:A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca
2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 113; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr.113.5.1519
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Latin American history and culture
ResumoMesmerized by indigenous peoples' stories, some scholars look askance at storytelling by their own kind, or narrative history. Andrés Reséndez admits that this engaging project empowered him with “an enormous appreciation for the craft of the storyteller” (p. 8). It shows. Along with a sprightly and probing narrative, Reséndez provides telling endnotes, some of them essays a page or more long, that enable his readers to relate to the lives and deaths of the story's characters in times and places so remote from our own. This stranger-than-fiction story of a sixteenth-century Spanish conquest gone cruelly wrong winnowed three hundred expeditionaries to a scarce four survivors: Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, two other Spanish officials, and a Moroccan black slave. The process, deftly related at every turn by Reséndez, began with eager recruitment in Seville, a comfortless Atlantic crossing, desertion and a hurricane in the Caribbean, and the colossal navigational errors that put them on the wrong shore of the Gulf of Mexico in April 1528. Four months slogging about northwestern Florida, fatal to fifty of them, the remainder's all-or-nothing escape on ingeniously constructed rafts, being rudely beached on the Texas coast, and the resulting horrendous die-off were but a preamble to seven more unbelievable years.
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