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Cabeza de Vaca Stumbles West

By Paul Lyons

11/23/2008 2:57:14 PM | Number of Comments: 0 | Add Comments +

Lately I have been a bit obsessed with the story of Cabeza de Vaca through the only real source of information on him – the book La Relation, which was his report to the King of Spain after he returned from the eight-year voyage. In 1525, Cabeza de Vaca and three others were the first people from the Old World to travel by land across the entire North American continent. The goal was to explore into the New World and claim it for the King of Spain. But the expedition went badly. They got caught in a hurricane, became separated from one another and in the end were reduced to eating kelp and whatever they could find. Many were reduced to eating each other. They wandered along the coast of Florida and the northern shores of the Gulf of Mexico. Of course most died of hunger and many were either killed by the Indians or were turned into slaves. The four survivors, often separated seemed to have adapted better than the others and got into the local seasonal rhythm. Eating blackberries for months on end. Then changing to the pickle pear cactus when in season. The diet must have been extremely dull.

Because La Relation, was a report to the King, it does seem like a sketch with a lot of the details missing. In the eight years that Cabeza de Vaca traveled across the continent he experienced many changes. He was a slave for a few years. He became a sort of faith healer. He was a trader who got to know the various tribes and was able to travel between them and be a middleman of sorts. In the end, what is fascinating is the empathy that he developed towards the native peoples. He befriended them and often wrote about their striking physical beauty. La Relation, was probably Cabeza de Vaca’s attempt to find a way to return to the New World and develop an agrarian Christian reality hopefully funded by the King. Because of this, the short book does not go into a lot of the anthropologic details or get into the interpersonal relationships between the men both of which would have been amazing. To the modern reader, we are left to fill in these gaps with our obvious opinionated tendencies.

One can only surmise what the Indians thought of the four men. Three catholic Spaniards and one black North African walking west in animal skins in the open western landscape. Did being a mixed race group make them less threatening or more curious to the Indians? One also wonders how the four men interacted. Was the African treated as the others or kept in a condition of servitude?

Some scholars have suggested that La Relation, is the first work of North American literature as the landscape and the human realization happen in tandem; as Cabeza de Vaca interacts with the Western environment and the people in the environment, he is changed in profound ways. Furthermore this sort of transformation theme runs through American writings ever after. Think of Melville, Mark Twain and Hemingway and it comes into view. All write about the journey of men and how they are transformed by their interaction with the environment. I find it strange how La Relation rarely makes it into a school curriculum instead one learns of Columbus then Jamestown and we spend months on end making turkeys out of construction paper.

What keeps Cabeza de Vaca’s journey in my mind are a few things. 1525 was 250 years before 1776 and the founding of the United States of America. The election of a man who happens to be black, Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States in 2008 is almost another 250 further. It is strange to think of how long the journey has been and how part of it was three Catholic guys and a black Moor from northern Africa trudging across the deserts of Arizona. Soon we will be lead by a guy who happens to be black and a catholic from Scranton. Perhaps, just perhaps, we are starting over in a way.

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The movie Caba de Vaca is alright but gets into a lot of sorcery stuff that was never part of La Relation.
The very readable translation of La Relation, that I read was translated by Cyclone Covey. The only problem with this version is that there are no maps but one can find them online.

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