This edition of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación offers readers Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz's celebrated translation of Cabeza de Vaca's account of the 1527 Pánfilo de Narváez expedition to North America. The dramatic narrative tells the story of some of the first Europeans and the first-known African to encounter the North American wilderness and its Native inhabitants. It is a fascinating tale of survival against the highest odds, and it highlights Native Americans and their interactions with the newcomers in a manner seldom seen in writings of the period. In this English-language edition, reproduced from their award-winning three-volume set, Adorno and Pautz supplement the engrossing account with a general introduction that orients the reader to Cabeza de Vaca's world. They also provide explanatory notes, which resolve many of the narrative's most perplexing questions. This highly readable translation fires the imagination and illuminates the enduring appeal of Cabeza de Vaca's experience for a modern audience.
The extraordinary tale of a shipwrecked Spaniard who walked across America in the sixteenth century In 1527, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong: delayed by a hurricane and knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival. Of the three hundred men who had embarked, only four survived--three Spaniards and an African slave. This tiny band endured a horrific march through Florida, a harrowing raft passage across the Louisiana coast, and years of enslavement in the American Southwest. They journeyed for almost ten years in search of the Pacific Ocean that would guide them home, seeing lands, peoples, plants, and animals that no outsider had before. In this enthralling tale of four castaways wandering in an unknown land, Andrés Reséndez brings to life the vast, dynamic world of North America just a few years before European settlers would transform it forever.
In November 1528, almost a century before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the remnants of a Spanish expedition reached the Gulf Coast of Texas. By July 1536, eight years later, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (c. 1490–1559) and three other survivors had walked 2,500 miles from Texas, across northern Mexico, to Sonora and ultimately to Mexico City. Cabeza de Vaca’s account of this astonishing journey is now recognized as one of the great travel stories of all time and a touchstone of New World literature. But his career did not begin and end with his North American ordeal. Robin Varnum’s biography, the first single-volume cradle-to-grave account of the explorer’s life in eighty years, tells the rest of the story. During Cabeza de Vaca’s peregrinations through the American Southwest, he lived among and interacted with various Indian groups. When he and his non-Indian companions finally reconnected with Spaniards in northern Mexico, he was horrified to learn that his compatriots were enslaving Indians there. His Relación (1542) advocated using kindness and fairness rather than force in dealing with the native people of the New World. Cabeza de Vaca went on to serve as governor of Spain’s province of Río de La Plata in South America (roughly modern Paraguay). As a loyal subject of the king of Spain, he supported the colonialist enterprise and believed in Christianizing the Indians, but he always championed the rights of native peoples. In Río de La Plata he tried to keep his men from robbing the Indians, enslaving them, or exploiting them sexually—policies that caused grumbling among the troops. When Cabeza de Vaca’s men mutinied, he was sent back to Spain in chains to stand trial before the Royal Council of the Indies. Drawing on the conquistador’s own reports and on other sixteenth-century documents, both in English translation and the original Spanish, Varnum’s lively narrative braids eyewitness testimony of events with historical interpretation benefiting from recent scholarship and archaeological investigation. As one of the few Spaniards of his era to explore the coasts and interiors of two continents, Cabeza de Vaca is recognized today above all for his more humane attitude toward and interactions with the Indian peoples of North America, Mexico, and South America.
The New World story of the Spanish explorer Cabeza de Vaca in his own words This riveting true story is the first major narrative detailing the exploration of North America by Spanish conquistadors (1528-1536). The author, Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking Spanish nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition sent to claim for Spain a vast area of today's southern United States. In simple, straightforward prose, Cabeza de Vaca chronicles the nine-year odyssey endured by the men after a shipwreck forced them to make a westward journey on foot from present-day Florida through Louisiana and Texas into California. In thirty-eight brief chapters, Cabeza de Vaca describes the scores of natural and human obstacles they encountered as they made their way across an unknown land. Cabeza de Vaca's gripping account offers a trove of ethnographic information, including descriptions and interpretations of native cultures, making it a powerful precursor to modern anthropology. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Cultural Writing. A new and improved translation of the Spanish explorer's chronicle of his journey across a large portion of what is now the United States. De Vaca's journey (1528 - 1536) of hardship and misfortune is one of the most remarkable in the history of the New World and contains many first descriptions of the land and their inhabitants. THE ACCOUNT is of estimable value for students of history an literature, ethnographers, anthropologists, and the general reader. It is the second literary text to be issued by a national project to reconstruct the literary history of Hispanics of the United States.
This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author of Castaways (Naufragios), Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with Hernán Cortés. In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native peoples along the way, learning their languages and practices and serving them as a slave and later as a physician. When after eight years he finally reached the West, he was not recognized by his compatriots. In his writing Cabeza de Vaca displays great interest in the cultures of the native peoples he encountered on his odyssey. As he forged intimate bonds with some of them, sharing their brutal living conditions and curing their sick, he found himself on a voyage of self-discovery that was to make his reunion with his fellow Spaniards less joyful than expected. Cabeza de Vaca's gripping narrative is a trove of ethnographic information, with descriptions and interpretations of native cultures that make it a powerful precursor to modern anthropology. Frances M. López-Morillas's translation beautifully captures the sixteenth-century original. Based as it is on Enrique Pupo-Walker's definitive critical edition, it promises to become the authoritative English translation. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1993. This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author of Castaways (Naufragios), Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of
Second place, Presidio La Bahia Award, Sons of the Republic of Texas, 2003 Perhaps no one has ever been such a survivor as álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Member of a 600-man expedition sent out from Spain to colonize "La Florida" in 1527, he survived a failed exploration of the west coast of Florida, an open-boat crossing of the Gulf of Mexico, shipwreck on the Texas coast, six years of captivity among native peoples, and an arduous, overland journey in which he and the three other remaining survivors of the original expedition walked some 1,500 miles from the central Texas coast to the Gulf of California, then another 1,300 miles to Mexico City. The story of Cabeza de Vaca has been told many times, beginning with his own account, Relación de los naufragios, which was included and amplified in Gonzalo Fernando de Oviedo y Váldez's Historia general de las Indias. Yet the route taken by Cabeza de Vaca and his companions remains the subject of enduring controversy. In this book, Alex D. Krieger correlates the accounts in these two primary sources with his own extensive knowledge of the geography, archaeology, and anthropology of southern Texas and northern Mexico to plot out stage by stage the most probable route of the 2,800-mile journey of Cabeza de Vaca. This book consists of several parts, foremost of which is the original English version of Alex Krieger's dissertation (edited by Margery Krieger), in which he traces the route of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions from the coast of Texas to Spanish settlements in western Mexico. This document is rich in information about the native groups, vegetation, geography, and material culture that the companions encountered. Thomas R. Hester's foreword and afterword set the 1955 dissertation in the context of more recent scholarship and archaeological discoveries, some of which have supported Krieger's plot of the journey. Margery Krieger's preface explains how she prepared her late husband's work for publication. Alex Krieger's original translations of the Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo accounts round out the volume.
This book combines a new English translation of La Relacion ("The Account") by Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca with the translator's analysis and commentary. La Relacion is Cabeza de Vaca's first-hand account of the Narvaez Expedition - Spain's failed attempt to colonize Florida in 1528. It tells the story of the first non-indigenous people to visit a large part of the present-day United States and Mexico and documents their first contacts with a number of pre-Columbian native American tribes. It describes the series of disasters and calamities that reduced Narvaez's army of 300 men down to four, including skirmishes with naked, bow-wielding natives, getting lost at sea, becoming shipwrecked, and being captured and forced to live as slaves of people who tortured them for their own amusement. It further describes how, after the four survivors were at their lowest, with nothing but their faith in God to keep them going, their fortunes turned, enabling them to emerge triumphantly from the wilderness, after eight years of being lost, surrounded by hundreds of adoring natives who believed them to be Children of the Sun. The heart of this book is David Carson's accurate, literal translation of Cabeza de Vaca's account. Not content with the typical approach of loosely paraphrasing the original text so as to get the basic idea across, Carson painstakingly chooses each English word so as to best replicate the author's words and voice. The result is the closest thing there is to reading La Relacion in Spanish. Next, Carson takes on the roles of editor, analyst, and commentator. Through his hundreds of annotations to the text, Carson tracks the Narvaez Expedition members' movements across Florida, the Gulf coast, Texas, and northern Mexico to an impressive level of detail and with insights that should settle several long-standing controversies about where the castaways went, and when they were there. He then goes even deeper, analyzing the castaways' motives in light of the culture of Spanish exploration in the Age of Discovery and pointing out the author's occasional contradictions and exaggerations. To bolster his analysis, Carson brings in relevant material from other 16th-century records, including Gonzalo de Oviedo's paraphrased version of the "Joint Report," which Cabeza de Vaca also co-authored. All of Carson's annotations are set off as footnotes, meaning one can make full use of them if desired, or simply skip them and read only the basic translation. Maps, a chronology, a glossary, a prologue, and an epilogue complete the book. If you have not read Cabeza de Vaca before, prepare for a fascinating story that will show you a side of American history you never knew about. If you consider yourself a well-read student of the Narvaez Expedition, this edition of "The Account" will surely become your ultimate reference book on the subject.
