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

Raised in Jerez de la Frontera, a client and servant of the powerful Dukes of Medina Sidonia throughout his life, a veteran of war in Italy, and married to a wealthy conversa (a person of Jewish origins from a family that converted to Christianity during the late medieval period), Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was appointed royal Treasurer for the expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez in 1526 and subsequently Governor of the Spanish province of Río de la Plata (roughly today's Paraguay) in 1540. Both appointments failed to produce the results he evidently hoped for while, somewhat paradoxically, allowing him to create a reputation as a "good conquistador," one who saw the Native Americans as fully human persons capable of embracing Christianity and Spanish rule without Spanish use of violence, i.e., military conquest. He also gained a reputation as a sort of Christian missionary, not only because of his seeming stance on how to treat Native Americans but also because, once forced into the role by Native insistence, he used Christian prayers as part of healings, events that could be considered miracles.

The Narváez expedition landed on the west coast of Florida, marched north to near modern Tallahassee, and then by locally built barges sailed along the Gulf Coast until the ships were wrecked or lost at sea on the Texas coast. From there Cabeza de Vaca and three other survivors eventually wandered across northern Mexico and part of the future United States Southwest until they met Spaniards in Sinaloa. He returned to Spain without the fortune he had hoped to obtain but with his version of a joint report on the odyssey that he and his companions had prepared in Mexico, and that, with some additional editing, he published at Zaragoza in 1542 (La Relación que dio Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca de lo acaesido en las Indias en la armada donde iva por governador Pánfilo de Narbáez …) and in a second edition in 1555 (the book is better known under its 1749 title: Naufragios). He declined offers to join Hernando de Soto's expedition, which was making up when he returned to Spain.

Cabeza de Vaca's appointment as Governor of the Río de la Plata (1540) also ended in failure. There he encountered an entrenched group of Spaniards and Spaniard-Guarani relations that included the use of women to cement alliances and provide services of all sorts for their (common law) husbands. That is, he found conditions that flew in the face of Catholic teachings about marriage and in the face of the Ordinanzas of 1526 that were to govern the Spanish "conquest" of the Americas. When, by his account, he tried to correct these and other abuses, as his contract with the Crown required, the local powers organized a mutiny, imprisoned him, and sent hm to Spain in chains. He was accompanied by papers that characterized him as a violator of the Ordenanzas. Jailed and duly charged with various crimes, Cabeza de Vaca spent the remaining years of his life seeking first a lessening of his sentences (achieved) and then exoneration. As part of that effort, his secretary, Pero Hernández, wrote a commentary on the events in Paraguay (published in La Relación y Comentarios del gobernador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca de lo acaescido en las dos journadas que hizo a las Indias … [Valladolid, 1555]). Cabeza seems to have died (1556?) without a full pardon.

Professor Varnum ably weaves the recent scholarship on Cabeza's life, the Narváez expedition (especially on the route he took in Texas) and his activities in the Río de la Plata with his own writings (and those of Hernández) about those events. The views of Cabeza's opponents in Paraguary are noticed but quickly passed over as she continues to follow his account. The result is...