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Brutal Journey: Cabeza de Vaca and the Epic First Crossing of North America

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Paul Schneider's third book is a delight from cover to cover. The Odyssey-like narrative is full of suspense, sublime characters, and indelible scenes that sound almost made up. The fact that this amazing, tragic and (brutal) journey happened right under today's strip malls and freeways along the Gulf Coast makes it even more amazing.

The reader is transported like an archeologist straight into the rampaging egos, wild delusions and doomed strategies of the would be conquistadors. They traverse "their' thoroughly alien and violent territory with eyes wide shut, battered to and fro as if from one of the squalls that greet their arrival in the New World from the get-go.

Schneider is a masterful writer, and the text is lean and full of sly wit. It's mercifully shorn of the unwieldy and tedious detail to which so many historians subject their readers. The structure is crisp and orderly, and moves swiftly. The author seems to enjoy peeling back the layers of this larger-than-life tale as much as the reader will, and we can thank Schneider for unveiling this vital piece of American history.

Amazing story of 400 Spanish explorers who walked into the bush of southern Florida in the 1520s and disappeared - eight years later four survivors showed up naked in Mexico with nothing but a few hundred friendly Indians in tow. In the intervening 8 years it was one page-turning adventure after the next, mostly dire tales of starvation, violence and exotic peoples, but also the spinning wheel of fortune from conquerer to slave and back again. They were the first to enter North America and cross it, encountering countless tribes and customs of the new world that within a century or two completely vanished. An otherwise little known story today, it was a classic best-seller in the 16th century, retold here with the latest scholarly findings.

Note: the original story was by Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca called "Castaways" (1555) (also goes by other names) and is still highly readable and widely available in modern English translation, it is a classic of 16th century literature. National Geographic ranks Cabeza de Vaca's narrative #63 on their "100 Best Adventure Books" list. I have not read it and wonder how it compares with this modern retelling.

Schneider's retelling is as good as "Over the Edge of the World" ("Brutal" takes place about 12 years after Magellan's expedition returned to Spain). Where Cabeza de Vaca's narrative has blank spots Schneider fills in from a lot of other sources. For the non-specialist this book is a synthesis of a lot of scholary research and discoveries, and also just a great adventure story.

For everyone who wishes this book were made into a movie - your wishes WERE granted in 1993 when "Cabeza de Vaca" (winner of 8 international film awards) was released by Roger Corman - directed by Mexican director Nicolas Echevarria. When I first saw the movie, it just blew me away. This movie inspired me to find and read "Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America" (University of New Mexico Press)- the translated account of de Vaca's report to the king of Spain (obviously one of the many sources for Schneider). I do believe I bought my VHS copy of "Cabeza de Vaca" from Amazon.com (haven't checked to see if it is available in DVD - hopefully so) If you liked Schneider's book, then find, buy, and ENJOY this remarkable film.

This is a story you want to read about as an armchair explorer. You certainly wouldn't want to live it. It is a tale of suffering. Starvation, torture, cannibalism, slavery, and dealing with various Indian tribes in addition to endurance survivors didn't realize they were capable of all were factors that had to be dealt with in this trip from Florida across the Gulf of Mexico, down the southeast coast of Texas and into Mexico. The author uses Cabeza de Vaca's journal as his primary source for his information, and admits that guesses have to be made at times in determining what may have occurred. Cabeza de Vaca's account of the trip was written some years following the trip in an attempt to acquire recognition and favors from the king of Spain and the public for his suffering, so this must be taken into account as well in determining how factual the account is. Of close to 400 people who started out on this trip only four survived. In addition to Cabeza de Vaca the only survivors were three others named Dorantes, Castillo, and a black Moroccan named Esteban. There are many excellent books involving exploration, especially those of Samuel Eliot Morison, and this one by author Paul Schneider provides us with a neglected subject regarding North American exploration.

If you want to read one book on Cabeza de Vaca's travels this is probably the one. Cabeza de Vaca was one of four survivors of a Spanish expedition to the United States in 1528. Landing in what is now Florida the expedition seemed fated for doom from the beginning. Lack of food and hostile Indians plagued the Spanish. Giving up all hope of gold and glory they built boats and attempted to sail to the Spanish settlements in Mexico by following the Gulf Coast. They were ship-wrecked near where Galveston, Texas is today.

Over the next few years Cabeza de Vaca and the other survivors lived with the Texas Indians and made their way toward the Spanish settlements in Mexico. In their wanderings the survivors crossed the continent before they finally encountered other Spanish on the Pacific Coast of Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca's account of his travels is the first -- and often the only -- report we have of the now vanished Indians living in Florida, Texas, and northern Mexico.

"Brutal Journey" is highly readable and in sync with up-to-date scholarship on Cabeza de Vaca. Speculation about the route of the Spaniards has inspired much impassioned scholarship and flag-waving patriotism. Did C de V remain mostly in Texas or was his route through northern Mexico? The author reflects the best guesses by scholars.

Smallchief

Because there are only two source documents (Cabeza de Vaca and the "Group") in existence about the Narvaez Expedition, Schneider spends a lot of the book hypothesising about what occurred. Much of Cabeza's memoir was written years after his recovery, and was written to impress both his audience and the King of Spain. So that it is difficult to tell what are 'recovered' memories and what are fantasies.

The book begins slowly and doesn't build apace at all. The lead up to the beginning of the journey is unreasonably long and much of the middle is more about the sociology of the indians of the Gulf, and descriptions from the DeSoto Expedition, than about the Narvaez. Schnieder has done a formidable job of turning this into a full length book, but by having to stretch his information, has left a very thin veneer over a few interesting facts.

This is truly a laymens book, almost a comic book version of an historical treatise and should be taken with a large grain of salt. An epilogue would have worthwhile as to how Cabeza was received in Spain and what happened to the two other Spaniards, aside from them finding rich wives.

This is an engaging commentary on Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca's account of his eight years of wandering in North America at the dawn of the European presence. I am grateful to the author for digesting so much of the available research and producing this book for the general reader. It does not take the place of the account itself, however, which ought to be read in its entirety.

Not fiction, it is the true story of the Cabeza de Vaca's unplanned early-16th-century prolonged confrontation with nature, at times without so much as a stitch of clothing, without the foggiest idea of where he was, really, except in a land where contact with natives was generally treacherous and deadly and only rarely peaceful. The Spanish title of his story is Naufragios (Shipwrecks). Of some 300 hundred in the original party, only four survived, not counting one and possibly a very few others who remained with native Americans, never to return. The account makes it clear how improbable the return of even those four was.

I was a little disappointed to find no explanation in this book for something that has always puzzled me in Cabeza de Vaca's story: How exactly were the pickly pears harvested and eaten? Schneider writes, "Pickly pears that size have trunks like trees, thorns like hyperdermic needles. The fruits themselves are covered with barbed peach fuzz that is almost worse than the thorns. But no one cared: everybody's skin was too tough, and the pulpy, juicy, bittersweet taste was too delicious to be bothered by such a minor annoyance." (p. 251) Even though everybody's skin was tough, I am puzzled. This plant has a splendid defense against the harvesting of its fruit. The same part of the story calls this time the happiest and most convivial of times, because stomachs, usually empty, were then filled with the fruit. But there is nothing quite like that barbed peach fuzz to impinge on anybody's happiness. Tiny barbed thorns of that type work themselves well into the skin and are very irritating. Schneider mentions sticks used to beat paths into the thorny mazes, but this is the only utensil mentioned. Cabeza de Vaca himself simply does not go into the details; he does not say that everybody's skin was too tough. Even the tough-skinned would eventually want to use some kind of tool, it seems to me. The Indians ate this fruit in season every year. This is not to doubt the account at all, simply to say that, all in all, something remains to be explained here.

There are, of course, other unanswered questions. Obviously, to deal with all in detail would have required a much longer book. How exactly were the boats made in which the Narvaez group fled westward from Florida? (This business of boat construction arises in some other exploration accounts. Many years later, for example, a missionary group under Eusebio Kino improvised construction of boats to cross the Gulf of California to Baja California and back.) This is much more easily said than done, of course, and leaves us wondering how it was accomplished. We are told that bellows were made of animal skin to improvise a forge for melting down metal. Sails were sewn from shirts. Pitch was collected from pines. And all this was accomplished by men nearly starving, continually falling sick, and threatened by hostiles. They did it to save their lives, and I do not deny that, under that impulse, it can be done; but I do wonder if anybody has ever tried to duplicate the feat after the fashion of Thor Heyerdahl and to document the attempt, just to shed some light on the subject.

I appreciated the author's quotation from Cervantes prefacing the bibliography. I took it as a note of humility, one refreshing because a little unusual and therefore not pro-forma, one putting the whole writing enterprise into perspective, which seems especially called for in a book on this subject. Recently I was telling somebody about Cabeza de Vaca, and she asked if he took notes during his wanderings. I realized how far I had failed to convey the nature of the story and had to explain that much of the time he was totally lost and had absolutely nothing with him, not even clothes to wear, so there was hardly any question of taking notes.

`Brutal Journey' retells one of the most incredible (and least know) chapters of the early European exploration of the Americas - the spectacular failure of Panfilo de Narvaez in his attempt to conquer the Gulf Coast of North America, and the ordeal of the four men (out of an original four hundred) who survived. Though the story had already been told in a first hand account by survivor Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca in his `Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America', there was amble reason for Schneider to revisit and expand upon this fascinating story.

Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior relates the failure of the Narvaez expedition, the fate of the nearly 400 men who perished, and the incredible experiences of the four who survived to walk out of the North American wilderness eight years later. It is as thrilling a non fiction tale as you will find, but has certain drawbacks. Cabeza de Vaca was not primarily a writer, and his narrative was written as a report to impress his king, not for a wide audience. Though it covers eight years, it is a slim volume - less than two hundred pages, and it offers little background information, plus often skips details and scrambles chronology.

Paul Schneider addresses all of these shortcomings in `Brutal Journey'. While using Adventures in the Unknown Interior as his starting point, he fills it out both with background and details. He tells the history of Panfilo de Narvaez's earlier exploits in Mexico and Cuba, and gives insight into his personality and character. This not only helps to explain his failed expedition to Florida and the Gulf Coast and the personality conflict that he had with Cabeza de Vaca, but also sheds some light on the way in which Spain went about conquering and colonizing in America. Schneider also draws on details that were not available to Cabeza de Vaca, using both the modern archeological record and the accounts of the de Soto expedition to fill in details about Native tribes and actual locations of the tale's action. He attempts to sort out the chronology where de Vaca scrambled it. Finally, and most importantly, Schneider is a better writer than was Cabeza de Vaca, and his excellent prose helps to make this amazing story more accessible to modern readers.

Whether or not you have already read `Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior', you should find Schneider's `Brutal Journey' an outstanding reading experience. If you have read de Vaca's narrative, it will expand your knowledge and understanding of its events. If you have not, it will be an excellent introduction to this fascinating and exciting chapter of early American history - I recommend it highly.

Theo Logos

A very well written re-telling of Cabeza de Vaca's 8 year journey from the swamps and marshes of Florida to the canyons of northern Mexico. For 7 of these years, the four survivors of the original 400-person expedition were captives of various Indian tribes along the Texas Gulf coast.
What is most intriguing about this journey, beyond the simple will to survive under horrendous conditions of periodic starvation, climatic extremes and ever-present mosquitoes, is the sudden transformation of the four travellers, Cabeza, Dorantes, Castillo and Esteban, from essentially slaves to powerful shamans. As shamans they attract hordes of followers who reverently pass them on from community to community on their year long trek across Mexico from the Gulf to the Pacific. Schneider recounts Cabeza's tales of curing the sick, making the blind see, raising the dead and inflicting mysterious deaths! Cabeza de Vaca makes no claim to any medical knowledge on the part of the four shamans: The cures simply happen with a few incantations in Latin and frequent Signs of the Cross. The story is so outrageous as to be beyond belief. But the net effects are verifiable in that Cabeza et al. were able to persuade hundreds of their Indian followers, who were hiding from raiding parties of Spanish looking for slaves, to leave their remote hiding places and peaceably walk into the camp of their would be enslavers bearing much needed food. (Presumably the Captain of the slaving party recounted this amazing event to his Governor who duly recorded them.)
Schneider briefly alludes to some unconvincing explanations of the behavior of the Indians but largely leaves it unexplored. This is a puzzle worthy of more detailed exploration.

I read this book in one sitting. From the first page, Schneider's ability to weave a complicated but driving story without sacrificing historical accuracy, had me hooked. The book is an adventure story like none other -- it would make a fantastic movie. But it also so much more than that. Schneider is a terrific historian and he paints subtle but brilliant portraits of cultures and cultural conflicts. The secret is in the details -- Schneider manages to bring us through a thrilling adventure while educating us about the historical climate, the cultures involved and the political stakes. This is, in other words, an eminent work of scholarship at the same time that it's a steamingly good read. Plus, it isn't just the story of a bunch of greedy Spaniards. Schneider uses the story of this journey to take us on a tour of the Native cultures along the route -- _before_ they were decimated by disease and warfare -- so what you get is an amazing portrait of powerful cultures in contact. He shows, step by step, how these Spanish (and African and Jewish and Muslim and Native) men were changed by their experience, until finally they were literally and culturally naked in the face of the New World.