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Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez

2001; Duke University Press; Volume: 81; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-81-2-355

1527-1900

Patricia Galloway,

Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism

This work by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Pautz is not just a new edition of the 1542 first-published account of the Narváez expedition by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca; it is a historiographical tour de force, a model for the kind of detailed textual criticism that is made possible by the investigation of the intertextual connections and reception of the text itself. This reader’s first reaction was to think that it is too bad that the impetus of the Columbus quincentenary did not give rise to many more such careful new studies of fundamental texts of Spanish exploration and conquest.If the edition consisted of nothing else than the careful transcription of the text in Spanish with an English translation on facing pages, including marginal notation of variations from the 1555 text and explanatory notes to the translation, it would be of great value to anyone who has little hope of obtaining access to any one of the four copies of the original still certainly extant. This is especially true if the reader is satisfied with the authors’ arguments that the 1542 account is a different work with a different emphasis and purpose than the frequently edited and translated 1555 version. One can also appreciate the rhetorical grace in placing the edition first, before the interpretive study, in that the reader has the option to consider the text virtually unencumbered and to judge the translation for herself.With all that said, however, I must expose my prejudices by complaining of the commonly accepted practice of stating editorial principles of resolving abbreviations and updating spellings—and then carrying them out silently throughout the text. In this day and age it would have been nice to find a CD in a pocket at the back of the book containing an unemended transcription with a hypertext apparatus including images of the actual pages of the original. I was also rather disappointed with a few citations in the footnotes—to Claude Lévi-Strauss on shamanism and Paul Radin on the trickster figure in Native American myth—that adumbrated a familiar problem of interdisciplinary efforts, where the outdated “normal science” literature of the foreign discipline (in this case, anthropology) is used instead of more recent scholarship. This is a special problem here with the older “trickster” literature, which is based upon nineteenth-century magpie collections of “myths” to which meaning is laboriously given by scholars who lack access to the language in which the traditions were originally couched. This underlying practice is so foreign to what Adorno and Pautz are doing with their textual analysis here that such citations have a very jarring effect.The first volume also includes a detailed account of the life of Cabeza de Vaca that places him in time, space, and social milieu and sets the stage for the detailed commentary of the work that follows. This important segment of the work begins to construct a picture, from the standpoint of Cabeza de Vaca’s story, of the corporate strivings of the really small number of families involved in the establishment of Spain’s power both as a nation-state and as a colonial empire. Adorno and Pautz foreground the overlooked work of older genealogical scholarship—Pellicer’s in 1652 and Sancho de Sopranis’s in the 1940s—to establish the context of what they refer to as the “incalculable factors of honor and prestige” (1:413) that marked a family of several houses connected with the conquest and governance of the Canaries (including its slaving practices) and in service to the powerful dukes of Medina Sidonia (whose house is still possibly in possession of one of the few copies of the work). Although Cabeza de Vaca’s own immediate house was settled in Jerez de la Frontera, on the border with Muslim Spain (Cabeza de Vaca’s wife came from a converso family), another branch of the family, significantly, was in Zamora, where the account was published.The second volume consists of an extended commentary and analysis of the expedition itself, at its beginning in Narváez’s assembly in Spain; during its protracted progress from the west coast of Florida to the west coast of Mexico; and in the ultimate fates of its four survivors. Adorno and Pautz articulate a view of the expedition made up of several new or newly recognized ideas, of which the main ones are that Narváez was not trying to reach Florida, but Pánuco, to follow up on the efforts and claims of Garay and his own enmity for Cortés and that Cabeza de Vaca and the other survivors’ turn inland from the Texas coast began as an effort to parallel the coast to escape the hunter-gatherers of the coastal region, continued as a mistake when they wandered deep inland in following a river, then may have become a conscious turn westward to seek the Pacific when evidence of cotton and corn in the interior, suggesting settled farming cultures, was made evident.Adorno and Pautz take a frankly constructivist view of historical sources, stating clearly that the account here cannot be considered a transparent source for the reality Cabeza de Vaca experienced, but only for his own experience of it. Yet after having declaring clearly and repeatedly that on these principles a precise route for the expedition’s travels can never be known on the strength of the now-extant evidence, the authors then proceed to play the game of detailed identification of places visited against all their more dogged predecessors.The detailed textual analysis here is valuable in understanding how the narrative was made, especially for the clarity with which the authors tease out Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative use of the different witnesses whose testimonies he represents. In this process it is crucial for them to be able to make use of Oviedo’s casting of the events of the expedition. As they argue convincingly, Oviedo used the Joint Report (provided to the Audiencia of Santo Domingo by three of the four survivors though dominated by Cabeza de Vaca’s testimony) to write his main account of the Narváez expedition (chaps. 1–6 of bk. 35 of the Historia general y natural de las Indias), but then later incorporated additional information from the 1542 publication in chapter 7 of the same work. The authors here thus use the main account in Oviedo to judge what Cabeza de Vaca himself added to his own work, but in order to do this they characterize Oviedo’s practice as that of a faithful transmitter of his sources, apart from his own recognizable and therefore easily removable commentary. In my view, this characterizes Oviedo anachronistically as the sort of critical historian that the authors themselves are; they indicate that Oviedo omitted “superfluous words” silently in order to make the narrative more “coherent” (2:20)—hardly the practice of a faithful scribe. In short, the image of Oviedo as a sort of “modest witness” contradicts significantly the additional and useful discussion the authors also offer of Oviedo as narrator of exempla of ideal conquest (3:42). Unfortunately, the critique that would be needed to guarantee the comparative significance of various parts of Oviedo’s work, comparable to the work here at issue, has not been done.Nevertheless, Adorno and Pautz take up several significant historical issues and move the discussion along constructively. Their analysis of the identity of the pilot Miruelo in his different sometimes fictional manifestations in the literature is especially interesting in that by untangling it they uncover another support for their argument that Narváez’s real destination was the Pánuco region. They also point out the invidious effects of recent scholarship on the Hernando de Soto expedition, which has been guilty of applying observations of the Soto narratives to the interpretation of Cabeza de Vaca’s account in spite of the fact that the latter clearly served as a source for at least two of those narratives. Finally, Adorno and Pautz point out another jarring misinterpretation: recent efforts to present Cabeza de Vaca’s portrayal of sodomy and same-sex unions among the Indians the expeditionaries met as a sympathetic attitude toward homosexuality. The authors point out that “homosexuality” itself is a modern construct, and that in the context of Cabeza de Vaca’s life and age the presentation of these observations may on the contrary have been intended to support future enslavement of the same Indians on the grounds of their impious practices.Probably the most arguable issue that the authors address is why the survivors turned inland and crossed Mexico from east to west instead of continuing down the coast to certain contact with Spanish settlement. They make much of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative positioning of evidence of maize cultivation as a fabrication intended and here their argument is strong in that they show how Cabeza de Vaca’s presentation of the events were designed to create the image of an “ideal conquest” in the context of discussions then current in Spain as the atmosphere that would favor the New Laws developed. The authors do address the issue of whether the survivors were in control of the route they took even after they were supposedly venerated: they were, the authors assert, “undoubtedly not the masters of these repeated rites of exchange but rather their willing collaborators” (2:299). Adorno and Pautz are reluctant, however, to open up more fundamental ethnohistorical questions here. They discuss whether native people actually did consider the survivors to be gods or to have supernatural powers, and trace the motif as a literary construction beginning with Columbus and Cortés, but they do not wish to give up the entire reality of the veneration Cabeza de Vaca portrays, referring to the “mutual cross-fertilization of gestures and comportment” (2:299) rather than just saying that both parties misunderstood one another and arrived at a way of behaving that benefited both but that plainly represented multiple intentions, only the Spaniards’ now even partly recoverable. In this context it would have been interesting for them to consider the discussions initiated by Richard White’s The Middle Ground.The third volume consists of at first apparently more tangential materials. A history of the creation and reception of the work (including a commentary on all known Spanish-language editions) makes careful use of new studies on the sixteenth-century Spanish book trade that support arguments for the possible inter-textual connections discussed earlier in the work and speak once more to Cabeza de Vaca’s intentions in composing the various lost and extant accounts of the expedition with which he was involved. Adorno and Pautz compare the 1542 and 1555 accounts in their multiple contexts of existing conquest literature, trends at court in policies on Indian treatment, and the career and reputation of Cabeza de Vaca.This segment is followed by three almost self-contained essays on the historical contexts of the work that support additional arguments in greater detail. The extended discussion of Narváez’s whole career in the Gulf of Mexico makes it plain that his intentions were to follow up on his earlier rivalry with Cortés and his imprisonment and humiliation at Cortés’s hands. An essay on the current exploration interest in the Pacific, exemplified by extensive efforts by Cortés himself, suggests why Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 account might have emphasized the importance of the westward part of the survivors’ trek. Finally, the study of Nuño de Guzmán’s violent activities in the conquest of Nueva Galicia sets up for the argument that Cabeza de Vaca found it to his advantage to present the Narváez survivors as carrying out a perfect conquest through religious persuasion instead of fire and the sword. This volume closes with a useful bibliography of relevant works and an index to all three volumes.What else should I say? Here is where the recommendation to buy or not to buy comes: one could wish that the volumes were less expensive, but the price reflects the unfortunate realities of printed editions that include the ideal level of commentary presented here. Clearly, research libraries should all purchase this book, irrespective of whether or not they specialize in conquest colonialism, simply because it is such a fine model. It would be satisfactory if there were some affordable way that the rest of the world could obtain access to this fine work.