A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca
By Andres Resendez
Basic Books £15.99, 314 pages
The story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and of his accidental journey across the American continent, is one of the most remarkable feats of endurance ever recorded. In A Land so Strange, historian Andres Resendez recreates this epic crossing in painstaking detail.
A well-connected member of Spain’s minor aristocracy, Cabeza de Vaca was appointed Royal Treasurer to an expedition launched in 1527 to colonise Mexico’s north-eastern seaboard. It sailed from Cuba to Panuco, on the Gulf coast, but navigational errors meant it fetched up near present-day Tampa Bay. The expedition’s leader, the ambitious colonial officer Panfilo de Narvaez, ordered 300 men, including the Royal Treasurer, to march inland. They would never see their ships again.
Florida’s swamps yielded no food and only brackish water. In desperation, the men marched north up the peninsula, finding only wretched huts and hostile natives. Soon they were forced to eat their horses, and destroy their weapons to build primitive tools.
Still certain they were near Panuco, they improvised rafts and sailed westwards, hugging the coast. Many drowned. Others succumbed to disease, dehydration and hunger. At the mouth of the Mississippi, the current pushed the rafts three miles out to sea.
A handful of survivors were washed ashore near Galveston, Texas, where they were welcomed – and subsequently imprisoned – by the local tribe. The captivity lasted six years, at the end of which Cabeza de Vaca and three fellow castaways, one an African slave, escaped.
They used their hard-gained geographical knowledge to move west. They lived uneasily among quarrelsome indigenous tribes, and soon acquired a reputation as healers. It was this “gift” that allowed them to continue until they reached the Pacific coast where, semi-naked and skeletal, they ran into a Spanish slaving expedition.
Resendez tells this gripping story with zeal. He makes much – perhaps too much – of the contrast between the usual Spanish methods of conquest, which relied on the sword and the cross, and Cabeza de Vaca’s culturally sensitive approach to the North American natives.
Inevitably, though, the book has its weaknesses. Only two primary sources for this story exist – Cabeza de Vaca’s own Narrative and an account by two other survivors known as the “Joint Report”. So Resendez traipses well-trodden ground. Worse, while taking Cabeza de Vaca’s account at face value, Resendez too often goes into speculative mode: “The raft crews must have been barely able to steer”; “perhaps they resorted to cannibalism”.
Still, it is impossible not to be swept along by his enthusiasm – Cabeza de Vaca’s ordeal never fails to excite the imagination.