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 Entertainment | Books | December 2006 
Texas Did Its Very Best to Kill Earliest Conquistadors
 Reese Vaughn - Advocate
Along the Gulf Coast we tend to know that Spanish conquistadors arrived in America before English Puritans, but Paul Schneider was surprised by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca when he came across his name in a friend's library.
His excitement and interest in what he calls "one of the greatest survival epics of all time" make "Brutal Journey" a fascinating popular history.
Schneider begins in Mexico in 1520, when Pánfilo de Narváez lost an eye to Hernán Cortés. To restore his honor, Narváez gained license from Charles V of Spain to subjugate the land "from Rio de Palmas to Florida."
Among his forces were official treasurer Cabeza de Vaca from Jerez de la Frontera, caballero Andrés Dorantes and his slave Esteban, a "'black Moor' from the Atlantic coast of Morocco," and Captain Alonso del Castillo from Salamanca, who may have been a converso, descended from Jews forcibly converted during the Inquisition.
Of 600, only those four survived.
"At its heart," Schneider writes, "Cabeza de Vaca's memoir of the expedition traces a relentless descent from the expected order of things."
In the New World in 1528, the explorers encountered shipwreck, swamps, starvation and dangerous natives. Narváez disappeared off Matagorda Island, and as a dwindling number of survivors struggled toward Mexico, aristocrat became slave, slave became leader, and old ideas of honor were lost.
Historians argue about Cabeza de Vaca's route from the Texas Gulf to northeastern Mexico and up the Rio Grande and then southwest to San Miguel de Culiacán. Forests of tree-sized prickly pear and saltwater bays where deer were drowned have changed and disappeared. In the 1930s, a Texas geologist refused to let the route be "wrongly transferred across the Rio Grande into a foreign country, Mexico."
Schneider draws from an extensive bibliography that includes Robert S. Weddle and Cuero historian William Foster to paint approximate locations on his map.
By December 1535, the four survivors had crossed the southern border of what would eventually become the United States, from Florida to California. Turning south, they encountered signs of the Spanish conquest in devastated villages where the inhabitants "went fleeing through the sierras without daring to keep houses or work the land for fear of the Christians."
The old order returned.
Reese Vaughn reviews books for the Advocate. Write to her at P.O. Box 118, Seadrift 77983 or email lrv@infionline.net. |
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