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Searching... McMinnville Public Library | 910.92 Cabeza de Vaca | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
In 1528, a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong: Delayed by a hurricane, knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, and ultimately doomed by a disastrous decision to separate the men from their ships, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival. Of the four hundred men who had embarked on the voyage, 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, and they were forever changed by their experience. The men lived with a variety of nomadic Indians and learned several indigenous languages. They saw lands, peoples, plants, and animals that no outsider had ever before seen. 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.
Author Notes
Andrés Reséndez is Professor of History at the University of California, Davis. This is his third book. He and his family live in Davis, California.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1528, 300 conquistadores embarked on the ambitious mission of colonizing Florida. They all disappeared. Eight years later, a band of Spanish slave-traders were rounding up their fleeing human cargo in northwest Mexico when they espied a group of men who appeared to be natives approaching them. One was white. Just as astonishingly, a companion of his was African. Who were these strange figures? They, and two others, were the last survivors of the lost expedition. Their march across Florida, their voyage on spindly rafts across the Gulf of Mexico, their captivity in Texas and their trek across the southwest to the Pacific coast form the backbone of Resendez's riveting account of the epic journey. The author, a history professor at the University of California-Davis, tells the tale from the Spanish, African and Indian points of view: Native Americans were just as amazed by the original visitors as the visitors were by them, and Resendez focuses on how the interlopers remade themselves as medicine men and made sense of "social worlds other Europeans could not even begin to fathom." Told from an intriguing and original perspective, Resendez's narrative is a marvelous addition to the corpus of survival and adventure literature. 15 illus, 16 maps. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Delightful retelling of the incredible journey of a castaway Spaniard who was in turn enslaved and befriended by Native Americans. Resndez (History/Univ. of California, Davis; A Texas Patriot on Trial in Mexico, 2006, etc.) aims to fill in some gaps in the Narrative published in 1542 by Álvar Nú¿ez Cabeza de Vaca, royal treasurer of a New World expedition who vividly recounted his unanticipated eight-year sojourn in the wilderness. Aiming for a river just north of the portion of Mexico where Hernán Corts was busily plundering the Aztecs, the fleet commanded by Pánfilo de Narváez was carried off course by the Gulf Stream (unknown to contemporary navigators) and landed mistakenly on the west coast of Florida in April of 1528. Half the expedition, including Cabeza de Vaca, took off on foot along the coast to find the legendary Rio de las Palmas, not realizing they were on the wrong side of the Gulf of Mexico. After a series of dispiriting misadventures, they built rafts that washed up on different parts of the Texas shore, where the men either perished or were taken captive. Enslaved for years by an indigenous Texas tribe, Cabeza de Vaca eventually escaped with two other Spaniards and a native Moroccan slave, Estebanico. Knowledge of the land gleaned from living among the Indians helped them survive as they walked all the way to the Pacific coast, and their rudimentary medical skills enabled them to perform what seemed like miracles of healing to admiring Indians along the way. The castaways finally reestablished contact with Europeans in 1536--and their status as healers quickly diminished. Resndez proves a patient storyteller, employing effective prose hand in hand with the tools of a scholar, including many maps, excellent footnotes and a terrific Further Reading section. The experiences of one of the first outsiders to see the American Southwest still prove fresh and pertinent. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The saga of Cabeza de Vaca, chronicler of the catastrophic 1528 Narváez expedition to Florida and Texas, fascinates as one of the most incredible from the Age of Discovery. Related as a straightforward survival story in Paul Schneider's Brutal Journey (2006), the epic becomes something more in historian Reséndez's account. While anchored to the desperate events of the journey, a possibility of alternative history informs Reséndez's narrative, for the ordeal transformed Cabeza de Vaca's attitudes from those of a conquistador into, after he returned to Spanish territory as if from another planet, an advocate of more humane terms of colonization than those of conquest and enslavement of native peoples. Exhibiting lightly his thorough immersion in clues to the Narváez party's route, Reséndez evocatively imparts Cabeza de Vaca's personal experience of encountering and enduring, a totally alien world, touching on his conviction of God's presence in his deliverance. Enriched by Reséndez's sketches of Cabeza de Vaca's three fellow survivalists, most fully of Estebanico, a black slave, this sophisticated history reflects and gratifies the considerable interest in the Narváez expedition.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2007 Booklist
Choice Review
Many books have been written--some quite recently--about Cabeza de Vaca's journey through Texas and northern Mexico. Resendez's achievement is to provide a readable, scholarly, and comprehensive account that covers the context, background, events, and aftermath. Unlike some books about these events, this volume by Resendez does not focus excessively on Cabeza de Vaca (which is a temptation, since he wrote an influential account of the journey). While Resendez gives Cabeza his due, he also shows the important roles that Diego Velazquez, Hernan Cortes, Panfilo de Narvaez, Andres Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo, Estevanico, and others played in the story. The author also correctly emphasizes that Cabeza and his companions traveled through an American landscape in a profound state of flux. The Mississippian culture of the Native Americans was declining or even collapsing, while Old World diseases were causing drastic declines in population as they spread to areas largely or totally unaware of the approaching conquistadors. Resendez has synthesized and added to the research of Rolena Adorno and Patrick C. Pautz's massive Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (1999) and other historians and archaeologists and produced a lucid, accessible account. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Most levels/libraries. R. Fritze Athens State University
Library Journal Review
Resendez (history, Univ. of California, Davis) chronicles the adventures of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, who, along with three other survivors of the ill-fated P nfilo de Narv ez expedition of exploration, spent over eight years in what is now the American Gulf Coast region and northern Mexico between 1528 and 1536. The author provides excellent background information about the preparations for the expedition, and its progress from Spain to Hispaniola to Cuba and eventually to Florida, where the explorers became separated from their ships and were lost in the wilderness. Resendez creates a gripping narrative of one of the most amazing survival stories of all time, basing his work upon the geographical descriptions of Native American cultures in Cabeza de Vaca's own writings, published in Spain in 1542. We follow the gradual migration westward of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, first as slaves of various groups of indigenous people and later as respected shamans and healers who eventually encounter Spanish conquistadors in northern Mexico. This excellent account is highly recommended for U.S. and Mexican history collections in academic and large public libraries.-Elizabeth Salt, Otterbein Coll. Lib., Westerville, OH (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.