"De muchas y muy bárbaras naciones con quien conversé y viví": Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Naufragios as a War Tactics Manual

In the Prohemio to Naufragios, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca offers the Crown a personal account of the failed expedition to Florida led by Pánfilo de Narváez in 1527. After the expedition ended in shipwreck, the author and three other survivors¹ traveled for nearly ten years from the Florida peninsula, across the Sierra Madre, to present-day Mexico City. Their curious experience came to occupy an entire book of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's Historia general y natural de las Indias. Oviedo, the Crown's official chronicler, used Naufragios only partially and drew the bulk of his account from the Joint Report (Relación Conjunta) that three of the survivors sent to Santo Domingo's Real Audiencia. The report was dispatched to the Emperor and is now lost. While the two sources tell largely the same story, Oviedo explicitly relegates the material he obtained form Naufragios to a list of curiosities tucked away in the last chapter of the book. From this, we can conclude at least that Cabeza de Vaca provides additional and slightly different information. Cabeza de Vaca's text, however, is not only different because of the information it contains, but also because of the intent that guides the organization and presentation of this information. As the Prohemio evidences, this text is an attempt to relocate the story of Alvar Núñez from the annals of failure to a space that will allow it to engage a discourse of triumph.

Perhaps no protestation in the Prohemio is as telling of the impulse to resonate with the history of Spanish Reconquista as the reference to Cabeza de Vaca's own name and ancestry and his attempt to link his ancestors' service to his own.

[. . .] bien pensé que mis obras y servicios fueran tan claros y manifiestos como fueron los de mis antepassados, y que no tuviera yo necesidad de hablar para ser contado entre los que con entera fé y gran cuidado administran y tratan los cargos de Vuestra Magestad, y les haze merced. (16, 18)²

[. . .] No me quedó lugar para hazer más servicio deste que es traer a Vuestra Magestad relación de [. . .] las diversas costumbres de muchas y muy bárbaras naçiones con quien conversé y viví, y todas las otras particularidades que pude alcançar y conoscer, que de ello en alguna manera Vuestra Magestad será servido.

(16, 18, my emphasis)

Implied in the expressed wish to be identified with his antepassados is the idea that, in order to forge a historically relevant link with his ancestors, the past must be reenacted—a past of service that led to a military triumph. Despite a moment of mediocritas mea,³ Alvar Núñez insists that at least part of Naufragios is useful "en alguna manera." Given the impossibility of articulating a connection to the Reconquista imaginary and to Cabeza de Vaca's lineage with the vocabulary of triumph, Naufragios does not shirk away from the language of failure. Instead, the narrative disrupts the oppositional structure of triumph and failure and re-inscribes itself into the arc of Spanish history by reinventing a failed enterprise, making it part of a tradition of preparation for conquest,⁴ rather than conquest itself.

Cabeza de Vaca's Prohemio asserts that Naufragios is not a description of what the voyage yielded but the material manifestation of the expedition itself: the text becomes the prize of the expedition. Lucía Invernizzi explores the shift away from the indefensible failure of Alvar Núñez's enterprise and toward "los lugares donde los servicios se evidencian, esto es, a la actividad verbal de Alvar Núñez" (101). But Alvar Núñez goes further: his text posits itself as a surrogate in the present for conquests of the future and thus establishes a link with a familial tradition of contributions to Spanish expansion. Rather than taking a part for the whole, the text uses the knowledge acquired in a failed expedition as the...