Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Panfilo de Narvaez (review)

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. Edited by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 3 vols. xxiv + 413 pp., xxii + 428 pp., xxii + 476 pp., figures, tables, maps, index. $275.00, cloth.)

This is a magnificent work, both in the meticulousness of its scholarly execution and in the quality of its editorial production. Even more than these achievements, it makes available a study of the European encounter with native America that is iconic, that foreshadows an entire genre of literatures and cultural idioms concerned with “savage captivity,” and that critically has continuing implications for a better understanding of Spanish colonialism in Florida (the territory north of the borders of New Spain from the Florida peninsula to the Pacific coast). The overall cultural importance of this text is reflected in the incessant production of new editions (at least six, plus four translations into English since 1983!). Part of this mystique stems from the pan-American travels of Cabeza de Vaca himself as well as from the ultimately ineffable nature of his actual experiences among indigenous peoples. However, that these experiences also are central to understanding the European-American encounter, its origins in an exploration of a “New World,” and the quotidian conduct and character of its participants ensures that the text has been, and will remain, a poetical as well as philosophical source for its readers.

This newest edition, the first modern edition of the original 1542 Spanish publication, can boast a number of distinct historiographical achievements. For example, the editors are to be praised for their decision not to forejudge the route of de Vaca’s party or the identity of the peoples encountered but rather to present the original orthography and preserve the lacunae implied by the original. This welcome rectitude allows the editors to show, among other things, that what usually has been taken as a single journey—beginning at a shipwreck site in western Florida, traveling first along the southern coast of the United States and then into the Texas region, west to the Pacific, south along the coast of Mexico, and finally turning east back toward the Gulf of Mexico—should actually be considered as two distinct wanderings. This determination was achieved primarily through a close comparison of Cabeza de Vaca’s text with the account given by Oviedo y Valdés in his Historia. Likewise the editors emphasize the retrospective nature of the entire work, and this enables them to provide better interpretations of apparent inconsistencies and lacunae in the overall relaciôn. This project of better contextualization certainly is extensive. The editors go on, in the subsequent volumes of this edition, to discuss other accounts of the Narváez expedition, the background to the expedition in Spain, and the subsequent fate of Cabeza de Vaca’s surviving companions and to present a bibliographical study of the various editions of Cabeza de Vaca’s account and a close historical contextualization of colonial exploration and administration throughout the Florida region. The reader is provided also with numerous detailed maps that greatly aid in reading both the text and the commentary.

As the editors make clear on numerous occasions they are well aware that a text such as Cabeza de Vaca’s cannot be taken as a simple reflection of an “experienced reality” but rather as the complex, retrospective product of an experience, the meaning of which remained/remains open and so has a purpose that required/requires explanation. For this reason, such accounts have to be critically read not only against other contemporary sources and later commentaries but also with a knowledge of the archaeology, ethnology, and ethnography of the region. Unfortunately it is in this regard that this edition is somewhat lacking. The sources cited for both the archaeology...