A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca (review)

In "The Extraordinary Tale of a Shipwrecked Spaniard Who Walked Across America in the Sixteenth Century" (the book's subtitle), Andrés Reséndez presents his readers with such a riveting retelling of this well-known story that he makes it new again. It is the saga of an expedition of 300 men, women, and enslaved Africans who set sail from Spain in 1528 under the leadership of Pánfilo de Narváez (longtime rival of Hernán Cortés) with hopes of claiming and settling Florida. Yet, a hurricane, lost ships, navigational errors, leadership follies, and challenges from Indians well capable of holding off would-be European conquest added up to colossal disaster. Expedition members ended up wandering along the Gulf Coast before taking to the water on handmade rafts which finally washed up on the Texas coast, in course of which their numbers rapidly diminished as they fell victim to drowning, dehydration, starvation, and cannibalism (by their fellow castaways). A mere four survivors—Cabeza de Vaca, Alonso del Castillo, Andrés Dorantes, and an enslaved Moor known only as Estebanico—escaped death only when they found sustenance as captives, laborers, and, later, healers among Indians who ultimately led them across present-day southwestern United States and northern Mexico into Spanish-held territory in Nueva Galicia eight years later (in 1536).

Though popular audiences may not be familiar with the ill-fated expedition, each year university students across the country gamely toil away at deciphering Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's sixteenth-century narrative of events. Well, they may fret no more, because Reséndez's beautifully written rendering of the account will keep students turning pages with his imaginative story-telling. Not only that, Reséndez's expansive research and scholarly depth of detail provide fascinating context to the harrowing tale of survival—detail that will help students get beyond the scripted nature of Cabeza de Vaca's memoir, limited as it was by the political imperatives of the factional and fractious world within which he wrote. This impressive level of research enables Reséndez to make real and comprehensible the sixteenth-century perspectives of Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow expeditioners. He brings their world to life—from colorful portraits of the would-be colonists to the nitty-gritty detail of how to build sea-worthy rafts with tools made of melted weapons, ropes made from the hair of their horses (who had to be sacrificed for this material as well as much-needed meat), and leather bags to carry fresh water made from the cured hides of those horses' legs. Wonderful side stories further enliven the tale, such as the determined efforts of Narváez's wife, María de Valenzuela, to mount her own expedition in search of her husband, leading her to purchase two ships, supply them with munitions and provisions, hire a captain and crew, and then later secure the arrest and imprisonment of the captain after he abandoned the search and sold the ships for profit.

Aptly casting his narrative as "an extreme tale of survival" (p. 3), Reséndez argues that Cabeza de Vaca's resulting re-self-fashioning led him, upon return to Spain, to advocate diplomacy and alliance rather than war and conquest as the preferable form of relations with native peoples, joining others such as Bartolomé de Las Casas as a defender of Indian humanity. Cabeza de Vaca thus represented a telling "road not taken" in Spain's New World policies. Yet, at the same time, the narrative is equally a story of Indian power to define and direct the identities and fates of Europeans in their lands. The survivalists' experiences illuminate a native world of dense and startlingly diverse populations, with elaborate political, social, cultural, and trading networks whose breadth and sophistication found physical representation in the well worn thoroughfares and highways criss-crossing the regions now...