Starred review from September 10, 2007
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 Reséndez'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 Reséndez 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, Reséndez's narrative is a marvelous addition to the corpus of survival and adventure literature. 15 illus, 16 maps.
Starred review from November 1, 2007
Reséndez (history, Univ. of California, Davis) chronicles the adventures of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who, along with three other survivors of the ill-fated Pánfilo de Narváez 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. Reséndez 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
Copyright 2007 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
November 15, 2007
The saga of Cabeza de Vaca, chronicler of the catastrophic 1528 Narvez 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 Schneiders Brutal Journey (2006), the epic becomes something more in historian Res'ndezs account. While anchored to the desperate events of the journey, a possibility of alternative history informs Res'ndezs narrative, for the ordeal transformed Cabeza de Vacas 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 Narvez partys route, Res'ndez evocatively imparts Cabeza de Vacas personal experience of encountering and enduring, a totally alien world, touching on his conviction of Gods presence in his deliverance. Enriched by Res'ndezs sketches of Cabeza de Vacas three fellow survivalists, most fully of Estebanico, a black slave, this sophisticated history reflects and gratifies the considerable interest in the Narvez expedition.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)