At thirty feet long by maybe fifteen feet wide, the craft was barely large enough to accommodate the 49 men in Cabeza de Vaca’s party. Simply lifting it off the beach and carrying it into the surf was an ordeal for the men in their weakened state. Once their raft was in a serviceable state, the first thing the expeditionaries did was take off their clothes and store them onboard. That way, they would at least have the comfort of dry clothes to face the merciless Gulf here in mid to late November, 1528. The naked men hopped in the water, and began to push the raft out into the waves. One by one, they hopped aboard, and then began to paddle maniacally to try to get past the breakers, but a couple hundred yards from the shore, a wave smashed into what I guess you could call the bow of their craft so violently that it knocked the oars from their hands. Still naked, shivering now from the cold, they felt themselves losing control of their raft, as it slowly rotated and presented its broadside to the next line of waves. When those waves hit, they were defenseless. The water swept clear over and under the raft, overturning it. Three men clung desperately to the sides, but ended up trapped underneath and drowned. Two others, presumably unable to swim, washed up lifeless on the shore as well. And of course, everything the crewmen weren’t wearing, was lost too: their bells and beads, of their weapons, even their clothes. Lastly, just to drive it all home, the waves smashed their capsized raft back onto the beach, dashing any hopes the men might have had of making a second attempt. The survivors staggered through the waves, back to shore, “half drowned…naked as the day we were born, having lost all that we had brought with us.”⁵⁰

The Cavoques, the native americans of the Island who had saved the lives of the expeditionaries with their generosity, had no idea that any of this was going on. They had returned to their village, where they were trying to make sense of the strange events of the last few days that had brought 49 pathetic, starving aliens to their little barrier island which could barely support them. The scarcity of resources in their lives was illustrated by the fact that their village was in fact simply a seasonal encampment, which they occupied in the winter months to harvest cattail roots and the fish and shellfish of the bay, only to abandon it in the spring before crossing over the mainland to continue their foraging there.

Given that scarcity, what was it that had motivated the Cavoques to go back to the shoreline to bring food to the strange-looking castaways? What did they hope to gain from sharing their meager resources with them? Or were they motivated by some other moral or religious sense of charity? It’s fun to invent theories here. Did they know that they were living in a moment when worlds were colliding? Had rumors of aliens like these reached them on their isolated outpost on the Texas gulf coast? Had the mystery illnesses afflicting the natives of Mexico begun to run their course this far north? Did they believe that these castaways were divine? Sent from the sky, perhaps, to test them?

The evening after the expeditionaries’ failed departure, the Cavoques returned to the shoreline to check in on the them. They were shocked at what they found. Somehow, the expeditionaries were in an even more pitiful state than when they had left them the day before. With the north wind blowing on them, the expeditionaries huddled naked and trembling around their sad fires, “closer to death than life.” And whereas the expeditionaries were always diligent about thanking God for even the smallest blessings, this time, they were all but administering themselves last rites: “There we were, begging for mercy from our Lord and forgiveness for our sins, crying many tears, each man consumed with pity not just for himself, but for all the others he saw around him as well.” ⁵¹

The Cavoques were so confused, that they turned around to go back to their village. Cabeza de Vaca went after them, and tried to explain what had happened. By means of hand signs, he began to recreate the story of what had happened, though it must have been obvious. Then, the Cavoques did something that shocked Cabeza de Vaca. Quote: “The Indians, seeing the disaster that had visited us and the state we were in from so much misfortune and misery, they sat down amongst us. And with great sadness and pain from seeing our unlucky selves, they began to cry intensely and so loudly that they could be heard from far away. This lasted for more than half and hour…” This really puzzled Cabeza de Vaca, as well as the rest of his colleagues. If they had found forty someodd interlopers back on their land in Castile, it’s doubtful they would have been nearly so generous, or for that matter, sympathetic. The Cavoques open expression of emotion was incredibly disarming, however, which maybe helps explain why ritual weeping was such an established part of Cavoque culture, as Cabeza de Vaca would come to learn. It definitely gave the expeditionaries an appreciation for the natives’ charity, and also new perspective on their own miserable state.⁵²

Upon first being discovered by the Cavoques in the previous episode, Cabeza de Vaca had been presented with a choice: feign strength and by doing so hope that he might scare the natives into helping him, or confess his vulnerability and appeal to some shared sense of human decency. He went with vulnerability, and it worked. Now, as the Cavoques wept all around him, he looked down at himself, and at his fellow expeditionaries, and noticed something. They were naked, quote “naked as they had been born,” and “naked as they were,” referring to the Cavoques. Their nakedness, their vulnerability was something they shared with the natives, who otherwise came from such a different universe of experience that they might as well have been a different species. Yet this concept, this word, “naked” “desnudo” o “a cueros” will appear more than a dozen times in Cabeza de Vaca’s account. It’s a reminder that on this journey he has none of the conquistador’s traditional tools, and yet also that he made himself like the men in the New World around him. Cabeza de vaca’s “nakedness” will become an ongoing metaphor for both his vulnerability and for his openness to new experience.

In this instance, Cabeza de Vaca once again embraced his vulnerability and handed himself over entirely to the Cavoque’s mercy. He asked them to take him and his men back to their village. To Cabeza de Vaca’s delight, they accepted, and with the good news he tried to rally his men up on to their feet to make the mile or so march to the other side of the Island. Despite the Cavoques unconditional generosity up to this point, some of the expeditionaries remained skeptical, however. Recall that some were veterans of the conquest of Mexico. They remembered the screams of their comrades captured in battle and sacrificed alive to the Aztecs’ gods. And when they saw the Cavoques’ “great pleasure” at hearing Cabeza de Vaca’s request, they read it in the worst possible way, as confirmation of their suspicions all along that the Cavoques wanted only to fatten them up enough for some kind of ritual sacrifice. In the end, five of the men said they wouldn’t go along, that they preferred to take their chances alone on the beach.

Most of the surviving forty or so men, however, were more hungry than skeptical, and so went along with Cabeza de Vaca’s plan. As Cabeza de Vaca puts it, “Otro remedio no habia” – there was no other option.⁵³

Instead of immediately taking the expeditionaries back to their village, the Cavoques began to run around collecting firewood. Lots of it. They spent a couple of hours doing this, leaving the expeditionaries plenty of time to wonder what exactly the natives needed so much firewood for.

As dusk began to fall, however, the thirty Cavoques returned, accompanied by the faint smell of smoke in the air. They came over to where the expeditionaries lay, too weak to walk and began to pick them up, one by and one. And then, they began to carry them through the cold night on their backs. “They never even let our feet touch the ground,” Cabeza de Vaca says. As they came over the first row of dunes, the expeditionaries saw what the Cavoques had done with all the firewood. They had lit bonfires all along the way to their village, stopover points where they could set down their skinny, shivering cargo and let them warm up again before going one. And in their village, the amenities only got better. The Cavoques had prepared for their guests a large hut, warmed by many fires, right in the center of the other lodges. It was just all too much, too much for these expeditionaries who had seen only the worst of human nature (from themselves and from their opponents) over the last few months. Why would these Indians be going to such trouble to take care of them? And then, a wild Pachanga started up, and it scared the daylights out of the expeditionaries. Probably more than one wished he had stayed back on the beach with the five skeptics: “An hour after we arrived the Cavoques started to dance, and had a great party that lasted all night, though for us there was no party nor sleep, as we expected them to sacrifice us.” A European observer in the 1700’s gives a more lengthy description of a south Texas mitote, as later natives would call these ceremonies: “They play a tambourine that is made of a tortoise shell, or of a half gourd, or with a French pot, and a whistle of reeds and an avacasele, for the sad ones they play certain instruments they call the caymán. This is very harsh and melancholy, and to the discordant notes they add sad and horrible cries, accompanied by gestures, grimaces and extraordinary contortions and movements of the body, jumping and leaping in a circle. For this mitote they light a fire, a big bon-fire and dance around it, circling around the fire without ceasing day or night… In these dances, the Indians seem like demons because of the gestures that they make. They adorn themselves with vermillion, and on some occasions with black, the eyes arched and reddened.”⁵⁴

And yet, even if the Cavoques were dancing around like “demons,” they had no intention of sacrificing their new guests. Their mitote was apparently little more than a celebration of the incredible events that had brought these aliens from another world to their shores. It had been a memorable few days, for everyone involved, New Worlder and Old. Dawn brought them only more charity on the part of the Cavoques, more fish and roots for them to eat: “they gave us such nice treatment that we were reassured and lost our fear of being sacrificed.” It was a high point for the expeditionaries after a dark several months. But it wouldn’t last. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.⁵⁵

Castaways (Z:f23r-f26r)

How the Narváez expeditionaries wore out their welcome on Galveston Island.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode VIII: Castaways. I’m Brandon Seale.

By the time they reached Galveston Island in November of 1528, the surviving members of the Pánfilo de Narváez expedition no longer harbored any pretensions to being conquistadors. Even the calling them “expeditionaries” seems a bit generous, given that they didn’t even know where they were or where they were trying to go. The Narváez expeditionaries were, most properly speaking, mere castaways at this point, shipwreck survivors barely holding onto life on a Gulf coast barrier island near modern day Galveston, Texas. Indeed, Cabeza de Vaca would title the second edition of his account “Naufragios” a term that we can translate literally as “shipwrecks” but that more broadly also means “calamities” or “misfortune.” And that is what Cabeza de Vaca’s fellow castaways had mostly suffered since they had landed in North America.

After having traipsed through the Florida pensinsula and lost communication with their ships, they had been forced to venture back into the Gulf of Mexico on five dubious watercraft of their own construction. After a few weeks of drifting west along the northern Gulf rim, the Mississippi river scattered the flotilla and eventually tossed Cabeza de Vaca’s raft onto Galveston Island (or perhaps nearby Follett island, but we’ll stick with Galveston for convenience).

On Galveston Island, they had been discovered by 100 or so natives, Cavoques, they called themselves, who were so moved by the Old Worlders’ pitiful condition that they actually cried when they saw them. They had mercy on them and actually physically carried the exhausted expeditionaries on their backs to their village on the other side of the island where they feted the forty or so survivors with food, warmth, and a blowout party. All but five of the expeditionaries, that is. Five of them were convinced the Cavoques’ plan was to sacrifice them, and so had stayed on the beach alone.

None of the expeditionaries were sacrificed, however. In addition to food and shelter, expeditionaries who had gone to the Cavoque village were given another gift. Cabeza de Vaca noticed one of the villagers wearing some sort of European-made trinket around his neck. He and his men had lost everything when their raft had overturned in the shallow surf, including all their clothes even, which meant that the trinket couldn’t have come from his naked and impoverished crew. So he asked the native villager, by signs, where he had gotten it from. The Cavoque responded, also by signs, that there were on the Island “other men like us.”⁵⁶

Shocked, Cabeza de Vaca immediately dispatched two of his men to go find out who the other “men like us” on Galveston Island were. Soon enough, they ran into 48 or so of their fellow expeditionaries, who similarly had come out looking for Cabeza de Vaca. This band of castaways seemed to be in slightly better shape than Cabeza de Vaca’s crew, if for no other reason than that they still had their clothes on. Cabeza de Vaca’s scouts brought them back into the Cavoque camp, where the two groups of expeditionaries were joyfully reunited.

And it wasn’t just any other group of expeditionaries. It was the raft commanded by Captains Andres Dorantes and Alonso Castillo. Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, and Castillo had worked well together in the past: Cabeza de Vaca and Castillo had twice co-commanded scouting expeditions back in Florida, with Dorantes along for one of those as well; Cabeza de Vaca and Dorantes seem to have organized a counterattack and won the day against a group of natives that attacked them near Biloxi; and Dorantes and Castillo had apparently worked well enough together to be tasked with co-commanding the raft they had just shipwrecked five miles down the shoreline from Cabeza de Vaca’s.

Perhaps it’s no surprise the three men got along. They came from comparatively similar backgrounds. The youngest and highest-born of the three was Alonso del Castillo Maldonado. Born in the town of Salamanca – the original college town – he was the son of a caballero doctor. He was ambitious, and so had followed in the steps of his brother and cousin who had come to the New World to fill important posts in the Castilian bureucracy. Castillo had sold off part of his estate to buy a captainship in Narváez’s expedition, though he had evidently proven his abilities as an officer since then, even if he remained relatively young, in his twenties perhaps.⁵⁷

Andrés Dorantes de Carranza was the lowest-born of the three, coming from the hidalgo class, to which Cabeza de Vaca is also sometimes assigned, though it seems that he was actually a caballero, like Castillo. He was a native of Béjar, and like Cabeza de Vaca had spent the previous decade on the battlefield, helping put down the comunero revolt as well back in Castile. He too wasn’t without resources, owing his captaincy to a recommendation by a local duke to Narváez. He had the resume on his own though, to be sure, and had already proven his mettle at least once on this expedition back on the shores of Biloxi back in Episode 5.⁵⁸

With Dorantes was a tall, bearded, Arabic-speaking black African named, Estevan. Estevan has become a favorite of modern students of Cabeza de Vaca’s story, and with good reason. He was young at the time of the expedition, we assume, partly because of what we will see his body endure and partly because almost every time he appears in Cabeza de Vaca’s account, it is as Estevanico, Little Estevan. Or they may have called him by the diminutive because he was a slave, Dorantes’s slave to be precise. All that we really know about Estevan’s background is that he was from a town on the Moroccan coast, Azemmour, and had been purchased by Dorantes in the slave markets of Seville. That he spoke arabic suggests that he had perhaps been raised a Muslim, but his Christian name (Estevan) and that fact that he had been permitted to accompany Dorantes to the New World at all suggest that he had been baptized at some point as a Christian. This was Estevan’s third continent to experience slavery on, and here as elsewhere, he proved himself remarkably adaptable. He seemed to have an aptitude for languages and for navigating the different customs of different peoples. A Viceroy of New Spain would later describe him as a “persona de razón,” which sounds patronizing to us now but that I prefer to read as a really remarkable compliment about a really remarkable person.⁵⁹

And so, reunited here on Galveston Island Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, Estevan, and the other eighty or so surviving expeditionaries wasted no time coming up with a plan. Unphased by their own failed relaunch of Cabeza de Vaca’s raft the previous day – an effort which had left five men dead – the group immediately set about trying to repair Dorantes’ and Castillo’s raft. It proved to be unsalvageable as well, however, so they developed a Plan B. They would just walk down the coast to Pánuco in modern-day Tamaulipas. There was a problem with this plan though. Nevermind that they still really didn’t know how to live off of this land, the bigger program was that most of the expeditionaries couldn’t swim, which is a pretty big problem when it comes to crossing the bays and rivers that criss-cross the Texas coastline.

Yet these were go-ahead men, who believed that almost anything was possible, and they were anxious to do something. The best they could do for now, they decided, was to send their four most able-bodied swimmers down the coast to bring back help for the rest. These select four were promptly sent on their way, while the rest settled into what they knew would be a lengthy stay on Galveston Island.

Over the subsequent weeks, the castaways began to grown more comfortable in the villages of their Cavoque and “Han” hosts. The Han were the name of the tribe that “held” Dorantes and Castillo’s men, relatives of the Cavoque who held Cabeza de Vaca’s.

Cabeza de Vaca tells us that the natives of Galveston Island generally went about naked; only the women occasionally covered their privates with a kind of moss, and the younger girls sometimes wore deerskins. But they weren’t very prolific hunters, which meant that they only acquired such hides “only by chance,” according to Cabeza de Vaca. They were mostly foragers, who moved with the seasons, collecting blackberries and oysters on the mainland during the spring months, capturing snakes, lizards and rodents to eat during the summer months, and harvesting fish and roots off of Galveston Island during the lean winter months, and often enduring long stretches of hunger when the foraging went poorly. Which made their generosity to the now eighty or so aliens in their midst during that December of 1528 all the more remarkable.

Their social structure was pretty typical for what Cabeza de Vaca would find in most of Native Texas. “There is no chief among them. All who have the same lineage live together,” which is to say that organization was determined by a combination of heredity and mutual convenience. According to Cabeza de Vaca, they viewed the elderly as somewhat of a nuisance, as people who “have passed their time and they only take up space and deprive their children of resources.” The men did the hunting, what little of it they could, and would bring their kills back to their wives to clean. The women did almost all the work in Cavoque and Han society actually, working from before sun-up to after sundown to forage for roots, scrape hides, and tend the ovens. The children, by contrast, they loved dearly. According to Cabeza de Vaca, “More than any other people in the world, these people love their children…” The Mitchell Ridge archaeological site on Galveston island demonstrates more quantifiably how the natives of the Texas coast valued the lives of men, children, and women, respectively: male burials are accompanied by on average 4.38 “grave goods”; youths, regardless of sex, by 3.3 “grave goods”; and women, just 1.0 grave good per person. ⁶⁰

Medicine men or shamans held a sort of unique status apart from the traditional structure of the tribe. They were exempt them from most work and allowed to take multiple wives. They were typically burned at their deaths instead of buried. Cabeza de Vaca also noted that the prevailing custom for a patient healed by a shaman was to give him everything that the person owned. “Ownership” was a loose concept however. In truth, property was essentially owned in common: “They are very liberal toward each other with what they have.”

Yet as November turned to December and December to January in what was apparently a remarkably cold year, Galveston island struggled to support the burden of the eighty or so additional mouths that had landed on her shores. The population of the island may have been nearly doubled by the arrival of the castaways, and soon the roots and fish began to give out. Worse, the castaways were nearly useless. They didn’t know how to grub roots or even catch fish, so they were more a burden than a blessing to the small tribe.

Of course, the expeditionaries who had chosen to go live with the natives in their village fared far better than the five who had remained on the beach. The five were so obstinate in their refusal to rejoin their companions in the village and so unable to forage for themselves, that they began to just die of starvation. They “arrived at such extremes that they ate each other one after the other until there was only one left, who because he was alone, had no one to eat him.” The Cavoques seem to have been the first to discover the cannibal-party going on the beach…and they were horrified! What kind of sick people would do this? Especially when their comrades were all being fed and cared for in the village nearby! The natives’ horror is particularly ironic given that later Europeans would frequently accuse native dwellers of the Texas Coast with cannibalism. If true, it may be that they had learned it from these five Castillians. Either way, the incident radically changed the perception that the Cavoques had of their guests. Ironically, it had been the five beach-dwelling expeditionaries’ mistrust of the natives that led to those same natives’ losing trust in the expeditionaries at-large.⁶¹

To add to the natives’ horror, soon, a mysterious stomach illness began to ravage the Island. Native Americans, famously, lacked immunities to many of the Old World diseases that the castaways carried with them, though in this case, the disease seemed to be equally devastating to natives and castaways alike: half of the natives’ Indian population was soon dead and sixty-five of the eighty expeditionaries joined them. This of course aggravated the resource-shortage on the island even further, and one particular custom of the Cavoques then made things exponentially worse. The traditional mourning period amongst the Cavoques when one of their loved ones died was three months or more. During that time, the bereaved did no work, and were supposed to be provided for by the rest of the tribe. Yet since there was no family unaffected by this epidemic, there was no one left to work.⁶²

Stepping out of the narrative for a moment, we today actually have some pretty unique perspective now on the second-order effects of pandemics. What I mean is that obviously there are deaths, but in some way, death is simple and straightforward. It is the larger effects on society and on the ability of the afflicted community to gather resources that you really don’t appreciate until you’ve lived through a pandemic. Of course, perspective is important here: with the great Columbian exchange of diseases in the New World, we’re not talking about a 2% mortality rate, we’re talking about a 50 or 75% mortality rate; that much is unfathomable for us. But in either case, it shuts down an economy. And when your economy is based on subsistence foraging, a few days of not working is devastating! Then, there are the emotional effects of separation, something I never would have even thought about ! One of the most tragic human aspects of a pandemic is that we have to deny ourselves even the comfort of each other’s company! Especially in these small native bands, typically numbering a hundred or so total people, being cut off from this community would be a fate worse than death for some.

And naturally, when this kind of apocalyptic tragedy visits a society, the blame game follows soon thereafter. And it didn’t take long for the Cavoques to make the connection between the strangers in their midst and the disease sweeping through their tribe. They concluded - perhaps correctly! - that the expeditionaries were the ones causing the illness and death. And so, they came to a logical conclusion to fix the problem: “They agreed among themselves to kill those of us who remained,” about 15 castaways, which included Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, Estevan, and Lope de Oviedo, that heartiest member of Cabeza de vaca’s crew.⁶³

Cabeza de Vaca got wind of this plot from the Indian who had been “keeping him” – and already you can see in that language a sort of shift in the expeditionaries’ status from guests to dependents of the Cavoques. Cabeza de Vaca’s “keeper” (we won’t say master, yet) – was the one who most ardently defended the expeditionaries, pointing out the disease was actually taking an even greater toll on the castaways. If they had power over such a disease, they wouldn’t have allowed eighty percent of their own people to die from it.

Cabeza de Vaca at a few points in his narrative refers to Native Americans as “gente sin razon,” “men without reason.” Quote: “to see these men, so without reason, so crude and so brutish, feeling such pain on our behalf, only made me and the others of my company lament the more deeply our own situation.” Read a certain away, this seems like a pretty obnoxious sentiment on Cabeza de Vaca’s part, and it really rubs modern readers the wrong way: here’s the Eurocentric ass insulting these natives who are expressing what ought to be a very universal human emotion and a very real proof that they can “reason” out what is going on and feel empathy for it.⁶⁴

What I want to posit here is that Cabeza de Vaca isn’t actually using “men of reason” pejoratively one way or another here. WE modern readers think reason is the end-all be-all, so we naturally hear it as an insult to say that someone else doesn’t have it. But in some way, that’s the ultimate form of Eurocentrism, to judge everyone’s intellectual abilities by how we in particularly think about things, and I don’t think that’s how Cabeza de Vaca is using it. He definitely doesn’t believe that Native Americans are incapable of thinking. Right after he uses the phrase, in fact, he shows the Cavoques debating amongst themselves, “reasoning through” as it were the question of whether the expeditionaries were to blame or not for the stomach disease running rampant through their camp.⁶⁵

The Cavoques “reason” differently, however. To determine whether they should kill the expeditionaries or not, they decide to put them to their own kind of test. They tell the expeditionaries to go cure the disease which they were pretty sure they had caused. Which isn’t necessarily an irrational thought. You break it, you buy it. Or maybe since the expeditionaries weren’t doing any real work anyway, kind of like their medicine men, they figured they might as well see if they could at least heal like medicine men as well. The challenge remained for them: go lay hands on the sick and blow on them or rub rocks on them or whatever and fix this damage you have caused. This all struck the expeditinoaries as ridiculous: “We laughed at this, saying that it must be a joke and that we didn’t know how to heal people” saying that they didn’t have power and that frankly that’s not how people got cured anyway, referring to the techniques of the Cavoques medicine men. In response, a Cavoque threw a bit of European-style reasoning right back at Cabeza de Vaca: “An Indian told me that I didn’t know what I was saying when I told him that the things he knew were wrong, because the stones and other things that grow in the field have their own medicine, and that he, simply by passing a hot stone over the stomach of a sick person, could ease their pain and cure them, and that we as men certainly had more medicine and more power than these stones.” Are you saying you are less capable than a rock, Cabeza de Vaca? ⁶⁶

What I love about this is that right after Cabeza de Vaca describes the natives as men without reason, a Cavoque turns it around on him and begins questioning Cabeza de Vaca’s “reason”! And Cabeza de Vaca took it to heart; it’s why, presumably, he included it in his narrative. It reminded him of his need to remain open to new things to survive in this new world. Maybe he was always wired this way, or maybe just his state of extreme nakedness and vulnerability made him so, but from this point forward he will certainly act like he believes that every native he meets can teach him something, no matter how primitive they seem or no matter how different the world from which they come.

And by the way, just to hit this point on the nose, there’s a direct analog for us in the present as well. How different is it to believe that you can’t learn anything from a bunch of backward hunter-gatherer than it is to believe we can’t learn something from historical figures because the great moral causes of their day aren’t the same as the great moral causes of ours? In this, in fact, it seems the ancients are probably ahead of us. One of Cabeza de Vaca’s contemporaries, who actually wrote his own version of his account based on interviews with others involved, said it well: “As time little by little teaches and leads us to understand, what we knew or understood in one way yesterday, we will come to know differently tomorrow.”⁶⁷

And so once again, Cabeza de Vaca embraced his nakedness and decided to try his hand as a native American medicine man. First, he asked the Cavoques to teach him what their medicine men did to heal. They told him how they passed their hands over the patients body, and blew on the aching areas softly. They showed him how to make a few cuts on the skin near where the pain was located, and then to suck the pain out through the incisions. Last, they taught him to cauterize the wound with fire, something that Cabeza de Vaca found novel and effective.

Cabeza de Vaca imitated these techniques as best he could, but also added a touch of his own. And interestingly, it isn’t some piece of “Reason” from that he pulls out of his quiver here; it is Faith: “The manner in which we cured was to make the sign of the cross and blow on the patient, and to pray an our Father and an Ave Maria, and to beseech as best we could to our Lord God that he give him health and inspire our hosts to treat us well.”⁶⁸

To the astonishment of all, it worked! “And our Lord God in his mercy willed that all those for whom we had prayed and made the sign of the cross over told the others that they were now healthy and well.” The illness sweeping through the Cavoque village seemed to abate. The surviving castaways – maybe just fifteen or so by now – were celebrated for their deeds and given extra food and hides. For a few days. But once again the general scarcity of resources and now of people meant that both Cavoques and expeditionaries were soon starving again.⁶⁹

It’s a bit puzzling to some why Cabeza de Vaca and his men didn’t continue their faith-healing, given how amply it was rewarded. Because of this, some actually think Cabeza de Vaca is projecting this episode back anachronistically, that their faith-healing didn’t start in earnest until later on. But there’s another explanation too: the expeditionaries took their faith-healing seriously. It was high-stakes. Think about the downside! What would happen if it turned out they couldn’t heal someone? What value would their lives have then?

At the end of March of 1529, the decimated Cavoque and Han tribes announced their intention to cross back over to the Texas mainland, a part of their normal seasonal migrations. The surviving fifteen expeditionaries were now faced with a decision, however. They knew they were pretty useless hands amongst these tribes, and even moreso in the new terrain of the mainland where they would have to start from scratch in learning how to survive. More than likely, they would be reduced to hauling firewood on their sunburned backs or digging for roots until their fingers bled, then hanging around the edges of the camp like dogs in hope of some scraps.⁷⁰

And so the survivors resolved to leave, to make their way toward the New Spanish settlement on the Pánuco River near modern-day Tampico, wherever that might be.

All but three of them, that is. Cabeza de Vaca, Lope de Oviedo, and the expedition’s notary were so sick they were barely conscious. They physicians, it seems, were unable to heal themselves. “If there was anything left that could have given me hope, that illness was enough to take it from me,” Cabeza de Vaca confessed. He was on death’s door, and he knew it, and in no condition to travel the many miles that lay between them and the Río Pánuco, wherever that might be. Or maybe they had just given up: “It seemed to me impossible at times to continue on, though I would find myself in much greater hunger and necessity later on.” Which kind of seems to be saying that if he had known what still awaited him, he might not have bothered to hold on. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca. ⁷¹

Out of Slavery (Z:f26r-f28r)

How Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca became a merchant and explored the Texas coast.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca: Episode IX: Out of Slavery. I’m Brandon Seale.

It had been almost one year since twelve of Cabeza de Vaca’s fellow expeditionaries had left him behind on Galveston Island, but he harbored no grudge toward them. How could he? They’d made every effort to try to bring him along, but in the sad state he was in at the time, they couldn’t even be sure he was coherent enough to hear their words.

After his companions had left him, sometime in the Spring of 1529, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca actually managed to recover from his illness. He was sustained, perhaps, by his sense of obligation toward the two other expeditionaries who had also been too sick to travel with the others. One of the two - the expedition’s notary - died in the coming months, leaving only that heartiest crew-member from Cabeza de Vaca’s ill-fated raft: Lope de Oviedo. Yet he was not the man he once was. The experience of his first year on Galveston Island had taken a toll on him.

This is because as soon as the novelty of the Narváez expeditionaries had worn off on their native hosts, the Cavoques, so too had their welcome. A big part of this had to do with the fact that their arrival coincided with the outbreak of some terrible, unidentifiable disease that killed 80 or 90% of their number and almost half of their native hosts as well. Especially in the moment we are currently living through, these numbers have new, poignant significance to us. We rightly react with horror at the idea of a disease that could kill 1 or 2% of our population. But 50%? Or 80%? We can’t even imagine how we’d react to that. Some of the natives openly blamed the expeditionaries for the disease, probably correctly, and it is a testament to their generosity that they didn’t just kill off the strangers in their midst. But they didn’t, and even after most of the surviving expeditionaries had gone, Cabeza de Vaca and Lope de Oviedo were allowed to remain.

But because of their unfamiliarity with the environment, Cabeza de Vaca and Lope de Oviedo proved themselves to be pretty useless by the standards of Texas native men in the sixteenth century. Their hosts set them to work doing menial tasks, like carrying firewood, fetching water, and digging for roots until their fingers bled, traditionally “women’s work” so to speak in these societies. As the expeditionaries struggled to perform even these tasks well, their treatment worsened. Food was withheld. And the physical abuse began. Slowly but surely, Cabeza de Vaca and Lope de Oviedo found themselves reduced from guests, to unwanted visitors, to – in their view – slaves.

Cabeza de Vaca skips over this dark year in the course of a single paragraph. But one of the things we’ve learned about reading Cabeza de Vaca is that the less he says about something, the more difficult it really was for him. In fact, so rare are his confessions of despair in his narrative, that I can count them off for here on one hand; first, when it became clear that their Florida expedition had failed at that now the horsemen in their midst were plotting to abandon the rest of the men; second, on the rafts in the Gulf of Mexico when they had been without water for days and “there was not a one of us who did not expect to die at any minute; third, when the Gulf had violently thrown them back onto Galveston Island, naked, trembling, and without any hope or means of escape; and then fourth, at the beginning of this year, when he had realized that he was too weak to go on toward Pánuco with his comrades, and would likely die here on Galveston Island. In each instance, he only refers to his despair elliptically, with language like “I will refrain from belaboring this point,” or “I pass over this episode quickly...” or “any one of you can imagine what happened” This is a such a well-established pattern that it suggests to me that it is a coping strategy of sorts, maybe even a technique Cabeza de Vaca had learned for dealing with misfortune.⁷²

By contrast, whatever techniques his comrade, Lope de Oviedo, used to deal with his hardship were not working nearly so well. Lope de Oviedo – at one time the “strongest and heartiest,” recall – began to withdraw in on himself. Oviedo had been one of the few who could even stand when their raft beached itself on Galveston Island. He had willingly and energetically climbed a tree and gone out to explore the island, when the rest of the crew could only crawl. Now, despite the ongoing abuse of his keepers, he refused to entertain leaving the island. It became clear to Cabeza de Vaca, it wasn’t illness that was holding him back from leaving Galveston; it was his own fear of what might happen to them if he did. Again, I’m not qualified to use the clinical terms, but it seems like he’s suffering some kind of PTSD. The certainty of his suffering on Galveston Island was less frightening to him than the uncertainty of whatever lay beyond.

Finally, one day, Cabeza de Vaca couldn’t take it anymore: “I could no longer endure the life that I had.” Sometime in the summer perhaps of 1530, Cabeza de Vaca decided to look for something better. He didn’t want to leave Lope de Oviedo entirely behind, so he simply crossed over to live amongst the Indians “in the woods on the mainland,” close by where he could still keep tabs on his companion. But this is also the first clue we have of a pronounced distinction between coastal Indians and inland Indians in this part of the world. In short, the Indians that lived inland seemed to be much more agreeable. You actually see this reflected in much of New Spain, where the patterns of Spanish settlement favored the central highlands over the more savage coasts. It was certainly a difference that the inland versus coastal Indians themselves observed, as they were in a state of “continual warfare,” according to Cabeza de Vaca. So everpresent was this conflict that some natives went so far as to light false campfires outside their camps to draw away any would-be-attackers or to sleep in trenches dug around their campsite rather than in their actual lodges in case their houses were ambushed in the night. ⁷³

Cabeza de Vaca identified a market opportunity for himself in this state of affairs. Because of the constant conflict, trade was all but nonexistent between the inland and the coastal tribes. Any merchant from one tribe daring to venture into the other’s territory – even with an innocent, commercial intent – would’ve been killed on the spot. But as any inland or coastal Indian could see, Cabeza de Vaca was not from the mainland or the coast. He was some kind of curious, non-threatening other. Incidentally, this kind of merchant work going between tribes, just like the manual labor he had been assigned in the Cavoque camp, was traditionally women’s work in these societies as well. In this world of war, peace in native American communities often came in the form of a woman, which is the title of a great book by Juliana Barr about exactly this. And Cabeza de Vaca seemed to be uniquely able and uniquely willing to assume this traditionally women’s role – after all, he was already doing “women’s work” back on Galveston Island, and nothing in his cultural tradition stigmatized making a profit off of other people’s petty antagonisms. ⁷⁴

And there’s at least two clues in his account that he may have had a competitive advantage in dealing with the natives. The first clue for this comes as Cabeza de Vaca is admiring how the natives “judge the seasons by the ripening of fruit, by the time that fish die, and by the appearance of the stars, and in all of this they are very clever and expert,” but none of the natives, he continues, “know how to reckon the seasons by either sun or moon, nor do they count by months and years.” The second clue is an instance later on when some natives refuse to scrape deer hides, out of fear they will starve if they don’t use that time to forage. Cabeza de Vaca is able to calculate that the time taken to harvest the little scrapings of meat on the hide will yield far more calories per hour than panicked foraging, and so willingly takes on the task, earning himself a few hides in the trade as well. All of which is to say the Cabeza de Vaca may have been working with a more developed mathematics than the people amongst whom he was trading.

Whatever his advantages, whatever his motivations, according to Cabeza de Vaca, “this occupation was good to me, because as long as I was in it, I was free to go where I wished and I wasn’t obliged to do anything and I wasn’t a slave, and wherever I went they treated me well and gave me good food to eat.” He traveled as far as forty to fifty leagues inland, he claims, 120 to 150 miles call it, carrying “snail shells with which they cut a kind of bean which they use for cures and in their religious festivals.” Back to the coast, he brought “hides and red ocher with which they paint and dye their face and hair, flint for arrowheads, glue and hard canes with which to make arrows; and tassels made of deer hair, which they also paint and dye red.” And again, almost all of these goods are found at the Mitchell Ridge archaeological site on Galveston Island, confirming that this kind of trade existed at the time. ⁷⁵

Now, when I started researching this story, my plan was to show Cabeza de Vaca meeting with the proto Karankawas, Hasinais, Tonkawas, Coahuiltecans, Apache, and Jumanos, all the Texas Indian tribes that we recognize from the accounts of Europeans arriving in Texas in the 17 and 1800’s. But as I alluded to in the previous episode, scholars frown on this approach as “discredited and anachronistic.” This is because three forces were at play between the 1500’s and 1700’s that were radically reconfiguring the map of Native Texas.⁷⁶

The first and perhaps most disruptive factor was disease. Soon after Cabeza de Vaca’s arrival – indeed, the sickness that decimated the Cavoques suggests it may have even been because of it! – Old World diseases began to sweep through the native tribes of Texas and Northern Mexico. According to archaeologist Carolyn Boyd, the archaeological record suggests that Cabeza de Vaca may have stumbled into Texas at precisely the moment of its greatest native population. Yet This same land that Cabeza de Vaca can’t travel more than a day or two in without running into a Native American village would be known to later Spaniards just 150 years later as the “despoblado” – the unpopulated region. And of course, the decimations of the native populations who made first contact with Europeans opened up their lands to invasion by other native tribes later on, like the Apache and Comanches, further erasing the cultural legacies of the tribes present in 1530.⁷⁷

Second, the author of one of my favorite works on Cabeza de Vaca, Professor Andres Resendez, has written an entire book arguing that the enslavement of Native Americans by Europeans may have played an even greater role than disease in decimating native populations. I haven’t read the book but trust that its premise is well-supported, if for no other reason than that so much of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative will later show us the devastating effects of the enslavement of native Americans on those communities in Mexico.

Lastly, what makes it difficult to tie the Texas natives of 1530 to the better-documented tribes of the 1730’s was that most of them didn’t seem to think of themselves as belonging to the kinds of sweeping, broad ethnic categories that Europeans were fond of. Europeans would continue to make this mistake well into the nineteenth century, insistently negotiating treaties with one band of natives that frustratingly had no impact on the behavior of other bands that spoke the same language. The scattered natives of Texas were, more often than not, loosely related peoples speaking broadly similar languages and living according to similar lifestyles.

But indulge me for a second here at least and let me try to shoehorn in a little discussion about the Hasinay Caddo Indians amongst whom the first East Texas Spanish missions would be planted two hundred years later. Because they were a quite advanced society, if we can use that term, and if Cabeza de Vaca had traveled fifty leagues north from Galveston Island, he very likely would have met them. They actually constituted the western arm of the same Mississipian cultural group whose southeastern arms reached into the parts of Florida the Narváez expeditionaries had encountered in Apalache. By 1530, the Hasinay’s sedentary, agricultural society was in a bit of decline, but they still lived amongst their ancestors’ massive mounds and beehive-shaped lodges with mud-plastered walls. They were among the best dressed of the Texas tribes at the time, covering themselves in hides died black and decorated with beads, shells, and bones, or clothing woven of nettles and mulberry bark. They wore their hair shaved or plucked along the sides, with long mohawks sometimes tied up in man-buns and decorated with feathers. The men’s bodies would have been tattooed with animals while their faces would have been marked by sharp lines from the forehead down to the nose and the tip of the chin; the women’s bodies would have been tattooed with swirling floral and leaf designs, while their faces too would have been marked with sharp lines running vertically down their faces.⁷⁸

And they practiced agriculture. They raised corn, for which reason (among others), later Franciscans placed high hopes on them as the group of Texas natives most amenable to conversion and assimilation into the Spanish mold.

So why doesn’t the consummate anthropologist Cabeza de Vaca tell us anything about such an impressive nearby civilization? It’s clear to me that he would have mentioned them if he’d met them, given how obsessed the expeditionaries had been and would be later on with finding corn-raising societies. Well, some have argued because of this omission that maybe he never was a merchant at all. One contemporary author has theorized that it may have been Andrés Dorantes or even Esteban, and not Cabeza de Vaca who was the merchant all along. That Cabeza de Vaca simply appropriated their stories to make his more interesting. The novelist Laila Lalami in her fictional retelling of Cabeza de Vaca’s journey, “The Moor’s Account,” theorizes that Cabeza deVaca may have spent these mysterious years when he claims he was a “merchant” married to a native woman and living fully as an Indian, something he never could have never published in a Spanish Inquisition-controlled printing press.

There is an easier explanation, however. Cabeza de Vaca just probably never traveled very far inland, much less to the north where the Hasinai lived. Indeed, the literal translation of the passage makes it sound like most of his travel was along the coast itself, where he could play the inland/coastal tribe arbitrage that he had sort of become an expert in: “With my dealings and my wares, I went deep inland as far as I pleased, and along the coast forty or fifty leagues.” Me alargaba. Plus, traveling north, toward the Hasinai, would have been in the demonstrably wrong direction from where he thought he needed to go: down the coast, and toward the Río Pánuco. Hugging the coast, by contrast, helped him to, “find out the best way to move forward.”

And during this time, there was something else tying him back to his home base: Lope de Oviedo. He felt a sense of duty toward Oviedo, if not a sense of comradeship or even affection. Every winter, Cabeza de Vaca stopped his trading and traveled back to the Island of Misfortune, where Lope de Oviedo still lived. Every year he would give him the same speech, trying to motivate him to flee with him. He told Oviedo that thanks to his travels, he was much more confident now in his ability to navigate this continent. And in a twist on the old Castilian notion of glory that the Narváez expeditionaries had originally sought, Cabeza de Vaca’s trading had purchased for him a reputation of sorts, a reputation that preceded him and helped protect him. Celebrity has its practical benefits, beyond just the gratification of ego! And his trading had brought Cabeza de Vaca new intelligence about the lands that lie ahead. Maybe he had heard rumors of others like them enslaved by tribes up ahead. Or rumors of the that at least one of the four strong-swimmers they had dispatched back in November of 1528 was alive? Or that more than one of the twelve castaways who had left the previous spring were still out there?⁷⁹

And yet Lope de Oviedo said no. Time and again, he said no, there was always some excuse. Not this year, not yet, it’s not a good time. Yet Cabeza de Vaca was, if nothing else, persistent. In the spring of 1532, he returned to the Island of Misfortune, resolved to try one last time to convince or inspire his fellow expeditionary to “ir Adelante” to move forward. Or to leave on his own without him. On the next, Cabeza de Vaca.

He Who Has a Why can Endure any How (Z:f28r-f28v)

How Cabeza de Vaca left Galveston Island.

Lope de Oviedo had not left Galveston Island since he had been shipwrecked there in November of 1528. I mean, physically he had maybe crossed over to the mainland a few times with the natives who kept him as something between a slave and a ward. But mentally, he was stuck on the Island of Ill-Fate, as his companion Cabeza de Vaca called it, and couldn’t be convinced to leave.

Lope de Oviedo had been one of only a handful of the men on Cabeza de Vaca’s raft who could even stand up after their harrowing, two-month-long drift through the Gulf of Mexico, during which they survived on a handful of corn a day and almost no freshwater. Nevertheless, after they were thrown onto Galveston beach, Oviedo mustered up the strength to scale a tree and then go exploring for several miles. It was Oviedo, in fact, who had first found the native Cavoque village, where he and Cabeza de Vaca found refuge for that first winter. That first winter that saw 75 or so of the surviving 90 Narvaez expeditionaries die of a mysterious stomach disease, along with half of the Cavoques who had taken them in.

As if watching his companions expelling their guts wasn’t enough, there were additional horrors. Five of their number had refused to go back to the Cavoque village, resolving to make it on their own on the beach. It was only a matter of weeks before they resorted to cannibalism, horrifying the Cavoques and nearly leading to the executions of anyone who even looked like the five on the beach who had just eaten each other. Oviedo then watched as the Cavoques turned from gracious hosts to indifferent neighbors to actively hostile masters, once the expeditionaries had worn out their welcome and become little more than useless extra mouths to feed.

Then, in the Spring of 1529, the disease finally laid Oviedo low. Unfortunately for him, this was precisely the moment that the rest of the fourteen or so surviving expeditionaries had resolved to leave Galveston. On top of all the trauma that had come before, now he was to be left behind by his companions to live out the rest of his presumably short life in this strange land.

Yet he wasn’t alone. The expedition’s notary and treasurer had fallen ill around the same time as Oviedo, and were also forced to stay back when the others moved on down the coast. The notary soon died, but the treasurer – like Oviedo – pulled through. In the treasurer, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Oviedo at least had the comfort of some kind of companionship, and together the two adjusted to their new life.

It was not an easy life. They were not “members” of the Cavoque tribe by any means, they were, in their view, slaves. Of course, their plight probably wasn’t as bad as that of native American slaves sent down into Castilian silver mines or worked to death on sugar plantations, but life was still touch and go for the two old expeditionaries. Starvation and beatings became the norm, and they were routinely assigned the most difficult tasks by their Indian keepers.

After a year or so of this, Cabeza de Vaca had managed to find a way out of the worst of it. He had started traveling across the bay to the mainland to trade goods between the inland tribes and the coastal tribes of Texas, who were apparently always at war with one another. Oviedo, meanwhile, continued his suffering. For one, he couldn’t swim, so getting across to the mainland was out of the question. And second, at least he was kept alive on Galveston Island if only barely. Who knew if he would be guaranteed even that small luxury if he left it.

And yet that damned fool Cabeza de Vaca kept coming back to him and begging him to go south with him. Where did he think he was going? Cabeza de Vaca had no better idea than Oviedo where they actually were. Was the Río Pánuco south? Or maybe they had already passed it on their rafts? Or maybe they were on some other continent altogether: this was the New World, after all, and nothing seemed to make sense here. Did Cabeza de vaca not remember what had happened with all the other tribes they had encountered along the Gulf of Mexico? How they turned on them? And what did he make of the fact that they had never heard back from the four swimmers they had sent ahead in November of 1528? Or the other castaways who had left in April 1529?

And so, even in the Spring of 1532, three and a half years after he had first landed there, Lope de Oviedo lingered on on the Island of Ill-Fate, refusing all of Cabeza de Vaca’s continued pleas that they venture south together.

For whatever reason, Lope de Oviedo’s transformation over this period recalls to mind stories of certain prisoners of war and concentration camp survivors I’ve read. The principal one that comes to mind is Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.” Frankl was an Austrian Jew who studied and practiced as a psychiatrist in pre-war Vienna. He was arrested by Nazis and eventually sent to the Auschwitz death camps, which he managed to survive.⁸⁰

There’s a lot of similarities between Frankl’s and Cabeza de Vaca’s accounts. The first thing that Frankl talks about doing upon arriving at the concentration camp, was that he “struck out my whole former life.” He makes himself psychologically naked, as it were, and actually physically naked as well, as he describes being shorn and deloused upon entering the camp. Similarly, in addition to making himself physically naked as well, almost as soon as he is shipwrecked on Galveston Island, Cabeza de Vaca casts aside all thoughts of his previous life. Never once in his narrative do we see him engaging in what-ifs: What if he hadn’t joined Narváez’s expedition? What if he’d accepted Narváez’s offer to stay with the ships in Florida? What if he had stayed at home with his wife and had a family instead? That train of thought would be about as useful as wishing the sun didn’t rise in the east and set in the west, however, and so he doesn’t allow it. We’ve already seen in the previous episode for example how Cabeza de Vaca is able to sort of distance himself from his despair. He refuses to dwell on it, even as he doesn’t hide from it. This is important too, according to Frankl, not to “minimize or alleviate the camp’s tortures by ignoring them or harboring false illusions and entertaining false optimism.” Oviedo, by contrast, looks much more like the camp inmates that Frankl describes who came in full of vigor, and who tried to resist the horrors of the camps with sheer will power. Will power runs out, however, and those men who came in so strong were soon reduced “to a primitive level.”⁸¹

The second similarity is the way that Frankl talks about “Turning suffering into a human achievement” – into a project, as it were. ““When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe…His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.” This is how you give suffering meaning. And meaning, for both Frankl and Cabeza de Vaca, comes from service. Frankl continued as a practicing psychiatrist in the concentration camp, even as he was being worked near to death every day. Cabeza de Vaca, similarly, he opens his narrative with a plea that his story be “received in the name of the service, as this is all that a man who emerged naked could take out with him.” ⁸²

For Cabeza de Vaca in those first years in the new world, the clearest expression of that service was in the responsibility he felt for his fellow expeditionary, Lope de Oviedo. Frankl too would have recognized this, stating at one point in his account: “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being…or to an unfinished work will never be able to throw his life away.” Cabeza de Vaca wouldn’t give up on him, and wouldn’t leave him behind. Despite Oviedo’s intransigence, Cabeza de Vaca returned year after year to the Island of Ill-Fate to beg Lope de Oviedo to come with him. Caring for his companion gave Cabeza de Vaca’s suffering meaning during these lonely years.

Finally, something Cabeza de Vaca said or maybe just the example of service he laid out wore Oviedo down. In the late summer of 1532, after three years of begging, he finally succeeded in convincing Oviedo to head south with him. We don’t know what he said or how he did it, but by the fall of that year, they were moving. Through his activities as a merchant, cabeza de Vaca had learned something about the tribes ahead along the Texas coast, and how to move amongst them. He had also observed that women in particular seemed to be permitted greater freedom of movement, owing to the continuous state of war that existed between the various tribes of the region. Indeed, he may have modeled his own career as a merchant off of seeing women move about the area. So, when he and Oviedo decided to leave, he actually hired women as guides to help lead him along and communicate with the tribes they might in encounter.

And with that they were off. They crossed over to the mainland, the swimmer Cabeza de Vaca helping the non-swimmer Oviedo across. In quick succession, they crossed four rivers, ending up after a few weeks near the Colorado River perhaps not terribly far from where it empties into the Gulf coast at Matagorda bay.⁸³

As they arrived to the south bank of the Colorado, they came upon some Indians who seemed inclined to talk to them. Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo were curious looking creatures to these natives, with their beards and pink skin. Yet there was something about the way these natives looked at them, almost as if they’d seen them before or something.

Cautiously, Cabeza de Vaca approached and began to converse with them, perhaps through the women he had brought along as guides or perhaps using signs he had learned as a trader. The Indians told them that they were from the Quevenes tribe, further down the coast, and they offered a tantalizing piece of news: there were others like them being held by a tribe not far away. And even better news: that tribe was headed toward them right now. They were headed toward a nut harvest down near the mouth of the Guadalupe River, just two days march from here. If Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo continued on, surely they would be rejoined with the three others like them in no time.

Wait, three? We thought there should have been many more, Cabeza de Vaca responded.

Oh, the others are long dead, the Quevenes responded. Hunger took some, the winters others. Three had been killed for fun. And two had been killed because one of the Indians had a bad dream about them. And the three survivors, the Quevenes contined, were also “very poorly treated, since the boys and other Indians, who are quite abusive and hostile to begin with, frequently strike them and beat them with sticks.”⁸⁴

Oviedo freaked out when he heard this. It only confirmed his worst fears. At least back on the Island, he knew who to avoid and how to act to stay alive. Why had he given that up? What did he hope to gain from this voyage? The entire Narváez expedition had been cursed from the get-go, why couldn’t’ Cabeza de Vaca just accept this?

And then it got worse. According to Cabeza de Vava, the Quevenes began to beat Cabeza de Vaca and Lope de Oviedo: “they slappped and beat my companion, and I received my share as well, and they threw mud at us and they held arrows to our chest each day saying that they wanted to kill us just as they had our companions.” What the hell happened here? How did this turn from a friendly exchange of information into an assault? It's as inexplicable to us as it probably was to Lope de Oviedo, to whom it served as just another example of the capriciousness of this “foreign and evil land.”⁸⁵

Cabeza de Vaca, on the other hand, offers us a really odd and almost funny explanation for why the Quevenes beat them up. He says it was “so that we might understand that what these Indians had told us about the poor treatment of the others was true.” It’s such a charitable and seemingly reasonable explanation of an assault: “Yeah, they weren’t trying to hurt us, they were just trying to make sure we understood what an assault was.” You almost wonder if he’s being sarcastic or humorous here, but I don’t think that’s the case. Because notice how this fits with what we’ve observed about Cabeza de Vaca, how he refuses to dwell on despair and how increasingly, he refuses to attribute bad intent to those who do him ill. And yet note what an incredible maturation this marks for Cabeza de Vaca. Five years ago, he was a petty middle manager, chafing at his commanding officer’s slights and engaging in bureaucratic turf wars. Now, he seems to have some new perspective dealing with the arbitrariness of life.

It makes the contrast with Lope de Oviedo even starker, however. Because after the same beating that Cabeza de Vaca explains away so charitably, Oviedo is done for. Oviedo had basically already given up hope before he had left Galveston island, but he’d allowed himself or been convinced by Cabeza de Vaca to believe just one more time that they might be able to escape their miserable situation. But the Quevenes had just dashed that hope. Suddenly, Oviedo was more convinced than ever that his suffering would never end. He gave up all goals, other than mere survival. Oviedo turned back. A life of known privation and quasi-slavery was preferable, rose-colored even, when compared with the uncertainty of what lay ahead. Cabeza de Vaca tried to stop him: “I begged him many times not to do it, and I tried many different arguments, but I couldn’t stop him. And with that, he returned, and I stayed alone with those Indians.”⁸⁶

Viktor Frankl tells the fate of one of his fellow concentration camp prisoners who one day had a dream that they would be liberated on March 30, 1945. 16:15 This prisoner was as sure of it as of anything in his life, as if God had promised it to him, and that’s what he used to sustain himself for the intervening weeks. But when the thirteth of March came and went without liberation, “he became delirious and lost consciousness. On March thirty-first, he was dead.” It’s an exaggerated example, but it sounds a lot like what happened to Oviedo. Men like this in the concentration camps, Frankl tells us, “preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless.” ⁸⁷

Lope de Oviedo is one of the most fascinating characters in Cabeza de Vaca’s account, because in my opinion he’s actually the character that I think is easiest to relate to. How would you respond if you lost absolutely every material comfort you had come to take for granted and were thrust into a situation of total dependence on people who were indifferent or even hostile toward your continuing existence?⁸⁸

It’s Cabeza de Vaca who we really still have to account for at this point. How was he still alive? And what gave him the motivation to move on? What in his experience suggested to him that this next attempt at movement would turn out any better? What allowed him to endure his captivity with even-spiritedness, to still be able to impute benign motives in the actions of some guys who had just gratuitously beat the hell out of him?

A clue to what keeps Cabeza de Vaca going is what he does once Lope de Oviedo leaves him. For several years, it had been his sense of duty to his companion, his service toward him that had given Cabeza de Vaca’s hardship meaning. Fortunately, as we just heard, just before the Quevenes Indians beat the daylights out of him, they had given him something else to latch onto: three more companions of his, held captive just up ahead. Cabeza de Vaca is able to redirect his sense of service away from Lope de Oviedo to these new three. And its not just service to his companions; its service to his King. A little bit oddly, here in his narrative he recalls his original charge from the King: “…even though the hope I sustained of ever leaving there was so slight, I took great care and diligence to commit everything to memory, just in case some day our Lord God should desire to bring me to where I am now, I would be able to bear witness of my good will and service to Your Majesty…”And lastly, it is his unwavering and unshakeable belief that whatever he suffers is in the service of his God that gives him the ultimate comfort, that allows him to move past trauma without hiding from it. And with that, we have essentially restated the Castilian “mandato real”, the defining ideals of this age for men like Cabeza de Vaca.⁸⁹

So who were these three survivors then who represented for Cabeza de Vaca the sum of his hopes and the continuation of his service to his fellow man, to his King, and to his God. He recalled the Quevenes words: “If we wanted to see the other Christians, in two days they would be there with their Indians to come to eat nuts along the same river where we found ourselves.” In two days, Cabeza de Vaca aimed to find out. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.⁹⁰

Faith the Size of a Pecan (Z:f28v-f31v)

How Cabeza de Vaca reunited with Alonso Castillo, Andrés Dorantes, and Esteban.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca: Episode XI: Faith the Size of a Pecan. I’m Brandon Seale.

After their first few months on Galveston Island, the 14 surviving Narváez expeditionaries knew they had worn out their welcome. They decided to move on, to try for the Río Pánuco one more time, but when the date of their departure arrived, three of their companions were too ill to join them. The notary, a formerly hearty young man named Lope de Oviedo, and the expedition’s treasurer were, in fact, so weak that they were barely even conscious. The healthy eleven debated what to do, certain that leaving behind the three was leaving them to die in this “foreign and evil land.” But it was spring, the barren country around them was as fruitful as it was ever going to be, and they couldn’t risk waiting around to see if their three companions would survive the disease that had already killed seventy-five or so of their fellow expeditionaries.

Soon after leaving Galveston Island, the healthy eleven came across another Narváez expeditionary who had been living with a different group of natives on the mainland. This gave them hope that further ahead there might be others still, and the party of now-twelve continued down the coast. Their number was soon reduced by drownings and starvation, however, to maybe eight or so. These eight eventually stumbled across the wreckage of one of the other rafts from their pitiful flotilla the previous year. And not long after that, a Castilian timidly emerged from the brush and presented himself to them. It was Figueroa, one of the four swimmers the group had dispatched to go find Pánuco just days after landing on Galveston Island back in November. They peppered him with questions: why hadn’t he made it to Pánuco? Where were the other swimmers? Where was the crew of the other raft they had passed?

The story he told wasn’t a happy one. The winter of 1528-9 had been cold, and soon two of the swimmers with him died from exposure; the third was killed by natives. All alone, Figueroa was soon captured by one of the nearby tribes and taken in. That was where he heard rumors of the third raft, of more men like him who had landed nearby, and soon enough he ran into a survivor from that third raft…the only survivor, it turned out, from that third raft. And his story, was even more unhappy. The third raft had been the raft commanded by the friars. After crashing onto the shore, the crew of the third raft also decided to make their way south down the Texas coast, and they hadn’t gone far before they came across the fourth raft, that of their commander, Pánfilo de Narváez’s. 3:03

Though if you’re keeping track, we’re still missing the fifth raft: and hopefully you remember that the first two were Cabeza de Vaca’s and one co-commanded by Castillo and Dorantes that had landed on Galveston Island.

We last saw Narvaez back in Episode 5 when he essentially told his men that it was every man for himself. After a string of failures at initiating even basic diplomacy with various different north American tribes, Narváez, it seems, had lost confidence in himself and become entirely distrustful of the natives of this new continent. So the survivors of the third and fourth rafts joined forces and marched south along the beach, Narváez decided to just stay on the raft and float alongside them, to be a little better protected against this unintelligible and arbitrary New World. And yet, the New World would still find a way to get him. One night, a norther blew in, bringing with it violent winds. The storm pulled Narváez’s raft’s anchor right off the sea floor and carried him out to sea. Pánfilo Narváez, conqueror of Jamaica and Cuba and governor-to-be of La Florida, presumably died floating on the Gulf of Mexico, in the words of Andres Resendez, “surrounded by the enormous Adelantamiento that he had failed to conquer.”⁹¹

Infighting broke out after Narváez’s disappearance, amidst some pretty severe food shortages. Several of the men killed each other, including the lieutenant governor who had assumed command after Narváez’s disappearance. And of course, none of this helped with the food situation. The survivors then resorted to the only logical option: “they sliced the dead into jerky.” The party survived a few months in this fashion, just waiting for the next man to die so they could eat him, not even trying to move on to Pánuco or anywhere else. In part because they still didn’t know where Pánuco was. Was it further down the coast? Or maybe they had already passed it??? Eventually, they ran out of crewmates to eat. By March 1, 1529, only one man remained: a man named Esquivel. At that point, Indians swooped in and took Esquivel into their camp, which is where Figueroa soon found him. He didn’t last long, however. Perhaps because of his ongoing communication with Figueroa, Esquivel’s tribe eventually killed him. Unwilling to go on by himself, Figueroa too had remained with his Indians, until the survivors from Galveston Island stumbled upon him here in the summer of 1529.⁹²

The Galveston party took Figueroa with them, and soon, the group of nine or so was moving on down the coast again. They made a pact amongst themselves “not to stop even though they died, until they came to a land of Christians.” ⁹³

Just a few days later however, perhaps near modern-day Rockport and Copano Bay, they were captured by an Indian band. Or maybe they gave themselves over as slaves to avoid starvation, who knows. What we do know, because we’ve seen it elsewhere, is that Old World expeditionaries made lousy New World slaves: they didn’t know how to forage in the unfamiliar environment and they were already so weak that they fatigued quickly. Their new masters soon came to resent having to care for them. According to a contemporary of Dorantes and Castillo who had read an accoutn prepared by them – have I mentioned that we have sources other than Cabeza de Vaca for most of this? More on that later – according to this contemporary: “The Indians who held these men were more cruel taskmasters than even a Moor could be,” which is meant to be pretty bad.” Eventually, the cruelty became gratuitous. They became playthings for the boys of the tribe, “The boys pulled their beards every day by way of pastime, and if they became careless the boys would pull their hair, and be seized with great laughter, the best pleased in the world.” ⁹⁴

As useless mouths to feed, their lives became cheap. As we heard in the previous episode, three of them were killed simply because they moved from one house to another when they weren’t supposed to; two more were killed because one of the Indians had had a bad dream about them.⁹⁵

By 1532, three years later, only three were still living: the young Captain Alonso Castillo from Salamanca, the veteran Captain Andrés Dorantes of Béjar, and his slave, a black North African from Azemmour in modern-day Morroco known as Estevan. In truth, there was little difference now between master and slave. Hunger was everyone’s closest companion. These South Texas Indians lived by feast and famine, hunting what they could in the winter, occasionally bringing down a deer, or even a giant wooly cows, as Cabeza de Vaca describes them, and then gorging on prickly pears in the late summer. But the early autumn months were always lean, and since the summer of 1532, there had been little to eat. Occasionally, the peoples of these lands were reduced to picking nuts and seeds out of the droppings of other animals. “Second harvest,” anthropologists call it euphemistically.

Yet here in the late fall of 1532, these three surviving expeditionaries had a feast to look forward to. Their band had begun to travel north, from the prickly pear grounds toward the great nut harvest that filled their bellies for two months out of every year. They had started traveling north, toward the lower Guadalupe River perhaps near modern-day Victoria, Texas, where this nut-bearing tree abounded and yielded its fruit every November and December. The nuts reminded these Castillians of Galician hazelnuts or old world walnuts, and indeed, they may have been Texas walnuts, but most today assume that they are referring to the fruits of the state tree of Texas: Pecans.

Castillo, Dorantes, and Esteban’s band was among the first to arrive that year, like fans to a football tailgate party, to stake out the best spots. They had set up their camps and begun to fall into the rhythms of daily life, when one day, an Indian approached Dorantes and told him some surprising news. A “Christian”, which is to say, a white man like him, was coming to that spot. Dorantes didn’t know what to make of it. They hadn’t seen any of their old expeditionaries since their initial trek down the coast, and from what they had heard from other Indians, all the others like them, including the ones they had left behind on Galveston Island, had perished. It wasn’t hard to believe, given what they themselves had endured.

And so when one day in late 1532, he saw the Royal Treasurer, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca come walking towards him beneath the pecan trees, Dorantes thought he was seeing a ghost. “When he saw me, he was very frightened, because for a long time they had assumed I was dead.” It had been three years since Dorantes had seen any of his old fellow expeditionaries, other than Castillo and Estevan. They didn’t bother to think much about the old days anymore, so that by now it was as distant and unreal as a dream. But upon seeing Cabeza de Vaca and processing who it was, Dorantes’ disbelief soon resolved itself into joy. It was a reminder of what had been, and of what maybe could be again. “We gave many thanks to God at being reunited, and that day was one of the happiest that in all our days we have enjoyed.” Dorantes then led Cabeza de Vaca to Castillo and Estevan who were similarly astonished and overjoyed.⁹⁶

They were overjoyed by Cabeza de Vaca’s arrival for a very particular reason. With Cabeza de Vaca in their party, they now had two swimmers: Cabeza de Vaca and Dorantes. It was too much before to expect one swimmer to carry Castillo and Estevan across each river they encountered. But with one swimmer now for each non-swimmer, they had a chance. And so after three years of cruel “captivity”, after three years of thinking about little more than trying to stay alive, the four old expeditionaries decided to start moving again, to attempt a return to “a land of Christians.”

What in the world was it that gave men like this the motivation to keep moving? By this point, they were more than four years and thousands of miles removed from their homes, they had no actual idea where they were, and no reasonable expectation of rescue or of ever reconnecting with their countrymen. They in fact had no reasonable expectation that they would even be alive tomorrow. So what was it, that kept these castaways from just burying their heads in the sand and giving themselves up for dead? Well, it isn’t a mystery, Cabeza de Vaca tells us: “The greatest help was God, our Lord, and we never doubted it.”⁹⁷

I guess I just have trouble understanding exactly what that means. And I should admit upfront that I am someone that has always struggled with Faith. Not for lack of trying I don’t think, but it’s almost like I didn’t learn the grammar at an early enough age and so I’m always working to conjugate each concept individually, which then makes me lose sight of the larger meaning and without the larger meaning the individual components don’t always make sense.

But Cabeza de Vaca’s account has really made me appreciate what I’ve been missing out on. The Faith of Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan is a powerful and plainly useful thing to them. It teaches them to really appreciate it when they receive an unexpected blessing, which are pretty few and far between in this story, but without that kind of appreciation, it would be easy to imagine these guys falling into abject depression. At the same time, it teaches them to look inward when things are at their worst, not to blame the external forces that they have no control over, because that too would be a recipe for making yourself feel just totally powerless and hopeless.⁹⁸

I didn’t notice these things the first few times I read Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative because there are so many instances of him “thanking God” or blaming his misfortune on his “sins” that they almost become like a part of the structure of the text, like punctuation or chapter breaks or something. Or maybe I just didn’t know what to do with them. With subsequent readings, I’ve tried to pay more attention to them, and yet I still havent’ really found a good way to incorporate Faith into my retelling of Cabeza de Vaca’s story here. In many ways, Cabeza de Vaca’s faith is utterly unexplainable, at least in an A follows from B follows from C kind of way. It is premised on the unknowability of God’s plans and on the arbitrariness of the world. This is something that Cabeza de Vaca even states up front in the prologue to his account, in a really eloquent way “…by fortune’s will, or more accurately through no one’s fault, but solely through the will and judgement of God….one person ends up with greater service than he had first thought, and another finds just the opposite. The latter may be able to give no more evidence of his design than his own diligence, and even this remains at times so hidden that it remains undetected.” ⁹⁹

This faith, this perspective really is the four expedtionaries’ greatest aid, consoling them, guiding them, and instructing them in how to deal with the ups and downs of life. And so when Cabeza de Vaca says something like “As for me, I know to say that I always had complete confidence in His mercy and that he would carry me out of this captivity. And I always said as much to my companions,” he’s not only telling us something that he believed, he’s telling us what his Faith taught him to believe in order to create the kind of mental resiliency that he needed to survive.¹⁰⁰

And it makes sense, doesn’t it, that a fairly useful way to maintain your sanity in a New World full of strange people operating with an entirely different and perhaps untranslatable worldview is to accept that there are more things unknowable in this world than knowable. And that seems to me a major difference between how we moderns view the world and how Cabeza de Vaca and frankly the native americans amongst whom he was living did. We think that everything in the world should be explainable; it doesn’t seem to me that most people in the sixteenth century did. And interestingly, I think that accepting the unknowability of the world, almost requires you to then accept that you are – and should want to be – in the service of something greater than yourself; if you can’t know for sure why everything happens the way it does, at least you can try to line yourself up with whatever that force is that is moving it! And this service to God, this giving oneself over to HIS unknowable plan runs all through these expeditionaries’ accounts. It’s is at the root of their notion of “encomiendose” or of “commending” oneself to God.¹⁰¹

When Cabeza de Vaca appeared out of nowhere and walked into the pecan bottoms of the lower Colorado river, it re-invigorated Castillo, Dorantes, Estevan, and Cabeza de Vaca too for that matter. It proved to them that some greater power must have had some reason for bringing them back together: quoting Cabeza de Vaca “And since God our Lord had been served to watch over me through so many hardships and misfortunes and at the end to bring me into their company, they too decided to escape and that I would help them cross the rivers and bays that we should run into.” And what that reason Cabeza de Vaca had been preserved was obvious to them: they were going to try, once again, to make it to the Rio Pánuco.¹⁰²

But they would have to wait. By the time they got their plan all worked out, it was January or so of 1533, and the pecans were played out, and the land south of them would yield nothing more until the prickly pear harvest next summer.

It was five and a half years since they had left Spain, and over four years since they had been shipwrecked on Galveston Island.

And now, they would have to endure – to survive – another seven or eight terribly uncertain months as slaves to their capricious masters. It was even worse for Cabeza de Vaca, who had won his freedom in recent years by becoming a merchant. He would have to give all that up and return to “captivity”. In exchange for room and board, he gave himself over as a slave to Dorantes’s master. This slavery, however, seemed more temporary, and more purposeful. If his life as a merchant had given him “the freedom to go wherever [he] pleased,” he was willing to give that up now in favor of slavery, so long as that slavery was in the service of “where God should wish to take [them].” On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca. ¹⁰³

The Great Tunal (Z:f31v-f34r)

How the four expeditionaries planned to escape from their masters. And how their plan was foiled.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 12: The Great Tunal. I’m Brandon Seale.

The men ran through the grasslands in their woven fiber sandals, some naked, some covered with only a loin cloth made from deer, rabbit, or coyote hides. They weren’t so much fast, as they were persistent. And they were coordinated. The doe running in front of them had tried everything to evade them, but at each turn, another man was there to meet here. Occasionally, she would stop, and try to disappear in plain sight, but before she could even start panting, the tribesmen were upon her again, pushing her ever closer to the shoreline. ¹⁰⁴

These Native Americas that Cabeza de Vaca and Dorantes lived with through the winter of 1532-3 weren’t as tall as the others the expeditionaries had encountered back on Galveston Island. They weren’t as proficient with bows and arrows either, but if everything went according to plan on this hunt, they wouldn’t need them. The idea was to drive the doe into the bay, and let her drown there, making everyone’s job easier. And by this point, they had pushed the doe into the sand dunes on the beach. The men from further behind began to catch up, and soon they formed in a line. They flushed the doe one last time from a stand of beachgrass, and the doe realized that she was out of options. Her pursuers were just a few dozen yards away now. Her only escape was into the gentle surf of the Gulf. She bolted with one last surge of energy and leapt into the waves. Then she panicked. The water was deeper than she had thought, and the waves were a new sensation to her. In her panic, she began to flail, expending what precious little oxygen remained in her lungs. By the time she went under, she was already dead.¹⁰⁵

The doe would feed the little band for several days and was a rare treat. The Indians of South Texas – as opposed to the Indians of the upper Texas coast – lived enjoyed very little variety in their diet. “Their main foods are two or three kinds of roots, and they search for them all over, but they are very bad and cause bloating.” Over the years, they had learned to grind certain foods to preserve them: mesquite beans, dried fish, desert flowers, even old bones. But in lean times, according to Cabeza de Vaca, “their hunger is so great that they eat spiders and ant eggs and worms and lizards and salamander and snakes and even vipers who kill men when they bite them, and they eat dirt and wood and anything else they can find, including deer droppings and other things that I’d rather not detail: I honestly believe that if there had been rocks in that land they would have eaten them too!” ¹⁰⁶

Though methodologically incorrect, it is tempting here once again to connect these natives with the tribes that later Europeans would find in the same region of south Texas. The label “Coahuiltecan” was imperfect even in the 1700’s however, as the tribes in the region were so diverse and so different, that many of their languages were unintelligible to each other.

The Indians of this region lived in bands of maybe twenty to fifty people, occupying poorly defined but fiercely defended territories. They had to move frequently, every two or three days, to avoid overtaxing the resources of any given area, though their possessions were so few that moving was not an unduly difficult process. The houses were simple tents, hides laid upon four bent sticks driven into the ground. As with the natives on Galveston Island, “The men do not carry burdens or loads, which is done by women and old men, whom they value the least.” Continuing: “Their women get only six hours’ rest each day. All the rest of the night they pass tending to their ovens to dry out the roots they harvest. And as soon as they wake up, they begin digging for more roots and carrying firewood and water to their houses.”¹⁰⁷ Cabeza de Vaca tells how infanticide particularly of female babies was common amongst these subsitence-level tribes. The rationale they gave to Cabeza de Vaca was that, in a world of “continuous war,” they preferred to see their girls dead than captured and “made to bear children who would one day become their enemies.” ¹⁰⁸

And yet the natives of South Texas faced the grimness of their lives cheerfully. According to Cabeza de vaca, they “are a very happy people, and even when they are starving they don’t stop having their dances and parties and rituals.”¹⁰⁹

And there was one time of year that they all looked forward to: the Great prickly pear harvest or Tunal at the end of each summer. “The best times that these people have is when they eat tunas, because then they aren’t hungry and all the time they pass dancing, eating them, day and night.” For three months out of every year, these Indians ate nothing else. They would squeeze the juice of the prickly pears into a pit in the ground and drink from it, the soil imparting just a hint of additional sweetness to the juice. For UTexas archaeologist Thomas Hester, the pit in the ground is actually a clue. Pots are readily found and even referenced in Cabeza de Vaca’s description of the Indians up the coast, yet if you get far enough down into South Texas, into the sandy plains around Brooks County heading toward modern-day Lake Falcón, ceramics pretty well disappear from the record around this period. And the Brooks county, area, by the way is the home of some of the largest concentrations of prickly pear in Texas. Indeed, before the arrival of set-stock cattle operations and before the great freeze of 1897, prickly pear thickets dominated the landscaping, rising in some cases many stories into the air.¹¹⁰

The four former Narváez expeditionaries especially were looking forward the Great Tunal of 1533: Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso Castillo, Andres Dorantes, and Estevan. They had been reunited again seven or eight months ago in late 1532 during the pecan harvest along the lower Guadalupe River. They resolved to try once more for the Río Pánuco, which they were closer to at this point than they had ever been so far – a mere 500 miles or so through some pretty inhospitable terrain populated by even more inhospitable people. But they decided they would have to wait until the Prickly pears bloomed the next summer, when they might be able to live off the flurouscent pink fruit as they moved across the land. And so they resigned themselves to seven more months of slavery, and split up: Cabeza de Vaca and Dorantes leaving with one band, and Castillo and Estevan with another, but all committed to reuniting somewhere in South Texas in the late summer of 1533.

It was no small thing put off their escape for seven or eight months. The expeditionaries were at the bottom of the social hierarchy in the tribes with which they lived, and their keepers made sure to let them know where they stood. Here’s Dorantes bluntly describing their situation, “[We] had not security for life from one day to another.” The tribesmen seemed to enjoy messing with the expeditionaries too: Dorantes tells about men appearing armed in front of him, without warning, in an apparent rage, “pointing an arrow at his breast, drawing the bow to the ear, and then laughing and saying “were you frightened?”” ¹¹¹

During his captivity with these Indians, Cabeza de Vaca relates how he was relegated to mosquito prevention duty. So well did he get to know the mosquitos of the region that he was able to categorize them into three different subspecies. The mosquitos in South Texas were so thick, in Cabeza de Vaca’s words, that you if you did nothing to protect yourself, you woke up looking like a leper, red, swollen, and eaten up. To ward off the little blood-suckers, the natives made a ring of campfires out of wet wood, and try to keep them smoking all night long. And this eye-watering duty was always assigned to the expeditionaries. If they fell asleep or if the fires went out, they could expect a beating. According to Cabeza de Vaca: “I can affirm that no work in the world equals it for suffering.” ¹¹²

It was no small miracle, then, that all four men were still alive in the Summer of 1533. Though held by different bands, they had managed to stay in contact, presumably because their bands were close by each other and again suggesting that their “slavery” was not without some freedoms. They must have watched closely throughout early 1533 as the little green prickly pear buds started to appear on the nopales, blossomed into bright yellow flowers in the spring, and then transformed once again into deep purple fruits that ripened slowly as the days grew longer. Finally, when the sun was at its highest and the land was at its driest, the deep purple fruits began to shade into pink, and that’s how they knew it was time to move. Sometime maybe in August of 1533, they made it back to the prickly pear ranges deep in South Texas. When they got their with their respective tribes, the four expeditionaries managed to reconnect with each other without too much trouble, and began to devise a plan. They decided they would slip off and attach themselves to one of the tribes whose home ranges lay to the south, so that when they left the Great Tunal, they would carry the four expeditionaries along with them, and closer then to the Río Pánuco. “They told me that in no way should I let the Indians learn of my plan to move on, because they would kill me for it.” For a solid month or two, they managed to keep their secret while they and their bands went about filling their bellies, but then, just as they were about to spring their plan into action, a fight broke out between the very bands of Indians by whom the four expeditionaries were being held. It started, it seems, over a woman. Soon, it broke out into blows, and ended in each Indian storming off huffily and telling his tribesmen to pack up their things. Suddenly, the Great Tunal of 1533 was over, at the last for the Indians holding Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan. “And so we Christians had to leave as well...” ¹¹³

The expeditionaries were once again going to be split up amongst various different bands. And once again, they were going to have to wait another year until they could try to leave this life, until they all came back together at the Tunal of 1534.

This had to be crushing. This isn’t like missing the Rolling Stones on tour, but they’ll be back next year. Taking up Cabeza de Vaca’s own language, this is like being told you are going to be released from prison after a half decade, then told there’s been a glitch and you’ve actually got to wait a whole nother year. It’s the kind of feeling that breaks most people. Two episodes ago we talked about Viktor Frankl’s anecdote from Auschwitz, about a fellow concentration camp prisoner who had convinced himself that the camp would be liberated on March 30, 1945. And when it didn’t happen, he just collapsed in on himself and died. And that is about what Cabeza de Vaca suggests the feeling was like: being sentenced to an extra year in a concentration camp.

It has always jumped out at me three of the four survivors of a 600 man expedition – Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, and Dorantes – seemed to come from a similar background and seemed to have previously demonstrated some kind of affinity for each other. Recall, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, and Dorantes all came from the lower to middle nobility back in Castile , and had been paired up on multiple previous occasions to lead scouting expeditions back in Florida, counterattacks against natives in Mississippi, and each had been given command or co-command of one of Narváez’s five rafts.

Now, there’s a cynical explanation for why three noblemen out of maybe an initial 80 should have survived when only 1 (Estevan) of the other 520 did. Cabeza de Vaca suggests that back on the Florida shore, some of the noblemen – perhaps even himself – refused to partake in the manual labor of building their little flotilla of rafts. It’s buried back in the discussion about the crew slaughtering a horse every third day to feed those who were laboring to build the rafts: “but I never could eat of them.” Is this because he wasn’t doing the labor himself? Was he at least supervising? He surely wasn’t just sitting on his hands. We don’t know. But if you extrapolate this pattern, maybe the reason three noblemen survived was because they always hung back and made the commoners do all the dirty work. Certainly this would take a toll, and maybe that is what goes on in their first winter on Galveston Island, for example.¹¹⁴

Of course, that doesn’t explain the three or four extra years Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, and Dorantes survived as slaves. They were certainly spared no hard labor during those years of servitude to the subsistence-level tribes of South Texas. And I guess those are the years that really fascinate me, because the ordeal in those years seems as much psychological as physical.

I can’t help but note that one thing the three Castilians shared was an education, a quite advanced education for the time. Just that all three were literate places them in a distinct minority for their time, and in the previous episode we found some evidence that they all conceived of their Faith in a similarly developed and intellectually-nuanced fashion. Castillo in particular seems to have studied at the University of Salamanca, and certainly Dorantes and Cabeza de Vaca received some kind of formal training in their formative years. Concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl did have a theory about educated people in extreme situations: “Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature.” Recall the example of Lope de Oviedo, originally one of the “heartiest” of Cabeza de Vaca’s crew, who ultimately collapsed in on himself in despair. He had the will-power and he had the strength to survive: but maybe it was some intellectual tool that he lacked.¹¹⁵

Was there something about Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, and Dorantes’s education that prepared them better for the suffering they endured, or at least the psychological part of it? We don’t think of overly-educated people today as being particularly well-prepared for hardship, but here I’ll note that education had different goals at different periods of history.

Here’s a quote from Mihaly Checksentmihai, whose written a book called “Flow,” detailing clinical findings about, well, what makes a good life worth living: “At certain times in history cultures have taken it for granted that a person wasn’t fully human unless he or she learned to master thoughts and feelings.” Even some of Csikszentmihalyi’s recommended tactics seem a little bit similar to the tactics we see Cabeza de Vaca using, for example, quoting Csikszentmihalyi: “Unless a person knows how to give order to his or her thoughts, attention will be attracted to whatever is most problematic at the moment,” This seems to be what we see Cabeza de Vaca doing in his narrative and frankly with his narrative – ordering his thoughts and feelings – but I can’t really offer any more evidence than that . It’s a nice idea though, if we believe that we can learn and prepare in advance how to suffer, in order to be better prepared for it.¹¹⁶

Of course, none of that explains Estevan. We of course don’t know Estevan’s actual education, but most likely, he had not had the benefit of the kind of education that the three Castilians had received. Then again, many of the things that the Castilians were experiencing for the first time and as the worst possible forms of treatment may have been things that Estevan had already suffered in his life as a slave on three continents now. In the words of our friend Andres Resendez in his book, “A Land so Strange,” “The man best able to cope psychologically with the adverse conditions was in all likelihood the African Estevanico.” Indeed, many modern interpreters of Estevan have liked to imagine that he might have even been enjoying the role reversal of seeing his master reduced to a slave as well.

We don’t have the same window into the coping techniques that Estevan might have been using, because he couldn’t write his account of everything that happened. We can make some inferences, however. Estevan seems to be particularly adept at languages and at learning how to communicate with the various native bands. Maybe this was estevan’s way of keeping his own mind active and engaged and not dwelling on the arbitrariness of the world that kept tossing them around.

There is undoubtedly something special about these four men, and certainly part of what happened was that they grew together during their time alone in North America. And they knew that their strength came in their unity, and so before their respective bands left the prickly pear grounds, the four of them made a commitment to each other.

To meet back here next year. Same time, same place. By giving themselves a goal and by reminding themselves of their duties to each other, they were giving themselves strength to endure what they knew was going to be a really, really hard year. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

The Utility of Belief (Z:f34r-34v)

How Cabeza de Vaca passed his most difficult year.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 13: The Utility of Belief. I’m Brandon Seale

Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso Castillo, Andres Dorantes, and Estevan had planned to escape from the native American bands holding them during the prickly pear harvest of 1533. During the prickly pear harvest, tribes from all over came together because it was pretty much the only time when the South Texas landscape offered enough edible foodstuffs to support mass migrations. Just days before the four were to escape, however, a fight broke out amongst their respective bands, which ended up scattering the bickering factions and with them, the four surviving Narváez expeditionaries. Individually, they knew that they had no chance of reaching their destination on the Pánuco river, the northernmost point of New Spain, wherever that was. And so their forced separation condemned them to another year of slavery, of mistreatment and mosquitos, of hunger and hardship, of disease and the prospect of death every day.

In his account, Cabeza de Vaca always glosses over the most desperate parts of his ordeal. To give you an idea, as to how bad this year was for him, he covers this entire year in only three sentences: “And this year I endured a very bad life, not only from hunger, but also from the mistreatment that I received from my Indians, such that I had to flee three times from the master who held me. They all went out to search for me, and put a lot of effort into trying kill me. But Lord our God in his mercy wanted to preserve and protect me from them.”

Yet each word offers a window into what that year was actually like for him. Here’s the first clause again: “And this year I endured a very bad life, not only from hunger, but also from the mistreatment that I received from my Indians…” The archaeological records confirms the state of near-constant starvation that these proto-Coahuiltecan tribes in South Texas endured. They spent most of their time foraging the brush country, a high-energy/low-yield activity if ever there was one. For context, this is land that supports one cow per 100 acres, and it takes four stomachs for that cow to be able digest what it does eat. This scarcity made their natives demanding masters. It wasn’t just that they were sadistic. It’s that the region didn’t have calories to spare, and if a man wasn’t pulling his weight bringing in resources for the tribe, what good was he? That said, Cabeza de Vaca did find the treatment he received from these Indians to be particularly cruel, and recall this is a man who was always able to find the silver lining in even the most gratuitous assault (see episode 9). The best evidence we have of how bad Cabeza de Vaca’s mistreatment during this year was, is how he responded to it. Here’s the second sentence of the first clause: “And this year I endured a very bad life, not only from hunger, but also from the mistreatment that I received from my Indians, such that I had to flee three times from the master who held me.” He “had to flee,” “Me huve de huir.” The language suggests compulsion, almost as if God was making him, that he had to do it or else he would die even though he knew his keepers would kill him if they caught him trying to scape. And he was caught! Three times actually! “They all went out to search for me and put a lot of effort into trying kill me.” ¹¹⁷

So what saved Cabeza de Vaca? His answer won’t surprise you: “But God, our Lord, in his infinite goodness, protected me and saved my life.” After being forced to remember this harrowing year at this point in his narrative, its almost as if he now has to invoke God to calm himself, to remind himself that he got through it, even five years after the fact when he finally writes all this down.

In three sentences, Cabeza de Vaca not only tells us what happened during the winter of 1533-3; he’s showing us the tools and the survival strategies that he used to survive it all.

There’s another man whose survival strategies come to mind when I read Cabeza de Vaca. In 1965, Commander Jim Stockdale was a 41-year old wing commander flying combat sorties over North Vietnam. On September 9, 1965, his Douglas A-4 was shot down. He ejected and deployed his parachute, and as he floated to the ground, he thought to himself “Five years down there, at least. I’m…entering the world of Epictetus.”

What he meant by that was that he was about to enter the crucible of a philosophy that he had only engaged with intellectually. Just a few years before, Stockdale had spent two years studying philosophy at Stanford. He found himself drawn to the teachings of Epictetus and Stoicism as a practical philosophy for living. As Epictetus himself said, his was not a philosophy of syllogisms or of pure logic: “here you practice how to die, how to be enchained, how to be racked, how to be exiled.” The end goal was to learn a posture of profound dispassion over the things in life that we cannot control, because most of the time, how we respond is the only thing in the world we really can control.

That’s more easily said than done, however, and when the North Vietnamese army gets ahold of you, it suddenly becomes very real. During his captivity, Stockdale would be tortured fifteen times, put in leg irons for two years, and placed in solitary confinement for more than four years. After returning to the U.S. eight years later – incidentally, about the same amount of time Cabeza de Vaca would be castaway in North America – Stockdale wrote about his experience, and tried to extract from it his own philosophy for enduring hardship.¹¹⁸

The first step, he says, is admitting – upfront and very early on – your fragility, your vulnerability, your nakedness, to use Cabeza de Vaca’s language. In Stockdale’s words, you must “confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” You have to accept that you will be forced to say and do things that you swore you never would. You have to accept that at some point, your captors may break you. Your will and your physical strength aren’t enough. Remember Lope de Oviedo back on Galveston Beach? Or the concentration camp inmate Viktor Frankl told us about who died when his liberation failed to materialize the day that he dreamed it would? Stockdale offers us a similar example. Describing those who tried to adopt a strategy of pure will power and positive thinking, “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” Hope is not a strategy.

All that said, according to Stockdale, even as you are refusing to delude yourself, you must simultaneously believe something else …something that seems to be in almost direct contradiction to what we just said. Despite a clear-eyed view of the “most brutal facts of your current reality,” what you can never afford to lose, is the “faith that you will prevail in the end.” That is, you must believe both that your situation will not get better anytime soon and that you will ultimately come out of it in the end. Business writer Jim Collins gets the credit for naming this the Stockdale Paradox, but I think we have seen a much earlier example of it in our tale. Listen to how similar sixteenth century Cabeza de Vaca and twentieth century Jim Stockdale sound. Cabeza de Vaca: “As for me, I know to say that I always had complete confidence in His mercy and that he would carry me out of this captivity. And I always said as much to my companions,” Now Stockdale: “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life…” What else is that but Faith in its purest form? How does Paul describe it? “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen”? In Cabeza de Vaca and Stockdale’s case, it seems to be the ability to admit to yourself the “most brutal facts of your current reality” while believing with equal sincerity that they can and will change for the better, whether or not that is true.¹¹⁹

So perhaps we needn’t really marvel or wonder at what precisely allowed the castaways to endure their extra year of captivity between 1533 and 34. They tell us quite plainly, and we should probably accept them at their word: it is their Faith. It may even be an empirically irrational Faith or a Faith in something absolutely absurd, but the utility of that Faith to these men seems inarguable. And I’m not just talking about the utility of their faith to console them in their darkest hours. I’m talking about Faith as the actual tool by which they began to prove their worth to the natives and win enough respect to lift themselves out of the abject state they were in in 1533-34. Because during that year, somewhere in South Texas between the years 1533 and 34, the four expeditionaries began transforming themselves into native medicine men.¹²⁰

Cabeza de Vaca doesn’t actually describe how he or Castillo or Dorantes or Estevan or whoever it was started faith-healing in South Texas, but he does comment just a few months later that the tribes around them had already “heard news of us and how we were curing and of the marvels that our Lord was working through us.” Which suggest that somewhere nearby and not too long ago they had been honing their craft. Now, of course, it wouldn’t be the first time the expeditionaries had called on their God to help heal sick Native Americans. Recall that Cabeza de Vaca and perhaps others had actually dabbled in faith-healing at particularly desperate moment back on Galveston Island. After a mystery disease had wiped out 80% of the Narváez expeditionaries and half of the natives, the native announced their plan to kill off the men they suspected of having brought the blight down on their village. They decided to give the castaways one chance to right the wrong they had caused, however, and told them to heal the sick. At first, the castaways laughed, saying they didn’t know how, but the natives’ position didn’t change. And so, the expeditionaries prayed in unison, imitated the native medicine men they had seen, said some Hail Mary’s and Our Fathers, and made the sign of the cross.¹²¹

The suggestion in the text is that their cures worked, or worked well enough anyway that the expeditionaries weren’t killed by the natives of Galveston Island. I should mention one other thing: Cabeza de Vaca had observed as far back as Galveston Island that medicine men were typically paid quite handsomely for their cures. To a cold, starving man in the depths of slavery, getting a few choice hides and maybe an extra meal or two would’ve certainly been motivating enough to at least try to imitate the medicine men he had been observing now for more than five years. And, do you recall the goods that Cabeza de Vaca said he traded along the Texas coast during his year stint as a merchant? One of them was red ocher, one of the most precious pigments used by native medicine men in their ceremonies and self-painting, which suggests to me that he might have had had multiple opportunities to observe medicine men in action.¹²²

Still, we’re left to fill in the blanks as to precisely how and when Cabeza de Vaca and his companions began faith-healing again. It is interesting to me that they should have started doing so in this hardest year of their captivity, in conditions even more desperate than those they found themselves in back on Galveston Island. It’s as though whenever circumstances made them most vulnerable, the expeditionaries turned to their Faith, not only as consolation, but as the actual tool by which they were able to survive; namely, by using it to heal the sick and demonstrating that they weren’t just useless mouths to feed. And this is where I think their mastery of the Stockdale paradox helped them.

After all, if you can simultaneously accept that your present circumstances are objectively hopeless and at the same time believe – truly believe - that you will triumph over them in the end, then why can’t you believe that by concentrating deeply, reciting the right prayers, and making the sign of the cross, that you might make yourself an instrument of divine intercession in the material world.

And I’m dead serious when I say that. Because that is what Cabeza de Vaca believed. And remember, their Faith keeps working for them! It sustains them, it heals the sick, and it slowly but steadily begins to show them the way out of their current misery. What would you be able to endure if your Faith told you that it “wanted to preserve and protect you,” and you in turn then saw your Faith working through you to preserve and protect others, and that as you saw others protected you came to believe more fully that you would be protected and this wonderful virtuous cycle ensues. It would prove to you, wouldn it? that God had bigger plans for you.

But whatever God’s plans for Cabeza de Vaca were, he knew they weren’t going to be revealed to him where he was. “Me huve de huir.” I had to flee. And so, as the prickly pear tunas started to turn from green to purple, he made his way into deep south Texas, toward the sandy ranges of modern day Brooks County perhaps, where he and his fellow castaways – Alonso Castillo, Andres Dorantes, and Estevan had vowed to rendezvous exactly one year ago. On the next, Cabeza de Vaca.

The Great Escape (Z:f34v-f36r)

How prickly pears reunited the four expeditionaries and filled their bellies before their great pilgrimage.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 14: The Great Escape. I’m Brandon Seale

If you’ve ever picked prickly pears, you know that they’re nasty little things. To pick them, first you have to weave your arm through the larger thorns of the cactus itself, but that’s actually the easy part, because you reach the fluorescent pink fruit, there is a much more sinister surprise waiting for you. The fruit itself is covered with tiny, almost furry little spines that seem to jump out and burrow themselves deep into your fingers. Then when you go to pull them out, more often that not they leave behind their toxic little barbs, which leaves you feeling the spines even when they’re long gone. Running a torch over the fruits helps knock down the thorns, and I’ve seen ranch hands brush them with a handful of grass to draw out the little spines as well. But even with using those hacks, if you spend a day picking prickly pears, you will spend a week picking the pricklies out of your hand.

And what’s your reward for all this unpleasantness? A fruit that is mostly seeds, and that is neither particularly sweet nor particularly tart, and that even then you can’t really eat without roasting or boiling it. Oh, and did I mention when prickly pears ripen? In August. In South Texas. When there is no water around. Which is to say that when paleo-communities were picking prickly pears, they were doing so as much to stay hydrated as to stay fed!

And this was the time of year that South Texas Indians looked forward to the most! Such was the brutality of their existence. In the hungriest of times, they consoled themselves with fantasies about how full their bellies would be in the summer months after they traveled to the great prickly pear ranges and ate their fill.

Yet Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso Castillo, Andres Dorantes, and Estevan had another reason to look forward to the prickly pear harvest, or Tunal of 1534. They planned to use the tunal to make their escape. The tunals were great social events. A general peace fell upon a land otherwise engaged in constant war: marriages were arranged, religious ceremonies performed, and trade conducted. It was perhaps the only time of year when the land offered sufficient bounty to allow for some leisure time for these long-suffering foragers and to support large movements of people. It attracted tribes from all over South Texas and northern Mexico, including the bands with whom Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan had been living the past year.

A year earlier during the prickly pear harvest of 1533, the four former Narváez expeditionaries were just days away from effecting their escape when the band keeping them tore itself apart in a fit of infighting. The band broke up and dispersed, splitting up the castaways, frustrating their escape plans, and consigning them to another year of slavery and privation.

Before they had been split up, however, they had made a pact to meet back at the same spot one year later. It was an ambitious thing to do, frankly. Every day they were in their current captivity, their lives were in danger, from hunger, from mistreatment, from the state of war the prevailed over the countryside, from the countryside itself, which seemed to want nothing more than to stab, bite, or poison any two-legged creature wandering through it.

Yet somehow, all four survived that awful year. And as the summer of 1534 came to a close, their respective bands began to move back to the great prickly pear ranges, perhaps in and around modern-day Brooks County, Texas.

It wasn’t going to be easy for the four men to reconnect. South Texas is a big, empty place without a lot of clear landmarks. Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan were close enough to each other that they had been able to stay in contact, but the three had no inkling of where Cabeza de Vaca was or even if he was still alive. Then, on or around September 1st, 1534, they saw smoke coming from another native camp. Somehow – they attributed it to divine guidance – they just knew that it was Cabeza de Vaca’s camp. They drew closer with their band, and found their intuitions confirmed. Whether they felt anxiety, disbelief, or joy upon seeing each other again, we can only guess. The narrative record just tells us that they jumped straight into planning. With good reason: they needed to get moving while the pear harvest held out and the general movement of people during that time helped assuage any suspicions at their moving about the countryside alone. And so the four men agreed that thirteen days from then, on the day of the full aka “ecclesiastical” moon, they would meet at a designated point and begin their journey south, to the land of their countrymen whom they hadn’t seen now in almost six years. And they gave each other an ultimatum. Anyone who didn’t appear at the set time, would be left behind.¹²³

On the appointed day – if not perhaps even a half day sooner, Cabeza de Vaca snuck away from his Indians and picked his way through the brush under the light of the full moon. Later that evening, Dorantes and Estevan found him, showing signs of fresh abuse at the hands of their keepers, a band that called themselves the Camones. And it wasn’t just the beating that had left them shaken up; they had finally learned the fate of the last, fifth raft of the pathetic flotilla with which they had departed the Florida coast back in 1528. The fifth raft had drifted on for days longer than the others, well after when any of their remaining supplies of food or freshwater would have run out, and ended up beached somewhere along southern padre island. Quote: “They had been so famished that even though they were being killed, they did not even defend themselves, and the Indians finished them off.” And that was it. The Indians who had found them, the Camones, seem to have been the Indians whom Dorantes and Estevan had just run into. They had proudly told the pair what they had done to the other men like them. As proof, they even showed them some of the clothes and weapons they had taken off of their old companions. It was a frightening story to hear right then and a reminder of how vulnerable – “naked”, if you prefer – they were in this land. Unlike Lope de Oviedo’s response a few years back, however, Dorantes, Estevan, and Cabeza de Vaca weren’t cowed by it. They used it as motivation to get moving.¹²⁴

Only Castillo still hadn’t shown up. Cabeza de Vaca, Dorantes, and Estevan decided to postpone their escape for a day longer, and moved closer to a band they believed to be holding Castillo. It was a risk, however, as this band was a historic enemy of the band that Cabeza de Vaca had been with. Yet despite their historic animosity, these bands suddenly sought peace with one another. It had the effect of actually bringing the respective bands together, giving cover to the expeditionaries movements. And sure enough, they soon confirmed Castillo’s presence in the camp. That night, the 13th of September by Cabeza de Vaca’s reckoning, Castillo broke away and joined the other three them and, once again, In Cabeza de Vaca’s words, “we commended ourselves to God, our Lord, and fled,” using that great word once again, “encomendar” to signal how this time, they were giving themselves over entirely to God, wherever he might choose to lead them.¹²⁵

Barely two days out from their escape, and hurried along by the fear that their old masters might be after them, they saw a pillar of smoke rising in the air up ahead. It had been a pillar of smoke rising in the air just a few weeks ago that had reunited them after the last brutal year of captivity, and these four weren’t the types to disregard mystical signs. They couldn’t know what tribe lay at the base of that pillar of smoke nor how they would be received there, but they decided to trust it anyway. As they drew nearer to the smoke, they came upon a single Indian traveling alone through the countryside. Fearful of the odd-looking quartet and conditioned to distrust most he encountered because of the continuous state of war that prevailed over the land, the Indian tried to run away. And here, in author Dennis Herrick’s words, Estevan saved the lot of them. A so-called “black Arab” from Morocco, he had come to the New World as the slave of Andrés Dorantes. The ordeal of the previous six years had dissolved much of the distinction between master and slave, however, and Estevan had emerged as a trusted and crucial part of the expeditionaries strategy for moving forward. He followed the Indian, calling out in various languages, trying to calm him and signal to him that the four meant no harm. It worked. He caught up with the Indian, the two conversed, and the Indian agreed to lead the castaways into to the next village. Estevan, as we will see, possessed an unusual aptitude for languages and an uncanny ability to communicate with many different kinds of peoples.

Whatever Estevan said to this lone Indian radically changed the way that the four expeditionaries would be received by native communities from this point forward. There’s no reason why these Indians shouldn’t have viewed the four as anything but beggars and potential slaves, no differently than every other tribe they had encountered before. Yet something was different this time. They weren’t going to just show up a village and beg for food. They were going to show up as someone important, someone valuable to the tribe. They were going to become Medicine Men. Maybe Estevan came up with it when he was talking to their Indian guide, or maybe it was premeditated in advance. It is worth mentioning here that September 13th – the date Cabeza de Vaca states as the date of their escape and an impossibly precise date given that he hadn’t seen a proper calendar in six years by this point – is the feast day of St. John Chrysotum, the patron saint of preachers. Or maybe the natives came to believe the four were special on their own, ““since they had already had news of us and how we were curing and of the marvels that our Lord was working through us.” In either case, when they arrived in the village, led by Estevan and their Indian guide, they were met excitedly by the natives, Avavares they called themselves.¹²⁶

And there’s another clue here as well in the housing arrangements the Avavares offered the four. Estevan and Dorantes they singled out to be housed with one of their medicine men. Which suggests to me that they perhaps thought of Estevan and Dorantes as medicine men. Based on this and Cabeza de Vaca’s line that they “had heard of us and how we cured people” suggests that quick-thinking Estevan had decided to present the castaways not as beggars, but medicine men, and built them up accordingly. He might also have had in mind something that Cabeza de Vaca had certainly noticed previously: that medicine men, or shamans, were rewarded quite lavishly by their patients in native North America…lavish anyway by the standards of the resource-poor region. Yet those small payments might be enough to allow them to move forward, and not have to rely on their labor or the generosity of strangers to keep them fed along the way.

The transition in the expeditionaries’ narratives from slaves to shamans is so sudden that it seems unlikely it was entirely planned. It feels like the expeditionareis would have taken more credit for it if it was something they had really thought through. More likely than not, all the things we’ve mentioned above just came together at the right time and in the right way to reveal to them the course they needed to follow. Then again, maybe that’s what divine intervention looks like, not a burning bush, but the subtle coincidence of various factors that all seem to favor a similar outcome.

Of course, the challenge with building yourself up as a Medicine man is that eventually, you have to start healing people. No sooner had the expeditionaries settled into their lodgings, then the Avavares put them to their first tests. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

Tests of Faith (Z:f36r-37r)

How the castaways became medicine men.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 15: Tests of Faith. I’m Brandon Seale.

Alonso Castillo looked terrified. Then again, he may have been a bit of a meeker soul to begin with. It’s hard to know for sure, because neither of the two surviving accounts of the Narváez expedition seem to come from Castillo directly and even in the so-called joint report, Castillo’s voice seems to get swallowed Cabeza de Vaca’s and Dorantes. He was also one of the highest-born men among the original Narváez expeditionaries with relatives in high positions in the Castillian administration of the New World, so it had not been an unnatural thing for him to have sold off part of his inheritance to buy a captaincy in the Narváez expedition. He was of the class in Castilian society that was born to command, yet even in the surviving expedition accounts, we never really see him acting commanding solo. More often than not, he is overshadowed by the other two Castilians, like when he went along with Cabeza de Vaca on some of his scouting missions back in Florida, or when he served as the more subdued co-commander with the more veteran Dorantes on one of the five doomed rafts the expeditionaries had taken out onto the gulf.

It is curious then, that it was to Castillo whom native americans first looked to heal what was ailing them.

The natives had just met Castillo the day before, when a strange looking black man had preceded the three, bearded pink men into the village of the Avavares, as they called themselves. The black man, Estevan, he said his name was, told the villagers he and the other three were medicine men. Fortunately, according to Cabeza de Vaca, the Avavares “had already heard news of us” and were honored by their presence. In that Avavar village somewhere in modern day Starr County, Texas perhaps, the four expeditionaries were met by the most charitable reception they’d had since landing on Galveston Island six years before. “[The Avavares] acted like they were happy to have us and took us to their lodges.” Estevan and Dorantes in particular they housed with their own medicine man on the edge of the village. Medicine men - shamans, if you prefer – occupied a special niche in native American socety. They existed somewhere between the material and the spiritual realms, between the knowable and the unknowable, and so the rules were different for them: in bands that practiced monogamy, they were allowed multiple wives; in bands that buried their dead, shamans were instead burned; and in almost all tribes, they were rewarded for successful cures with handsome payments from their patients. The expeditionaries had not failed to notice all this over the last six years, and it would not have been hard for them to conclude that life as a medicine man was better than the life they had known.¹²⁷

You couldn’t just become a medicine man. You had to be called to it, and you had to have a certain amount of presence and showmanship. The four expeditionaries had a little bit of that going for them: they certainly looked different than anyone else wandering around South Texas at that time. And when they worked in enough Catholic ritual into their actions, it certain gave the appearance of theater. Of course, the most important part of being a medicine man was being able to actually cure people. And so the same night they arrived in the Avavar village, they were put to the test. Cabeza de Vaca tells how several Indians were brought before them, “saying they had terrible headaches and begging us to cure them.” But more specifically, they were brought before Alonso Castillo. Again, why Castillo? Cabeza de Vaca was the oldest of the four, seemed to be the acknowledged leader, and had been a bit of a student of these medicine men since his days trading red ocher with them on the Upper Texas coast. It wasn’t Dorantes or Estevan, whom they esteemed enough to put up with their own medicine men during their stay in the village. Yet they apparently selected the meekest-looking of the lot, Castillo, to put to the test.¹²⁸

Or maybe the castaways steered the ailing Indian patients to Castillo. Because there’s another interesting fact here I should include: Castillo’s father was a Doctor. We don’t get any detail about this in the accounts and there’s no mention of his using any medical insights in his cures, but it’s an interesting piece of background info. Nevertheless, it didn’t seem to give Castillo much confidence in himself. He is a reluctant medicine man, always worried that “that his sins might interfere with his cures and they would not all work out well,” which also kind of fits with my rather baseless portrait of him as having been more generally humble and mild-mannered.¹²⁹

It’s also a revealing statement because it tells us something about the state of minds of the expeditionaries as they performed these cures. It’s tempting to assume that their cures were just some kind of carnival trick. But everything in the accounts suggests that the exepditionareis took them dead seriously. They believed that when they were performing cures, they were accessing something divine or something anyway beyond their control. They trusted – because they had to – that if these Indians were asking them to cure, that it was in fact God asking them to cure, and that if God wanted them to cure, God would cure through them, but only if they truly handled themselves over to their God, “encomendarse.”

Interestingly, this is precisely what their patients believed as well. This act of curing, of “faith-healing” to use a different word, brought together the Old World and the New in ways that nothing else so far had. The Old Worlders and the New could barely communicate by words and signs, they could barely even comprehend each other’s worlds, yet when Alonso Castillo closed his eyes and raised his hands in front of the first patient, they were all united in their belief that something unknowable and otherworldly was transpiring between them. And they knew that they had to believe that for that to work. So maybe the expeditionaries were the ones who wanted Castillo to perform the first cures precisely because he was the meekest of them. Perhaps they viewed their most pious and most doubtful companion as the most fitting conduit for divine intervention.

With the ailing Indians before him, Castillo began to recite Pater nesters and Ave Marias in what even his patients’ might have sensed was a different language from the ones the expetitionaries spoke amongst themselves. Castillo lay his hands on the afflicted, or maybe he breathed on them or passed a warm stone over them or made small incisions in their skin, imitating what they had learned of the practices of native shamans. And then, to close, he made the sign of the cross over them. In manus tuas commendo spiritum eum. Quote: “And as soon as he had made the sign of the cross and commended them to God’s care, at that moment the Indians said that their pain was entirely gone.”¹³⁰

It had worked! Their patients “went back to their lodges and brought us back many prickly pears and a piece of venison, which we didn’t even recognize.” It had been that long since they had eaten meat! And they brought back more patients. “And as news of our cures spread among them, they came back with other sick people that same night for him to cure.” And it kept working. All of the sudden, four expeditionaries who had been on the brink of starvation for the last half decade now had more food than they knew what to do with. It seems like the natural impulse would have been to hoard it. But they didn’t, either because they simply couldn’t, or because another idea occurred to them. Everything they couldn’t eat themselves, they gave away. By giving away their bounty, they began to generate an immense amount of a good will, and their fame began to spread even further.¹³¹

For three days, people came from far and wide, like a small music festival on a dairy farm in upstate New York swelling to a mass migration of hundreds of thousands of people. It may not of have been hundreds of thousands, but the magnitude of the social movement that the four expeditionaries were about to set off in proportion to the population of the countryside they were in was even greater. And yet, all of these people created a problem. The prickly pears near the Avavar village were soon picked clean. The Avavares – who were enjoying the prestige and perhaps commercial benefits of playing host to these now-famous medicine men – nevertheless realized that they needed to move somewhere else if they were going to be able to forage with any success. The expeditionaries happily agreed; their goal wasn’t to be medicine men, it was to keep moving south, toward the Río Pánuco where they thought they might be able to rejoin their civilization. With the Avavares, they journeyed south for five days until they arrived at the biggest river they had seen since the mighty Mississippi had scattered their flotilla of rafts back in 1528. It was, most modern scholars think, the Rio Grande somewhere in the vicinity of modern-day Lake Falcón, though I should acknowledge that there are some who have the expeditionaries turning inland several months back and perhaps following the Colorado River up into Texas. They didn’t cross this river yet, but they made camp near it, presumably to take advantage of the more fertile lands draining it.

The prickly pears were starting to give out, however, and as they did, it meant more time spent by the four expeditionaires and their native band foraging. It also meant there were fewer groupies travelling to meet them, fewer to heal, and less wealth to spread. In times of hunger, it seems, even medicine men had to go find their own food. The four expeditionaries, like the rest of the Avavares, began to pass their days seeking out the scarcer, seasonal forage that supported the natives for most of the year in South Texas, in this case, a kind of “grass” or “vetch” that wasn’t easy to find.. Hunger began to set it. And one day, as he searched farther and farther from camp for fresh hunting grounds, Cabeza de Vaca wandered off too far, out of sight of the rest of his band. When night fell, he found himself alone. And after several hours of trying to find his way home, he realized he was lost.

It was by now, the winter of 1534, and winter in South Texas can be a surprisingly bitter thing, particularly when you are, as Cabeza de Vaca reminds us he was, “desnudo como nascí” naked as the day I was born. It’s a line that should reemphasize for us how vulnerable he was feeling in this land where pretty much everything in it wanted to bite, sting, or kill him. Then layer in the crushing psychological effect of being alone again. Cabeza de Vaca had endured a brutal year of slavery and only just a few months ago been reunited with his three fellow expeditionaries. Being together with his old expeditionaries always seemed to energize Cabeza de Vaca, to give him strength. And now that was taken from him. And worse still, all this just weeks after they seemed to have found a way to move through this strange land and escape their captivity! Their successful faith-healing of the previous weeks had absolutely changed their prospects. How cruel that now, after this recent little ray of hope, how cruel that now he should be cast out in the wilderness by himself and left to his own devices!¹³²

As Cabeza de Vaca continued on searching through the indistinguishable monte, fending off despair, ahead of him he saw something glowing. He directed himself toward it. He drew closer but heard no voices, strange for such a large fire. He came closer still until at last he saw what it was. “It pleased God that I should find a burning tree.” I’m not kidding, in the middle of Starr County, TX, somewhere under the waters of modern-day Lake Falcon, perhaps, Cabeza de Vaca had stumbled upon a burning bush.¹³³

He actually doesn’t draw any attention to the very obvious biblical parallel here, even choosing to use the word “tree” instead of “bush”, but I’d be willing to venture that no one, at least no contemporary of Cabeza de Vaca’s, who read his account didn’t call to mind Moses here. And for Cabeza de Vaca himself, could there have been any greater sign that his God was watching over him?

Cabeza de Vaca passed that first night next to the warmth of the burning bush, and then set out the next day to search again for his band. Wisely, he took with him a pair of burning sticks so that we would not be without fire the next night, which indeed, is what it came to. As night fell, he went down to the riverbank, collecting some firewood, and then scratched out a hole in the ground. He set four fires around him on all four sides, “like a cross” to ward off any animals and keep himself warm, and lay himself down in the hole to sleep. It occurs to me that from above, he might have looked like he was pinned to a flaming crucifix, an image that I find to be a bit heavenly but a bit hellish as well.

For five nights he continued this routine. “And all this time I did not eat a mouthful because I didn’t find anything to eat, and as my feet were bare, they bled profusely.” A hard cold front, he believed, would have finished him off, but he was spared this. Instead, it was actually his own artifice that almost killed him. One night, after laying himself down in his hole and setting fires all around him, he covered himself in some long grass to try to keep warm. After he had fallen asleep, a spark jumped and set the grass of top of him on fire. In his hungry and fatigued state, he was slow to react. “Asleep in my hole, the fire began to burn fiercely, and as quickly as I was able to get myself out of it, I still had all my hair singed.” Hair on fire, he leapt out of his hole, looking like nothing so much as like a demon emerging from the underworld. He beat out the flames, caught his breath, and counted his blessings.

The next day, continuing to follow the river, he finally stumbled back into the band of Avavares and found himself reunited with Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan. His reappearance in the native band and the story that accompanied it would have only made him seem more mysterious, more shaman-like to his native hosts, though in reality he probably looked a bit like a corpse, with his singed hair, sunken eyes, and charred skin. His companions had given him up for dead, and were overjoyed at his miraculous reappearance. “And we gave many thanks to our Lord because we never lacking in his aid,” says the man who for five days ate not a mouthful, his feet bleeding from the rough terrain he had to cover, and burned so severely that he still carried the scars from it. If that seems like a strange sentiment to you in such circumstances, I encourage you to go back to listen to Episode 11 where we talked a little about the Cabeza de Vaca’s Faith.

The burning bush and his own five nights in the wilderness served to remind Cabeza de Vaca of his ongoing nakedness, which is to say, of his ongoing vulnerability and that – despite their initial success as faith-healers - they still depended entirely on their God for their success.

The day after Cabeza de Vaca’s return, five new lame Indians were brought before the expeditionaries. They hadnt’ actually been asked to cure for the last couple of months, so the timing of this is suspicious. Maybe they wanted to test the expeditionaries, and particularly Cabeza de Vaca’s pretty incredible claims to divine protection during his days wandering through the brush country. And yet, it wasn’t to Cabeza de Vaca that they brough the five “lame and very ill” Indians, “tollidos y enfermos.” The downside to being a medicine man is that you have to keep practicing as a medicine man. Once you stop, you’re no longer worthy of any special treatment; and if you fail, well, that’s worse than if you’d never tried. And as the five lame Indians came before him, Alonso Castillo realized that there was “no other means by which the people would help them leave this miserable life.”¹³⁴

Once again, Alonso Castillo looked terrified. He lifted his hands, however, and began to pray. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

Signs and Wonders (Z:f37r-f38v)

How Cabeza de Vaca and his companions performed their cures.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 16: Signs and Wonders. I’m Brandon Seale.

By the end of 1534, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan had made their way as far south as the Rio Grande, somewhere perhaps near modern-day Lake Falcón. And they were no longer mere slaves to the hunter-gatherer tribes of South Texas. They had become medicine men, faith-healers, and honored guests of the new tribes they met – a marked change from the treatment they had received for most of their six years on the continent up to this point.

Of course, the flipside to being medicine men is that they were called upon to perform increasingly challenging cures. First it had just been some Indians with headaches; now, it was five lame Indians with some kind of apparently permanent disability. As an upfront payment for their healing, these five disabled Indians had brought their bows and arrows, items of inestimable worth to these resource-poor Indians, and lain them at the feet of Alonso Castillo. To-date, it had only been Castillo who had been asked to heal, yet he was never fully comfortable with it. Always, there was the implicit threat that if they failed, they would have exposed their uselessness to the peoples hosting them, and in Castillo’s case he was always fearful “that his sins might interfere with his cures and they would not all work out well.” Of course, maybe it was Castillo’s piety and humility that made him such a good medicine man? Even so, the four expeditionaries agreed that only God could heal the five Indians before them now. No carnival trick, nothing even that Castillo might have picked up from his doctor-father back in Salamanca was going to save them now, and so they all gathered around Castillo to pray and invoke his intervention.¹³⁵

In this instance, the ritual seems to have gone on for hours. Eliseo Torres, a professor at the University of New Mexico, has actually written a paper comparing the healing techniques of the Narváez expeditionaries and those of three early twentieth century Mexican curanderos – medicine men, if you will. Curanderismo blends beliefs and practices from both the Catholic saludadores of old Castille and native American shamans in the New World. Professor Torres gives us some of the techniques used by his three twentieth century curanderos: “Don Pedrito would pray, massage the body, and prescribe simple herbal plants, the drinking of water, and the use of mud to rub on the ailment. Niño Fidencio would prescribe herbs, baths, and prayer. Teresita would also prescribe herbs, baths, prayer, and would use hypnosis.” The other important ingredient, of course, was faith. Quote: “The belief that all healing comes from God makes it religious as does the concept that a curandero can only bring God's will.”¹³⁶

It's not a surprise, then, that Professor Torres goes so far as to call Cabeza de Vaca the “first curandero.” And I think he’s right that Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Doranes, and Esteban probably would have used many of the same techniques that Professor Torres catalogued a moment ago. In this case, we can imagine Castillo taking up his position in front of the five disabled Indians, and starting perhaps with a prayer in a language that sounded ancient and holy to even his fellow expeditionaries. Perhaps first he asked his patients to make confession: aside from being a sacrament in the Catholic tradition, it was apparently also a part of many Native American religious practices. Maybe he massaged the bodies of the afflicted, strategically placed or burned herbs, or offerd them water to drink, eucharist-style. Perhaps he blew on them, or passed warm stones over them. Maybe he chanted his Pater Noster and Ave Marias over and over, inducing in himself a sort of hypnotic trance – we’ve got a couple of hours apparently to fill in this scene, so it’s not an unreasonable supposition. Perhaps then he bled them a little, making small incisions near their pain points and then cauterizing the wounds with fire, all while his companions “prayed in the best way we knew how.” ¹³⁷

In truth, the only thing we really know for sure about this particular ceremony, is that it ended at that magical, liminal moment, just as the sunset, when he made the sign of the cross over his patients, and commended them to God’s mercy.

But nothing happened. No one was upset at first. Everyone in this age – New Worlder and Old – knew that the universe was a mysterious place, and that cures didn’t always happen instantaneously. The disabled Indians were taken away, back to their camps and they fell asleep. Meanwhile, the expeditionaries continued praying. Is this because they were they worried? Cabeza de Vaca says he wasn’t: “As for me, I know to say that I always had complete confidence in His mercy and that he would carry me out of this captivity. And I always said as much to my companions.” Of course, what else could they do? “no habia otro remedio,” Cabeza de Vaca says, “There was no other way to get these people to help us or for us to extract ourselves from this miserable life” than to perform these cures.¹³⁸

The faith of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions is pretty hard for us to make sense of in the modern age, but I do think it is worth trying to understand. I have this idea, correct or not, that whatever belief system these guys emerge from their experience with has to be a pretty functional set of ideas, that they must have some utility even if the way in which they are formulated is hard to make sense of. And here’s where this starts to get a little uncomfortable, because the Faith of these four expeditionaries is not just some childlike belief in a white-robed wish-fulfiller in the sky or in some kind of amorphous idea that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds. It is, in fact, a very specific faith in a very specific creed. Admiral Jim Stockdale, the Vietnam War POW, agrees with this: “I do not know of a single case where a man was able to erase his conscience pangs with some laid-back pop psychology…” No, it seems that the kind of Faith that is really necessary to sustain people in extreme situations like this is a Faith in something demonstrably impossible. Which I’m arguing these expeditionaries would have had to have believed to have kept going. How else could they have motivated themselves to get up each morning than to have some kind of belief system that tells you that – no matter how bad everything has gone to this point, there is at least a credible chance that things might go a little better today. That despite the fact that the last ten tribes you’ve encountered have beaten you to within an inch of your life, this tribe might not, and that you owe it to them and to your own belief system to give them that benefit of the doubt. Jordan Peterson offers a nice quote in his book 12 Rules For Life: “Faith is not the childish belief in magic. That is ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.”

And I really want to emphasize something else. The expeditionaries’ faith keeps working for them! Why wouldn’t you trust in something that works? “Come morning, the [disabled Indians] all awoke so well and healthy and they went away so energetically it was as if they had ever had anything wrong with them.” Cabeza de Vaca assiduously avoids using this word, but it sure as heck seemed like a miracle. As you might imagine, this provoked quite a response. “Among the Indians this created great awe, and it reminded us to give many thanks to our Lord and to try to know more fully his mercy and that from this we might have certain hope that he would liberate us and take us to where we might best serve Him.” ¹³⁹

Word of their healings spread far and wide and once again, a wave of sick people came looking for them. “In all this land nothing else was spoken of except the mysteries that our Lod God worked through us, and people came from far and wide so that we might cure them.” The four expeditionaries were on a roll. The first cures back in September or so of 1534 weren’t enough to dispel in them the suspicion that they were some kind of fluke, or some kind of one-off that their God worked through them perhaps just to keep them safe for a few months longer. Now, it seemed like something else was at work. This wasn’t a fluke. They felt themselves called upon to serve all these peoples coming before them. And each successful cure contributed to their confidence as well as to the confidence that their patients had in them!¹⁴⁰

But remember too that here along the North shore of the Rio Grande, the expeditionaries are just a few months and a few dozen miles away from other tribes who had held them as slaves for may years. And apparently spoke the same language as the Indians they were with now. How did those bands react when they heard that their hairy, dirty old slaves were now medicine men? No man is a prophet in his hometown, after all. And sure enough, some of the expeditionaries’ old masters came south to check out what all the commotion was about. And they brought with them a test.¹⁴¹

Cabeza de Vaca actually imputes no ill will to these old acquaintances of theirs when they showed up unexpectedly. Yet as we’ve seen in other instances, even when he is being assaulted, he’s pretty reluctant to project malice onto other people. In this case, Cabeza de Vaca actually goes so far as to say of these old acquaintances that “They liked me” which seems strange given that nothing about the treatment he received from them in the previous episodes would suggest this. But I still can’t help but read the events that follow as some kind of test meant perhaps to expose the expeditionaries. Because, as I’ve said, the case they brought before the expeditionaries was a pretty difficult one. It was a dead man.¹⁴²

Castillo refused to do it. As we mentioned, he was was always “a very fearful healer,” but so far the other expeditionaries had always been able to persuade him to do it. Not this time. And frankly, there was virtually no reason why anyone of them should have tried to heal this man. Even the native American worldview probably accepted that medicine men couldn’t bring dead men back to life. For the four expeditionaries to have begged off would have been totally understandable.

But Cabeza de Vaca accepted the challenge. Why? He had so much more to lose by screwing this up. I think we can read between the lines in his narrative a little to understand his reasoning: “I had to go with them,” he says, “Huve de ir con ellos…, using the exact same words of sort of divine compulsion that he had used earlier when describing his need to try to escape from his old masters even though he knew it meant risking his life. In short, he was called to do it. I’ll let Cabeza de Vaca take it from here:

“I saw that the sick man we had been asked to heal was dead, because there were many people all around crying and his tent had already been taken down, which is the sign that the owner has died. And so it was when I arrived, I found the Indian with his eyes rolled back in his head and withoutany pulse, with all indications that he was dead, so it seemed to me and Dorantes agreed. I pulled back the sheet that they covered him with. And as best I could, I prayed that our Lord be served by giving this man health as well as all others who needed it. Afterward, I made the sign of the cross and blew on him many times. They brought me his bow and some ground prickly pears as payment.”

Again, nothing had happened at first. The dead man lay precisely where they had left him, covered in what was essentially a burial shroud, with his lodge already torn down, a sign that his own people had effectively written him off as dead. Cabeza de Vaca went on to heal a few others who were laying around in a bad state, though none so bad as the dead man of course. After he finished this, he gave away the prickly pears they had paid him with, and everyone went back to their lodges to sleep for the night.

Yet later that night, suddenly, some of the Indians to whom Cabeza de Vaca had given his extra prickly pears to came running into camp, extremely animated, “saying that the dead man that I had cured in the presence of so many had risen up well and moved around and eaten and spoken with them, and that all that I had cured were healthy and without fever and very happy. This caused greate awe and fear, and in all the land nothing else was spoken of.”¹⁴³

And with good reason! These funny-looking medicine men had just raised a man from the dead! This is kind of a big deal, even in a world that believes in magic. On its face, to us as modern-readers, it is literally unbelievable. And remember that Dorantesa and Castillo are still alive when Cabeza de Vaca publishes his tale, and they end up with copies of it. Not only do they not contradict him on this and many of the other really incredible claims, but Dorantes’s son would later actually endorse it wholeheartedly in a later account he wrote of his father’s life.¹⁴⁴

To most modern readers this entire episode cries out for an explanation. It’s not hard to come up with ways to imagine that the dead man was merely unconscious perhaps, or sleeping, or something, though Cabeza de Vaca says the exact opposite of this in the text. Some attribute the expeditionaries’ cures to trickery or showmanship or some kind of hypnotic healing of purely psychosomatic ailments. And maybe they are right, I suppose we can never know for sure. But I like the way Professor Andrés Resendez says it: “there is no more evidence to support those explanations than there is to support the faith of both the castaways and the natives in supernatural intervention. All we can say with confidence is that this gift of curing, whether real or imagined, allowed the castaways to move toward their deliverance.”¹⁴⁵

And actually, if we read the text carefully, we see that expeditionaries themselves remain pretty humbled and in awe of what is happening as well. Or at least they avoid the kind of obvious self-agrandizing that we would expect after performing such a miraculous deed as raising a man from the dead. I mean, the analogy to Lazarus is obvious to any reader in the Christian tradition, which by extension would make Cabeza de Vaca Jesus in this analogy. But Cabeza de Vaca doesn’t reference it and seems to be studiously avoiding the word “miracle” to describe any of the expeditionaries’ cures, any one of which surely would have qualified for the label had it happened 1500 years earlier in Galilee. Maybe this is just to stay out of trouble with the Inquisition, but I think we might just as easily believe that it came from their sincere belief that they were not the ones performing the cures, that they were just the instruments of some greater force at work.¹⁴⁶

And if we want to think about it more tactically, you can see the advantage of loudly proclaiming oneself to be merely the instrument of the divine, rather than a diving being yourself. As the example of Jesus shows, claiming yourself to be divine can get you killed…but killing the instrument of the divine is a riskier thing, something that could boomerang back on you in unforeseeable ways.

And lastly, the four expeditionaries put another clever twist on their practice as medicine men that made the people around them want to see them succeed: they gave away everything their patients brought to them as payment. If they had simply kept all the bows and arrows and prickly pears and “flint stones as long as one and a half palms” or tried to sell them off for some personal benefit, it surely would have eventually made them targets of resentment. Instead, the expeditionaries saw that they could reinvest these payments in the people around them, and thus attach entire communities to their success.

The healing of the five crippled Indians, the raising of the dead man, and the subsequent fame that followed led to a marked reversal of fortune for four men who just a few months ago were daily on the brink of starvation. Now, “All those who heard of our fame came looking for us so that we might heal and bless their children.” Soon, Dorantes and Estevan had to be recruited in as healers themselves as well to keep up with the demand for their services. Further, quote: “And no one that we cured did not say that he felt better…” and “All left, the happiest people on earth, having given us the very best of what they owned.”¹⁴⁷

For eight months the expeditionaries remained there, camped on the north shore of the Rio Grande into the Summer of 1535 performing their cures and building their retinue. Their goal was still to get to Pánuco, near modern-day Tampico, the northernmost point of New Spanish settlement on the American mainland. They knew they needed to get moving, but until the prickly pears blossomed again, the land couldn’t easily support their movement. There was, actually, another reason to get moving as well. Rumors had begun to circulate throughout the countryside of evil, bearded medicine men wandering around, taking natives’ possessions, inflicting mysterious wounds on them, and disrupting their traditional religious ceremonies. Indeed, these evil, bearded medicine men sounded suspiciously like the four expeditionaries. And wasn’t it strange, some started to whisper, that these medicine men showed up right around the same time as the diseases they professed to cure? If they had investigated, they would have found that disease had followed the expeditionaries all the way from Galveston Island. One man’s faith-healer, is another man’s witch-doctor. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

Mala Cosa (Z:f38v-f41v)

How the expeditionaries came to question their medicine.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 17: Mala Cosa. I’m Brandon Seale.

One of the most memorable stories in Cabeza de Vaca’s account is the story of “Mala Cosa.” It’s one of the few times in his account where we get a native American perspective on how they viewed their changing world during this time. And I’ll be honest, the more I read it, the more I think it paints a pretty unflattering portrait of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions.

Here it is, at length: “From [the natives’] account it started fifteen or sixteen years ago. They told us that a man had gone about in that land whom they called “Mala Cosa”, short-haired, with a beard, though his face they could never clearly make out. Just before he arrived at someone’s lodge, the occupant’s hair would stand on end and they would tremble, and then suddenly Mala Cosa would appear in the doorway holding burning sticks. He would enter their lodge, and take whatever he wanted from them. Then, he would make three cuts into their sides with a very sharp rock, one hand wide and two palms long. Then he would stick his hand into the incisions and remove their intestines, and he would cut off several inches and the part that he cut off he would throw in the fire. Then, he would make three cuts into their arm, in the crook of the elbow, and dislocate it. A short while later, he would re-set the arm and place his hands over the wounds, and they told us that when he was done, everything healed right up. They said that many times when they were dancing in their religious ceremonies he would appear among them, sometimes dressed as a woman, sometimes as a man, and that when he wanted to, he could pick up an entire lodge and lift it up into the air and a little later bring it crashing down. They also said that many times, they gave him food to eat, but that he never ate, and that when they asked him where he came from and where he had his home, he pointed to a hole in the ground and said that his home was down below.”¹⁴⁸

As Cabeza de Vaca scholars Adorno and Pautz point out, the story fits into the long tradition of native American trickster tales, something which isn’t particularly important for our purposes but which lends it a certain authenticity. What’s more interesting for our purposes is how much Mala Cosa sounds like Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, Estevan, or an amalgamation of the four of them!¹⁴⁹

Let us count the ways. First, this mysterious character, “Mala Cosa,” according to cabeza de Vaca, first appeared in the region fifteen or sixteen years ago. Well, counting backwards from the summer of 1535, that puts it in approximately 1519 – the precise year that Cortés landed in México and when other Castilians first set foot on the Pánuco river, only 400 or so miles south of where Cabeza de Vaca and his companions sat now. Interesting, right? Next, the reference to Mala Cosa being “bearded” sounds distinctly European. Next, according to the story, Mala Cosa was in the habit of appearing unannounced and quite suddenly – just as Cabeza de Vaca and his comrades had a habit of doing. Also, Mala Cosa carried with him “burning sticks.” Well, the last figure we walking around with burning sticks was Cabeza de Vaca himself, wandering lost along the Rio Grande two episodes ago with his only protection against the elements being the firebrands he had salvaged from a burning bush.¹⁵⁰

It actually gets even more uncanny the deeper we go with this. We learn that Mala Cosa’s MO was to enter a lodge outside of which he had appeared, and take whatever he wanted…is this how the natives perceived the four medicine in men in their midst, charging them for their cures at the going rate of everything that they owned? We hear that Mala Cosa was roaming the countryside dislocating joints and then “A short while later, he would re-set the arm and place his hands over the wounds, and they told us that when he was done, everything healed right up.” Who else do we know roaming around the countryside, setting broken bones and laying on hands? And there is something familiar to how Mala Cosa effects his cures: he would make three cuts near the afflicted area, then cut into the sides of his victims with a rock, “one hand wide and two palms long.” We’ve heard of the expeditionaries bleeding and cauterizing their patients too, and we just saw a Cabeza de Vaca being gifted a flint one and a half palms long a few episodes ago!

It continues. Sometimes, we learn, Mala Cosa would appear dressed like a man; sometimes dressed like a woman. Recall back to episode 9 when we saw Cabeza de Vaca doing a lot of traditionally “women’s work,” most notably as a merchant moving about amongst the many tribes of the region. We also learn that Mala Cosa’s hosts often tried to offer him food, but he never ate, kind of like the way Cabeza de Vaca and his companions very publicly gave away almost all the food they were gifted for performing their cures. Lastly, when [the natives] asked [Mala Cosa] “where he came from and where he had his home, he pointed to a hole in the ground and said that his home was down below.” Recall that Cabeza de Vaca’s experience from Episode 15 when he had scratched out a hole in the ground and surrounded himself by fires to protect himself at night after he’d gotten lost for five nights in the South Texas monte? The fires had ignited the grass he had used to cover himself, leading to him having to leap out of the flaming hole, like a demon emerging from the underworld…or like Mala Cosa coming out of his hole. ¹⁵¹

Perhaps because the deeds and misdeeds of Mala Cosa sounded so much like those of the expeditionaries, they felt compelled to rebut the story right after they heard it: “We told them that Mala Cosa was evil. And in the best way we could, we made them understand that if they were to believe in God our Lord and if they were to be Christians like us, that would not need to fear him and that in fact he wouldn’t dare come do those things to them and – pay attention to this part – that we knew it for certain that as long as we were in this land, he would not dare appear in it.” They “knew” it…like the way Clark Kent always knows when Superman won’t be around?¹⁵²

Almost anyone who has read Cabeza de Vaca closely has noted the parallels between Mala Cosa and the four expeditionaries. Cabeza de Vaca seems to have noticed them as well. Proof of the impression it made is the fact that Cabeza de Vaca chose to include it – and really, only it – of all the native American folk stories they heard during their years in the New World. And he includes it even though the little narrative within a narrative seems to serve no plot purpose, and does nothing to advance the expeditionareis on their quest to keep moving. So Cabeza de Vaca must have had some reason for wanting to include it.

So let’s see what we can come up with. As we said, on his own, Mala Cosa fits very nicely in the line of Native American “trickster” tales that show up across many different native American oral traditions. Yet in Cabeza de Vaca’s telling, he sounds like a European, demonic doppelganger for the expeditionaries themselves. Mala Cosa, in this instance, then, serves a dual literary purpose, representing both New and Old World literary traditions, even as he himself represents the duality of the expeditionary medicine men itself. He straddles the lines of literary traditions just as he straddles the “line separating good and evil that passes right through every human heart, through all human hearts,” to paraphrase Alexander Sohlzeneetzen. It’s interesting because I think this notion of good and evil actually reflects a more native American than classically Catholic worldview. Here’s a quote from archaeologist Carolyn Boyd, referring specifically to meso-american mythologies, but she’s using it to describe believe systems that she has found as far north as the Rio Grande: “Everything in the Nahua universe had an inamic partner: masculine-feminine, east-west, hot-cold, day-night, light-darkness, etc. The becoming of reality and the creation and perpetuation of the cosmos involve the struggle between inamic pairs and the alternating dominance of one inamic over its partner (Maffie 2014:13).” This native American notion of the binary nature of the world extended to us as individuals as well. They held that each human being was actually the receptacle for two or more souls, two or more forces acting sometimes in opposition to one another, in the same way that Mala Cosa seems to be expresses a darker version of the expeditionaries religious motivations. And if this is the case, then with the Mala Cosa story, Cabeza de Vaca isn’t just retelling a very thematically Native American folk tale; he’s using the Mala Cosa story to work in a very thematically native American belief system into his narrative.¹⁵³

Watch now how Cabeza de Vaca next passes some very Western, biblical allusions through this new native American worldview he’s trying on. Just after he concludes the Mala Cosa story, he describes how he and his companions suffered through the South Texas summers foraging for roots and digestible grasses and mesquite beans, “I have said already that we went naked in that land, and not being accustomed to it, we shed our skin twice a year, like snakes.” Which is an interesting analogy for Cabeza de Vaca to make at this point in the story. Just as he is contending with the good and evil in his own soul, just at this moment where he is as naked as Adam, even more so in a way: he’s naked in the sense that he has no clothes, but he’s really doubly naked from the sunburn sloughing off his epidermis, with the thorns of the monte doing the rest, Cabeza de Vaca compares himself to the animal that warned the first man and woman about the dangers of knowledge of good and evil. But THEN, as he’s wandering around the monte bleeding all over from thorn pricks and from his raw feet, Cabeza de Vaca jumps from the imagery of original sin to the image of the figure sent to redeem that sin. “The only relief and consolation I had in the midst of these labors was to think in the suffering of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and the blood he shed for me, and to consider how much greater must have been the pain of the thorns he suffered than that which I was suffering.”¹⁵⁴

Juxtaposing this imagery of a serpent and the passion of Christ is a really elegant way for Cabeza de Vaca to represent the duality that is at play within a human soul, just as he has done by telling the story of Mala Cosa. And looking at it through this lens, the allusions to the garden of eden and the passion of Christ aren’t random nonsequiturs following the Mala Cosa story; they are meant to drive home a message in biblical, European terms that he has just expressed by telling a Native American folk tale.¹⁵⁵

Which is really, in my interpretation, Cabeza de Vaca’s artful way of expressing he and his companion’s doubts about continuing as medicine men. They were playing with forces they didn’t fully understand and certainly couldn’t control. It gets lost in the 500 year old prose, but everything that was happening around them was weird. They had never seen anything like this. Wouldn’t you feel a little funny about what you were doing if suddenly, all around you, you saw the sick healed, the lame walk, and the dead live? All of this occurring through the course of hours-long ceremonies that often ended late at night with intoxicating rituals that contained within them, always, a hint of violence? Should they really keep doing this, the expeditionaries were beginning to ask themselves? What if the cures stopped working? Maybe, one of their cures hadn’t worked, and it spooked them: Cabeza de Vaca does later mention one Indian that they failed to healed, though apparently this patient “still believed that we were able to heal him.”¹⁵⁶

All of this is my build-up to try to explain why, in the spring of 1535, Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow expeditionaries suddenly stopped performing cures, despite the fact that things seemed to be going so well for them all of the sudden. In the space of a few months, their faith-healing had elevated them from unloved slaves to feted guests, celebrities in Native South Texas. And their new status brought with it some freedom from want, and even allowed them to buy some good will by distributing their honorariums to the people all around them. And this is the best I can come up with why Cabeza de Vaca included the Mala Cosa story at this point in his narrative and why he and his companions stopped their cures immediately after. They wanted to find a more straightforward, less risky, more controlled way to move across the country.

Starting in the Spring of 1535, the four medicine men closed their ministry and tried to make an honest living as skilled artisans: “I made a deal with the Indians to make combs, arrows, bows, and nets for them,” Cabeza de Vaca tells us. The expeditionaries also offered to make mats and to scrape the hides of the game the natives were able to bring down. Cabeza de Vaca explains that the natives didn’t like to do these things because they were basically worried they would starve if they didn’t spend every spare minute foraging for food. But Cabeza de Vaca and his companions realized that scraping hides actually yielded small but sufficient quantities of protein, which was a rare blessing indeed, and the hides themselves could serve the expeditionaries as warmth through the cold winter months and as a form of currency once they started trekking south again.¹⁵⁷

But as the spring of 1535 progressed, the expeditionaries soon realized they weren’t getting anywhere. The region was just too barren and unyielding, that they could never do anything more than get by. They began to second-guess their career-change. On reflection, by trying to save themselves by their own hand – instead of by allowing themselves to be instruments for God’s will – they had lost all of the status and security that they had had back when they had trusted Him capital H more blindly. They thought they had seen a linear path forward, a way to stack up enough treasures on earth to protect themselves from want. What they found, however, was that they couldn’t. At least when they had been medicine men, God had provided for them, and showed them a path forward: yes, it was weird and it was kind of scary, but being medicine men had brought them security and frankly it made the natives around them happy. Reflecting back on that now, they knew now what they needed to do.

They bartered their hides and other meager goods for two dogs (because they were a self-transporting food source, sorry dog-lovers) and stocked up on as many roast prickly pears as they could carry. And once again, “We commended ourselves to God, our Lord, that he might be our guide, and took leave of these Indians.” Encomendámanos, he says, twice in the course of one paragraph. And finally, sometime in the summer of 1535, they began marching south once again.¹⁵⁸

It didn’t take long for them to come upon a new village, where they could quickly find out if their gambit would work. Could they just pick up the old medicine man routine where they had left off? Or had the stories of Mala Cosa circulating through the countryside ruined any chances they had of being welcomed into any village? It didn’t seem to go well at first at this new village. When they were first sighted by the inhabitants of the new village, the villagers fled. Replaying their tactics that they had used with the Avavar tribe with whom they had first tried out the medicine man routine, the expeditionaries – or perhaps more specifically, Estevan – called to the women and boys, reassuring them of their good intentions. Cautiously, the women and boys came forward. “They approached and placed their hands on our faces and bodies and then rubbed them on their own faces and bodies.” The expeditionaries weren’t quite sure what it meant. Still, the villagers signaled for them to follow them back to their lodges, of which there were a fair number, fifty Cabeza de Vaca tells us, making it perhaps the largest community that the expeditionaries had come across since Florida. The villagers put up the expeditionaries for the night, with the four still puzzling over what the villagers’ curious reception meant. Were they grateful for the arrival of four medicine men? Or had they just captured four Malas Cosas? Or worse, maybe they had just captured four imposters, mortals like them with no more power than the stones in the field? Once again, the four medicine men would have to prove themselves. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

The First American Ponzi Scheme (Z:f41v-f46v)

How a spiritual movement spirals out of control.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 18: The First American Ponzi Scheme. I’m Brandon Seale.

Sometime in the summer of 1535, four self-proclaimed medicine men presented themselves to a native American village consisting of fifty or so lodges. The man in front was the most distinctive-looking. His skin was dark brown, the color of a buffalo hide, and his hair and beard were darker even than that. By contrast, the other three were so pale and sunburned that they almost glowed, their skin flaking off them like a snake shedding its skin. The dark one in front started making hand signs and shouting as he drew closer. We bring you good news, he gestured to the native americans, Maliacones, they called themselves. We’re the four you’ve heard about performing great cures throughout this land. And indeed, the Maliacones had heard of this curious band of medicine men. But at the same time, they had also started hearing stories about bearded demons appearing mysteriously on the edges of villages, performing their bad medicine, then leaving and taking with them everything the villagers owned. Mala Cosa, they called this trickster medicine man. And so the Maliacones held back until they could be sure who it was that had just come to visit them.

If truth be told, the four medicine men had plenty of misgivings themselves. Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan that believed they were doing God’s work in performing their cures: but deep down, they had begun to wonder. They were so overwhelmed by the power they suddenly had that they began to mistrust it. And so they had closed their ministry, so to speak, taking up work instead as artisans, making bows, arrows, and mats for the Indians hosting them – and they almost starved to death in the process. Being an artisan doesn’t pay nearly as good as being a showman. And not only did they start to go hungry, they found themselves stuck, moving no closer to their destination on the Rio Pánuco. The contrast couldn’t have been starker to their time as medicine men: those first few heady months in late 1534 early 1535 had won for them more status and advanced their journey further than anything else they had done in the almost seven years that they had been stuck here in North America. They knew what they had to do. And so, in Cabeza de Vaca’s words, “We commended ourselves to God” and went back on the road as medicine men.

And now they had arrived at this fifty-lodge village of the Maliacones. Estevan, out front, convinced a few women and children to come forward and see that they meant no harm. The women and children cautiously petted them like some kind of exotic animals, feeling their faces and bodies with their hands, checking perhaps to see if they were real, or what kind of creatures they were. Once the natives convinced themselves that the four men were real, they invited the new arrivals into their village, gave them one night’s rest, and then promptly presented them with a passel of their ailing tribesman “begging us to bless them.” It’s unclear what specifically their ailment was, but there never seemed to be a shortage of natives in 1530’s North America in need of spiritual healing. The four medicine men said their prayers, performed their routines, and made the sign of the cross. Cabeza de Vaca doesn’t say it explicitly, but the implication is that it worked. God had favored them once again, chosen them to be his vessels. As payment, the natives presented the expeditionaries with baskets of prickly pears, a most welcome honorarium for these four men who had grown reaccustomed to hunger during the few months when they had stopped curing. They ate what they could, and gave away all the rest to their hosts.

Word began to spread once again about the cures, and “while we were with the [Maliacones,] others came from further ahead.” This time, however, the expeditionaries resolved not to get bogged down, and to keep their show mobile always in search of new patients, new pastures, and forward progress. This came as a great disappointment to the Maliacones, who enjoyed the prestige of having these great medicine with them and certainly enjoyed it when the expeditionaries gave away all their honorariums to them. But over the their tearful protests, the expeditonaries moved on.¹⁵⁹

Just a few days later, the four arrived at a larger native village, this one with 100 lodges, certainly the largest they had seen since Florida if ever. The reception here, was even warmer, suggesting that their reputations had preceded them. The villagers brought out all their children for them to bless, and gave them gifts of mesquite flour. The four expeditionaries dutifully performed their cures, redistributed their gifts, and moved on to the next village, leaving a bunch of very happy natives behind them. A few, perhaps, offered to guide the expeditionaries to the next village on what seems to have been some kind of established pre-Columbian trade route. It doesn’t seem to me that they would have needed guides, however. They couldn’t travel more than a day or two without running into another village. And at each stop, the expeditionaries refined their routine further. They would send forward Estevan first, who got everyone’s attention with his unique appearance, and who always seemed to able to communicate with the new peoples he encountered, despite the enormous variety of languages they encountered. And then the Castillians came along, playing their part. Cabeza de Vaca describes how he, Castillo, and Dorantes: “carried ourselves with gravity, and in order to maintain that we said very little.” And they didn’t just walk up, lay hands on the afflicted and shout “Demons come out,” they performed mass-length, multi-hour rituals that enchanted their audiences, most of who had never seen anything like it. Recall too that even the expeditionaries’ form of prayer back in Castille would look unfamiliar to us to today, and probably seem a bit New Agey. There was a strong emphasis on the communal aspect of the exercise of Faith. As professor Gilbert Hinojosa reminded me, it was a pre-reformation faith premised much more on revealing the sacred in everything through ritual, rather than trying to make the mundane holy through liturgy. Services were characterized by much longer, repetitive prayers and extended cantations meant to induce a quasi-hypnotic state. Long pauses would have been left for self-reflection, spiritual contemplation, and the “discernment of spirits.” There is no reason to doubt that everyone involved – expeditionaries and native congregants alike – believed that they were communing with the divine during these ceremonies, but it wouldn’t be unfair to assume that some measure of showmanship was also expected or required.

At some point along the way in the late summer of 1535, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan came upon a river whose waters came up to their chest, a river as wide as the Guadalquivir, they claimed. Most scholars think this was the Rio Grande on the border between modern Texas and Tamaulipas, near Lake Falcon, and just a few hundred miles now from their intended destination near modern-day Tampico. I get a little bit confused at this point in the narrative because I feel like they’ve been hanging around on the North side of the Rio Grande for a while now, but this point in late summer 1535 seems to pretty clearly be the moment when they cross it.

As they were crossing the Big River, some gourds floated down from somewhere upstream. The natives around them held these to be items of special reverence, “la cosa de mayor fiesta,” believing them to “come from the cielo.” The expeditionaries might have drawn a different conclusion: it was evidence of agriculture upstream. Agriculture meant settled, sedentary societies, and sedentary societies were the kinds of things that Castilians were always looking for. They took it as confirmation that they were on the right path and strapped the gourds around their waste as “insignia” of authority, which the is what the natives believed them to be. ¹⁶⁰

And indeed, around this time, something changed in how the natives began to look at the four expeditionaries. From being creatures of suspicion or at best novelty, they became objects of real esteem. The best proof of that growing esteem was in the number of Indians that now followed the expeditionaries. Now, as they moved between villages across the barren monte of Northern Tamaulipas, dozens of native americans followed them. Some were perhaps motivated by the experience of it all, like band groupies. But also, they became legitimate celebrities: “They carried us to their homes without allowing our feet to touch the ground.” Continuing, “So great was the fear and agitation that they had to be the first to touch us that they nearly squeezed us to death,” Cabeza de Vaca recalls.¹⁶¹ All of which was heightened by the religious ceremonies that they led once they established themselves in each new village, which were then further enhanced by the ritual ingestion of peyote, datura, fermented teas, and other intoxicants. Often times, these rituals crossed over into the bacchanalian, with drumming and dancing going late into the night, and always with the faint threat of turning violent at any moment. The women retreated to the periphery, fearful of provoking the drunken fury of any of the men. As the nights wore on, the expeditionaries followed the women’s example, retreating as well to their lodges lest they end torn to pieces in the frenzy.

Which is all to show how their success as medicine men actually proved to be a terrifying, uncontrollable thing, even as the movement continued to build on itself into the fall of 1535, as it pushed further south, closer now than ever to the tiny Castilian settlement on the Río Pánuco. The expeditionaries’ dozens of followers grew into hundreds, and soon it wasn’t just the sick asking for blessings, their entire flock came to expect it each day! Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan were spending three hours a day, they claim, on blessings and cures. Yet if we take them at their word, they were indeed producing some truly amazing cures. Somewhere around this time, they claimed to have cured an entire village afflicted by blindness, or by “clouded” vision. I’m reminded of another new testament passage here, the line where John the Baptists’ followers ask Jesus if he is the messiah. As per usual, Jesus doesn’t answer them directly, instead, he tells them to go back and report everything he’s done, which he helpfully summarizes for them: “The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them.” All of which are things these expditionaries have done by this point, if you’re keeping track, except for making the deaf hear and cleansing lepers, though earlier in the narrative Cabeza de Vaca does compare the effects of mosquito bites on a person to the appearance of a leper, and he technically was the one protecting his masters from the mosquitos back, so maybe we can check that box for him as well. ¹⁶²

But then something starts to change in the character of their entourage. All of a sudden one day, their followers didn’t wait for the four medicine men to dole out their patients’ payments; they just took whatever the supplicants brought forward. “Our followers became so many that we couldn’t control them.” This soon became the new norm. Then, the four noticed that six guards had been posted outside their lodges each night. Was this to protect them? Or to keep them from leaving. The behavior of the crowd grew even more aggressive each day. At the next village they entered, their entourage just pre-emptively ransacked, taking all of the possessions of everyone living there. Quote: “those who came with us began to do much evil, taking away the livelihoods and sacking the homes of all who received us so well without leaving them anything…But we couldn’t do anything about it or punish those who acted so and we had to suffer it until we might have more authority over them.” They had lost control of their own movement, and it was now running roughshod over the country.

And yet, if we believe Cabeza de Vaca’s account, the victims themselves didn’t seem to mind. First, if nothing else the four expeditionaries put on a good show, and it had to one of the most interesting things that had happened in a long time to the subsistence hunter-gatherers of the region. Second, the medicine men’s cures worked! Or at least they seemed to. Very few Cabeza de Vaca scholars believe that he is wholesale making up the cures: it’s such a strange and unnecessarily bold lie during the years of Inquistion Spain, to appropriate upon oneself saint-like powers of healing, that it would be an odd thing to invent. And there are enough other contemporary, third-party accounts to lend pretty convincing credence to the fact that somehow, whatever the expeditionaries started doing around this time began to create for them an following of Native Americans that would allow them to continue moving forward across the continent. Unfortunately, we can’t really tell what they are curing. We have one mention of blindness, which we heard earlier in this episode. Blindness is sometimes associated with Smallpox, but the expeditionaries would have been able to diagnose that. Which makes us ask, are they really curing physical blindness, or is it some kind of spiritual blindness? Dr. Carolyn Boyd has written about how certain tribes in Mexico still to this day undertake spiritual journeys in order to gain “the ability to see.” Similarly, Nahuatl (another related, Southern Uto-Aztecan language to Huichol) use a compound word that translates literally as eye-heart to refer to the soul. It was a spiritual sight, not so much physical. So maybe the cures are more metaphorical, as they bring the light of spiritual sight to the natives. We’ve seen them dealing with something like dystentary back on Galveston Island. We hear about fevers now down in South Texas. At least one scholar has speculated that they are dealing with Typhhus…which would, most likely, have been something brought by men like Cabeza de Vaca to the natives amongst whom they are now living. Which begs the question? Are they actually spreading the diseases that their desperate patients are now asking them to cure? There’s mentions of a sickness called “modorra” which I’m told we might translate as “lethargy.” Are the natives of sixteenth century north America just depressed? Melancholy? Do they sense they are living at a pivotal time and they don’t know how to deal with it? ¹⁶³

I don’t have enough information to answer these questions, and I haven’t seen the matter convincingly settled by any scholars on Cabeza de Vaca either. But I do fell comfortable concluding this: the four expeditionaries were clearly doing something to make the natives of south Texas and northern Mexico feel better, physically, spiritually, or whatever. Whether they were causing the diseases they were professing to cure I don’t know, but the consensus amongst native americans at the time was that they were doing more good than harm, and they continued to come from far an wide to see them, be treated by them, and in many cases now, to join them on their journey across the continent.

But as a businessman by day, I can’t help but notice the incentives that the four expeditionaries set up here that helped them in their journey, that aligned their interests with those of their followers in a way that gave their movement a momentum on its own. Cabeza de Vaca says, “seeing our distress, even the Indians who lost everything consoled us that we shouldn’t feel bad, because they were very happy just to have seen us and that their possessions had been put to good use and that they would be repaid by those further on who would make them very rich!” The expeditionaries had just unleashed the continent’s first pyramid scheme. At each new village, the natives were stripped of all their belongings, but then they were reassured that they would soon be made whole simply by joining the movement and robbing the next village. It seems like a rather economically devastating MO, but it had the very practical upside of making a lot of people around the four expeditionaries very invested in maintaining their aura as medicine men and keeping their show moving. In a kind of perverse way, it created something the expeditionaries had never been able to create before: momentum!¹⁶⁴

Recall that in the previous episode, Cabeza de Vaca told us a folk tale about a character who was, essentially, his evil doppelgagner roaming through the country terrorizing the natives. Perhaps not coincidentally, soon thereafter he is forced to contend with the consequences of the Pandora’s box that he and his fellow expeditionaries had opened. The raging mobs of his followers are the physical manifestation of his own potential for evil, which he had been struggling to come to terms with as his power as a healer grew. The expeditionaries eventually realized that, in a different way, they were once again just as out of control as they had been two years ago as slaves on the Texas coast. And though they were happy to be moving, they were doubtful of whether their movement was taking them where they wanted to go. They needed to re-establish control of their movement. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

The Inexplicable Turn (Z:f46v-f48v)

How the four expeditionaries turned away from their goal.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 19: The inexplicable Turn. I’m Brandon Seale.

When the Narváez expedition had departed Cuba in March of 1528, its destination was the so-called “Rio de las Palmas,” or the modern-day Soto la Marina lying about halfway between Brownsville and Tampico. Castilian knowledge of the geography of the Gulf Coast in 1528 was limited, however. The only man who had even claimed to have sailed around the Gulf was the Narváez expedition’s pilot, who demonstrated his chops by high-centering the expedition’s ships on some shallow sandbars three days onto the job and then unloading the expedition on the western coast of Florida instead of the eastern coast of Mexico.

But there was one geographical feature that apparently everyone on the expedition knew to look for in identifying the Rio de las Palmas: Mountains that were visible from the sea. This seems to be why Cabeza de Vaca makes two conspicuous mentions in his account of places where he DIDN’T see mountains – once in Florida, and once in the prickly pear ranges of South Texas - as a way to illustrate how far they still were from their destination. It’s a strange thing to mention a topographical feature that you DON’T see…unless it’s precisely that topographical feature you are looking for.¹⁶⁵

Then, in the summer of 1535, the four remaining Narváez expeditionaries and their growing entourage of native companions “began to see mountains which seemed as if they ran in a line to the coast.” And these mountains were only about fifty miles from the coast, meaning they would have been visible to a passing ship. It was the most tantalizing clue they had yet found and though they couldn’t have known it, they were indeed closer to the Rio de las Palmas than they had ever been so far…or ever would be again.¹⁶⁶

Since escaping from their masters in South Texas the year before, the expeditionaries had been traveling inland, parallel to the coast, rather than along it. Even as far back as 1530 or so, Cabeza de Vaca had noted that the inland tribes seemed to be just a bit more agreeable than the coastal ones, a pattern that apparently held all the way down the Texas-Mexico coast. Remember the coastal Quevenes – those Indians who had gratuitously beat up Cabeza de Vaca and Lope de Oviedo just to give them a taste of what their companions were enduring? And the Camones? The Indians who had bragged to Dorantes and Estevan of how they had killed the fifth raftful of their comrades just for sport.

Things were different now, however. Whereas before, the expeditionaries had been unwanted beggars, they were now esteemed medicine men. They healed the sick, gave sight to the blind, and even raised a man from the dead! Soon, even people with no apparent affliction were coming from miles around to be blessed, and the expeditionaries were spending as much as three hours a day curing people and making the sign of the cross over every morsel of food they ate. Now the upside to this is that the four expeditionaries were paid pretty well for their troubles. It was not uncommon, in fact, for them to hand over everything they owned: beads, red ocher, food, bows and arrows, and flint stones that were worth more than gold to the natives. Wisely, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan had early on adopted the custom of giving away they received, something which generated a lot of good will for them. And eventually, as the volume of cures increased, it began to generate a lot of wealth. Then, it kind of started to feel like some of their followers were hanging around not so much for the spiritual benefits, as the material ones. As the four expeditionaries and their party continued to move from village to village in northern Tamaulipas, their entourage began to grow exponentially. “The number of our followers became so great that we couldn’t control them.” Soon, the followers began to pre-emptively ransack every village they entered, though they did so with the consolation to the victims that all they had to do to make themsevls whole was join up with their merry band and ransack the next village.¹⁶⁷

It was with all of this social upheaval and uncertainty going on all around them that the expeditionaries first saw mountains, presumably the Sierra de Pamoranes or the Sierra de Cerralvo separating modern-day Nuevo León from Tamaulipas. It was exhilirating. If for the last seven years they had been surviving on Faith, in front of them was now something tangible that suggested a return to their old lives. They started marching toward the mountains; but they were stopped. Their followers – or should we call them their handlers? – wanted to steer them instead toward some related or allied peoples, because they “didn’t want their enemies to be benefited such as it was by seeing us.”¹⁶⁸

And so here occurs the great mystery of the Narváez expeditionaries overland journey. Here, in the summer of 1535, they were within sight of the mountains they had been searching for since 1528. They were just a couple of weeks march away from the Rio de Las Palmas, and a few more perhaps to Pánuco, where they knew other Castilians to have established a town. And truth be told, letting themselves go toward the coast where their handlers wanted to take them actually WAS moving in the right direction. “They all wanted to bring us to their friends…whom they said had large homes and would give us many things.” There was nothing up in the high desert anyway, they warned, them, no people and no food. To prove their point, they sent out scouts who returned confirming that there was nothing to be found that way.¹⁶⁹

The expeditionaries grew angry, or maybe frustrated is a better word. They were tired of feeling out of control. And so for some really hard to say reason, they dug in their heels, pivoted, and turned almost 180 degrees now in the opposite direction. Turning away from the mountains, turning away from the coast, turning away from Pánuco, they turned northwest. It’s baffling, and Cabeza de Vaca does little to help resolve the mystery when he offers us essentially three justifications for his companions inexplicable turn.¹⁷⁰

The first one we’ve already mentioned, which was the four expeditionaries were afraid of coastal peoples. quote: “All the peoples of the coast are very evil and we preferred to travel through the land because the inland peoples have better dispositions and treated us better.” And by the way, the archaeological lends credence to this cultural distinction, according to archaeologist Thomas Hester on the Texas State center for the study of the southwest website, who notes that there is a major shift in how ceramics were used or not used starting about twenty five miles from the shoreline all along this area. And there was particularly good reason to be fearful of the coastal natives close to Pánuco. Because those natives – like the rather inhospitable inhabitants of Florida – had likely been exposed to Castilian slaving expeditions. The settlement at Pánuco was frequently used for launching slave raids into the interior, and Castilians in the region that fell into the hands of the natives they were battling there often ended up flayed and on the walls of temples. Conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo – no stranger to fierce Indians – himself observed that the Indians of modern-day Tamaulipas “were the most barbaric of all those the Spaniards had encountered in Mexico.” Heck, it’s still one of the most violent parts of the continent today. reluctance to other fascinating thing to think about is that these Natives they were encountering had probably met other Castilians. Maybe the expeditionaries picked up on something sinister in the natives’ insistence on trying to march them down into their “Relatives’” lands, and refused to go with them for that reason. ¹⁷¹

That still doesn’t explain very well why the expeditionaries did a complete 180, however, instead of just a slight detour inland, and so Cabeza de Vaca offers us a second justification: “Ultimately, we did this because by traveling overland we would better come to experience its details, so that if God our lord were served by bringing one of us out and returning us to the land of Christians, he would be able to give an account of all we had seen.” Some older chroniclers of Cabeza de Vaca took this as evidence of the expeditionaries wanderlust, their simple joy in exploring. Another line of argument chalks it up to more naked greed, a desire to discover some natural resources worth extracting before they returned home in an attempt to win for themselves some material reward for their suffering. And indeed, Cabeza de Vaca fills his account with surveyor-style observations, noting areas where there are good pastures for cattle, fertile soils for agriculture, or signs of riches to mined. Of course, this was also his original royal commission, to: “…inform us extensively and particularly of every matter… as well as all the rest you see, and I should be informed of” and Cabeza de Vaca took his duty to his king seriously.¹⁷²

But then Cabeza de Vaca also offers a third reason why he and his companions turned away from the coast to go inland. Just as they were struggling with this question of whether or not to allow their handlers to carry them toward the coast, they overtook two women traveling up into the mountains northwest of them. The women recognized the expeditionaries as famous medicine men, and stopped, offering them everything they had, as was the custom. Inside one of the women’s packs was something that the expeditionaries hadn’t seen since Florida: ground corn! Of course, in and of itself, the corn wasn’t that interesting; the men were no longer starving. But recall what we’ve said corn symbolized. It represented sedentary societies, the kinds of societies that Castilians could extract tribute from, the kinds of advanced civilizations upon which the Castilians diplomatic skills and education were much more effective, and the kind of mass populations they might convert to Catholicism. Corn meant Gold, glory, and god.

This corn served as a powerful enticement to the four expeditionaries. They took it as a sign. Maybe they also recalled the gourds they had found in the previous episode, floating down the Rio Grande and also coming in from the Northwest. Still, if they had known how close they were to Pánuco, they might just as well have marched into the Castilian settlement there, reported on what they found, and waited until later to run down the hints of a sedentary civilization somewhere back up in the Sierra Madres.

Of course, usually when someone offers three different reasons for why they did something, it’s because they don’t really have a reason. I think the cold hard fact here is that the expeditionaries still had no idea where they were. And I think they were acutely uncomfortable with the religious movement they had set off. At first their medicine man routine just exhausting; then it became downright destructive; now, it was straight-up frightening. They had started to feel that they lacked any “authority” over the unruly band behind them anyway, and truly seemed to fear its violent edge.

And so when they turned away from their band somewhere in northern Tamaulipas. And from the text, it seems like it was a bit uncertain for them whether they were going to be able to get away from their followers, who protested loudly and erupted into sobs and wails when they saw them leaving. But the four expeditionaries apparently instilled enough fear in their followers that when they told them to stay behind, they listened. The four were out on their own again, for the first time in eight or nine months. After traveling for only two days, they found another quite sizeable native community, despite their previous followers’ insistence that there was nothing to be found by going this direction, which seemed to confirm for them that their old followers were not really being honest with them about things. Their plan wasn’t to give up their medicine man routine entirely, they just wanted to do it in a more restrained, controlled fashion. Of course, the first Indians they encountered on their new northwesterly route were terrified of four mysterious medicine men when they first saw them. They knew that when these men appeared on the edge of your village, you could kiss your earthly belongings good bye as well as any since of normalcy. Yet they also noticed that – unlike the stories they had heard – these four traveled alone, with no ransacking mob behind them.

The four came forward and told the villagers who they were and that they had come to spread good news and the to heal the sick. No, there would be no ransacking, you don’t need to worry about that, they said. And the villagers dropped to their knees in gratitude. It’s hard to tell if that gratitude came from a sense of reverence toward the medicine men or from gratitude that they weren’t going to be robbed, but it’s clear that the esteem they had for Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan was real. They refused even to drink water before the expeditionaries blessed it, “so great was our authority amongst them.” And this was a powerful moment of validation for the expeditionaries, this feeling or recovering their authority, independent of any menacing mob behind them. As if to confirm their independent authority, in the next village they came to, the in-house shamans gave them two new ceremonial gourds upon entering, which Cabeza de Vaca claims, “added to their authority.” The four settled into the village that evening, thinking they had regained their autonomy, righted their course, and established for themselves some kind of control over their own destiny.¹⁷³

They woke the next morning to screams. Their old followers had caught up to them. They too had apparently known where this village was, despite what they had told the expeditionaries. The poor villagers were so surprised by the old followers’ sudden arrival that hadn’t even had a chance to hide anything. This time, the mob took everything, explaining all the while they were robbing them that the medicine men were “children of the sun” who came from the cielo, and “that we had the power to heal the sick and to kill them and other lies,” essentially mocking the “authority” the expeditionaries believed they had just recovered right in front of them.¹⁷⁴

There are two offhand mentions in Cabeza de Vaca’s account of some “principales” or “headmen” amongst their mob of followers. These were the men who distributed all the booty after each episode of ritual pillaging, and it seems these were the ones with whom Cabeza de Vaca and his companions had had to “negotiate” in trying to set their course. Because these headmen seem to have had their own agenda. Maybe the four expeditionaries weren’t so much the instruments of the divine as they were instruments of some very clever native headmen. Of course, it wasn’t as though the four expeditionaries got nothing out of this deal. They got food, they got protection, and they got to keep moving. And despite Cabeza de Vaca’s laments about the mob’s treatment of other natives, it was a devil’s bargain that he and his companions were willing to make after almost seven years as castaways. And maybe the headmen reminded the four expeditionaries of this.

And yet the expeditionaries little rebellion had not been entirely fruitless. They did seem to have established for themselves a bit more “authority” even in front of these headmen. From here on out, they wouldn’t just be carried along wherever the mob wanted to go. Their continuing forward momentum would be the result of an ongoing, complex, and occasionally tense negotiation – as Professor Andres Resendez calls it - between the four medicine men and their followers that would keep them moving now into modern-day Nuevo León and Coahuila. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

All Things to All People (Z:f48v-f49v)

How the expeditionaries entered the spiritual heartland of Native North America.

Wecome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 20: All Things to All People. I’m Brandon Seale

At several points in this series, I’ve lamented the fact that we don’t really have any primary accounts about Native American life prior to the arrival of Europeans.

But that’s not quite true.

Scattered across northern Coahuila and Southwest Texas are hundreds of caves and rock shelters containing some of the oldest artwork in the Americas, dating back more than 4,000 years. Many of these murals are located near the old Val Verde county community of Shumla, outside of modern-day Del Rio. In 1998, Carolyn Boyd founded the SHUMLA archaeological and research center to preserve and study this rock art. She began her study of these works as an artist, in fact, not as an archaeologist. She painstakingly re-drew each of the panels that she studied, reliving the artistic act of creation with each one. Later, she supplemented her drawings with 3D laser mapping, drone mapping, structure from motion photogrammetry, portable X-Ray fluorescence, handheld digital microscopes and more.¹⁷⁵

What she and her team discovered was that the colorful pictographs were more than just the primitive taggings of stone age graffiti artists. For one, they were compositions of impressive scale, that can “span as much as 150 meters long, 15 meters tall, and contain hundreds of figures. Of the 76 murals documented by Shumla Archaeological Research & Education Center, 34 extend greater than 3 meters from the shelter floor and required a ladder or scaffolding to produce.”¹⁷⁶

Another clue to the panels’ significance was in the pigments with which they were painted. To outline their compositions, the artists sometimes used Red ocher, for example, something which Cabeza de Vaca used to trade as a luxury item along the coast. Other times, the red pigment was made through a much more laborious method of grinding yellow siltstone and burning them, the fire impating a red color to the rock and imbuing life and energy into it. The binder more often than not was deer tallow, a nutritionally dense and yet scarce food for the inhabitants of the region. Which is to say that these drawings represented real sacrifices of time and caloric resources by these peoples living most of their lives on the edge of starvation, as we’ve seen in Cabeza de Vaca’s years of privation. ¹⁷⁷

Lastly, there is real compositional complexity in these works. “For example, figures often are portrayed with a series of lines entering or emanating from open mouths. These lines represent sound in the form of speech or song, and they represent breath or sense of smell. [And pay attention to this part] To differentiate between inhalations and exhalations, or sound emanating from an open mouth, artists altered the direction of the brushstroke.” That is really subtle and masterful. Furthermore, features of the rock are incorporated into the murals to create 3D effects; for example, in the way that figures appear out of and disappear into crevices. Some of the caves even seem to have been selected for their unique acoustical effects, concentrating sound from throughout the canyon into one spot. And several of them seem to exhibit some form of nuanced solar geometry, with the sunlight playing with the narrative displayed on the panel on different days of the year, further bringing them to life. In over 99% of the panels studied, the pigments are applied in the same order: first black, then red, then yellow, then white. What this means, is that the people viewing the rock art probably also knew this order, so they could re-compose the panel as they looked at it, almost as if the different colors were appearing onto the stage at different times. These weren’t just 2D or even 3D images! These were the equivalent of prehistoric movies! ¹⁷⁸

And in a sense, they are even more powerful than that. These were interactive stories! According to Boyd: “The most common form of post-painting modification is incising, which is evidenced by repeated, deliberate, short incisions cut into the imagery. Some figures were rubbed and incised multiple times and in varying locations.” Picture the viewers of these panels reaching up and touching them, slicing at them with sharp flints as if to draw out their energy in the same way that Cabeza de Vaca describes native medicine men “making a few cuts where the pain is and then sucking the skin around the incision.” By interacting with the panel, it’s as though they are participating in the story that it tells. ¹⁷⁹

And like all good art, it didn’t just awe, it instructed! For example, one of the principle motifs running throughout multiple rock art murals is the Peyote/deer/rain/ motif. In many of these paintings, little peyote buds fall from the sky like rain and fix themselves to the ends of the antlers of the region’s impressive whitetail deer. And these show up throughout rock art panels in the region. Well, embedded in that association of Peyote, deer, and rain. Dr. Boyd realized, is both an empirical observation and an important lesson for hunter gatherers: Peyote swells after a rain and becomes more visible, just as deer emerge to nibble on plants which also blossom after a rain. By following where the deer graze after a rain, ancient hunter-gatherers could find their sacred peyote. ¹⁸⁰

Even more interestingly, Dr. Boyd has been able to trace many of the motifs of this rock art right down to the present, in the preserved traditions of the Yaqui, Hopi, and Mexica peoples, the latter more commonly known in English as the Aztecs. Interestingly, the Mexicas believed that they had descended into central Mexico from their mythical homeland somewhere perhaps along the upper Rio Grande, a land that they called Aztlan, which is a really tantalizing cultural memory given the findings of Dr. Boyd up near Del Rio. But even more compelling are the observations of their linguistic cousins, the Huichols, who are still one of the most isolated and unimpacted tribes on the continent. Dr. Boyd in her writings describes bringing a modern-day Huichol medicine man to view the White Shaman and other murals, and listening to them decipher them for her as simply as if they were reading a newspaper. ““These are my grandfathers, grandfathers, grandfathers. They are all here. All my grandfathers, all my ancestors, they are all here,” is what he said.¹⁸¹

Given these similarities with Yaqui, Hopi, Mexica and Huíchol legends, Dr. Boyd concludes that the people who created these rock art panels must have come from a similar tradition. Even more specifically, she suggests that they probably even came from the same language group, in this case, the Uto-Aztecan group, to which Yaqui, Hopi, Mexica, and Huichol all belong. Which would really be remarkable, wouldn’t it, if we could determine what language a pre-literate people spoke based only on their 4,000 year old paintings? And here’s an even cooler clue: I think that Cabeza de Vaca actually gives us evidence in his narrative to help back this up. ¹⁸²

Recall that by late summer of 1535, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan had turned away from the Gulf Coast and started marching northwest through modern-day Nuevo León and up into northern Coahuila, the land of these cave paintings. Or at least that’s what we think, because around this point in his narrative Cabeza de Vaca describes a sierra twenty miles long “made up of iron slag,” which sounds a lot like the mountains around Monclova, and a nearby “very pretty” river that could be the Nadadores, flowing through lovely Cuatrocienegas and San Buenaventura. Even more convincing is Professor David Olson from Texas State’s argument that the “thin-shelled pine nuts” that Cabeza de Vaca refers to here are the pinus remota, a long-overlooked and fairly localized pine nut found north of Monclova. By the way, Professor Olson is actually a Professor of physics and astronomy, not history or biology or anything, but he’s a fellow Cabeza de Vaca fan-boy and his next Cabeza de Vaca article, he told me, will attempt to use astronomical clues to date parts of Cabeza de Vaca’s journey. And did I mention that Dr. Boyd, is also now affiliated with Texas State? Texas State is all over Cabeza de Vaca, I recommend you check out Texas their websites for the Witliff Collection and the Center for the Study of the Southwest on these topics.¹⁸³

Ok, back to Dr. Boyd’s theory that it was a Uto-Aztecan speaking people that created the rock art we’ve been talking about. At around this point in Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative, when he is entering northern Coahuila and the land of these paintings, for some reason he decides to translate two native American words for us, the only two in fact that he gives us in the entire text. And even here, he doesn’t really give us a context for the words, he just offers them to us in what seems like one of his characteristic anthropological asides. One word, “arraca” he says, meant “come here”, which I can’t really make sense of. But the second word he gives us is much more intriguing. “Xó” he tells us is, was these people’s word for dog.

As soon as I mentioned this to Dr. Boyd, she stopped me. “You’ve just told me what language they were speaking,” she said. The Mexica word for dog is “xolotl,” sometimes “xolo” for short, like the Tijuana soccer team. But even more interestingly, Dr. Boyd continued, in Mexica mythology it was a dog deity who lead the sun into and out of the underworld each night. Is this the role that Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan had assumed for their native American followers? Were their followers calling them “Xo” as they guided them through the sierras of Northern Coahuila, lighting the way through the darkness of some unknown lands? ¹⁸⁴

If you’ll bear with me, I’ll even take this one step further. The most prevalent motif that Dr. Boyd finds in the Rock art of this region what she calls “crenelated arches.” The murals are just chock full of quasi-geometric arches, often with “an opening at the center of the arch, and a skeletonized anthropomorphic figure located above, below, or behind the arch.” The skeletonized shaman represents a medicine man who has learned to see himself down to his core, right through to his own nakedness, as it were. And Boyd argues that the arch represents these people’s worldview of “a universe that consists of various layers, with a supernatural realm below the earth’s surface.” That may be, after all, why these paintings are always found in caves, portals between the subterranean and the surface: “They exist in a liminal place, between the feminine earthly forces of the rock all and the masculine solar forces acting upon it.” ¹⁸⁵

Now, do you recall back in Episode 15 when Cabeza de Vaca found himself separated from his band for five nights, and had to fend for himself all alone in the South Texas monte? To keep warm, each night, he would dig himself a hole, cover himself with prairie grass, and surround himself by fires lit from the ashes of a mysterious burning bush that he had found. One night, a spark from one of these fires torched his grass blanket, awakening him, and sending him leaping out of his hole with his hair on fire, an accident that left him scarred and charred.

So, now, project this story back onto what we just heard about these people’s worldview. How would a Native American of northern Coahuila have interpreted Cabeza de Vaca’s story of his near-death experience in the wilderness? A naked, starving, almost “skeletonized” man sleeping in a hole beneath the ground, almost killed by fire but instead leaps out of it with his hair aflame, his skin both raw and red and charred and black, holding his firebrands that had kept him alive those previous days, looking like nothing so much as the figures depicted on the rock art on the cover of this episode with black bodies, flaming heads, and hands holding burning sticks. It might also help if I told you that – according to Diego Duran’s The History of the Indies of New Spain written in 1581 - five-day underworld journeys are a classic structure of these tribes’ mythologies, the exact number of days Cabeza de Vaca says he was alone in the monte. In fact, according to Dr. Boyd, one of the Nahuatl words for their chief God, the God of Fire, was “Nauhyotecuhtli” which can be translated as “Lord of the Group of Four”, with the group itself constituting its own fifth member. Doesn’t this start to sound a lot like our four traveling medicine men? It’s almost as if the four expeditionaries had walked right out of the rock panels and into real life! ¹⁸⁶

And by the way, I’ve spoken to Dr. Boyd about these parallels, and she thinks there’s something to it. In her words, “How could Cabeza de Vaca NOT have been impacted by (and impact) those he spent so much time with. He was a man of faith. Spirituality was part and parcel of his life, and the believe system of the native people, at the core, shares many parallels with his own faith. His situation was desperate. He was walking the fine line between life and death frequently. In anthropological terms, he was often in a liminal place in which significant transformations take place….I think you could argue that the blending of the two belief systems is what helped him survive. I am not sure he could have written his narrative WITHOUT incorporating this into it.”

Throughout the summer of 1535, the tug of war continued between the four expeditionaries chasing rumors of agricultural societies up ahead and their dozens of native followers who had their own priorities which will probably forever remain hidden to us. It’s fun to wonder if maybe they were pulling them up into this spiritual heartland, this sacred land of rock art to which natives had been retreating for thousands of years on spiritual journeys, to test these four new medicine men perhaps. Of course, they might also have been in it for the loot. The band continued ransacking each new village they came to, though according to Cabeza de Vaca, the natives who were robbed were always consoled by the idea that they could just join up with the merry band and then take whatever they wanted from the next village they came upon. “Then they left, the happiest people on earth, having given us the very best of what they owned.” And a bit counterintuitively, their marauding band actually seemed to be bringing peace to the land: “Throughout this whole land, those who were at war suddenly became friends and came to receive us and bring us everything they had.” Whereas normally, the peoples of the barren Sierra Madres warred with each other constantly for the meager resources in the region, now, they just willingly gave up everything they had and peacefully stole it back again from the next village.¹⁸⁷

Eventually, the band had stolen so much stuff that they couldn’t even carry it all. So they started just dropping what they didn’t want and leaving it behind, their trail through the region now marked by their unwanted loot. In a world of scarcity, it’s not hard to understand the attraction a curious movement like this would have on a poor hunter-gatherer who had never ranged more than a few dozen miles from his home and who’s most valuable possession was a rabbit club. And so the band continued to grow, until it reached into the hundreds. And the expeditionaries felt powerless to stop it: “The number of our followers became so great that we couldn’t control them.” Of course, they didn’t have much incentive to stop it either: the ransacking mob had an irresistible Ponzi scheme logic to it that kept the party moving. Toward where was still unseen, but for the four expeditionaries who had been stuck for so many years along the Texas coast and in the south Texas brush, any movement was welcome.¹⁸⁸

After one of their ritual ransackings here in Northern Coahuila, some of the natives came into possession of a cast copper rattle, with a face, “un cascabel gordo grande de cobre y en él figurado un rostro.” This was a truly rare good for this part of the world, and they gifted it to Andres Dorantes. It was unlike anything the four expeditionaries had seen since…well, since they had found a golden rattle in the first native village they had found in Florida. Cabeza de Vaca doesn’t dwell on the peculiar coincidence of the two rattles bookending their journey up to that point; he and his companions were more intrigued by what the worked copper bell suggested: an advanced civilization, somewhere nearby. The expeditionaries asked where the rattle had come from and they learned that it had come from the northwest.

They were eventually able to convince their entourage to keep moving with them toward the northwest, chasing now the a pretty overwhelming set of evidence that suggested to them some kind of agricultural society up that direction. Again, they kept running into new village after new village, again, suggesting a much denser native population than later Spaniards would find when they labeled this region “despoblado,” or unpopulated. And their party drew new recruits from these village, the movement at its peak grew to three or four thousand people! All this in a region where the largest community they had yet encountered had maybe a couple hundred living souls in it. Which would have to make it one of the largest social movements in the history of the continent up to this time! Were Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan reminded of the stories of the early apostles of their faith, to whom people brought all they owned for distribution to each “according to his need”? Did they know they were living out the great pilgrimage stories that their native American followers had recorded and retold on rock art panels for thousands of years? There’s a beautiful parallel in this if it’s true. Or frankly even if it isn’t.

Their dizzying rise in status and the speed with which they were now storming across the land was so unexpected and so far from anything that they could have planned, that you can understand why they saw the hand of God in it. As they followed the slope of the Sierra Madres northwest, toward the Texas Big Bend region, the movement began to severely strain the landscape. Prickly pears were blooming again, but, like the great buffalo herds, this movement had to keep moving quickly so as not to overgraze their range and starve. But the further along they went, the more and more encouraging signs they found: beads, plumage, more gourds. And they started to hear rumors of societies up ahead who lived in stone houses and planted crops! On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

The Arrowhead (Z:f49v-f52r)

How the four expeditionaries discovered their power. And rediscovered their vulnerability.

At least twice in his account, Cabeza de Vaca states that his companion Alonso Castillo had been the first in his party to perform cures. Cabeza de Vaca seems to have been second to take to the role, but adds that, “I was the boldest and most daring when it came to performing cures.” We saw this clearly back in Episode 16 when he brought a dead man back to a life, at a moment when he probably hadn’t needed to risk his fragile reputation as a new medicine man on a such a risky proposition. We’ve also seen some circumstantial but convincing evidence back in Episode 14 that it may have been Estevan who had first convinced the natives that the four strange-looking expeditionaries weren’t just beggars, but were in fact powerful medicine men. And in the previous episode, it was Dorantes to whom the villagers brought a precious copper rattle; and, later on he’ll be given five emerald arrowheads as well, suggesting something of his prowess as a healer as well.

My point is that by late summer 1535 the four former Narváez expeditionaries were three-months into their re-booted traveling medicine show and they were damn good at it. “We never cured anyone who didn’t later say that he was healthy,” Cabeza de Vaca claims, though he later qualifies this a little saying that “even those who weren’t cured believed that we had the power to cure them.” Which suggests that in addition to physical cures, the expeditionaries were also offering their patients something else: hope, something for which there apparently was a market in sixteenth century North America. As evidence for this, the four medicine men were now being followed by thousands of Native Americans, representing “so many places and diverse languages that my memory can’t even remember them all,” all wanting to be close to the mysterious medicine men and to be part of whatever this movement was that they were leading now into modern-day northern Coahuila.¹⁸⁹

But leading a movement was exhausting. The thousands of followers “wouldn’t dare eat any food - even if they were dying of hunger - unless we blessed it first.” And by any food, they meant like every single bite, like a priest blessing each communion wafer. “It was so much work to have to blow and bless each follower’s food and drink, and for many other things they wanted to do they came to us first to ask permission, so you can imagine how much we were inconvenienced by all these requests.” ¹⁹⁰

And yet, to call the natives in their entourage “followers” may be misleading. The four medicine men felt as though they had little control over them. In each new village they entered, their entourage took everything they could find, distributed the goods amongst themselves, then consoled/recruited the victims by telling them they would be made hole if they just joined in the movement themselves. As much as they may have lamented this “ritual marauding,” to use Rolena Adorno and Chales Pautz’s term, the four expedititionaries knew that they benefitted from it: it gave a Ponzi scheme momentum to their movement across the continent, as each batch of new recruits joined to make themselves whole for what had been stolen from them back in their hometown. ¹⁹¹

It led the four expeditionaries to really question the forces they had unleashed, and to question the source of their healing powers. Think back to episode 17, where Cabeza de Vaca tells us about Mala Cosa, a shadowy, trickster figure that showed up in local lore around the same time that Europeans had. And sure enough, the more Cabeza de Vaca described Mala Cosa, the more Mala Cosa started to sound like him! I’ve interpreted this as an expression of the self-doubt that Cabeza de Vaca and his companions felt about their cures. Maybe they had as much trouble believing in them as most modern readers do today. So uncomfortable did it make them, that they gave up healing in early 1535, just a couple of months after they had started. They laid down their ceremonial gourds and tried to earn an honest living…and failed miserably. Whereas as healers, they were esteemed guests, cared for and carried through the land; when they stopped healing, they were just useless mouths to feed. It became clear to the expeditionaries that their path lay through “commending” themselves to God and it sure seemed like what God really wanted them to do was to return to being medicine men. And so they consented to start healing again, all while contending with the uncontrollable and frightening side of humanity that it exposed them to.

And it’s not as if they hadn’t tried to assert their authority over the movement. Two episodes ago, when they were just a couple hundred miles from the northernmost settlement of New Spain on the Rio Pánuco, they inexplicably turned around 180 degrees in the opposite direction. More than anything, it seems they wanted to try to lose the followers who had attached themselves to them. And the four expeditionaries thought their move had worked. But then, about forty-eight hours later, their old entourage came back with a vengeance, sacking and pillaging their new hosts with only the slightest veneer of ritual on top of it. And somewhere around here, we started to get mention in Cabeza de Vaca’s account of native headmen, “principales”, amongst their band of followers, who seem to have been the ones really calling the shots. The headmen placed a posse outside each of the expeditionaries lodges each night, ostensibly to protect them but perhaps also to make sure they didn’t sneak away again. Indeed, Professor Andres Resendez describes the expeditionaries journey from this point forward as an ongoing “negotiation” with these native headmen, who still needed the medicine men’s magic to accomplish their marauding just as much as the expeditionaries needed the headmen and their marauders to keep moving northwest across the continent.¹⁹²

But the copper rattle that the last village had given to Dorantes had stirred something in the four old conquistadors. Maybe it had reminded them of the gold rattle they had found back in Florida, maybe it had reminded them why they had come to the New World in the first place. At the very least, it had validated their intuition that to the northwest might be a larger, sedentary, agricultural society, the kinds of society that Castilians knew much better how to work with. Whatever it was, something at this juncture made the already bold Cabeza de Vaca even bolder.

“Here they brought me a man and they told me that he had been wounded a long time ago by an arrow entering his back from the right, and that he had the arrowhead right up against his heart. He said that it caused him quite a bit of pain and that because of it he was always sick.” This is interesting case because it’s the first one we’ve heard of with a clear physical cause. Cabeza de Vaca can’t just wave his hands and make the sign of the cross and pretend like he’s done with this guy. To me, this sounds potentially even riskier than trying to heal a dead man! I mean, no one actually expects you to heal a dead man, so if it fails, well, that’s manageable. Here, Cabeza de Vaca is being asked to conduct open-heart surgery! And he agrees to do it!

Here’s how it went down: “I cut open his chest with a knife to where the arrowhead was.” Endquote and stop there for a second to imagine cutting someone’s chest open with a flint knife while he’s lying awake in front of you! Continuing: “I saw that the arrowhead had gone in crooked, which made it very hard to remove. I twisted the knife and inserted it further and with a lot of work I was able to get it out. It was very large. With a deer bone needle, I gave him two stitches…And two days later, I cut out the stitches and the Indian was as good as new. He told me that he didn’t feel any pain whatsoever.”

So this time, I’ll skip over my usual ooing and awing, because this is obviously an impressive feat and one of the most widely recognized stories in Cabeza de Vaca’s account. But I just have to say that I think this cure was indefensibly reckless! What would have happened to Cabeza de Vaca if his patient had bled out on the operating floor in front of him? He had nothing to gain – they were already the most famous and powerful medicine men in their part of the world – and everything to lose. It’s hard to see why Cabeza de Vaca went ahead with this.

Also, interestingly, Cabeza de Vaca doesn’t credit or even mention God following this cure, which is a bit unusual. I mean, he just conducted open-heart surgery in the Coahuila brush country and managed to save a man’s life! If anything is worth thanking God for, it would be something like this. Instead, however, he mentions only his own reputation: “This cure gave us among the Indians as much reputation throughout all that land as they were capable of esteeming and holding dear.” This really is a different response to the one we have grown accustomed to. And the reaction of those around him is also a bit different. Instead of winning just reputation or fame, they start to win quite valuable material goods: marcasite, antimony, beads, and spectacular, furry brown leather robes, all of which, they were told, came from the peoples to the northwest who lived in permanent houses many stories high. And the extraction of the arrowhead also coincides with a renewed obsession with finding Corn. The four expeditionaries start to sound a bit like they had seven years earlier back in Florida. And increasingly, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan are beginning to see their daily interactions with their followers in terms of a struggle for “authority” – an expression perhaps of their uncomfortable tug of war with the native “headmen” they had to deal with daily, but also a far cry from the spirit of service had really sustained them through their hardest times so far on this continent. In fact, by this point in the narrative, it has been almost seven chapters since Cabeza de Vaca has even mentioned God, a glaring omission for a man so grounded in his faith through the preceding 23 chapters.¹⁹³

By the fall of 1535, their multi-thousand-person band had descended from the Sierra Madre oriental, and the four expeditionaries came once again upon a large river, its waters running chest-deep. It was, according to the route we are following, the Rio Grande once again, maybe in the region of modern day Boquillas, Coahuila. It’s sits today opposite Big Bend National Park, which maybe the easiest place listeners can get to to appreciate the terrain that the expeditionaries were traveling through. That anything can live in this terrain is a miracle, and indeed, Cabeza de Vaca records that they traveled almost 150 miles at one point without seeing any game. Their party severely taxed the land’s meager resources. Pretty soon the deer hunters and the rabbit hunters were coming home empty-handed, as well as the grub-hunters scrounging for grasshoppers and worms, and even the foragers couldn’t possibly have been collecting enough for everyone. Also, in continuing to travel west, the party was entering territory occupied by historic enemies of some in their entourage. And so their entourage, began to push back.

One day, the power struggle came to head. One of the native headmen told the expeditionaries that he and his people wouldn’t go any further. The expeditionaries clearly needed their followers to protect, guide, and forage for them, but they didn’t want to go back the way they had come from. And so the expeditionaries tried to pound the table: “To them we said that we wanted to go where the sun sets.” No, no, their followers replied, “es que there’s no people there, no food, and no water as you see.” You’ve said that before and you were wrong, the expeditionaries said, Send out some scouts. “That is the land of our enemies, our scouts can’t enter there.” Then send women, the expeditionaries insisted. Women, they knew, could move more freely in the land and were sometimes used in fact to mediate in times of war. The native leaders agreed, but also seem to have given them instructions to make sure not to find anything. When they returned five days later claiming they hadn’t found anything, the expeditionaries blew up.¹⁹⁴

Cabeza stormed out into the brush. His companions – Castillo, Dorantes, and Esteban – seem to have done the same. Their entourage of natives kept waiting for them to return: but night came and went, and the next morning found them still refusing to have any contact with anyone. This terrified the natives; these four men were the most powerful medicine men on the continent. And they seemed to be pissed off. “They went to where I was. And all night they were not sleeping and very afraid, speaking to me, telling me how scared they were, begging us not to be mad, that even if they knew they were to die along the way with us, they would take us now where we wanted to go.” But that seems to have just annoyed the expeditionaries even more. Another day passed, and he and his three companions still refused to rejoin their followers. “And then, a strange thing happened.” In camp, three hundred of the natives fell ill. Then, soon thereafter, eight of them died. For a party that large, a stationary camp is a deeply unsanitary and frankly deadly think. But to the natives, what it looked like was that when the four expeditionaries had withdrawn from their community, they had withdrawn their protection as well. Which by the way, is exactly what the natives had always believed, that so long as the expeditionaries were with them, no harm would befall them. This is why they hadn’t wanted to let them go into the lands of other Indians! And now look what had happened! And at first, the expeditionaries did nothing to dispel that notion. From his isolation outside the main camp: “Andres Dorantes told one of his Indians to tell the others that because they wished to compel them to take them, they were all dying.” Basically saying that because you won’t let us go where we want to go, your people are dying. It sent shock wave of terror rippling through their band of thousands. “Throughout all the land where this became known, they had so much fear of us that it seemed simply by looking at us they would die!” Their followers get so freaked out that they tell everyone to back off and leave them alone. They would scold crying children to keep them quiet, and actually punished one mourning woman whose cries were too loud by scraping her from head to toe with rat’s teeth. For fifteen days, the exepditionaries “never saw one of them [Indians] laugh nor cry, nor otherwise show his feelings.” ¹⁹⁵

For the last seven years, these four expeditionaries had been at the mercy of this “strange and evil land.” For the first time really, they found themselves in a position of power – and yet when they acted on it, they found that it produced some awful consequences. Not only could they cause great emotional distress to their needy followers; their anger had the power to kill those who followed them!

And yet by pulling out of their community, the expeditionaries know that they have committed a sin, independent even of the obvious suffering they see that it has inflicted on their followers. As professor Gilbert Hinojosa at Incarnate Word University pointed out to me, their Faith was a pre-Reformation, pre-Council of Trent faith centered on community. I don’t understand this well enough to go into it, but Cabeza de Vaca at least seems to hold some idea that faith exists in a communal setting. That without community, there is only vulnerability, and vulnerability without faith is a diminished and terrible existence. It was an idea that the natives amongst whom he was living probably related to. In fact, I think we could argue that Mala Cosa represents the manifestation of this idea, in counterpoint: Mala Cosa was a demonic, solitary figure on the fringes of society, coming and going as he pleased, taking whatever he wanted, leaving behind only scars and nightmares – with no attachments to a community, with no sense of service to keep him grounded, and hence with no divine protection to offer. At this moment, when the four expeditionaries have pulled out of the community of their followers, they look more like Mala Cosa than at any other point in this story.

And they knew it. “The truth is that seeing this caused us more pain than we could bear.” And, at a practical level, it scared them. “We feared that those who didn’t die would leave us alone out of fear, and that all other peoples ahead of us would avoid us, seeing what had happened to our followers.” With this realization, they were cast down from their position of supreme power, back into a position of extreme vulnerability. They were, they realized, naked still as they had ever been. But now that they were back, focused on their vulnerability, they at least knew what they needed to do next. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

Crossing the Divide (Z:f52r-56v)

How the four expeditionaries re-connected with the Castilian world.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 22: Crossing the Divide. I’m Brandon Seale.

Throughout the fall of 1535, the Native American spiritual movement headed or at least figureheaded by Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan stormed its way across Northern Coahuila. Their cures never failed them, culminating in the extraction of an arrowhead by Cabeza de Vaca from the beating heart of an ailing Indian. Their compensation increased with their fame: whereas before, a basket of roasted prickly pears and a piece of dried venison seemed like a fortune, now they were being gifted beads, minerals, and even worked copper rattles. And as word of these four expeditionaries spread like a prairie fire, it drew in new recruits from miles around until their party numbered now three or four thousands souls!

But one day, on the south side of the Rio Grande just across from Big Bend National park, it almost fell apart. The four expeditionaries’ rise had been so meteoric – just a year ago they had been starving slaves eeking out a living in South Texas – and the source of their newfound power was so mysterious, that it finally just overwhelmed them. The four broke away from their camp of thousands and went off to brood in the brush by themselves – leaving their followers trembling at what would happen now that their medicine men had withdrawn from them. And sure enough, 300 of the followers promptly fell sick. Then, eight died. Others seemed likely to follow them. The camp descended into chaos, with children screaming, and women wailing at the impending death of their loved ones.

Incidentally, this all happens just at the moment in Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative when he and his companions seem to be further from God than ever. What I mean by that is that by my rough Kindle count, Cabeza de Vaca mentions God sixty-one times during the course of his entire thirty-eight chapter narrative. Yet from Chapter twenty-three – when their latest run as medicine men really took off – until Chapter 30 here, Cabeza de Vaca invokes God only once, and there only in passing. It’s a glaring omission. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

The four expeditionaries’s withdrawal from their community of followers is representative of this withdrawal from God at this juncture. And it took seeing their followers falling sick and dying to show them this. Inasmuch as the episode of the expeditionaries’ withdrawal from their community of followers marked the pinnacle of their power as medicine men, by alienating them from the community that was protecting them and carrying them across the continent, it left them just as vulnerable as ever. And as unknowable as God may be, He still has a way of letting you know when you’re doing something you’re not supposed to, and the suffering that the four expeditionaries witnessed in their community “caused us more pain than we could bear.” Realizing that they were powerless on their own and realizing it was their only recourse, the expeditionaries turned back to God, for the first time in seven chapters: “We begged God to fix things.”

And fortunately for them, He did. Not only did “the sick began to get well,” but also, many of their followers decided to go back to their homes, reducing the strain on the barren countryside. Others who had previously been opposed to marching deeper into the lands of their traditional enemies, found the courage to move forward. A new sense of harmony and purpose animated the camp, and just a few days further on, they came to the intersection of the Rio Conchos and Rio Grande, the site of one of the largest communities in North America at this time. In 1535, this “junta de los rios” supported a population of perhaps 10,000 people, which is pretty impressive when you consider that the population today of Ojinaga-Presidio at the same location is only about 30,000. And both the four expeditionaries and their many followers from the hunter-gatherer bands of Northern Mexico were blown away by what they saw there.

The natives at the junta de los Rios concho and Rio Grande lived in fixed houses, made from adobe bricks, plastered inside and out with red, yellow, black, and white pigments, rising multiple stories into the air, perhaps like the Pueblo ruins near modern-day Salinas, New Mexico. They traded as far east as Louisiana and all up and down the Rio Grande, Conchos, and Pecos Rivers, and down into Mexico. Though their diets centered around the beans and squash that they raised, their economy centered on the buffalo. In addition to the meat - which Cabeza de Vaca described as tastier than traditional beef - these people used these animals to make everything, from “shoes to shields.” They would travel hundreds of miles and spend months out of each year hunting and processing these animals. So central was the buffalo to these people’s lives, that the four expeditionaries took to calling them, “the People of the Cows.” Cabeza de Vaca describes the People of the Cows as the “The people with the best bodies that we saw, and the most liveliness and capacity and the best understood and responded to us when we asked them questions.”¹⁹⁶

I don’t think there’s any mystery why this is. The People of the Cows were living a style of life closer to the four expeditionaries than anyone else the Castilians had met so far on the American mainland. They had agriculture, they had trade, and they had urban centers. They probably had some kind of social structure, though we don’t get a whole lot of clues as to this, but there are hints that things are tamer, more domesticated, such as a passing mention by Cabeza de Vaca that the women in this society went around covered with deer skins. Compare also the wild, bacchanalian mitotes we’ve seen amongst the Coahuiltecan hunter-gatherers with this slightly later description of a People of the Cows party: “They made music by beating their hands while sitting around a big fire. They sing, and in time with the signing they dance, a few rising from one side and others from the opposite, performing their dances two, four, and eight at a time.” I’m not saying that square dancing is the sign of an advanced civilization, but it would have certainly been more relatable to the expeditionaries, who genuinely admired the “ingenios y industrias” of the People of the Cows. Later Spaniards would share their opinion, and the People of the Cows, whom Spaniards would call the “jumanos” were among the first targets of the New Spanish missionaries. Other native americans noticed too. When the Apaches descended from the great plains 100 years later, they incorporated many of the People of the Cows into their tribes and seem also to have adopted their buffalo-centered lifestyle supplemented by seasonal agriculture.¹⁹⁷

Yet even amongst these more “advanced” People of the Cows, the expeditionaries’ reputations preceded them. Their existing followers made sure to hype them up and explain to the People of the Cows what was expected of them. And yet this time, there was No ritual marauding or ransacking. Maybe the four expeditionaries’ temper tantrum had calmed their entourage. Maybe their followers were more intimidated by the People of the Cows. Regardless, the truth is that the entourage didn’t need to go marauding. The People of the Cows were so awed by the four medicine men and the social movement behind them that they just tidily piled up all their belongings in the center of their houses and waited meekly with their hair pulled down over their eyes for the medicine men to come see them.

And yet the expeditionaries weren’t seduced by the relative sophistication of the People of the Cows. Indeed, their brief time at the Junta de los Rios had only confirmed for them they needed to keep moving. Amongst the People of the Cows, they had seen ornamental tropical feathers, suggesting that they had access to trade routes that reached into Southern Mexico – where the expeditionaries knew Castilians to be. And though the People of the Cows had some metal goods, they didn’t seem to possess the knowledge of working metal themselves, which meant that Dorantes’ copper rattle must have come from further along as well. And lastly, the expeditionaries realized that the People of the Cows didn’t actually raise corn due to a prolonged drought, which meant that the two women who had first drawn the expeditionaries up into these mountains must have obtained their corn from somewhere else too. The People of the Cows could read the disappointment in the expeditionaries eyes, but encouraged them that they could find feathers, copper, and corn if they continued their journey westward, to “where the sun set.”¹⁹⁸

And so after just a few days’ rest, the expeditionaries set out northwest along the north bank of the Rio Grande. For seventeen days, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Doratnes, Estevan, and an uncertain number of their heartiest followers marched up along the north bank of the Rio Grande, toward modern-day El Paso. They had been warned that the “camino al maiz,” the road to the corn, would be barren, and true to form, all they had to eat each day was “a handful of deer fat” (1915). But they had grown accustomed to hardship, and to traveling at a blistering pace. In the last three months, they had covered maybe 750 miles. Accounting for a few rest days here and there, their party was covering maybe 10 miles a day through some of the most barren country on the continent. In a marked change from how the expeditionaries had fared in their first years in the New World, however, now their toughness and endurance was the object of admiration. “We walked all day without eating until nightfall. Our companions were shocked at how little we ate. Yet we never felt tired and the truth was that were so used to laboring like this that we didn’t even feel it.”¹⁹⁹

At the end of those seventeen days, they crossed back over the Rio Grande for the third time in about as many months – the first time had been back near Lake Falcón in the summer, then near Boquillas in the previous episode, now somewhere near El Paso perhaps. This time, they crossed from the north bank to the south, and turned ever so slightly southwest. It was late fall of 1535, but still warm enough that communities up ahead might still be harvesting corn. This idea drove them forward, motivating them, even as the deer tallow began to run out and they were reduced to eating powdered grass. They followed the sunset seventeen more hungry days, into the Sierra Madre Occidental, across the continental divide, and down into modern-day Sonora.

At the end of a second seventeen days – it feels like seventeen must be symbolic here, doesn’t it? I can’t figure out for what though – after a second seventeen days they came upon another village with permanent houses, somewhere in the Yaqui River valley. We don’t get as many details about the natives of the Rio Yaqui as we did about the People of the Cows, except that the expeditionaries took it as a sign of the advancement of this civilization that the women here went about fully-clothed, and at least in Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative, there is a direct correlation between how advanced a society is and how well covered up its people are. This village was also clearly part of a well-established trade network, and the villagers brought to the expeditionaries material objects of some real value, even by European standards: coral beads, turquoise, and bolts of cotton “finer than that of New Spain,” which the expeditionaries dutifully distributed to their followers. And once again, Dorantes was singled out for a truly special gift: five emeralds knapped into arrowheads. Cabeza de Vaca doesn’t give us any more context for the gift in his account, but recall from Episode 20 that the number five is associated with perfection in many Uto-Aztecan cultures and we are, by the way, solidly and undisputably amongst Uto-Aztecan tribes by this point. You should also know that these Uto-Aztecans told worshipped a god who came from the east - like the expeditionaries - who went to the underworld – like Cabeza de Vaca during his five days alone in the monte back in Episode 15 - to recover the chalchiuitl, emerald bones of the ancestor - like the emeralds they had just given Dorantes? Some of you listeners may even recognize the name of this god: it was Quetzacoatl, “the feathered serpent,” who was actually worshipped in various forms throughout pre-Colombian Mexico. But here’s something you probably didn’t Quetzacoatl’s twin was Xolotol, the dog-deity underworld guide we mentioned back in Episode 20, because it sounds like that may have been what some of the natives were calling Cabeza de Vaca and his companions. And wait, there’s more, do you know what symbol was frequently associated with Quetzalcoatl according to scholar Dorothy Holser? Rattles. Like the copper rattle given to Dorantes back in Coahuila.²⁰⁰

Clearly, the emerald arrowheads and the copper rattle and all of these other gifts aren’t just random. They are forms of tribute rich with symbolism that the native americans are the region are offering to the four expeditionaries. It sure seems like the expeditionaries must have realized this: because he fills his account with so many details and side-narratives that are rich with meaning in the native American tradition, even as they would seem like non-sequiturs to a European reader. But knowing what we know from the archaeological record and from other accounts, it sure seems like the natives of the region are confirming that the expeditionaries fluency with their own faith tradition…that the expeditionaries are in fact are living out a central story from their faith tradition. Inasmuch as the expeditionaries’ journey has validated the expeditionaries’ own faith, as we talked about in some of the early episodes, what we’re seeing in these most recent episodes is the way that it is also then validating the faith of the natives amongst whom they are traveling.

For three days the expeditionaries stayed with the villagers on the Rio Yaqui. Each sunrise and sunset the villagers passed their hands over the expeditionaries’ bodies, then they would shouting and raise their hands to the sky and sing, thanking them for coming “del cielo,” from the sky, or from heaven – the Spanish doesn’t distinguish. Yet these expeditionaries hadn’t come from the sky: they had come from Castille. And what these Castillians sought, was corn. And so the expeditionaries peppered these Indians of the Yaqui valley with questions about where they could find more corn. Seeing how obsessed the expeditionaries were with corn, mothers began placing kernels of it in their babies hands to better win the favor of these odd-looking medicine men. And when the expeditionaries finally found corn being cultivated in a subsequent village on the Rio Yaqui, “This was the thing in the world that made us happiest and for this we gave infinite thanks to our Lord.” Moreso than representing advanced societies that Castilians might conquer, I think that corn had come to represent home to the expeditionaries. Finding large, prosperous, corn-raising societies fulfilled their apostolic mission for sure…but it also increased the likelihood of bringing the expeditionaries into contact with the corn-raising societies of central Mexico which they knew their countrymen now ruled as overlords. ²⁰¹

Of course, throughout his entire account, Cabeza de Vaca NEVER talks about longing for home. About missing his wife, or mourning the experiences he was missing, or the fact that he was never going to have a chance to raise children and pass on his family name of which he was so proud. And this is just one of the reminders to me of just how different these people were from us. No modern author can write about this story without trying to imagine how these expeditionaries dealt with home-sickness, yet the expeditionaries themselves never talk about! My theory so far has been that by refusing to dwell on thoughts of home, it allowed the expeditionaries to cope better with the obvious hardship they were facing, much like other prisoners of war we discussed. But every time that Cabeza de Vaca talks about corn, a part of his old conquistador energy returns. And so I’ve come to believe that corn is maybe he and his companions’ code-word for home, or least a reminder for them of their past lives and what they were striving to return to.

As if on cue, on the third day of the expeditionaries’ stay at that village, an Indian came to see them from either further down the Rio Yaqui, near where it empties into the Pacific. Castillo, the most pious and “most esteemed” of the group, noticed that this Indian was wearing a peculiar piece of jewelry around his neck. “There Castillo saw an Indian of this village with a piece of sword belt, and a horseshoe nail hung from his neck like a jewel.” The sword belt and the horseshoe nail could only mean one thing: Castilians were nearby! Indeed, the last time Cabeza de Vaca had seen such an artifact was around the neck of an Indian on Galveston island, which had been the clue that reunited him with Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan. “Where did this come from?” the expeditionaries asked the Indian. “Del cielo,” from the sky, the Indian of course said. No, fine, but where did it fall from the sky, the expeditionaries asked again. “He responded that some men with beards like ours had come from the sky and arrived at that same river [we were on now], with horses and lances, and swords.”²⁰²

It was, mas or minus, Christmas of 1535. And the expeditionaries had just been presented with the greatest gift they could have received: a connection, after more than seven years of separation, with their old countrymen.²⁰³

And they received one more gift that Christmas season from the people of the village on the Rio Yaqui: “600 opened hearts of deer.” And once again, it was to Dorantes specifically to whom the natives presented their gift. I should mention that Dennis Herrick, a biographer of Estevan, theorizes that all these special gifts that keep going to Dorantes may actually have been intended for Estevan, who according to Cabeza de Vaca here, “was always the one who spoke to [the natives].” But since Estevan was, technically, Dorantes’s slave, he then had to render all of these gifts up unto his master and so they appear in Cabeza de Vaca’s account as gifts to Dorantes. It’s an interesting theory for sure.²⁰⁴

The gift of the deer hearts led the expeditionaries to name the village on the Rio Yaqui, “Corazones.” Note that this was the first time that the expeditionariees had bothered to name a place since being shipwrecked on their “Island of Ill-Fate” more than seven years ago. And Cabeza de Vaca includes some other interesting literary bookends in his narrative around this point. We’ve already mentioned how the copper rattle Dorantes had been given back in Coahuila recalls the gold rattle that Narvaez expeditionaries had found when they had first set foot in Florida, just as the beltbuckle around the neck of the Indian here on the Rio Yaqui recalls the trinket around the neck of the Indian on Galveston Island that had first reunited Cabeza de Vaca and Castillo and Dorantes and Estevan. I also can’t help but notice that 600 is also the number of souls who had sailed away from the Iberian peninsula in the Narváez expedition more than eight years ago no. On five ships no less, later reduced to five rafts, kind of like the five emeralds Dorantes had just been gifted.²⁰⁵

Maybe these are just literary flourishes inserted by Cabeza de Vaca, but just as likely, I think these parallels were the kinds of things that the deeply religious expeditionaries would have interpreted as divine confirmation that they were once again aligned with God’s plan. There is no such thing as coincidence in the worldview of the expeditionaries. And so after a brief rest along the Rio Yaqui, sometime around the Feast of the epiphany, 1536, the expeditionaries took up their march west again, heading west “to where the sun set.” And they were clear now about their goal. It wasn’t corn they were after: they were going after Castilians. In their satchels, they carried with them the five emerald arrowheads and the 600 deer hearts. Behind the four expeditionaries, Cabeza de Vaca tells us, marched the body fo their followers, numbering precisely 600. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

Four Horsemen (Z:f56v-f60v)

What the four expeditionaries found when they were reunited with their countrymen.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 23: Four Horsemen.

For the first three months of 1536, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso Castillo, Andres Dorantes, Estevan, and 600 or so of their native American followers traveled down the Pacific Coast of México. They were backtracking along the trail of an Indian they had met up in Sonora who had sported a Castilian beltbuckle and horseshoe nail on a necklace. The Indian had confirmed for them that the artifacts had come from men “with beards like ours.” But the Indian also told them that these bearded men had come with horses and armor and weapons and had run through two of his friends with a lance. “[He] told us how other times Christians had entered their lands and destroyed and burned their villages and carried off half of their men and all of their women and children.” And the four expeditionaries now saw this for their own eyes. In normal times, the Sonoran coast is a lush, well-watered plain that, according to Cabeza de Vaca was “without a doubt the best in all of the Indies and more fertile.” In 1536, however, it looked more like a scene from the Apocalypse. “We went through much of the land and found it all abandoned, because the inhabitants there had fled to the sierras, leaving behind their houses and fields, out of fear of the Christians.” From their position of shared nakedness with the natives, the expeditionaries physically felt the effects of this devastation, of the food shortages it caused and the psychological trauma it was inflicting. They met some natives who were so shaken up by everything they were experiencing that they just stopped eating: “They were determined to let themselves die, which seemed better to them than waiting to be treated with such cruelty as they had been.” ²⁰⁶

This gave the four expeditionaries pause. “We gave much thanks to our Lord God for what we heard because we had doubted of ever hearing news of Christians again. At the same time, however, we found ourselves confused and saddened…” Aside from the pain it caused the expeditionaries to see human suffering in any form, there was a practical consideration at play here too. The expeditionaries were worried that their followers would hear about the misdeeds of the other “bearded men like us” and turn on them. “We feared that when we arrived amongst the natives living closest to the Christians and warring with them, that they would treat us poorly and make us pay for what the Christians had done to them.” So they had to restrain their excitement at the prospect of rejoining Castilian society and establish some separation between themselves and the other bearded guys roaming this country. “As indirectly as we could, we asked where these [bearded] men were.” Once they had their answer, they announced to the natives that “we would search for these men and tell them not to kill and take the natives as slaves, and not to take them out of their lands, or do them any harm at all.” The expeditionaries had come to believe that God had some great plan for them, but up until this moment, it hadn’t been clear what it was. “Dios nuestro Senor fue servido de traernos hasta allos” – God was served to bring us to this point, they now realized, because of their unique ability to protect the natives from their own countrymen. The expeditionaries had spent more than a year now as full-time shamans, medicine men mediating between the spiritual and the material world. Now, they were being called upon to mediate between two different temporal worlds: the Old World and the New World. Now, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions were to become apostles to their own peoples preaching the humanity and, to use an anachronistic term, the rights of Native Americans.²⁰⁷

At this point in the narrative, Cabeza de Vaca turns to address reader with the opening lines of his new gospel, and he opens full of epiphany and indignation: “From our experience it should be clear that to convince these peoples to become Christians and obedient subjects of the Imperial Majesty, they must be treated well, and that that is the only certain way and there is no other!”²⁰⁸

With this new clarity of purpose, the expeditionaries seemed to grow a little in status. The natives of the Sinaloa coast through which they were traveling began to come out of their hiding places, and brought forth food and provisions for the expeditionaries and their entourage from their meager stores. The Sinaloa natives guided the expeditionaries and their traveling band along hidden roads through the mountains. And once again, the expeditionaries gained momentum. Where before there had been nothing but desolation and emptiness, a path now materialized before them. It carried them south, down the coast, and onto the trail of the Castilian slavers.

And finally, three months and three hundred miles after they had seen the Castilian belt buckle on an Indian’s neck, they caught up to their countrymen. Not the four expeditionaries themselves at first, but some brave native scouts who had agreed to go ahead and look for the men terrorizing their homeland. Unsurprisingly, since the men they caught up with were slavers, they had with them a string of natives in chains on their way to the mines or encomiendas of New Spain. So although the news of Castilians nearby excited the four expeditionaris, it terrified the natives traveling with them. The natives had already come three hundred miles into what was essentially a war zone. And they had now made contact with an enemy who had shown himself to be infinitely more powerful than they were. Despite the expeditionaries begging and cajoling, the natives refused to go any further. Were the expeditionaries really going to get this close and then have to turn around? Yet what exactly did the expeditionaries’ native followers have to gain from going forward with them?

In spite of their trepidation, eleven natives ultimately did volunteer to go forward with the expeditionaries. I wish we knew more about them, but in the narrative they are just numbers, so we can only speculate what motivated them to risk their lives for these four odd-looking medicine men. And to overcome their exhaustion from traveling so far so fast across so ravaged a country. According to Cabeza de Vaca, even Castillo and Dorantes too claimed they were too tired to go on, at least for the moment. In the face of all this, however, those eleven natives raised their hands. So around April 1, 1536, Cabeza de Vaca, Estevan, and the eleven went forward, while Castillo and Dorantes stayed behind with the other 600 natives or so in their band.

For three days the forward party searched for the slavers, zigzagging across the Sinaloan coastal plains from the sea to the mountains. And finally, they found a fresh, Castilian campsite, left behind by four horsemen it appeared from the tracks and stakes they had used to hobble their horses. Knowing they were closing in, the party of thirteen put in for the night, and went out for the slavers first thing the next morning. Then, on that morning of the third day, they crested a little hill, and down in the valley beneath them, at last, they saw four Castilian horsemen. And by the way, for any future adaptors of this story into a screenplay, my recommendation is that you make the four horsemen’s mounts white, red, black, and pale respectively. And don’t think this kind of symbolism isn’t on Cabeza de Vaca’s mind. Remember, he had just arrived to this point of re-entry into Castilian society after a journey of three days…a journey that had begun when they had gone ashore in Florida eight years prior on Good Friday…and just to put the point on it, it was, now, mid-April of 1536, pretty damn near if not Easter day itself. Cabeza de Vaca is more artful than I am, however, and he doesn’t feels no need to overwrite the scene. On the contrary, after seven and a half years, thousands of miles, and hundreds of lives, Cabeza de Vaca narrates his great moment of homecoming with disappointing brevity:

“The next morning, I caught up to the four horsemen. They were greatly confused to see me so strangely dressed and in the company of Indians. They were staring at me for a long time, so astonished were they that they neither spoke nor asked questions. I told them to take me to their captain.”

In the intro to this season I drug this scene out for several minutes, because it feels like it deserves that kind of attention. But the reason that Cabeza de Vaca doesn’t dwell on this scene is because for him, this isn’t the climax of his story. Remember, his goal was never just to get home, or to be reunited with his countrymen. If that had been his only goal, everything else we have studied about the psychological tools used by those in similar circumstances suggests that he wouldn’t have made it! No, this moment was merely his resurrection, his reentry into Castilian society. Now, he and the other twelve with him (Estevan plus eleven natives) were to begin their true work. Kind of like the way another man 1,500 years ago in Galillee only really go to work with his twelve disciples after his resurrection. And it’s interesting also that the number thirteen, according to Dr. Carolyn Boyd, held mythological significance in native American numerology as well, as the number that represented the celestial realms. I like to think that maybe Cabeza de Vaca was using a bit of numerology to inspire the natives in his party just as he uses Christian symbolism to convey meaning to his Castilian audience. It’s a great example of him tailoring his message to his different audiences, as he slowly begins to transform from an apostle to the natives into an apostle to his own people.²⁰⁹

The four horsemen led Cabeza de Vaca, Estevan, and their band of 11 back to their main camp and brought them before the captain of their slaving party. After hearing Cabeza de Vaca’s incredible story, the captain dispatched a troop to go fetch Castillo and Dorantes, with Estevan, returning once again, as the guide. Alone now, with his countrymen, Cabeza de Vaca demanded a notarized statement certifying the day, month, and year of his return to service as the Royal Treasurer of the Narváez expedition. This scene always makes me laugh when I read it. Cabeza de Vaca still doesn’t have any clothes on, but ever-the-Castilian civil servant, the first thing he does is demand a notary. It’s good he did though, because this is where Cabeza de Vaca and his companions re-enter the historical record. We don’t have this particular document, but from here forward we do have a documentary trail by other third-parties confirming most of what happens next.²¹⁰

Cabeza de Vaca spent the next few days talking to the Captain and the other slavers, listening to them complain about it poorly it was going for them lately now that they had frightened all the natives for miles around up into the mountains. The natives’ abandonment of their fields was actually even more painful for the slavers than it was for the natives, since it denied them the provisions they needed to move through an unfamiliar countryside. The slavers, in fact, were beginning to starve. And in this, Cabeza de Vaca saw his opportunity to perform his first “wonder” – we won’t call it a miracle – in his new ministry.²¹¹

When five days later, Castillo, Dorantes, Estevan, and their 600 strong band of natives arrived, they had brought with them “all the corn they could in the clay-topped pots in which they had buried and hidden it.” The natives also brought bows, and leather pouches, and bison hides, the types of goods they habitually gifted to the four medicine man. And when they arrived in the Castilian camp, the expeditionaries made sure that the starving slavers saw the entire procession lay their pots of corn and other gifts at the feet of the expeditionaries. Then, just as they had always done with their native audiences, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions distributed these gifts to the slack-jawed Castilian slavers, who were shocked by what they were witnessing. Four castaways, presumed dead in Florida eight years ago, had just walked out of the wilderness on the Pacific coast of Mexico with an entourage of 600 native americans worshipping them as their spiritual leaders, and then delivered all of their natives’ possessions to those same men that the natives had been so effectively avoiding for weeks now.²¹²

The Castilian slavers totally misunderstood whatever it was Cabeza de Vaca was trying to demonstrate with this display, however. Rather than thank the natives for the gifts, or the expeditionaries for showing them how to treat with the natives, they just got up, grabbed their slave chains, and moved in on the 600 natives that Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan had so kindly brought them. What are you doing? The four expeditionaries asked, stopping them in their tracks. Why the hell did yall bring 600 natives in here if not for us to take them as captives? The slavers responded. Are we supposed to just let them go? That’s not really how this game of conquest works, man.

Immediately, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions began to worry that they had miscalculated. Their goal all along had been to get back to a “land of Christians.” Almost by definition, their flock of native Americans wouldn’t be able to enter that land with them, but the expeditionaries still had a vague notion that once they got there, they would be able to advocate for their well-being. It had never occurred to their return to the Land of Christians would consign their 600 followers to enslavement at the hands of those Christians. Quietly, the four expeditionaries turned to their followers and suggested that they return to their homes, quickly, for their own safety. Yet their followers had seen what had just gone on as well, and they were now worried about leaving the four expeditionaries in the hands of these unsavory-looking slavers! And by the way, they reminded Cabeza de Vaca, the way this works is that we don’t leave you until we make sure you’ve been safely handed off to the next group of people, remember? And we don’t exactly trust this lot.

The slavers, chains still in-hand, started to lose patience at this point. They picked up on what the expeditionaries and their followers were talking about, and jumped into the argument, saying, in short, “Don’t be fooled, these guys are just like us! In fact, they are actually down and out unlucky versions of us, you really don’t want to be hanging out with them, much less following them.”

The natives refused to believe it, however, and turned now to argue directly with the slavers. “[The natives] responded, saying that the [slavers] were lying, because we [four] had come from where the sun rises and that [the slavers] had come from where it sets, and that we healed the sick and they only killed those who were healthy and that we came naked and barefoot and they were came with horses and lances and that we had not a greedy bone in our body and that in fact everything we got we had turned around and given to them, leaving nothing for ourselves whereas they had no other goal than to rob them of everything they had and had never given anything to anyone.”²¹³

That is a smackdown of historical proportions. The scene would be funny if the stakes weren’t so high. But the argument here amongst the natives, the expeditionaries, and the slavers raises a fair question: Who were Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan more like by this point? Were they more like the native americans amongst whom they had labored and lived the last seven and a half years? Or were they more like the Castilian slavers whose language they spoke? Danny Anderson, president of Trinity University here in San Antonio is actually the one who really clued me into the way Cabeza de Vaca is playing with perspective throughout this whole scene. The narrative voice in Cabeza de Vaca’s account flips from Cabeza de Vaca, to his companions, to the slavers, and then back again, really highlighting the narrators uncertainty as to which side he belongs on. Because really, by this point Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, and Dorantes were something in between, liminal figures with a foot in both worlds and unsure themselves which world they more rightly belong in. Cabeza de Vaca never quite settles this issue either, concluding only that “In the end, we could never convince the Indians that we were Christians like the [slavers]” – but abstaining from any sort of positive affirmation on his own part that he and his companions actually WERE like the slavers. Because that’s not really the point. Mostly, the expeditionaries want to get their followers as far away now from the Castilian camp as possible. But now that the natives had seen the slavers motives so nakedly exposed, they were afraid to turn their backs on them. Only with “much work and insistence” were the natives convinced to let the expeditionaries go with the slavers, and this only after the slavers swore to let the natives go in peace. For now at least, this was a bargain the slavers were willing to accept. If the natives were worried what would happen to the expeditionaries if they left them with the slavers, the slavers were worried what would happen if they didn’t separate the expeditionaries from their followers. These four renegade expeditionaries had made clear their disapproval of what the slavers were up to, and appeared to wield an uncomfortable amount of power over their 600 followers behind them. It felt like they could pretty easily overwhelm the couple of dozen Castilians in the slaving Camp if they decided to. Even after the terms were agreed to, however, it seems that Cabeza de Vaca didn’t quite trust his countrymen’s intentions, and he felt the need to include the following disclaimer for the historical record : “And so I say and affirm that if the Indians don’t live up to their end of the bargain, it will be the fault of the Christians!” by which he means the slavers.²¹⁴

Or would it be Cabeza de Vaca and his companions’ fault? Did Cabeza de Vaca really believe that a slaving expedition wouldn’t try to enslave 600 unarmed natives that he and his companions had just delivered into their camp? That would seem to require some pretty willful naivete on Cabeza de Vaca’s part. Interestingly, it’s around this time in the narrative that Cabeza de Vaca notices that the expeditionaries have lost the five emeralds they had been given back in Corazones. Those five emeralds, we theorized based on Native American numerology, represented perfection somehow, divine sanction for the expeditionaries’ ministry. And here, just a few days after the expeditionaries’ return to Castilian society, it seemed that perfection had already been lost.

For almost eight years the expeditionaries had dreamed of rejoining Castilian society. Here in modern-day Sinaloa, after almost eight years of wanderings, they had done it. And yes, I’m speaking overly generally here since we don’t really have Estevan’s perspective, but he had ample opportunities along the way to flee into the wilderness if that had been his goal. Despite the fact that in returning to Castilian Society he was, in truth, only trading captivity in the native world for slavery into the Castilian one, he too had marched every inch of the way alongside the three Castilian expeditionaries, suggesting that on balance he too might have been motivated somehow to rejoin Castilian society.

All four of the expeditionaries were probably disappointed by their reunion. Almost immediately, they found themselves in opposition to their countrymen. The expeditionaries felt that if the price of deliverance from their “captivity” on this continent was the enslavement of the native Americans who had followed them across the continent, then their mission really had not succeeded. Their mission, their “mandato real” from the King himself had been to bring the natives into the knowledge of the faith and into the service of the Castilian Crown – not to reduce them to beasts of burden in the mines and encomiendas of New Spain. Because in addition to their new mandate as apostles to their own countrymen preaching the humanity of Native Americans, the expeditionaries believed that God had given them their own sort of “encomienda” over the natives: to protect them from Castilians, and to teach them how best to protect themselves in this post-Apocalyptic world. On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

The Ideal Conquest (Z:f60v-63v)

How the four expeditionaries closed out their expedition.

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 24: The Ideal Conquest. I’m Brandon Seale.

Once Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso Castillo, Andres Dorantes, and Estevan the “Black Arab” from Azenmour walked into that Castilian slavers’ camp in April of 1536, there was no way they would ever go back to the Native American world. Yet the four expeditionaries hadn’t yet fully re-entered the Castilian world either, and this started to really bother the slavers. First off, the expeditionaries refused to put any clothes on! It would be months before the four expeditionaries could stand the feeling of clothes on their skin. Second, it took them weeks before they would even sleep on a bed, preferring to curl up on the hard ground like a dog. Third, they still insisted on carrying around their so-called “principal insignia of authority,” they called them, which to the slavers just looked like a couple of dried-out gourds. Fourth, it unsettled the slavers to see the way the natives followed around and hung on every word of their four “children of the sun” as they referred to the expeditionaries. And fifth, worst of all, the expeditionaries made no attempt to hide their opposition to the slavers’ business, and had actively prevented them from rounding up the 600 natives who had generously brought the slavers’ food at the expeditionaries’ request.

The slavers decided they needed to get rid of these four guys. As soon as they could, they sent them south, under armed escort. The four expeditionaries quickly realized that the slavers’ guard wasn’t there so much for their protection as it was to keep them in line, and it was a bit of a painful realization: “We went to them in search of liberty and when we thought we had it, it turned out that it was the opposite.” No, instead they were placed on a death march to Culiacán via the most circuitous, difficult path possible, meant to keep them out of contact with their old followers and, well, if it killed them off along the way, all the better. Seven men in the party escorting them south actually did die along the way, but the expeditionaries were pretty well hardened by this point and made it to Culiacán alive and well. The experience, however, had led them to fear that as soon as they had been marched out of the slavers’ camp, that the slavers had immediately gone out after their native followers – totally ignoring the promise they had made not to.²¹⁵

Yet the first man they met in Culiacan, the leader in fact of the Castilian civil administration there, was a very different kind of man than the slavers whose company they had just departed. Melchior Díaz, the alcalde mayor here in Culican, seemed genuinely appalled at how the four old expeditionaries had been treated, and actually rode out to accompany them on the last few miles into Culiacán. As he rode with them and heard their story, “he cried with us, thanking our Lord God for having shown so much mercy to us.” First, Diaz’s tears and prayers are Cabeza de Vaca’s way of telling us that he’s a good guy, cut from the same cloth as himself. And second, Díaz’s weeping for the plight of the expeditionaries can’t help but recall the weeping of the Cavoque Indians back on Galveston Island, where Cabeza de Vaca and his companions “captivity” had begun, which is just another little bookend that Cabeza drops into his narrative to signal the end of his journey.²¹⁶

The expeditionaries took advantage of Alcalde Diaz’s sympathetic ear to describe for him what they had seen up the coast: abandoned fields, depopulated villages, native populations starving themselves rather than be taken captive by the Castilian slavers. Díaz, in turn, shared that the slavers’ activity had placed him in a difficult situation as well. Namely, it had left both Castilians and natives starving! The natives recall, had all fled into the mountains, which meant they weren’t raising corn, which meant they weren’t paying tribute which mean the system of imperial government wasn’t working. Díaz begged the four expeditionaries to help him, to “send emissaries to call in the natives and tell them in the name of God and of your Majesty to come down and resettle in the plains and word their lands.” ²¹⁷

I think it’s interesting that, in a sense, Alcalde Díaz, a Castilian, is now asking the expeditionaries to prove themselves as medicine men. Just as Cabeza de Vaca and his companions thought they were done with all that, that they had returned to the comfort and familiarity of their own culture, they are called upon to perform another “cure.” But at least with the natives, the cures had always been physical: with their own people, the cure required was much grander. Specifically, the “grand service to God” that Díaz requested was for them to call down the Indians in the area of Culiacán and convince them that if they would return to their fields and accept the sovereignty of Castilian authority, that they might live in peace – even though everything the expeditionaries had just seen from the slavers told them that this promise wasn’t true, no matter how well-intentioned Alcalde Díaz may have been! But just as before when they found that they HAD to perform their cures to keep the natives moving them through the countryside, they know now that they need Díaz’s help to move them along the rest of the way back home. And they believed that they could change things, that their experience had taught them how to deal with the natives.

The four expeditionaries agreed to help the Alcalde, because by doing so, they hoped they could demonstrate to Castilian administrators the “rationality” of the natives, and indeed the need to treat them kindly in order to win them over. To this end, they sent the last of their ceremonial gourds “our principal insignia and proof of our great status,” up into the mountains with two Indians who had seen them come into the slavers’ camp a few weeks ago with their 600-man entourage. For seven days, those natives dutifully canvassed the land, vouching for the works of the four old expeditionaries, and spreading the news of their arrival in Culiacán. And sure enough, a week after they had put out the word, the four expeditionaries were pleased to see three native “lords” and dozens of others come marching into Culiacán.²¹⁸

It was approximately May 1, 1536, exactly eight years after Pánfilo de Narváez had called his ill-fated council on the Florida shore to decide whether to abandon his ships and march overland into North America. And here again was convened a great council, this time on the opposite side of the continent, to symbolically close out the Narváez expedition. Yet the exepeditionaries had prepared a very different speech than the one that Narváez had made in Florida, and once the natives and Castilians or Christians as they call them - had all been gathered together, they began:

“We told the Indians [gathered there] that we came on behalf of God who is in the sky, and that we had wandered through the world for nine years, telling all we found that they should believe in God and they should serve him because he had authority over all things in the world and he rewarded the good and repaid the bad with perpetual fire and that when the good died they were taken to the sky where no one dies and where no one is hungry or thirsty or lacking for anything, but instead it was the greatest glory that anyone could imagine and that those who did not want to believe in him or obey his commandments he would cast beneath the earth in the company of demons in the midst of a great fire which never burns out but which instead would torment them forever. Instead, if they wanted to be Christians and to serve God our Lord in the manner that we instructed, that the Christians would hold them close as brothers and treat them well, and that we would order the Christians not to do them any harm or to remove them from their lands and to be their greatest friends. If they did not wish to do this, however, the Christians would treat them very poorly and they would carry them off as slaves to other lands. To this they responded that they would be very Good Christians and serve God. And when they were asked what they worshipped and sacrificed to and to whom they prayed for rain for the corn and health for themselves, they responded that it was also a man who was in the sky. We asked them what his name was. And they said, Aguar, and that they believed he had created the world and all things in it. We asked them how they knew this. And they responded that their fathers and grandfathers had told them, that these things had been known for a long time, and they knew that water and all good things came from him. And we said that that being they were talking about, that was who we called God, and that’s what they should call him too and they should serve and worship him as we instructed and things would turn out well for them.”

There is SO MUCH here. First, the expeditionaries’ – and I keep saying the expeditionaries, because all of the accounts just refer to the speakers here as collective – the expeditionaries’ speech begins with a little mini-requerimiento, that statement of Castilian conquest that Narváez had read upon disembarking in Florida eight years before. Only in contrast to Narváez’s version, the expeditionaries are performing it in plainspeech, in a way that a human being might actually be able to understand. More even, they are doing it in the Natives tongue! It’s as if their experience over the previous 8-9 years had taught them how to better present the mission of Castilian imperialism, in a way that the natives might legitimately be able to consider and accept, while still complying with the requirements of Castilian law. Because, I also think there’s some bureaucratic ass-covering going on here by the expeditionaries: Even though Cabeza de Vaca frames this speech as the message that he and his companions have been sharing with “everyone, throughout the World,” in actuality this is the first time we’ve heard them get anything close to this doctrinal in their conversations with the natives! If they are going to re-enter Castilian society and if they are going to be taken seriously by Castilian authorities, however, they need to show that they respect the formalities of Castilian administration and frankly that they haven’t forgotten their obligations under the “mandato real.” And so here at the outset, they are establishing their bonafides to both their native and Castilian audiences respectively.²¹⁹

And it worked! The expeditionaries very quickly get the answer they were supposed to get from the Natives: yes, we’ll be good christians and become your friends. But then, without stopping or letting the Castilians present settle for that answer, the expeditionaries keep the dialogue going and roll into a totally unexpected line of questioning. They take the incredible step of ASKING the natives now about their Faith: “what they worshipped and sacrificed to and to whom they prayed for rain for the corn and health for themselves.” Now, they are showing the Castilian authorities that the natives are thoughtful, spiritual creatures and they’re teaching their countrymen HOW to proselytize to them, not just by making demands on them, but by treating them as fully-formed human beings with belief systems worth understanding. The natives respond in turn that they worshipped a “man who was in el cielo” – in the sky, or in heaven. “We asked them what his name was. And they said, Aguar, and that they believed he had created the world and all things in it.” Boom, with that the expeditionaries have basically established in front of the Castilian authorities that these natives are proto-Christians, and the law is very clear that they can’t enslave Christianized Indians. But just to be sure, the expeditionaries then turn back to the natives and try to teach them how to get along with the Castilians! “We said that that being they were talking about, that was who we called God, and that’s what they should call him too and they should serve and worship him as we instructed and things would turn out well for them.” That thing you are already doing, the way you are already worshipping, the expeditionaries are saying, do more of that, keep doing it the way you are doing it, but call him Dios, Nuestro senor! Things will go much smoother for you!²²⁰

At a very basic, practical level, they are teaching the natives how to answer the Castilians questions in a way that rips away the slavers’ veil of legitimacy. Because the only plausible way the slavers can keep slaving is by contending that either the natives are not fully-formed human beings or that they didn’t respond in the right way to the requerimiento which previously had only been read to them in a language they couldn’t understand. For the rest of the council, the expeditionaries go on to give the natives more tips on how to protect themselves. They tell them to erect crosses throughout their lands and to carry them in front of them when they approach the Castillians. Never before have the expeditionaries placed any emphasis on Christian symbology, but suddenly, for pragmatic reasons, it’s at the top of their list. After the council at Culiacán, the three native lords and all the other attendees peaceably returned to their people and brought them down from the highlands. Crosses began appear throughout the countryside, native-built churches began to pop up, and the children of the native lords were baptized as Christians. Soon, the slavers whom the expeditionaries had first encountered up on the Rio Sinaloa came back to Culiacán and reported that there too the natives were returning to their homes and beginning once again to work their fields, even coming out to the slavers with crosses and offering them food and gifts. So astonished was the captain of the slaving party that he ordered his men to return to Culiacán and to cause no more harm to the natives there. And that is truly about as radical a Road to Damascus story as one could imagine. THIS scene, I believe is the real climax of Cabeza de Vaca’s story, the scene that justifies all the suffering the expeditionaries have endured and the faith they have kept.²²¹

By showing how the natives as capable of knowingly and willingly accepting the Castilian’s god, they expeditionaries are putting an end to any possible debate about the humanity of native americans and the rights that that entails. In the words of Cabeza de Vaca uber-scholars Rolena Adorno and Charles Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions have just effected the ““ideal conquest.” In contrast to Narváez’s attempted conquest by pronunciations, in conquest to the slavers’ conquest by devastation, in conquest even to Cortés’s conquest by arms, in this remote little corner on the Mexican frontier, four unarmed expeditionaries had just brought thousands of Native Americans to into the service of the Castilian crown and to the knowledge of the Christian faith. With that, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso Castillo, Andres Dorantes, and Estevan have fulfilled the original mission assigned to them by the King, nine years after he’d given it to them: “that in [the King’s] name we should go and conquistar those lands AS WELL AS bring the natives to knowledge of the true faith and true God and to service of your Majesty.” ²²²

As a symbol of the success of their mission and the close of their ministry, the expeditionaries handed over their ceremonial gourds once and for all to the natives who had come to listen to them. And Cabeza de Vaca then concludes his description of the Council in Culiacán with the prayer that “May God our Lord in his infinite mercy will it that in all the days of Your Majesty’s reign and under your power and lordship these people shall come truly and freely as subjects of the true Lord that created and redeemed them. And we hold it for certain that it will be so, and that Your Majesty shall be the one to put it into effect…”²²³

This story would be a lot happier if it ended here.

But it doesn’t.

Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan left Culiacán a couple of weeks later, sometime in the middle of May, 1536. They arrived in modern-day Jalicso near Guadalajara in mid-June, and from their, their fame preceded them on the final month or so of their march to México City. Everyone – everyone! – had known that the Pánfilo Narváez expedition had perished in Florida, to a man. And yet here they were, four miraculous survivors, who had walked thousands of miles across the continent and showed up on the opposite coast with an entourage of hundreds of native American following them. On July 23, 1536, they entered México City to great fanfare. The new Viceroy, the archbishop, even the great old conquistador himself, Hernán Cortés, vied with each other to befriend the expeditionaries and of course to attach their particular agendas to their popularity. A hundred years later, people would still be talking about the celebration held in their honor, replete with jousts, bullfights, and even a sort of re-enactment of the expeditionaries rescue from their “captivity,” with the expeditionaries dressed in deer hides and all.²²⁴

And yet, on the same day they had entered Mexico City, Cabeza de Vaca tells us, marching just behind the four expeditionaries in the same convoy, 500 new Indian slaves marched into the great capital as well. Were these some of the 600 natives who had accompanied the four expeditionaries on their final march? The 600 that the expeditionaries had left behind to the “mercies” of the slavers? Even if they weren’t, it had seemed like Cabeza de Vaca had delivered the death knell to Indian slavery back in the council in Culiacán. Why does he include this detail for us, at the moment of his triumphant return? Is there something Cabeza de Vaca isn’t telling us? On the next episode of Cabeza de Vaca.

The Gospel According to Cabeza de Vaca (Z:f63v-67r)

How Cabeza de Vaca saw his legacy. Narváez

Welcome to Cabeza de Vaca. Episode 25: The Gospel According to Cabeza de Vaca

The memory of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso Castillo, Andres Dorantes, and Estevan endured for a couple of generations in native North America. Spanish expeditions into Northern Mexico in 1542, 1565, and 1582 and perhaps others found stories still circulating about the three white and one black medicine man who had passed through. In 1629, the “People of the Cows” came seeking out nearby Franciscan missionaries after reported visions of a “Lady in Blue,” a Spanish nun who had mentally projected herself through space and time to prepare them for Christian conversion. Was it a coincidence that these peoples – the most advanced that Cabeza de Vaca and his companions encountered – should have then become some of the earliest and most eager recruits to the Franciscan missions of the area? It’s fun to imagine that maybe the four old expeditionaries had laid a foundation for Christianity amongst the tribe…but I admit it’s a reach.²²⁵

As late as 1643, one of the early settlers of Monterrey, Alonso de Leon, whose son would lead some of the first organized Spanish entradas into Texas, recorded Indians in Nuevo León who told stories of a white man who had passed through the area 100 years before performing great cures. De Leon believed that they were referring to Cabeza de Vaca. And again, interestingly, these so-called Coahuiltecan tribes of northern Mexico were among the first to embrace mission life. Had they retained enough memory of the four expeditionaries’ gospel to identify it with the words of the later Franciscan missionaries? Eh, that seems pretty attenuated as well.

The reality is that the material legacy of the expeditionaries in North America was pretty minimal. Their legacy on their own culture, however, may have been more significant. Within a month or so of the expeditionaries arrival to Mexico City in July of 1536, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, and Dorantes produced a document known to history as the “Joint Report,” their collective account of everything they had seen and endured during their eight years wandering the continent. It became the foundation for Cabeza de Vaca’s solo version of events published in 1542, known today as the Relación and then reworked in 1555 as “Naufragios” which means “Shipwrecks,” or more generally, “Disasters” or “Calamities.” These writings had an immediate impact. Within a year of the publication of the expeditionaries’ joint report telling of the devastation wrought by Castilian slavers in Culiacan, the Governor of that province was removed and recalled to Castile. Then, Bartolome de las Casas, the Royal Protector of the Indians, used Cabeza de Vaca’s account in his reportto support arguments in favor of more humane treatment of the native population. This culminated in the promulgation in 1542 of the so-called “New Laws of the Indies for the Good Treatment and Preservation of the Indians,” which officially ended Indian slavery in the Hispanic New World. And indeed, from this point forward Spain would always have a different view of the native population of the Americas in comparison to other European powers. As Professor Gilbert Hinojosa at Incarnate Word here in San Antonio pointed out to me, the population of the Spanish-speaking Americas is still primarily indigenous in origin. And though the integration of Hispanic and Indigenous populations in Latin America has always been imperfect, if you were a native American watching European sails come over the horizon in the age of exploration, your DNA fared a much better chance of being passed on if those sails were Spanish rather than, say, English.²²⁶

The expeditionaries’ joint report probably wasn’t prepared only to make the case for the humane treatment of Native Americans, however. It seems like it was prepared by Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, and Dorantes in anticipation of asking the crown for permission to lead a new expedition into North America! It’s a sign of how indefatigable these men were and how powerfully that Castilian “mandato real” continued to drive them. And it’s one of those historical counterfactuals that is pretty fascinating to think about. Imagine what that would have been like. These four old veterans, the most widely traveled men in North America, returning to proselytize and peaceably “conquer” the natives who already reverenced them as great religious leaders, the four supported now by the might and supply chain of the Castilian crown, and effectuating an ideal conquest based on Christian brotherhood. This must have been the fantasy that the expeditionaries entertained anyway.

Not long after arriving in Mexico City, however, Alonso Castillo – the pious son of a doctor from Salamanca – decided to settle down. And after all he had gone through, who can blame him. He married the wealthy widow of another conquistador, a marriage that brought with it a nice encomienda of land and natives. He would live out the rest of his life in México City, raising three daughters there and achieving some civic distinction as a royal inspector, city councilman, and even as the alcalde of the city in 1540. He died sometime around 1548.

Dorantes held on to the dream of returning to the north for a bit longer. He and Cabeza de Vaca planned to go to Castile in early 1537 to petition the King for the rights to La Florída, but Dorantes’ ship was almost sunk by a Caribbean storm. That was enough for the old expeditionary. He abandoned his voyage and returned to Mexico City. He too married a wealthy widow, also with a nice little encomienda to recommend her. At one point, the Viceroy tried to convince him to lead an expedition back into the north, but Dorantes declined. He wasn’t opposed to returning to military service – he apparently fought in several campaigns in Jalisco and other parts of New Spain - and he dutifully sought and fulfilled the other administrative offices expected of men of his rank, but he also would never venture far from Castilian society again either. In subsequent years, Dorantes fathered three daughters and a son, who half a century later would write his own account of his father’s travels, vouching for the “miraculous” deeds that his father and his three companions performed. Andrés Dorantes died sometime around 1556 or so.²²⁷

Cabeza de Vaca, however, was as single-minded as ever. He was fixated on the idea of returning to North America, by which I mean the lands north of New Spain. This time however, he intended to return as Royal Governor. He rested in Mexico City for only a month or two before booking passage back to Castile. His usual luck followed him along the way. He was supposed to sail in late 1536, but that ship capsized in port. Departing then in early 1537 with Dorantes, this time in a convoy of three ships bound for Havana, two of those ships started taking on water during a storm, including the one Dorantes was on. This is where Dorantes turned back. But Cabeza de Vaca pressed on, through another hurricane near Bermuda and pursuit by French pirates on the last leg of his journey. On August 9, 1537, however, he set foot on Iberian soil for the first time in more than a decade.

Yet he arrived just a few months too late. Earlier that year, the King had commissioned Hernando de Soto to lead a new expedition to North America, or more specifically the lands between modern-day Texas and Florida. After some discussion with De Soto, Cabeza de Vaca declined to take a subordinate position in this expedition. He seemed to feel that his next career step was to command, not to serve as second-in-command on another expedition to North America. And so it was that neither Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, nor Dorantes, would ever return to the North American wilderness.

There was only one of the four expeditionaries who would return to the land of his captivity. And it was the man for whom that captivity might have been indistinguishable, or even preferable, dare we say, to the captivity with which he lived in Castilian society. In the wilds of North America, Estevan , the black Arab from Azenmour, had been perhaps the most important member of their party because of his facility with languages and his ability to communicate with the natives. He was at the very least a nearly co-equal collaborator. But once back inside the structures of Castilian society, he returned to his former station, symbolized by who quickly he starts to slip from view in the three Castilian expeditionary narratives as soon as they were reunited with their countrymen.²²⁸

Which is not to say that people didn’t appreciate his worth. The Viceroy initially tried to buy him from Dorantes for 500 pesos, a spectacular sum at the time. And Dorantes declined. It’s charming to thing think that this was out of some sense of loyalty or something; yet it might just as well have been that Dorantes wanted to retain Estevan for his own hoped-for return North. Who knows. Somehow or another, Estevan did end up in the Viceroy’s service, however, the Viceroy attaching him in fact to the same expedition north which Dorantes declined to lead. That 1539 expedition - commanded by Fray Marcos de Niza - backtracked the four expeditionaries’ trail up the Mexican Pacific Coast, in search of the famed Seven Cities of Gold. Estevan traveled ahead of the rest of the column with an entourage of his own, leading with his staff and gourds as insignia of his authority. Estevan reconnected with some of the tribes he had been amongst just four years prior, and fell back into the old routine: performing cures, trading goods, and paving the way for the rest of the expedition north through Sonora, and eventually up into modern-day Arizona.

And then one-day, amongst the Zuni tribe in modern-day New Mexico, Estevan disappeared. There’s no eyewitness version of exactly what happened to him, but the conventional account holds that the Zunis filled Estevan “full of arrows like a Saint Sebastian.” That account comes from Fray Marcos, however, who would later be exposed as a terrific liar. Several modern novelists and biographers have instead imagined Estevan simply ditching the friar’s expedition and going off to live amongst the natives amongst whom he had been revered as a “child of the sun” rather than serving a society that viewed him simply as a child of Ham. There’s a tantalizing clue that supports this. Even down to the present day, a bearded, black-skinned shaman that looks unlike anything else in the native American pantheon figures prominently in Zuni and Hopi mythology. It would be fitting and poetic if this was a vestigial memory of that great medicine man Estevan, the only of the four old Narváez expeditionaires to return to the northern part of the continent, and the only one of the four who would die there.

In the end, Cabeza de Vaca – the oldest of the four surviving expeditionaries - seems to have outlived the lot of them. And yet he didn’t just slide into a comfortable retirement once he reached Castile, or even spend much time at all with his wife, friends, family, or doing anything other than trying to corral as many favors as he could to support him in his bid for a royal command somewhere in the Americas. By Christmas of 1537, he secured a meeting with the King, who was duly impressed by his story, and awarded him the Adelantamiento of the Rio de la Plata province, corresponding more or less to modern-day Uruguay and Argentina.

And yet, in the Rio de la Plata, Cabeza de Vaca would encounter something more dangerous even than hostile natives: he would run up against the entrenched interests of other Castilians, for whom his little quirks like preferring to go about barefoot and his prohibition against plundering allied natives did nothing to win them over. Within a few years of Cabeza’s de Vaca’s arrival in South America, the province mutinied against him. He was sent back to Castile in chains in September of 1545 and prosecuted for thirty-two different and largely-trumped-up offenses. He would spend the next three months in jail; six months after that under house arrest, the year after that in confinement at court, and the next four years continuing to fight the charges through Castile’s painfully slow legal system. On March 18, 1551, he was convicted of the charges against him, stripped of all his titles, banned from ever returning to the New World, and exiled to a penal colony in Algeria. ²²⁹

What a terrible reversal of fortune. Maybe this is why Cabeza de Vaca’s story hasn’t been made into an American movie yet, because this isn’t the story arc we expect or want for someone who has endured what Cabeza de Vaca has endured and been transformed in the way that we’ve seen Cabeza de Vaca transformed. As unjust as it may seem to us, the little evidence we have suggests that Cabeza de Vaca endured the injustices of the civilized world with the same equanimity he endured those of the North America wilderness. Eventually, his patience was borne out. After a few years, a later court overturned the 1551 conviction and commuted his sentence. And in 1555, Cabeza de Vaca’s sentence was thrown out altogether.

Despite some early histories characterizing Cabeza de Vaca’s later years as poor and undistinguished, it actually seems that he was able to settle back into a life of relative comfort and esteem in his hometown of Jerez de la Frontera, the town whose name recalled all the ways that Cabeza de Vaca’s ancestors had dutifully pushed the Castilian frontier onward and outward. It was fitting then, that when he died in 1559, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca – the man who had spent almost two decades in the prime of his life on the King’s American frontier - was probably buried alongside his ancestors in the Real Convento de Santo Domingo en Jerez de la Frontera, alongside his grandfather, Pedro de Vera, conqueror of the Canary Islands, among others.

For some reason, it seems like one of our favorite games these days is sitting in moral judgment of those who are no longer alive to defend themselves. Not surprisingly, defendants in such cases don’t typically come out looking very good, and Cabeza de Vaca would be no exception. I mean, what should we do with the parts of his story that seem so radically incompatible with our own values? His tireless urge to conquer other people, the “ritual marauding” that he and his companions tolerated in order to move themselves across North America, and the massive dislocation of Native Americans that his presence in the Americas foreshadowed. In that light, to heroically recast his survival story as an “ideal conquest” seems like a supremely insensitive whitewashing of the opening of the decimation of an entire continents’ worth of people. And if you want to keep being irritated by Cabeza de Vaca, look no further than all of his hyper-biblical allusions: for example, depicting himself as a castaway crawling on to the Island of Malhado like Paul crawling onto the shores of Malta after his shipwreck, his encounter with a mysterious burning bush like Moses on the Mountain, and his resurrection of the dead Indian like Jesus with Lazarus, to name just the obvious ones. Is Cabeza de Vaca not-so-subtly comparing himself to the saints, Paul, Moses, and Jesus? At least pick just one model for your sanctimoniousness and run with it, man.²³⁰

I have two problems with this kind of moral grandstanding, though. One, it’s lazy. It us giving ourselves permission not to have to learn anything from the almost unfathomable ordeal that Cabeza de Vaca and his companions survived, simply because we can’t relate to some things about him. Cabeza de Vaca calls us out on this error early in the narrative, in fact, through his own example during his first days on Galveston Island. Recall that whereas most of the rest of his fellow expeditionaries dismissed the natives as primitives that had to be dictated to (see Narváez) or savages that couldn’t be trusted (see the men who stayed on the beach and ending up eating each other) or beings incapable of reasoning (see Cabeza de Vaca himself at the start of the story!), Cabeza de Vaca eventually resolves – almost as a matter of faith – to trust that they might have something to teach him. His ability to learn from those who otherwise seemed so unrelatable ends up saving his life, and ultimately puts him and his companions on the path to their deliverance. If Cabeza de Vaca, a 16th century Castilian nobleman, can find a way to relate to subsistence-level Texas hunter-gatherer whose language he could barely even speak - and grow from it! - how can we say that we moderns can’t learn anything from a 16th century Castilian? Or for that matter, from people perhaps even more unrelatable than that? Maybe even from people who don’t like us or who we don’t like us! But I tell you what, if you can’t get there, rationally, then do what Cabeza de Vaca ultimately does: take it on Faith, as an axiom for how we should relate to other people.

The second problem I have with dismissing Cabeza de Vaca as just another self-aggrandizing memoirist is that he won’t let you read him that way! First, look at the title that he gives to the 1555 edition of his narrative: “Naufragios,” “Disaster,” or “Calamities.” That’s not exactly a triumphant lead-in. And the beauty of this narrative lies in watching him wrestle with the dark side of everything he is seeing, doing, and becoming. Mala Cosa lurks everywhere in this text. 19:42 Even the allusions that Cabeza de Vaca makes to Paul, Moses, and Jesus, for example, ultimately redound in a really unfavorable way on Cabeza de Vaca. Because each of those three men died in their divine service, willingly, whereas Cabeza de Vaca and his companions chose not to! What I mean by this is that the best thing they could have done for their hundreds or thousands of native followers would have been to have kept them as far away from other Castilians as possible. To have NOT returned to Castilian society and instead remained with their flock up in the mountains. Remember, Moses was never allowed to enter the Promised Land; Jesus had to die on the cross; and even Paul had to lose his head at the end of his race. By making it home alive, the four expeditionaries failed their own faith story in a way. And they have failed the natives’ faith tradition as well! Xolotl doesn’t guide his people to the underworld and then leave them there! Cabeza de Vaca and his companions could have stuck with his native followers once they had brought them into contact with Castilians. Cabeza de Vaca seems to be realizing this when he tells us that 500 Indian slaves marched into Mexico City with them on their “triumphant” return that day into Castilian society. It’s a detail that totally undercuts any notion of an “ideal conquest,” but it’s also totally consistent with the way we’ve seen Cabeza de Vaca contend with the dualities of a world in which good and evil seem to exist as naturally and necessarily alongside each other as life and death.²³¹

Cabeza de Vaca concludes his account with a curious post-script. He jumps back in time nine years, and takes us back to Narváez’s ships as they ply the Florida coast searching for a place to land. One of the ten women on board, a woman with a peculiar gift for prophecy apparently, came forward one day to speak to the Governor. She told him what a Moorish woman back in the heavily-muslim town of Hornachos back in Castile had told her years before. It’s as though Cabeza de Vaca is giving the ultimate “other” from Castilian society - a Moorish woman - the last word: “And this woman said that if [Narváez] disembarked [in Florida], he at least should avoid marching inland, because she believed that neither he nor anyone else who went [inland] with him would ever come out; but that if one did come out, that God would perform through him many great miracles, though in truth she believed that few if any would actually escape.”²³²

As professor Andres Resendez pointed out to me, this is the only time in the entire account that Cabeza de Vaca uses the word “miracle,” and in actuality he’s using it in like the fifth person: he’s telling us what someone told him a woman on board the ships told Narvaez that a Moorish woman in Hornachos told her. And maybe that’s because Cabeza de Vaca isn’t identifying himself with the “one who came out performing many great miracles” in the woman’s prophecy. Indeed, the heading for this chapter is: “In which the account is given of what else happened to those who went to the Indies, and how they all perished.” How they ALL perished? Read in this light, and given the fact that Cabeza de Vaca has refused to call any of his deeds “miracles,” then it starts to sound like Cabeza de Vaca and his companions aren’t the ones in the prophecy that came out performing miracles, but that they were just like all the others who perished when Narvaez marched inland! 23:20 Maybe, we are to take it that, whoever it was that emerged from the wilderness in Culiacán was someone else entirely than whoever it was who had disembarked in Florida eight, nine years prior. Maybe then, the point of Cabeza de Vaca’s story isn’t his “ideal conquest” of a continent or his cataloging of the greatest run of miracles ever performed this side of Galilee, but maybe instead the point of the story is as a confessional almost of his own transformation and personal growth.²³³

In the last paragraph of the Prologue to his account, Cabeza de Vaca informs the King that he has no great riches and no new lands to offer him, that all he can offer the King is his story, “as this is the only thing that a man who came away naked could take out with him.” In returning here one final time to his nakedness, Cabeza de Vaca is reminding us of that theme of vulnerability that pervades his story. Vulnerability is hard for anyone, harder still for a man I would argue, and hardest still for a hardened conquistador like Cabeza de Vaca. His experience, however, has stripped him down to his core, brought him into primal proximity with his own capacity for good and evil, and transformed him into something different than what he was before. And that’s not just incidental to the story, that is precisely how and why he survived, because he allowed himself to be vulnerable and to be open to these kinds of changes. But if Cabeza de Vaca leaves us with one other lesson in addition to the virtue of vulnerability, it’s this too: it’s that it was only through his Faith that he found the strength to be as vulnerable as needed to be. To corrupt a line from Brené Brown’s book on vulnerability: Faith without vulnerability is dogmatism. But vulnerability without faith is despair. And survivors don’t abide despair.²³⁴

Thank you for listening. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finish a series like, but also what a let down. I never feel like I do the material full justice, particularly in this case, where I feel like I only touched on so many facets of this story that we could have gone deep on. Cabeza de Vaca’s account really is as rich to me as a religious text, and capable of as many interpretations. If you got anything out of my interpretation, I’d love it if you’d subscribe, leave us a review, and or share it on social media. And if you didn’t get anything out of the last dozen hours or so of me talking, go read the account for yourself, and let me know how it speaks to you.

Footnotes

Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, eds., Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 1:244. These numbers come from Cabeza de Vaca’s account, where he noted “I took the black man and eleven Indians.” ↩
Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: the Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 48. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 3: 119; Paul Scheider, Brutal Journey: Cabeza de Vaca and the Epic First Crossing of North America (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2007), 19. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1:340-1; Wikipedia, “Andalusian Spanish,” last modified April 22, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andalusian_Spanish. Cabeza de Vaca stated that “Life in Jerez de la Frontera from the 1480’s through 1509, that is, from the earliest possible years of Cabeza de Vaca’s birth through the death of his second parent, was characterized by land and sea expeditions from this frontier city into lands held by Muslims and, until 1492, into the neighboring Nasrid kingdom of Granada.” ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 298-299, 343, 345; Donald E. Chipman, “Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed May 29, 2025, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/cabeza-de-vaca-lvar-nunez. It’s a name that sounds like it came out of Quixote, alongside Rocinante and Maritornes. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 336, 326-327. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1:360. ↩
Reséndez, A Land So Strange, 13, 26; Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517-1521, ed. Genaro García, trans. A.P. Muadslay (New York: Noonday Press, 1978), NEED PAGE NUMBER HERE; Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 3: 205. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1:375, 3: 335. “What progress the Indians made in becoming Christians;” ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca,1: 376, 2: 22; 3: 3-4. ↩
Ibid., 2: 57, 131. ↩
Reséndez, A Land So Strange, 46; Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 23, 2:16. ↩
Texas State summary online, pg 2 of 15 DON’T KNOW WHAT THIS SOURCE WAS AND COULDN’T FIND; Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 406, 20. Bernal Diaz del Castillo put it more bluntly when he said that he came to the New World to serve God and king, and to get rich. ↩
Scheider, Brutal Journey, 55; Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 28. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 29. ↩
Ibid., 2: 56. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1:31. The new pilot claimed he had sailed the whole Gulf Rim. For more information and identification of Miruelp with other voyages see Adorno and Pautz. ↩
Reséndez, A Land So Strange, 76. ↩
Numbers 33:1-50. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1:20. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 3: 217. ↩
Dorantes says it was a disk. Is this an example of Cabeza de Vaca inserting literary elements in his account, to parallel the copper rattle in Coahuila later on? ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 135; Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, La Historia General de las Indias: Con Priuilegio Imperial [The General History of the Indies: With Imperial Privilege] (Seville: Printed by Juan Cromberger, 1535), 129. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 2: 114. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 132. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 44. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1:365. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 125; Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 3: 137; Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias (Madrid: impr. de M. Ginesta, 1875-1876), 536. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 125; Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 46. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 46. ↩
Ibid., 1: 122. ↩
Ibid., 1: 62. ↩
Ibid., 1: 66-67. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid., 1: 70. ↩
Scheider, Brutal Journey, 171. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 224. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 2: 149. ↩
Ibid., 1:78. ↩
Ibid., 1: 88. ↩
Ibid., 1L 90. ↩
Ibid., 1: 90, 92, 98. ↩
Ibid., 1: 92. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid., 1: 94. ↩
Ibid., 1: 92. ↩
William W. Newcomb, The Indians of Texas: From Prehistoric to Modern Times (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1961), 1070. ↩
But if he’s consciously changing dates for literary effect, would that make him an unreliable narrator? As we mentioned in Episode 2, some think so. One of them is Kun Jong Lee, who finds Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative of landing on the Island of Malhado suspiciously similar to the account of Paul stumbling shipwrecked onto the shores of Malta, or “Melita” they called it…which, come to think of it, sounds quite a lot like Malhado, the name that the expeditionaries would give to this stretch of sand. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 94. ↩
Ibid., 1: 98. ↩
Ibid., 1:98. ↩
Ibid., 1: 98-100. ↩
Ibid., 1: 100. ↩
Ibid., 1: 100, 102; Newcomb, Indians of Texas, 1339. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 102. ↩
Ibid. ↩
He was perhaps one of the highest born men on the expedition. Ibid. 2: 423. ↩
Scheider, Brutal Journey, 27. ↩
Herrick, 319. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 116, 108; Thomas R. Hester, “Artifacts, Archaeology, and Cabeza De Vaca in Southern Texas and Northeastern Mexico,” Windows to the Unknown: Cabeza de Vaca’s Journey to the Southwest, Center for the State of the Southwest, Texas State University, accessed May 25, 2025, https://www.txst.edu/cssw/research-programming/cdvresources/windows/hester.html; Robert A. Ricklis, “Cabeza de Vaca’s Observations of Native American Lifeways: Correspondences in the Archeological Record of the Texas Coast,” ibid., accessed May 25, 2025, https://www.txst.edu/cssw/research-programming/cdvresources/windows/ricklis.html. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 106. ↩
Ibid., 2: 195. ↩
Ibid., 1: 105. ↩
Ibid., 1: 100, 150. ↩
“Reason,” in Cabeza de Vaca’s language, is a byword for how Europeans think, which is also what I think the Viceroy is saying when he says that Esteban is a “person with reason” – he thinks like us. By this time, Castillian “reason” had certainly proven to have some utility in many situations, something of which Cabeza de Vaca was aware. At the root of this word, “reason” is one of the great debates raging right now in the courts of Castile: what kinds of beings were these Native Americans and, accordingly, what rights were they entitled to? And by the way, this is clearly going on with the Native Americans as well in their attempts to metaphysically process these Europeans. There’s a broad trend across Native American societies to refer to themselves as “The People” in their own language, with all other outsiders being something else, something categorically different, with these hairy, bedraggled castaways the best example of this yet. And it is indeed the nature of the humanity of these castaways – and whether they should be allowed the right to live by the standards of their tribe – that they are trying to reason out when they are arguing as to what role the castaways played in causing this illness. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 112. ↩
Ibid., 3: 326. ↩
Ibid., 1: 114. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 231. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 114, 116. ↩
Ibid., 1: 66, 78, 98, 114. ↩
Ibid., 1: 118, 137, 181, 233. ↩
Ibid., 2: 214, 1: 181, 216. ↩
Ibid., 1: 120. ↩
Ibid., 2: 180. ↩
Carolyn E. Boyd, “Making: Process and Vivification in Pecos River Style Rock Art,” in Ontologies of Rock Art: Images, Relational Approaches and Indigenous Knowledge, ed. Oscar Moro Abadía and Martin Porr (New York: Routledge, 2021): 17. “The most well populated land ever seen in the Indies,” according to one conquistador. ↩
Newcomb, Indians of Texas, 4211, 4359, 4335. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 120-122. ↩
Viktor Frankl, A Man’s Search for Meaning: An Introduction to Logotherapy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1962) NEED PAGE NUMBER HERE. After the war, Frankl wrote about his experience, employing his training as a clinical psychiatrist to try to identify the techniques that he felt best served his fellow victims of the concentration camps and might, in small measure, have helped those who survived do so. As best I understand it, his school of thought, “Logotherapy” he called it, focused on resolving patients’ psychological problems by helping people find the meaning in them. ↩
Ibid., 78. ↩
Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 78-79; Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1:20. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 2: 201. ↩
Ibid., 1: 124. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 75, 72. ↩
And just so you know, there actually are some third-hand reports of him still being alive 10 years later when the de Soto expedition came through, though they never saw him themselves. So maybe we shouldn’t entirely mock his decision. Hell, for all we know, he might have simply preferred life on Galveston Island, and willfully gone native. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 122, 18. ↩
Ibid., 1: 124. ↩
Resendez, 131 ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 134; Reséndez, A Land So Strange,132; Oviedo, La Historia General, 238. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 236, 278. Oviedo at this point suggests “There now remained but ten of the twelve men who had started.” ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 2: 210, 215, 279. They “agreed to become” slaves of another band at one point. Oviedo, La Historia General, 279 mentions that: “They boys pulled their beards every day by way of pastime, and if they became careless the boys would pull their hair, and be seized with great laughter, the best pleased in the world.” ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 280. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 126. ↩
Ibid., 1:68. ↩
For example, the first thing they do when they were just reunited here after three years of separation and slavery is thank God for it all. Back in Florida when they were in a fighting retreat to the coast from Apalache, they thanked God for getting them to the beach, even as half of their party was sick with dystentary and about one fifth of them would be buried there on that same beach. And when their sorry little raft survived a storm in the Gulf, separating them once and for all from most of the rest of their companions. That would not be my reaction to those situations, and yet it seems to come as naturally to Cabeza de Vaca as breathing. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 413. And then, as quick as they are to attribute good fortune to God, they are just as quick NOT to blame him for any of their bad fortune. Instead, they always blame their own “sins.” And this is really hard for someone like me not raised with Faith to understand, but it seems like a pretty objectively better way to deal with setbacks. Exhibit A: As they were about to end their awful experience in Florida, Cabeza de Vaca referred to it as “the land into which our sins had placed us. When their raft was destroyed trying to leave Galveston Island, leaving them cold, naked, and nearly hopeless, his crew’s first act was to ask God for “forgiveness of our sins.” Dorantes, in his account, expresses that he believes that only God could have given them the patience to endure the abuse of their masters “in discount of their sins, and because they merited more.” This kind of sentiment reads to us today as a sort of perverse self-flagellation, like a form a self-victim-shaming. But what if, in fact, they are using it to keep themselves from sinking into total despair about how God-awful their luck really has been. In those circumstances, blaming circumstance and things outside your control for setbacks in life – even when accurate – is about as disempowering a thing as you can do. The confession of sins, by contrast, is a chance to looking inward, at yourself, at the things you can control gives you a chance to perhaps uncover something that you could change that might improve your present lot. Did we treat those Indians wrongly? Is Pride getting in the way of me accepting an easier path forward? Have I done everything I can to be of service to others, instead of just thinking about myself? And, of course, in these men’s Faith, the confession of sins is the first step toward having them wiped away, allowing you to move on with your life without undue self-recrimination. ↩
Ibid., 1: 160. ↩
The prologue talks about this posture, “if at any time God, our Lord, wished to bring me [out]” of his ordeal. After disembarking on a barrier island in a futile search for freshwater, “[we agreed to trust to God, our Lord, and rather risk the perils of the sea than wait there for certain death from thirst.]” And as a counterpoint, recall that Cabeza de Vaca’s last proposal to Narváez was that they should join up their drifting rafts “[that the three together should continue our way wherever God might take us.” Narváez, of course, rejects the proposal, and Narváez serves, if nothing else in this tale, as the object lesson of what not to do in most any given circumstance. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 128; Oviedo, La Historia General, 284. And so they resolved anew “as Christians and as gentlemen….that they would not live this life… which separated them from the service of God.” ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 120, 88. ↩
Newcomb, Indians of Texas, 704, 1398. “They run from morning till night in pursuit of a deer. They kill a great many because they follow it until the game is worn out and sometimes catch it alive.” ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 282. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 138-140; Newcomb, Indians of Texas, 726. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 140. ↩
Carolyn E. Boyd and Kim Cox, The White Shaman Mural: An Enduring Creation Narrative in the Rock Art of the Lower Pecos (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016), 16. Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 140. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 142. Describing the kind of scary rituals the four expeditionaries become a part of.] A description from two centuries later describes what one of these South Texas parties might have been like: “The guests, attired in their best finery, assembled sometime before dark. Soon after dark a large fire was started, meat was put on to roast, and music for dancing commenced. A drum, made by stretching a coyotehide over a wooden hoop, and a gourd rattle were used to accompany the singing onlookers. The dancers, both men and women, soon began to circle the fire in time to the pulsating music. They danced with their bodies close together, their shoulders moving slightly, their feet close together, from which position they progressed by a series of hops, all in time with the music. The dancing went on the entire night without pause. Peyote was passed at intervals, and occasionally some of the dancers fell into trances. Among some groups, those who had fallen into this peyote stupor were roused by being scratched with a sharp-toothed instrument until the blood flowed freely. In some ceremonies a shaman also addressed the participants. This ceremonial dance and the festivities were ended by daybreak, the guests departing with any remaining food.” ↩
Ibid., 1: 142. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 280-281. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 144. ↩
Ibid., 1: 128, 146. ↩
Ibid., 1: 99. ↩
Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, 36. ↩
Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (new York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 594, 2521. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 148, 146. “[They advised me to in no way give the Indians any idea or let them know about the plan or they would immediately kill me.]” ↩
To survive this, he and the other POW’s employed a couple of the strategies that we’ve seen Cabeza de Vaca and the other expeditionaries using. First, the POW’s prized contact with each other, even at great risk to themselves. It was not only a source of solace, a reminder that they weren’t alone in what they wer suffering: it became a source of energy! Recall how Cabeza de Vaca described the day of his reunion with Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan after so many years as “one of the happiest that in all our days we have enjoyed”? And how after this, they immediately resolved to try to escape again, something they hadn’t dared try for three or so years prior? Well, Stockdale and his fellow officers also appreciated the value of contact, and went to great lengths to maintain it. They tapped out messages in secret code, and even wrote each other notes with rat droppings on toilet paper. Second, they organized emotional support strategies for talking to men returning from torture sessions. Stockdale is quite open about the fact that, under torture, everyone eventually breaks down, and that the self-recrimination that comes after that can be worse than the physical pain. Before they let their fellow-officers go down that shame spiral, however, they would counsel them through it, and they would do so in a way that, to me, sounds a lot like the hearing of confession. Recall as well how the Narváez expeditionaries habitually confessed their sins not just because they were good Catholics, but because it seemed to help remind them of the things they did have power over in even the most disempowering of situations. Lastly, in Stockdale’s words, he and his fellow officers never stopped trying to be their “Brothers’ keepers.” This service – to use the term Cabeza de Vaca frequently comes back to – gave their suffering meaning, just as Cabeza de Vaca’s sense of duty to his God, his King, and his fellow expeditionaries seems to keep him going when even his sense of self-preservation might have given out. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 160. ↩
It is true, as a critic would point out, there were probably a lot of very faithful and perhaps even very good men amongst the 300 who disembarked with Narváez in Florida, who probably believed just as sincerely as Cabeza de Vaca that they would prevail in the end. And most of them, those who had believed until their last unsuspecting moment were just as dead now as those who had cursed God aloud with their dying breath. So Faith is not a shield against the arbitrariness of the World. Yet it can also be said, even more definitively, that all of the men who did survive the Narváez expedition – all four of them anyway - found their Faith intensely deepened by the experience and intensely useful in surviving it – much like Viktor Frankl and Jim Stockdale. ↩
Ibid., 1: 152. ↩
Ibid., 1: 114. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 284. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 150. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid., 1:152. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Professor Eliseo Torres on curanderismo: “A person can receive a God-given gift or don to become a curandero or the gift can be accomplished through an apprenticeship.” Eliseo Torres, “Response to Cabeza de Vaca’s Narratives in Regard to Healing Methods and His Role as a Folk Hero as Compared with Three Curanderos” (unpublished manuscript), ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 162. ↩
Ibid., 1: 154) ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid., 1: 156. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid., 1: 160. ↩
Ibid., 1: 162. ↩
The curandero practices the art of folk healing and uses religion and the supernatural. The belief that all healing comes from God makes it religious as does the concept that a curandero can only bring God's will. The belief that certain rituals and practices can effect a certain outcome makes it supernatural. A person can receive a God-given gift or don to become a curandero or the gift can be accomplished through an apprenticeship. ↩
Ibid., 1: 160; Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 60. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 160. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid., 1: 163. ↩
Ibid., 1: 162. ↩
Ibid., 1: 162-164. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 122. ↩
Reséndez, A Land So Strange, 178. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 164. ↩
Ibid., 1: 166. ↩
Ibid., 2: 273. ↩
With his burning sticks, he was a literal light-bearer in the wilderness, Lucifer, in the latin of the Vulgate bible that presumably Cabeza de Vaca was familiar with…though interestingly, that name is also used for Jesus, which says something about the duality of God that I’m not definitely not qualified to try to tease out. ↩
Ibid., 1: 137; Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 50. Incidentally, this kind of ambiguous dual sexuality is very much a feature of Native American’s conception of divinity as well, according to Dr. Carolyn Boyd. Lastly, there is Cabeza de Vaca’s peculiar reaction to the story the first time he heard it: he and his companions, he tells us, laughed at it. You know, it’s one of only two times in the entire account that we see the expeditionaries laughing. Do you remember the other time? It was almost seven years ago, back on Galveston Island when the natives there demanded that the expeditionaries stop the spread of the disease that had arrived on the island at the same time they did. At first, the expeditionaries laughed at the idea of themselves as medicine men. Yet when they tried their hand at it, they were surprised to find that it worked. It was the first time in the narrative that we saw them faith-healing, and the natives kind of smugly reminded them that they had told them they could do it. Similarly with the story of Mala Cosa, the natives bring forth hard evidence to silence the expeditionaries laughter. They produced “many of those he had taken, and we saw the scars from his slashes in the places they had said.” ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 168. ↩
Boyd, “Making,” 14; Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 154. ↩
The countryside was so thick with brush that they couldn’t forage without penetrating the thorny groves all around them. What does he think of? “The only relief and consolation I had in the midst of these labors was to think in the suffering of our Savior, Jesus Christ, and the blood he shed for me, and to consider how much greater must have been the pain of the thorns he suffered than that which I was suffering.” ↩
Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, NEED PAGE NUMBER(S). And just as some support for the idea that this is what he was struggling with here, I go back to some of the other prisoner of war accounts we’ve talked about. Viktor Frankl, Jim Stockdale, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, they all emphasize that coming to terms with the problem of good and evil is something that they all had to do in their respective captivities. And the conclusion they all come to is that both good and evil are embedded in each of us. Frankl: “The rift dividing good from evil goes right through all human beings.” Solzhenitsyn: “Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts.” Jordan Peterson nicely brings that conclusion back to biblical narrative. His interpretation of Jesus’ act of “taking upon the sins of the world” is that meant recognizing the evil in his own heart by making himself the ultimate sinner. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 196. I remember when I first moved to Mexico years ago, someone told me that I would know when I was fluent in Spanish when I could tell jokes in Spanish. Well, the sixteenth century analog to that seems to be the ability to tell stories. And in retelling the Mala Cosa tale for us, Cabeza de Vaca is demonstrating how he and his companions had finally learned to tell stories in their audience’s idiom. They were, more or less, fluent now in the culture in which they found themselves. ↩
Ibid., 1: 172. ↩
Ibid., 1: 174 ↩
Ibid., 1: 176. ↩
Ibid., 1: 194-195; 2:306. ↩
Ibid., 1: 194. ↩
Ibid., 1: 199, 2: 263. “The next morning they brought every living soul of the village to be touched by us and to have the cross made over them” (1722). The implication in the text is that they cured all these people, though it does not say it. Another contemporary chronicler, Oviedo, would claim they had. ↩
Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 63, 103-4. In ixtli in yollotl. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 196-198. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 2:35; Oviedo, La Historia General, 220. Once in Florida, and once in the prickly pear ranges of South Texas. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 198. ↩
Cabeza de Vaca’s language after reuniting with his three companions in 153_. ↩
Ibid., 1: 198. ↩
Ibid., 1: 200. ↩
Frankly it calls into question the route we’ve been following for these guys. Early Texas historians resolved this by saying that the mention of the mountains being just forty or fifty miles from the coast must have been wrong, and that all along, Cabeza de Vaca, Castillo, Dorantes, and Estevan had been marching west across Texas toward the Davis mountains, which is what they were seeing now. That’s not the favored view amongst scholars. ↩
Ibid., 1: 200, 2: 238, 241; Oviedo, La Historia General, 296. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 200, 3: 3-4. ↩
Ibid., 1: 202. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 9. ↩
Boyd, “Making,” 6. ↩
Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 21, Boyd, “Making,” 7-8, 17. Boyd found some parallels here with the practices of some of the great Nahua scribes in central Mexico: “For example, when portraying an image related to the upper world, Nahua artists selected organic colorants. If painting an image related to the underworld, they used pigments mined from below the earth’s surface. And if the image was of a deity or concept related to both the upper and lower realms, the painters blended mineral pigments and organic colorants in a ritual action similar to what was carried out by the gods at the origin of time…Together the substances form a complete and powerful being.” ↩
Boyd, “Making,” 10; Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 5, 112. ↩
Boyd, “Making,” 9. The White Shaman mural in particular, Dr. Boyd argues, tells their creation story. I’ve used the White Shaman panel as the cover art for this episode and you can also see it on display at the Witte Museum or through the occasional tours that the SHUMLA center offers out past Del Rio. In Dr. Boyd’s words, “The mural was first painted with black, the color of femininity and primordial time – a time of perpetual darkness. Soon after the black paint dried, the artist applied red, the color associated with masculinity, fire, and blood. It is also the color of crepuscular light – the red glow appearing on the horizon just before sunrise. The next color applied was yellow – associated with the rays of the rising sun as it ushers in the dry season and overcomes the black of night and the red of predawn. And finally, the last color applied was white – associated with the zenith and the white light of midday. It is the color of sacrificial transformation and transcendence – the return of primordial time. Thus the cycle of life continues.” ↩
Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 70, 82. ↩
Quoting Boyd: ““Deer, peyote, and maize are so intimately interwoven that the Huichol believe that maize is deer, peyote is deer, and maize is peyote; one cannot exist without the others.” See also the story of Matsihua in her article. NEED TO NOTE IF THE QUOTE IS HERE BOOK OR ARTICLE AND PAGE NUMBERS for both references. ↩
Body and Cox, White Shaman, 10: Nancy Hickerson, The Jumanos: Hunters and Traders of the South Plains (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 47. As to whether this is well outside the Uto-Aztecan range, Nancy Hickerson supports the idea that Nahuatl served as a sort of lingua franca through this region, saying "The Jumanos of the lower Pecos had trading contacts via La Junta and the Rio Conchos which extended into Chihuahua. Captain Alonso Jaimez, Castano's second in command, was able to communicate with them through an interpreter; it is likely that the language used was Mexican (Nahuatl)." So, in the late 1500s, it looks like Nahuatl was at least understood by groups in the region. ↩
See also Resendez, Land So Strange, 188. ↩
Xólotl, incidentally, also has a meaning of “double” or “twin” according to Dr Boyd, which would make him a particularly appropriate totem for the old world exepditionaries struggling with their own relationship with good and evil. ↩
Boyd, “Making,” 49, 20. ↩
See image in Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 105. See also Diego Duran, The History of the Indies of New Spain (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 355; Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 127. I can keep going too. Soon after Cabeza de Vaca returned from his burning bush/journey to the underworld experience, he tells about his ongoing struggles to adapt to the South Texas brush country, laboring under the hot sun, hauling wood and other items on his backs, and “shedding our skin twice a year, like snakes.” Well, you know what else crenelated arches represent? Snakes. The serpent plays a central role in many native American belief systems. Quoting Boyd for all of these, first the Yaqui Indians: “Entrance and exit to the supernatural world of yoania must be made through the mouth of a giant serpent.” The Hopis: “The serpent serves as the communicator between the earthly world and the world below.” The Aztecs also often depicted the surface of the earth itself as a serpent, you may even be able to picture this in your head if you’ve ever seen any of the artwork decorating their temples. And the Huichols today still conceive of the world itself surrounded by a sea-like serpent with two heads through which the sun must pass each day. In precisely the way the snake sheds its skin, it is constantly reborn, in the same way as the medicine man who passes from the spirit world to the material world born is reborn. In the same way, as the central figure of the expeditionaries’ Faith as well, I might add. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 232. ↩
Ibid., 1: 215. ↩
Ibid., 1: 196. ↩
Ibid., 1: 210, 212. ↩
Ibid., 1: 204, 2: 295. ↩
Andrés Reséndez, phone interview with author, December 13, 2019. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 208. ↩
Ibid., 1: 214, 216. ↩
Ibid., 1: 216-218, 2: 317; Oviedo, La Historia General, 300. In Cabeza de Vaca’s accout in the first person, though Dorantes apparently did the same thing in his account, suggesting it was the lot of them.But the expeditionaries were playing with fire. They were mistaking their utility as instruments for their “authority” as beings. And I would argue that this chapter actually plays out like a little mini -Temptations of Christ morality tale. First, the natives tried to get out of going the direction the expeditionaries wanted by telling them that there was no food or water out there, yet Cabeza de Vaca entertains the notion of going out on his own through that barren desert, as if he might somehow turn stones into bread as the Devil had dared Jesus to. Second, in threatening to go out on his own, it’s as if he’s threatening to throw himself off the Temple: it would have been no less dangerous, and no less foolish. Third, in this moment Cabeza de Vaca at this moment seems to have precisely what the devil offered Jesus: dominion over all those around him, the power of life or death in his hands. And here’s how: suddenly “as we were still pretending to be angry, and their fear had still not subsided, a strange thing happened. That day, many of them fell ill. The next day, eight of them died. Which, incidentally, rat’s teeth as a part of Shaman’s scarifying tool are found throughout this region from Galveston Island. Hester, “Artifacts, Archaeology, and Cabeza De Vaca in Southern Texas and Northeastern Mexico;” Ricklis, “Cabeza de Vaca’s Observations of Native American Lifeways.” ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 146. ↩
Newcomb, Indians of Texas, 3671; Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 226. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 224. ↩
Ibid., 1: 232 ↩
Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 129. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 59. Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca 1: 220. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, 302, 61. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 2: xxi, 339. ↩
Ibid., 1: 232, 234. ↩
Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 59. Maybe they had heard natives’ stories about the eating of deer hearts as being almost like the fruit of the tree of good and evil, that bite that opened their eyes and made them quasi-divine? ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 238, 240, 250. ↩
Ibid., 1: 240, 236. ↩
Ibid., 1: 240. ↩
Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, 158. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 2: 380. ↩
Oviedo, La Historia General, PAGE NUMBER NEEDED ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 248. ↩
Ibid., 1: 250. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid., 1: 252. ↩
Ibid., 1: 254, 244. ↩
Ibid., 1: 254.His boss, the Governor of the Province, was a rabid slaver, so much so that even his ex-communication by the church had done nothing to slow him down. ↩
Ibid., 1: 256. ↩
Maybe after the Mala Cosa episode. ↩
Ibid., 1: 258. ↩
Ibid., 1: 262. ↩
Ibid., 3: 115. Just days before they had found the trail of the slavers up in Sonora, the expeditinoaries had been gifted as a part of their medicine man services 600 open-deer hearts. It’s a curious detail to remember…and it’s a curious number. There were 600 men and women who departed the Iberian peninsula on the Narváez expedition back in June of 1527; there are 600 men and women following the expeditionaries now as they marched into the slavers’ camp on the Rio Sinaloa. It’s as though by giving the expeditionary medicine men these hearts, the Natives are entrusting their hearts to the expeditionaries. The word in Spanish they would use, incidentally, is “encomendar”, of commending or entrusting their souls even to these medicine men. This is the word that Cabeza de Vaca and his companions return to in moments of uncertainty during their travels, when they “commend” their spirits over to their unknowable God’s care, recalling Jesus’s last words on the cross. They are symbolicaly the words of the utmost faith and the utmost desperation. There’s another very relevant use of this word “encomendar” that I haven’t mentioned to this point. The entire model of the Spanish conquest of the New World was initially built around the “encomienda” system. The idea here is that individual conquistadors were granted “encomienda” – “trusts” maybe to use a corporate near-equivalent – over groups of natives in a certain region. These Indians were placed in trust to this conquistador, that he would see to their well-being, their spiritual education, their Hispanicization, and would of course control their labor. In many cases, unfortunately, the emphasis was more often than not on the latter, on exploiting the labor of the natives entrusted to them, something widely exploited in the English historical tradition as the “Black Legend,” an overall critique of Catholic Spain by Protestant northern Europeans as backward, bigoted, exploitative, and dehumanizing. What proponents of the legend failed to note was how strongly forces within Spanish society as well reacted to the exploitation of the native population. Even before the publication of Bartolome de las Casas’ expose of some of the worst abuses in 1542, the Castillian crown had promulgated various measures to try to protect Native Americans, including as early as 1500 when they condemned Columbus’s taking of Indian slaves in the carribbean. This entire council or struggle in some way is over these two competing visions of encomendar. Is it their mission to enslave and forcibly encomendar these natives? Or is to entrust themselves as well as these natives to some kind of joint fate together, and to face the uncertainty of whatever that means together? ↩
Ibid., 1: 262. ↩
Ibid., 2: 412. ↩
Ibid., 2: 320, 3: 149. ↩
Ibid., 2: 387, 3: 144. ↩
Ibid., 2: 409. ↩
Ibid., 2: 420. As they also point out, in his last appearance in Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative, he is not even referred to by his name, referred to only as “el Negro” – the only one, incidentally, who agrees to go with Cabeza de Vaca on their last intense push to catch up to the slavers in Culiacán. ↩
Ibid., 1: 395, 398. ↩
Kun J. Lee, “Pauline Typology in Cabeza de Vaca’s ‘Naufragios,’” Early American Literature 34 (September 1999): 141-162.And there’s other things about Cabeza de Vaca that we might rightly find irritating. Still, this seems to agree with the Joint Report in all material points and contemporary chronicler Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés gives high -praise to Cabeza de Vaca’s character and to the content of the account: “everything he reported was understood to be true.” As Oviedo is our only source for the Joint Report, however, it is worth noting that several of Cabeza de Vaca’s most colorful episodes don’t appear in Oviedo’s account. Some of the really more interesting episodes, namely: the burning bush, the resurrection of the dead Indian, the tale of Mala Cosa, and the removal of the arrowhead. Now Oviedo admits that he has edited out some of the more “miraculous” elements of the story, in an effort to present a less sensationalized story, but unfortunately, because we don’t have the original Joint Report, we can’t then say for sure whether the burning bush, the resurrection, Mala Cosa, or the arrowhead appeared there. ↩
Incidentally, self-sacrifice is a core trope in meso-American mythology as well – particularly that of the rock artists of the Lower Pecos we analyzed in Episode 20. Their creation myth holds that Grandfather Fire – the “mother and father of all the gods” – in the darkness before time, five volunteers marched East to the great mountain and decided that one of them should sacrifice himself and thereby turn himself into the Sun Father. The first four tried, and failed. It was the fifth volunteer who succeeded, throwing himself into the abyss, descending through give levels of the underworld, then emerging five days later in the East through a cave as Sun Father. And in turn each day, the Sun Father must “sacrifice” himself to the dark forces of the underworld so that the forces of fertility might be released, as Johannes Neurath puts it. And indeed, the pilgrims depicted in the White Shaman mural, Carolyn Boyd argues convincingly, are on a vision quest that will end when they “turn themselves into violent sacrificers of themselves” thus reenacting and participating in the Sun Father’s great act of creation. Boyd and Cox, White Shaman, NEED PAGE NUMBER. ↩
Adorno and Pautz, Cabeza de Vaca, 1: 272. ↩
Ibid., 1: 290. ↩
Ibid., 1: 20. ↩

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