Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: American Trailblazer by Robin Varnum (review)

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was one of four survivors of the Pánfilo Narváez expedition sent to La Florida in 1527. After he and his companions survived several years of slavery at the hands of natives, they walked through much of what is now the southwestern United States before coming upon fellow Spaniards in northern Mexico in 1536. Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain in 1537, and a few years later he was sent to Paraguay as provisional governor. His governorship was contested, and he was eventually arrested and brought back in chains to Spain, where he spent the rest of his life attempting to exonerate himself.

Although many scholars will likely be familiar with the outlines of this story, Varnum’s biography supplements it with valuable details. For example, fascinating archeological evidence enhances what we learn about many of the native tribes Cabeza de Vaca encountered. Varnum’s explanations of some of the passages of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative—for example, the geographical information she presents about the landscape he was traversing—help readers better understand his experience.

This book presents Cabeza de Vaca’s story chronologically, focusing on his travels in the Americas. Varnum acknowledges her extensive debt to Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz’s English translation of the 1542 edition of Cabeza de Vaca’s account (Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, 3 vols., University of Nebraska Press, 1999) and David Howard’s Conquistador in Chains: Cabeza de Vaca and the Indians of the Americas (University of Alabama Press, 1996). Although Varnum cites the meticulous study accompanying Adorno and Pautz’s translation, she fails to engage many of its conclusions regarding the complexities of the historical record, as well as the extent to which Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative was driven by his own agenda. As a result, her book often presents the material uncritically. We read, for example, that “Cabeza de Vaca would one day reproduce the emperor’s coat of arms . . . on the frontispiece of his 1542 Relación” (22). This leads readers to believe that Cabeza de Vaca chose to include this image, but, as Adorno and Pautz and Ralph Bauer (whose meticulous 2003 study of the multiple textual versions of Cabeza’s Relación in The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity is absent from the bibliography) have established, the printers alone were almost surely responsible for the woodcut.

Varnum interprets Cabeza de Vaca’s account as a precursor of US literary history, offering as it does a welcome (and now increasingly common) challenge to the traditional narrative. Yet, her identification of the Pilgrims (xi) arrival in Massachusetts in 1620 as the starting point of that narrative is problematic, and not only because the Jamestown settlers (1607) beat them by more than a decade. It also perpetuates the suppression in US historiography, recently documented by Anna Brickhouse (The Unsettlement of America: Translation, Interpretation, and the Story of Don Luis de Velasco, 1560–1945, 2015), of Spanish attempts to settle the Chesapeake in the 1570s. Perhaps this is a quibble, but it is indicative of a general lack of careful attention to historical details and their presentation. Thus we read that “the earliest written description” of the future United States was penned by Giovanni Verrazzano in 1523, although that account is in fact dated July 8 of the following year (xi). More glaring is the statement that Columbus departed from Spain on his second voyage to the New World in 1494 (it was in 1493) with 17 ships. The record is inconclusive with regard to the number (13).

Varnum’s book nevertheless presents the story of Cabeza de Vaca compellingly, with ample details and supplementary information that make it come alive. Anyone interested in the general contours of this story will find it rewarding. Serious scholars, however, will find other sources...