Since its initial publication in 1542, the odyssey of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca has had wide appeal. For over four centuries the narrative has attracted ethnographers, geographers, historians, antiquarians, and aficionados of the epic. The British Museum, for example, contains at least twenty-two copies of the account in one form or another, while the Library of Congress claims at least twenty-one. In 1961 the Cabeza de Vaca story appeared in a paperback edition, and recently his wanderings were featured in a junior encyclopedia of American history sold in supermarkets throughout the United States. The continued popularity of the narrative is difficult to contest; perhaps this is the reason for reissuing it once again.
A reprint of the 1905 translation by Fanny Bandelier, this work has two distinctions. Mrs. Bandelier based her translation on the 1542 Zamora edition of Los naufrágios rather than on the more commonly used 1555 Valladolid edition. A careful, meticulous translator, she also avoided the mistakes of her predecessors. She has done what Professor Donald Cutter in his introduction calls the “best translation.” Included in the volume besides the Cabeza de Vaca report are a letter from Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza to Charles I concerning the expedition of Father Marcos of Niza into the country traversed by Cabeza de Vaca as well as the report of this same Fr. Marcos.
It would be redundant here to recreate in detail the adventures of Cabeza de Vaca. The story of his eight-year peregrination in Florida, along the Gulf Coast, and throughout Texas and northern Mexico is already well known. It might be useful, however, to assess his story from another vantage point—whether it created a favorable or unfavorable image of the New World. We know that the descriptions of the New World circulated in Europe pricked the imaginations of sixteenth-century Europeans. Some accounts, such as those published by Hakluyt, glowingly described the Indies as a region of untold riches and fertile land, a utopia where the enterprising could obtain great wealth and physical renewal. Other less favorable descriptions created an anti-image of the New World. These pieces portrayed a barren, unfamiliar land populated by cruel savages, a strange New World characterized by the bestial, the abnormal, and the unpredictable.
If the Cabeza de Vaca report or the rumors surrounding it whetted the appeitites of Spaniards for further exploration of the northern rim of New Spain, it is difficult to see why. His narrative is one of incredible hardship and of a brutal struggle for existence. From the moment he and his compatriots set foot in Florida in 1528 until they made their way back to Mexico in 1536, they faced one crisis after another. The swampy coastal areas of Florida and the Gulf Coast and the deserts of northern Mexico were difficult to cross. When the Spaniards took to the Gulf of Mexico to escape the rigors and hazards of land travel, they had to endure the broiling sun by day, bone-chilling cold at night, terrible thirst, and howling storms. Many Indians were hostile, refused the Spaniards food and shelter, and continuously harassed them. Cabeza da Vaca, although holding strongly to the noble savage view of the natives, also saw them as barbarians, particularly when he observed their habits of piercing their breasts, noses, and ears with reeds and killing their infant daughters. To survive, Cabeza de Vaca lived like an animal. Roaming about virtually naked, he reported at one juncture: “Like snakes we shed our skin twice a year.” For food he had to eat what nature or the Indians provided—prickly pears, crawfish, roots, deer, deer tallow, and corn when he could secure it. In the end it is not surprising that storms, illness, exposure, Indian attacks, and starvation spared only four of the Spaniards.
Little in the published report gave the impression that northern New Spain was a land flowing with milk and honey. If the legend of the Seven Cities of Cíbola stemmed from the Cabeza de Vaca story, it could only have gained acceptance through rumors and hearsay. He found little gold or silver, only coral beads, turquoise, and malachites. Occasionally he travelled through rich, fertile land needing habitation and improvement by “reasonable people,” but otherwise the region was harsh and brutal and peopled by strange, uncivilized natives, who could hardly have been characterized as exotic, even by the imaginative Mediterranean mind of the sixteenth century.
