by Tony Horwitz
Pressing on alone, Cabeza de Vaca found the only other survivors of Narváez’s three-hundred-man force: two Spaniards, and a “black Arab” who had come to La Florida as one of their slaves. They were all slaves now, to an Indian tribe, and Cabeza de Vaca became one, too. This was the low point of his journey, an unceasing round of forced labor and scarce food. The Indians were so hungry that they ate spiders, worms, powdered fish bones, dirt, even deer dung. Worst of all were the mosquitoes, which left everyone so bitten that they looked to Cabeza de Vaca like lepers. “I can affirm that no other affliction suffered in the world can equal this.”
He also wrote of native customs that shocked him, including what he called drunkenness, likely the result of smoking peyote or consuming it as tea. Women and the elderly, “the people they least esteem,” carried all loads. Fathers sometimes buried their young sons alive, in obedience to dreams, and fed newborn daughters to their dogs. They did this rather than let the girls be taken by the other tribes with whom they were constantly at war. “If their enemies were to marry their daughters, they would multiply so much that they would conquer them and take them as slaves.”
Cabeza de Vaca relates this dispassionately, and on the next page describes these same natives as “very merry people.” His writing about Indians is rarely judgmental, but nor is it romantic. Though many people today imagine early America as a gentle and bountiful paradise, Cabeza de Vaca depicts the lands he passed through as an impoverished and Hobbesian world, where all struggled against all for survival.
After more than a year of bondage, Cabeza de Vaca and the other three survivors escaped and fled west, subsisting on the juice of a cactus fruit (the prickly pear), until they encountered another Indian clan. The natives, having heard of bearded strangers who possessed the power to heal, came to one of the Spaniards, “telling him that their heads hurt a great deal, and begging him to cure them.” He prayed and made the sign of the cross, and “they immediately said that all their pain was gone.” The wanderers were rewarded with more venison than they could eat or carry.
Cabeza de Vaca, the most confident of the Spaniards, became the lead physician. He performed surgery, using a knife to remove an arrowhead from an Indian’s chest and sewing up the wound with a bone needle and deer sinew, and he even restored to health a man who had no pulse and appeared dead.
He attributed his medical success to divine mercy. But natives had their own beliefs about illness and healing. After resurrecting the “dead” man, Cabeza de Vaca recorded Indians’ fear and awe of “Mr. Bad Thing,” a small, bearded figure who lived in the ground and never ate. Periodically, he rushed into lodges and drove a sharp flint into random victims, then pulled out their entrails; or he slashed and broke arms. Afterward he reset the bones and laid his hands on the wounds, instantly closing them. Indians may have associated the bearded Mr. Bad Thing with the strange men who had come among them.
As the Spaniards traveled on, passing from tribe to tribe as celebrated medicine men, the Account becomes gradually more mystical and surreal. Naked as the natives, the nomads broiled under the desert sun. “Since we were not used to this, we shed our skins twice a year like serpents.” Covered in sores, and pricked by thorns, Cabeza de Vaca consoled himself with thoughts of Christ’s much greater suffering. The Spaniards also adopted an ascetic air, to awe Indians. “They were astonished to see how little we ate. They never saw us get tired, and really we were so used to hardship that we did not feel tired.”
To amplify their aura of mystery and power, the Spaniards carried gourds given them by native shamans, and rarely talked to Indians. Instead, the black slave, Estevanico, acted as scout and intermediary: it was he who “always spoke to [natives] and informed himself about the roads we wished to travel and the villages that there were and about other things that we wanted to know.”
Gradually, an entourage of several thousand Indians began trailing the four men, reverently asking them to blow on and bless food and drink. These followers may have been using the Spaniards, too. At each settlement the Spaniards approached, their native escorts warned people that the bearded men were fearsome creatures, capable of bestowing life or death. Then the escorts sacked the village. The looted, in turn, joined the looters in pillaging the next place. Heralds ran ahead to announce the approach of this ecstatic, marauding procession.
Where it was headed isn’t clear. “We wanted to go towards the sunset,” Cabeza de Vaca wrote, offering a rare directional detail; his descriptions of the landscape and Indian customs also provide clues. But it’s impossible to reconstruct the Spaniards’ route with any precision. The best guess is that they walked across Texas and parts of the Southwest, and crossed into northern Mexico before reaching the Gulf of California.
Turning south along the coast, Cabeza de Vaca entered settled farmland and learned that “bearded men like us, with horses, lances and swords,” had terrorized natives and carried them off in chains. Though gladdened to hear “news of Christians,” he observed the desolation they’d wrought: burned villages, abandoned fields, natives living on tree bark.
Then, scouting ahead with Estevanico and a party of natives, Cabeza de Vaca encountered “four Christians on horseback.” The riders “were quite perturbed to see me so strangely dressed and in the company of Indians,” he wrote. “They looked at me for a long time, so astonished that they were not able to speak or ask me questions.”
After eight years and several thousand miles of wandering, Cabeza de Vaca was barely recognizable to the riders as a fellow countryman. Nor could natives “be persuaded to believe that we were the same as the other Christians.”
In a sense, they no longer were. The horsemen were slave raiders who wanted to seize the Indians trailing behind Cabeza de Vaca. He negotiated their safety before sending them home to their villages. But he later learned that the slave raiders had come back and attacked. “We wanted freedom for the Indians, and when we thought we had secured it, quite the opposite happened.”
So began Cabeza de Vaca’s return to a civilization that now felt foreign to him. He was given clothing but couldn’t wear it for many days, and was only able to sleep on the ground. Sailing home to Spain, he took up his pen in defense of the Indians he’d set out to conquer. “All these people, in order to be attracted to becoming Christians and subjects of your Imperial Majesty, need to be treated well,” he wrote. “This is a very sure way to accomplish this; indeed, there is no other way.”
THE ACCOUNT IS a curious document that can be read on many levels: as a travel adventure, a manifesto, a castaway story, a captivity narrative. It is also a spiritual memoir that echoes Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. At other points, the Account seems a precursor of classic American journeys into and across the continent. Like Huck Finn and Jim, the Spaniards and Estevanico wander a wilderness where “sivilized” rules no longer apply. Like the self-reliant heroes of Hollywood Westerns, Cabeza de Vaca often journeys alone through the vast empty spaces of America. The Account even evokes a psychedelic sixties road trip: four naked, shaggy guys, adrift in a desert of peyote-smoking shamans.
A British writer, Richard Grant, eloquently captures these resonances in his own nomadic travelogue, Ghost Riders. The Account feels “characteristically American,” he writes, because its author “had become an American by the time he wrote it. He had been through an odyssey that was not possible in Europe, and by the end of it he no longer thought or behaved like a European. In a sense, he had been conquered by America.”
IF THAT WERE the end of Cabeza de Vaca’s saga, it would represent an uplifting tale of two worlds, commingling rather than colliding. But his journey had a cruel coda, for both Cabeza de Vaca and his vision of peaceful coexistence. After writing the Account, he sailed from Spain to become governor of a troubled colony in South America. Landing in Brazil, Cabeza de Vaca decided to travel the rest of the way overland, embarking on another epic trek, this time through jungle.
Reaching his post in present-day Para
guay, he enacted reforms to protect Indians and the poor. But the colonists, accustomed to enslaving and looting natives, rose in revolt and arrested him. They charged him with assorted crimes, such as raising his family banner rather than the king’s, and sent him in chains to Spain, where authorities ordered him banished to a penal colony in North Africa. Though the sentence was later lifted, Cabeza de Vaca died in obscurity, at a time and place unknown.
His plea for kind treatment of the natives he’d encountered in North America was likewise betrayed. Soon after he and his fellow survivors reached Mexico in 1536, they gave a report to Spanish officials that previewed Cabeza de Vaca’s published account. What caught the attention of officials, however, wasn’t the generosity of poor natives: it was hints the travelers gave of riches in the land they’d wandered.
For instance, the nomads had been given a brass or copper bell, which, they were led to believe, came from a wealthy society to the north that smelted and cast metal. They were also given stones that Cabeza de Vaca called emeralds, brought from a mountainous region where “there were villages of many people and very large houses.” The stones were probably turquoise, and the populous villages the high-walled pueblos of the American Southwest.
This was enough to inflame the fevered imagination of settlers in New Spain, as colonized Mexico was known. Though Cabeza de Vaca sailed home in 1537, the viceroy of New Spain recruited one of his fellow castaways, Andrés Dorantes, to head back north and “learn the secret of those regions.” This agreement collapsed, but not before the viceroy had bought Dorantes’s slave, Estevanico. It was he, rather than Cabeza de Vaca, who would have a lasting impact on the history of North America.
WHILE READING THE Account, I’d highlighted every mention of Estevanico, and tracked footnotes in search of any scrap about him. In the annals of early America, it is extremely rare to find a slave described as an individual, or even named. I was also intrigued by the parallel between Estevanico and the American slave York, who played a crucial yet neglected part in the Lewis and Clark expedition.
According to the Account, Estevanico was a native of Morocco, presumably a Muslim who had converted to Christianity (Spain didn’t send infidels to the New World, at least not officially). His original name is unknown: Estevanico is a diminutive of Estevan, the Spanish rendering of Stephen. Some documents call him Estevanico de Dorantes—“Dorantes’s little Stephen,” or “Stevie.” At other times he’s referred to by his skin color only, as el negro.
Estevanico’s role in the Account, as interpreter and scout, suggests he was a skilled linguist and intermediary who moved easily between the worlds of Spaniards and Indians. Like Cabeza de Vaca, he also must have been a man of exceptional strength and stoicism to survive the eight-year ordeal. His new owner, the viceroy of New Spain, seems at least to have recognized these traits. In 1538, he sent Estevanico as guide on a mission to probe the unexplored region north of Mexico that had become known as Tierra Nueva: the New Land.
As leader of the reconnaissance party, the viceroy chose Fray Marcos de Niza, so called because he was from Nice, in southern France. The friar had traveled to Peru following Pizarro’s conquest of the Incas. Apparently, this qualified him as an expert who would recognize any other rich kingdom that existed in the mountains of Tierra Nueva.
In the viceroy’s written instructions to Marcos, he assured the friar that Estevanico had been ordered to obey the friar absolutely, as he would his own master. But soon after the expedition departed for the north, Estevanico raced ahead with a group of natives. Marcos, in a report he later gave to the viceroy, claimed that he’d dispatched “the Black” as an advance scout.
Other Spanish accounts tell a different story. According to one, Estevanico offended Marcos by “taking the women the Indians gave him, collecting turquoises, and amassing a quantity of both.” Also, the Indians “understood the Black better, because they had already seen him before.” As he proceeded north, Estevanico gathered an entourage of some three hundred natives and began carrying a gourd hung with bells and feathers, reinhabiting the role that Cabeza de Vaca’s troupe had played several years before. Now, Estevanico had the part to himself.
Before leaving Marcos, however, he agreed to keep the friar informed by sending back messengers bearing crosses. The size of the cross would signify the importance of what lay ahead. Soon after Estevanico’s departure, a messenger returned with a cross “the height of a man,” Marcos said. The courier told him that Estevanico had heard “a report of the greatest thing in the world”—seven great cities, their multistoried dwellings adorned with precious stones. The city dwellers were also “well dressed” in long cotton shirts, hides, and belts. This was significant, because Europeans associated clothes with civilization, and Indians’ frequent nakedness with the absence of it.
Soon after, another large cross arrived with a message urging Marcos to hurry; Estevanico was speeding toward the seven cities, which he called Cibola. As Marcos followed, he, too, met Indians who told of Cibola’s streets, plazas, and very tall buildings. The friar innocently asked whether “the men of that land had wings so they could climb to those upper stories. They laughed and pantomimed a ladder to me.”
The next message Marcos received wasn’t a cross but the arrival of bloodstained refugees from Estevanico’s party. A day before reaching the first of Cibola’s cities, they said, Estevanico had sent heralds ahead with his customary calling card: his ceremonial gourd and a message “that he was coming in order to make peace and heal them.” In response, one of Cibola’s leaders angrily flung the gourd to the ground and declared that anyone coming to the city would be killed.
Estevanico ignored this warning, only to be stripped of his turquoise and imprisoned in a building outside the walled city. When he and his native escorts tried to flee, the Cibolans attacked. One of the Indians who escaped said he’d seen no more of Estevanico. “We believe they shot him with arrows.”
Though frightened by this report, Fray Marcos nonetheless pressed ahead to see Cibola for himself, or so he later claimed. His report on the last leg of his journey is brief and lacking in fresh detail. Marcos said he reached a hill “within sight of Cibola” and glimpsed exactly what the Indians had described: a large settlement of tall, flat-roofed buildings, grander even than Mexico City. According to his native guides, it was also the least magnificent of the seven cities. Having confirmed Cibola’s existence, Fray Marcos turned and raced back to Mexico, “with all the speed I could.”
Like the fountain of youth, the legend of seven enchanted cities ran deep in European belief. According to medieval lore, seven bishops had fled west from Portugal in the eighth century, to escape invading Moors, and had founded Antilia, also known as the Isle of the Seven Cities. In later centuries, sailors periodically claimed to have glimpsed Antilia, and the isle migrated around maps of the Ocean Sea: a floating fable. Some Europeans thought Columbus had found Antilia and nearby islands: hence the Antilles, still the name of a Caribbean archipelago.
Now the elusive Seven Cities had surfaced again, in Tierra Nueva. On the face of it, this made no sense: Cibola wasn’t an island. But in a world where marvels such as Mexico and Peru had only just been discovered, anything seemed possible. And the more Marcos talked, the more wondrous Cibola became. An irrepressible storyteller, he told his barber that Cibolans wore necklaces and belts of gold—a detail he hadn’t reported before and couldn’t have seen from his distant glimpse of the city. Marcos also told of camels, elephants, and creatures with a single horn that extended to their feet and forced them to eat while lying on their sides.
The viceroy, meanwhile, had wasted little time in acting on Marcos’s official report. He quickly organized a major expedition, spending 85,000 silver pesos of his own money. Early in 1540, just months after Marcos’s return, the friar was headed north again, as part of the largest army of conquest the Spanish had yet assembled in America.
MEN WHO TOOK part in this expedition would later write, in passing, abou
t Estevanico. While retracing his route, they learned from Indians that he had outraged the people of Cibola by demanding turquoise and women. Also, “it seemed nonsense to [Cibolans] to say that the land he was coming from was one of white people who had sent him, when he was black.” They concluded he was a “spy or guide for some people who were trying to come to conquer them,” which was essentially the case.
Nowhere in the half dozen Spanish accounts of Estevanico’s journey is there any expression of regret over his death, or appreciation of his service. “He thought he could get all the reputation and honor himself,” one Spaniard wrote of the slave’s race ahead of Marcos, “and be considered bold and courageous.” But lust and greed undid him. Natives saw “he was a bad man and not like the Christians,” another Spaniard claimed. “He was touching their women, whom the Indians love more than themselves. Therefore they decided to kill him.”
Even if these reports were accurate, they described classic conquistador attributes: initiative, courage, and a hunger for glory and spoils, including women. Cortés was lionized for the same traits; for a black slave, they brought only censure and obscurity.
Estevanico’s trek with Cabeza de Vaca, and his discovery of Cibola, set in train the Spanish conquest of the southwestern United States. Yet this remarkable man—African, Arab, European slave, American healer, interlocutor between three continents and cultures—is barely remembered today, except at a small park named for him, in a barrio at the edge of Tucson.
CHAPTER 6
THE SOUTHWEST
TO THE SEVEN CITIES OF STONE