Christine Richardson

UCLA

September 16, 2020

HIS 340-01: The American West

A Land So Strange

In April of 1536, according to Cabeza de Vaca’s he encounters other human being’s;

being that he was the only one that spoke Spanish. He wanted to be taken to the slave’s captain

and to know the Christian date and requested to have it officially recorded. De Vaca’s began

recalling him and his slave’s existence of being in an unfamiliar place for eight years. Due to an

incompetent leader. De Vaca’s states, when he set out to colonize Florida in 1528 three hundred

men on that journey, only four survived including himself and three other men; two Spaniards,

and a slave named Estebanico. (pg.2)

Panfilo de Narvaez was an adventurer, a prisoner himself in some form or another in his

life; one can assume the reason he treated the natives so harshly, maybe because what he endured

(who knows). Narvaez had dreams of his own, the former partner to Diego Velazquez, a colonist.

Velazquez a widower beloved for his banler and constant talker of pleasure and mischief.

According to de Vaca, Diego had seen a good deal of human misery. Diego Velazquez was very

successful at waging war and getting the vanquished Natives to work in his mines. The colonist

and the Adventurer Narvaez main quest were to capture and conquer Cuba. (pg.17)

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 According to the script, Cabeza de Vaca was a slender by statue; he hailed from Jerez de

la Frontera, a parched but attractive Andalusian town about fifty miles due south of Seville. On

their voyage there was another man, a slave named Estebanico, he came from Azamor, a

substantial coastal town of some five thousand inhabitants in the Kingdom of Morocco in

northwest Africa. Estebanico, was sold to Captain Andres Dorantes; that is how he ended up on

the voyage to Florida. (pg.56)

On their journey they became stranded. The men had to endure years of captivity in no

man’s land; they were to make rafts, traveling through the Gulf of Mexico. These men re-

invented themselves as medicine men. They learned the native language. De Vaca’s came to

understand the indigenous people, their heritage, and their way of life. Narvaez’s party first saw

the mainland on April 12, 1528. Cabeza, stated that when they approach land the geographic

seemed unsettling; the coast on the starboard side seemed to run north instead of south, and the

sun set on the sea rather than on land, as it would have occurred at the mouth of the Rio de las

Palmas.

At first sight, Narvaez fleet continuing down the coast, and was said that it was not

suitable as a port, the only things they saw was an Indian village with ordinary huts. Some

Native Indians captured. Under no control of the Indians, they were forced to show their village.

When the Europeans discover that the Natives had in their possession gold, they asked the

Natives where the gold came from; they replied, far far away. Europeans gushed at the idea of

another Aztec Empire. Narvaez was a greedy man; he did not like the Royal Treasurer, Cabeza

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deVaca. Upon reaching Appalachian, it was no Aztec Empire, it was a simple village; with no

gold insight everyone was wondering, had they been lied to.

Cabeza de Vaca wrote, “because each one can image for himself what could happen in a

Land so Strange and so poor and so lacking in every single way that it seemed impossible either

to be in it or to escape from it.” Cabeza de Vaca glosses over those dark movements: “I do not

think there is no need to tell in detail the miseries and hardships in which we found ourselves,

since considering the place where we were and the little hope we had for survival, each one can

imagine a great deal of what would happen.” (pg. 122)

Cabeza de Vaca, came across some Indians that cried for them and fed them. It confused

de Vaca; what is happening, he thought, are these natives going to sacrifice us, why are they

being so kind; thankfully that did not happen, the Indians still show empathy. Cabeza de Vaca,

recalls a time when a young Indian girl, who dare to cry before him was immediately taken far

away, and with a sharp tooth of a rat, the Natives slashed from her shoulders to her legs. “And

seeing this cruelty and angered by it, de Vaca asked, why did they torture that poor child in that

way, why. And they responded that it was to punish her because she had wept in front of them.

(pg.195)

In the Epilogue, out of the four, Cabeza de Vaca, found his calling. Cabeza will go back

to his home of Spain, with the hope of becoming adelantamiento; since Narvaez had died at sea

on a raft, due to a terrible wind that carried him out to sea; what is so ironic about the death of

Narvaez; Velazquez died at sea to, clutching and holding on to his horse. Narvaez, he was so

heartless with his crew and the Natives, he thought he was being safe from being attacked by the

Natives; he had his men sleep on land so that they can protect him from approaching danger, but

the mighty sea had others plans. When de Vaca returns to his country he states that he will

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explain his journey about the new land. Cabeza de Vaca, believes that when the Spaniards return

to the mainland enslaving Indians and torching villages is not necessary; de Vaca will make the

case for establishing a partnership with them. (pg. 218)

Over the course of his journeys, Cabeza de Vaca, according to him; he found that

America’s bounty consisted not only of gold and silver, but also of land and good people.

Together, Europeans and Native Americans could make the new World yield spiritual as well as

material wealth. Cabeza plans did not go well; In Valladolid, he learned that the Crown had

already giving away the commission for the conquest of Florida. In an instance de Vaca states,

his cherished plans, long harbored during his travels in North America and in the months that he

had stayed in Mexico City, came to naught. The King gave the position of adelantamiento, to

another by the name of Hernando de Soto; de Vaca refused to be under another man, not after all

he went through.

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