Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

Spanish geographer and explorer

• Born: c. 1490
• Birthplace: Jerez de la Frontera, Castile (now in Spain)
• Died: c. 1560
• Place of death: Spain

Cabeza de Vaca’s capture by Native Americans in Texas unwittingly gave him the chance to explore the region in detail and write an invaluable account of the people and topography of Texas and northern Mexico, which stimulated further Spanish exploration.

Early Life

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (AHL-vahr NEWN-yayz kah-BAY-zah day VAH-kah) was the oldest of the four children of Francisco de Vera and Teresa Cabeza de Vaca. Cabeza de Vaca used his mother’s surname (which means “cow’s head”) because of its honored association in Spain with the struggle against the Islamic Moors. At a battle in 1212, an ancestor had used a cow’s head to designate an unmarked pass for Christian soldiers against the Moors. As a result of this action, which helped to win the victory, the ruler at the time had given the name “cow’s head” to the ancestors of Cabeza de Vaca’s mother.

Cabeza de Vaca’s parents died when he was young, and he lived with an aunt and uncle until he launched his career as a soldier. He began as a page while still in his teens and was involved in fighting in Italy. He received serious wounds at a battle near the Italian town of Ravenna in 1512. During the next fifteen years, Cabeza de Vaca fought in battles with the armies of the Spanish king against rebels and also in struggles with the French in Navarre.

Life’s Work

In 1527, Cabeza de Vaca joined the expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez that had been established to conquer Florida for Spain. The Spanish king, Charles I , designated Cabeza de Vaca as the treasurer and what was called the chief constable of the expedition. Five ships carrying six hundred people left for the Americas in June, 1527. The expedition soon encountered obstacles. More than one hundred of its members elected to remain at Santo Domingo. A significant number then perished in a hurricane in Cuba. By the time Narváez and his men had sailed from Cuba in April of 1528, there were only four hundred men left in his command. A few days later, the expedition made landfall in Florida and claimed the territory for Spain.

Then the expedition began to fall apart. Narváez decided to explore the interior and left his ships and supplies. Eventually he and his men found themselves running low on food. Attacks from North American Indians put the Spaniards in even greater danger. Narváez had his men build some crude barges, and he decided to head for Mexico, which he believed was not far away. In fact, it was hundreds of miles distant.

The flotilla of five barges made good progress for a month and passed by the mouth of the Mississippi River. Then a violent storm scattered the vessels, two of which came to rest on an island near the Texas coast on November 6, 1528. Eighty men survived, including Cabeza de Vaca. They were alone in a wilderness, however, at a great distance from any settlement of their European comrades.

Cabeza de Vaca’s primary concern now was his own survival and eventual journey to Mexico to rejoin his countrymen. He later recalled that “the cold was severe, and our bodies were so emaciated the bones might be counted with little difficulty, having become the perfect figures of death.” He had no way of knowing that it would be seven years before he found his way back to Mexico and his own civilization.

For four years until 1532, Cabeza de Vaca lived among the American Indians of the Texas coast and ventured inland to trade goods with other tribes. He became a kind of medicine man to the American Indians in the area. Since he had no real medical skill, all he could do was pray over the sick and sometimes blow on their injuries. Cabeza de Vaca saw a great deal of the land because the American Indians ranged widely to find the prickly pear fruits and pecan nuts that formed the major part of their diet.

Throughout this part of his adventure, Cabeza de Vaca thought constantly of escape, and he often considered his chances of making a break for freedom. Finally, he persuaded three other Spanish captives to go with him, though he would have made his expedition alone if necessary. By the autumn of 1534, he and his companions, Andrés Dorantes, a black slave named Estevanico (Esteván) , and Alonso del Castillo Maldonaldo, fled southward in the direction of Mexico.

The exact route that they traversed has been the object of controversy. Because he was the first European to cross many Texas landmarks, Cabeza de Vaca has become a part of Texas nationalism or state identity. Modern efforts to trace Cabeza de Vaca’s steps through Texas and Mexico have indicated that “the four ragged castaways,” as Cabeza de Vaca’s party became known, spent twenty-two months on their route to Mexico. The final thirteen months saw the most sustained and purposeful travel. Their trek began in what is now known as southeast Texas near the Guadalupe River. They then moved southward toward the Rio Grande. They crossed that waterway near the location of what is now the International Falcon Reservoir.

At the Rio Grande, they turned northwest and went in the direction of the present-day city of El Paso. Thinking that they could reach Spanish settlements on the Pacific coast and eager to discover new lands, Cabeza de Vaca and his colleagues moved through northern Mexico and then headed south and east down the Pacific coast of Mexico. This detour added two thousand miles to their journey.

During this phase of Cabeza de Vaca’s trip, he once again practiced the medical skills he had used among the American Indians. He came on a man who had an arrow lodged near his heart. With a cauterized knife, Cabeza de Vaca removed the arrow and closed the incision that he had made. The success of this rough operation added to the four Spaniards’ fame among the American Indians. Cabeza de Vaca has become known as the “patron saint” of the Texas Surgical Society for having performed the first such operation within Texas.

Cabeza de Vaca and his associates encountered a band of Spanish slave hunters on April 11, 1536, marking the end of their ordeal in the wilderness. They then went on to Mexico City, arriving in July, 1536. Cabeza de Vaca wanted to leave for Spain immediately, but circumstances delayed his departure until the spring of 1537.

After he returned to Spain, Cabeza de Vaca prepared a detailed account of his years in the wilds of Texas and Mexico. His narrative, written during the three years after he came home and published in 1542, became known as La Relación . It later appeared in subsequent editions under the title Los Naufragios (the shipwrecks). Another source, written by Cabeza de Vaca and two of his companions on the trek, was prepared in Mexico in 1536. These two versions became classics of the period of Spanish colonization and are the basic sources for any understanding of Cabeza de Vaca as an explorer and historical figure.

Once back in Spain, Cabeza de Vaca was given the post of governor of the province of Rio de la Plata (what is now Paraguay) in 1540. There he tried without success to apply some of the lessons he had learned with the American Indians in Texas. His humane treatment of the indigenous people there aroused political opposition among the Spanish settlers and he was returned to Spain in chains to face charges of misrule. The legal proceedings against him resulted in his banishment for a time to North Africa. Eventually, he was cleared of the charges and returned to Spain, where he died in poverty, probably around 1560.

Significance

Cabeza de Vaca’s experience is one of the great sagas of the period of Spanish colonialism, and it won for him an enduring historical fame. His work was also important to the future course of Spanish activity in North America. Because of the clarity of Cabeza de Vaca’s account of his journeys, the Spanish in Mexico obtained a better sense of the geographical extent of Texas and northern Mexico. The information that Cabeza de Vaca provided also served to stimulate interest in the area north of where Cabeza de Vaca had traveled. Perhaps that region might contain the gold that animated so much of the Spanish impulse to conquer territory and subdue the Indians in the Americas.

To verify what Cabeza de Vaca had discovered, the Spanish authorities sent a priest, Friar Marcos de Niza , northward, along with Cabeza de Vaca’s companion, Estevanico, the black slave. During this expedition, Marcos de Niza viewed a Pueblo Indian settlement and saw what he believed to be the glitter of silver and gold. He interpreted his findings as specific evidence of the legendary Seven Cities of Cíbola that would contain the gold that the Spaniards had long sought. From this report stemmed the expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado that led to Spanish penetration of the interior of North America. In that sense, Cabeza de Vaca’s wanderings and subsequent reports of his adventures proved a significant turning point in the history of the Spanish presence in what would become Texas and the United States.

Bibliography

Adorno, Rolena, and Patrick Charles Pautz. Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. Volume 1 of this three-volume set contains Cabeza de Vaca’s own narrative of his adventures. Volumes two and three provide close readings and interpretations of the narrative together with analyses of the place of the work in literary history and the general history of Spanish exploration in the Americas.

Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez. The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca. Edited and translated by Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. A stand-alone edition of Adorno and Pautz’s critically praised translation of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative.

Campbell, T. N., and T. J. Campbell. Historic Indian Groups of the Choke Canyon Reservoir and Surrounding Area, Southern Texas. San Antonio: Center for Archaeological Research, University of Texas at San Antonio, 1981. Despite its title, this work is a valuable interpretation of Cabeza de Vaca’s route in Texas and the information that his account offers about Indian life and customs during the sixteenth century.

Chipman, Donald E. “Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.” In The New Handbook of Texas, edited by Ron Tyler et al. Vol. 4. Austin: Texas State Historical Association, 1996. The best brief biography of Cabeza de Vaca, with a good review of the issue of his route to Mexico and his historical significance.

Chipman, Donald E. “In Search of Cabeza de Vaca’s Route Across Texas: An Historiographical Survey.” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 91 (October, 1987): 127-148. An excellent survey of the long-standing controversy about the route that Cabeza de Vaca took to return to Mexico during the mid-1530’s.

González-Casanovas, Roberto J. Imperial Histories from Alfonso X to Inca Garcilaso: Revisionist Myths of Reconquest and Conquest. Potomac, Md.: Scripta Humanistica, 1997. Examines the political and ideological functions of official historiographies of Spanish conquest in the Americas and reconquest in Iberia. Includes a reading of Cabeza de Vaca’s narrative and the ways it authorizes Spanish colonialism. Includes bibliographic references and index.

Hedrick, Basil C., and Carroll Riley. The Journey of the Vaca Party: The Account of the Narvaez Expedition 1528-1536, as Related by Gonzalo de Oviedo y Valdes. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1974. A good translation of the so-called Joint Report of the expedition of which Cabeza de Vaca was a part.

Howard, David A. Conquistador in Chains: Cabeza de Vaca and the Indians of the Americas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997. A biography of Cabeza de Vaca that sees his Texas experience as a key influence in his change from exploiter to protector of the Native Americans in the Rio de la Plata province.