Cabeza de Vaca

Malhado or The Island of Doom was the name Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca gave to an island off the Texas coast when he and accompanying Spaniards were shipwrecked. The island was not so much an island of doom for Cabeza de Vaca as it was for the native tribes living there. His accounts of cold, stormy weather that inhibited the Indians from pulling up roots to eat or for finding fish were completely focused on the dire threat of starvation of him and his people. Cabeza de Vaca accounts "their cane contraptions for catching fish yielded nothing; and the huts being very open, our men began to die. Five Christians quartered on the coast came to the extremity of eating each other. Only the body of the last one, whom nobody was left to eat, was found unconsumed. Their names were Sierra, Diego Lopez, Corral, Palacios, and Gonzalo Ruiz." While Cabeza de Vaca goes on to describe the 'strange' customs of the Malhado people, he neglects to emphasize the savageness of his own men who were capable of commiting cannibalism. He talks of a custom of the tribe which involved other people in the community providing food to a family who had lost a son or brother. "At a house where a son or brother may die, no one goes out for food for three months, the neighbors and other relatives providing what is eaten. Because of this custom, which the Indians literally would not break to save their lives, great hunger reigned in most houses while we resided there, it being a time of repeated deaths. Those who sought food worked hard, but they could get little in that severe season. That is why the Indians who kept me left the island by canoe for oyster bays on the main." While Sierra, Diego Lopez, Corral, Palacios, and Gonzalo Ruiz were capable of cannibalism to survive, the people of Malhado were willing to sacrifice all the food they had for their belief in the custom. Cabeza de Vaca mentions throughout his account of the uncivility and savageness of different natives he encounters. "The Indians, understanding our full plight, sat down and lamented for half an hour so loudly they could have been heard a long way off. It was amazing to see these wild, untaught savages howling like brutes in compassion for us. It intensified my own grief at our calamity and had the same effect on the other victims." He goes on to say how the indians brought back food for him and the other Spaniards. "In the morning, when they brought us fish and roots and acted in every way hospitably, we felt reassured and somewhat lost our anxiety of the sacrificial knife." It was the native people he describes who brought his people food and drink upon their arrival who were much more civil and hospitable than his own men. I was curious to see if the island of doom for Malhado had a specific location in today's geography. I found that historians have located its position and it is an island off the Texas coast known today as Galveston Island.

"All the houses and churches went down. We had to walk seven or eight together, locking arms, to keep from being blown away. Walking in the woods gave us as much fear as the tumbling houses, for the trees were falling, too, and could have killed us. We wandered all night in this raging tempest..."-Ch 1My version of the text didn't call it a hurricane. Did anyone else's? I just was struck by this because even though it was never identified as a hurricane, it was certainly clear exactly what the winds amounted to."found the buhíos deserted, the Indians having fled by canoe in the night. One of the buhíos was big enough to accommodate more than 300 people"-Ch 3I always think of wigwams as being smaller homes, suitable for only one family generally. This obviously contradicts this. Also in my text, this chapter seems to begin with kindness — the crew sends ahead a man who speaks and trades with the Indians. But then the rest of the crew arrives the next day and the Indians have disappeared. When I first read this I was slightly confused; now after having read further into the story I realize it's natural foreshadowing and quite clear.Also — the man traded "fish and venison for trinkets." Why couldn't "the Indians" find their own fish and venison? Were they being kind and accepting his unfair offer (the man likely couldn't make the trinkets), or could they really not hunt for fish and deer? Indeed, deer are native to North America. I don't understand why the European trader was offering up deer.Speaking of eating:"They [the Mariames people] cast away their daughters at birth; the dogs eat them ... if they were to marry off their daughters, the daughters would multiply their enemies until the latter overcame and enslaved the Mariames, who thus preferred to annihilate all daughters ... We asked why they did not themselves marry these girls. They said that marrying relatives would be a disgusting thing; it was far better to kill them than give them to either kin or foe."No part of this passage made sense to me. There are obviously other factors affecting this, but no wonder the Mariames Indians no longer live in Texas. How were they reproducing with flourish when they had to buy all of their wives? The neighboring Yguaces lead similar practices. Their food practices are astounding to us now — but not when I consider the dry stretch of land in what would today likely be Texas that they lived in. "Two or three kinds of root comprise their basic diet" even though much of that root is bitter (and slaved away at by the women, who spend "the wee hours heating the ovens to bake roots" as the "men bear no burdens" Ch 30). And otherwise they eat deer (apparently more skilled than the Indians first mentioned in Ch 2) and spiders, deer dung and poisonous vipers among other things we would never consider food today. I like that the drunks are described as drinking liquor from the cactus.And as depressing as these people sound food-wise (they must move every few days to find more nourishment,) they are described as having wonderful parties and being encouraging people at times of the prickly pear season — "Many times while we were among this people and there was nothing to eat for three or four days, they would try to revive our spirits by telling us not to be sad; soon there would be prickly pears in plenty." (Ch 30)I'm astounded generally by how poorly the Indian tribes de Vaca meets eat. Some stretches of land only have chacan (not-so-good juniper berries) to eat. Then in Chapter 47 de Vaca describes the methods the Indians use to cook without pots or pans. They're inventive ways, and contradict almost everything else I've read about food in this story. To me, and perhaps because de Vaca's view is stilted, the Indians do not seem to be the great farmers I've learned since elementary school they were.

Estevan: the slave that accompanied de Vaca (Artist Rendition)Cabeza de Vaca’s story is certainly a heart warmer after last week’s classes dealing with Columbus’ brutality and the genocide of the Caribbean’s native islanders. De Vaca’s journey may have started off as a typical conquistador narrative, where Indians are fought, killed, and forced to show the Spaniards where gold can be found, but it ends with de Vaca assimilating to some degree into the native culture and recognizing their fellow humanity. Unfortunately, the tales of the Indian sympathizer would for the most part only be used favorably for the natives long after the death of de Vaca. A contemporary reading of de Vaca’s tales underlines the natives’ continental trade routes as proof of a society far more advanced than what was generally believed in de Vaca’s time. Even when de Vaca returned to Spain and made direct pleas to the Spanish Crown to treat the natives more passive and justly, his words went unheard. Yet the most ironic and depressing consequence of de Vaca’s travels and accounts is the pivotal role that they played in later, terribly destructive expeditions into the American Southwest. Soon after de Vaca’s return, word got around that a credible (Spanish) source had purported that large Indian cities lay to the north of the known territories of New Spain. These cities were know to the Spaniards as the Seven Cities of Cibola and were thought to be very rich in gold. In actuality, the cities that de Vaca heard about through his native friends were adobe villages made from mud, which were deemed to be great cities by the nomadic native tribes. Yet despite the fact that de Vaca never claimed to have seen the Seven Cities of Cibola, Spanish Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza was convinced that the fabled cities existed and he wanted to claim them for himself and his God.

Lope de AguirreIn Cabeza de Vaca’s commentary, the odds of explorer-to-native finally make sense. Given numerous advantages over the foreigners, most importantly familiarity with land and climate, those who have been conquered in the previous stories we have read become the conquerors – or almost – at many points in Cabeza de Vaca’s expedition. While it is understandable that some of the first settlers to the Americas were revered as “men from the sky” (Columbus) and admired for their novelty, surely by the time that Cabeza de Vaca arrived in Florida many of the natives had wised up. That may be the case, but it is more likely that the inland tribes had a greater propensity towards violence due to their comparably constant need for self-defense; at least living on islands afforded a token more security than the persistent threat of invaders through the forest.

While reading Cabeza de Vaca I couldn’t help but think of a film that I watched with a critiquing class a few semesters ago. Though Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (Aguirre, the Wrath of God) the journey of the Spaniards here is through the Andes and not across what is now southwest America, the imagery and desperate tone of the explorers draws definite parallels.

Poster from the 1972 movieAguirre, filmed in Peru and Mexico in 1972, was written and directed by Oscar-nominated German Werner Herzog and stars a middle-aged Klaus Kinski. The plotline follows a group of Spaniards in search of El Dorado in 1560 and is based on the diary of Dominican monk Gaspar de Carvajal, who served as religious counsel on the expedition of Gonzalo Pizzaro. Despite speculation swirling around the production of Herzog’s manuscript, Kinski’s protagonist is rooted in history: the real Lope de Aguirre did in fact rebel against Pizzaro and lead a quest down the Amazon for El Dorado.

Obviously this is a different situation than presented in Cabeza de Vaca: here, the Spanish have a distinct power over their native slaves, in contrast to the constant violent barrage from the northern antagonist counterparts. Additionally, the expedition begins with relative opulence: the opening shots of Herzog’s film show men in full courtly garb, native slaves acting as servants, and even a handful of women on board the rafts they set afloat (Aguirre’s relationship with his daughter provides us with the sole glimpses of the main character’s humanity). Similarly, however, their numbers begin greater, their confidence steeper; the exceptionally drawn parallels between Cabeza de Vaca’s travelogue and the harrowing scenes from Aguirre become apparent as morale – and food – decreases.

This sense of desperation is what caused me to alight immediately on Herzog’s film; the depiction of the complete vulnerability of the Europeans in the “uncivilized” jungle, at the mercy of the elements, terrain, and natives seemed to me an excellent filmic example of the Cabeza de Vaca’s sentiment, at least at some points in his journey. Herzog amplifies the juxtaposition of the two cultures by including more evidence of courtly Spain and by making the wilderness even more of an unknown; here Cabeza de Vaca had an upper hand in knowing that there was evidence of Christian settlers before him, but Herzog’s Aguirre is subject to the vast darkness and eerie silence of the woods along the Amazon. By the end of the film the sense of isolation has driven him insane. It is a wonder to me that the same didn’t happen to Cabeza de Vaca, especially since he was constantly in native clutches and at risk of execution or sacrifice; perhaps the fact that his assailants were right in front of him provided comparable peace of mind.

        Performing the first surgery   Upon coming to North America, Cabeza de Vaca took on many unanticipated roles. Originally, he participated in the excursion as an explorer, along with hundreds of fellow Spanish conquistadores. However, once separated from most of his party, and living amongst the Native Americans, Cabeza de Vaca stepped into various positions including slave and merchant. One of the most interesting capacities Cabeza de Vaca fulfilled was that of healer.

Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación features several references to his healing people. One of the most detailed comes in chapter fifteen. Convinced that he and his companions are powerful men, the Native Americans refuse to give the Spaniards food until they try to heal the sick. Befuddled, the Spaniards make crosses over those who need healing. This practice depicts a strange convergence of European Catholicism with the animistic beliefs of the Native Americans. Cabeza de Vaca’s take on the incident is that it was merely a survival tactic—to get food. Meanwhile, the Native Americans remain convinced that the Spaniards posses special healing powers and feel as though they have been helped.

Modern Day Navajo Medicine Man

a vintage shaman I will be the first to admit that I grew up with an aversion to holistic medicine: I took one look at acupuncture and headed the other direction. But now, a bit more mature in my medical methods, I have become desperate for an ailment to my plaguing migraines. And while a part of the process is a lovely little prescription cocktail, the other sector is a cranial-sacral massage (read as: a modern day medicine woman travels with her inflatable mattress to my home and shifts the flow of my cranial fluid all with the power of her hands. Yes, it’s creepy at first.) The treatment gets really hot and I have to drink about four huge bottles of water afterwards to ease the dizziness. But trust me, her shaman-miracles (and her degree in occupational therapy) have saved me a few morphine-drip-trips to the ER.

Now traveling back in time: in Cabeza de Vaca’s “Account”, we find out that the medicine men get to have all the fun. They have the most freedom and can pile on the woman (and score, “there is great friendship and harmony” [60] among the felines) – but most of all they use rocks for beneficial powers and are showered with treasures. Cabeza de Vaca describes the natives’ practices in chapter 15, “When they are sick, they call a medicine man, and after they are cured they give him not only all their possessions, but also seek things from their relatives to give him. What the medicine man does is to make a cut where the pain is and suck around it.” But this is the part that we most readily know.

What I didn’t realize (until the internet enchanted me) was the connection between the shaman and music, which used some of the earliest forms of percussion (as reported by a European) with their “arietos” – the healing rattles made of dried gourds. Cabeza de Vaca writes, “They had hollow gourds with pebbles in them, which is a sign of great solemnity, since they bring them out only for dances and for healing ceremonies, and no one else dares touch them. They say that those gourds have powers and that they came from heaven, because there are none in that land.” (92) What is fascinating about this is that a contemporary composer by the name of Colin Matthews, some 500 years later, uses Cabeza de Vaca’s musical undertone as the inspiration for his piece: “The Great Journey of Àlvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca.”

It is a note-based interpretation of the text in the form of a cantata with one baritone voice and eight players. The ingenuity of the piece, aside from its literary origin, is that Matthews set strict limitations for the work. All the instruments and voice had to be European but the end result had to be “tribal.” Lina del Castillo, who analyzes these guidelines, suggests that this severity in instruction is an attempt at replicating the hardships that Cabeza de Vaca had to deal with during his travels. Basically, he had to make the most of what he had and Matthews focused the musical version around that sense of ingenuity by stripping the ensemble down to the bare essentials.

But more importantly, Matthews tries to mimic a disjointed harmony of communication that the Spanish traveler encountered time and time again throughout the narrative. Rushing rolls of percussion create tension with the wind section and the sole use of the Spanish language (which, as we know, is all Cabeza de Vaca had to work with.) Ironically enough, though Matthews had the “arietos” available to use, he chose not to – as a way to both complicate and simplify the creative and tense tonality. You can listen it to it HERE!!!

Cabeza De Vaca (Cow Head) Cabeza De Vaca What happened to hospitality?! In a few hundred years how did travelers go from Marco Polo and Ibn Battutah (who’s 705 birthday is today Jan 24) who relied on the kindness and hospitality of others to Columbus and Cabeza de Vaca who do not hesitate to take over villages, plunder supplies and attack natives. Where did this leap come from? How did strangers become enemies? I am trying to figure out where this mentality shift came from. How Indians become lesser beings? How did the relationship between traveler and host become a relationship of enemies? Is it because of the fact that they speak a language that Spaniards cannot understand or do not have interpreters for? Is it because the Indians are nude, or nearly nude? Is it because they did not have metal weapons or guns? Or is it more of a shift from the ideals of travel and exploration of conquering? In his travels through what is now the South-western part of the United states the group of land explorers engaged Indians in skirmish after skirmish. “As the Indians went by, our men attacked them and captured three of four of them, which we took on as guides from that point forward.” [De Vaca, 40]. Another example of their hostile guest-host relationship is when the explorers take over a village from which the Indians fled and only after being confronter returned their wives and children. The Spaniards were attacked twice; Cebeza de Vaca mentions that they managed to kill one Indian each time. The Spaniards stayed there 25 days living on the Indians supplies and in their village. That’s a far cry from the guest’s behavior at the beginning of the semester. Yet, what confuses me is that they meet other group of Indians with much kinder rituals. On the Isle of Misfortune they meet the Indians kindly. “We went with others to their dwellings and were well received.

Cabeza de Vaca spends years with a number of different groups of native North Americans, and even though they speak “a thousand” (as he claims) different languages (none of which are Spanish, or any European language for that matter), he still seems to know what exactly what they’re talking about all the time. He attributes their ability to communicate to an intricate sign language that all the natives understand. At first, this seems a little farfetched, and modern readers probably (and reasonably) doubt that he really had any kind of understanding of what these different people really thought or felt or what any of their practices and traditions meant. But in reality, Cabeza de Vaca’s stories about conversing in sign language are actually very plausible.

The nomadic Plains Indians of North America and Canada famously developed a complicated system of sign language because people constantly encountered other groups that spoke different languages. It was first studied in depth in the nineteenth century, and by then it was associated exclusively with people from farther north than anywhere Cabeza de Vaca ever went, but it is thought to have originated from the south—particularly Texas and Mexico.

By the eighteenth hundreds, when it was first studied and written down, the vocabulary included a lot of words that were results of contact with Europeans. Words like horse and hospital, infantry and bible and bicycle. But it is the simpler, more general concepts that don’t necessarily have anything to do with Europeans or post-contact life. It is easy to see how these signs could be easily understood by people of different tribes, different cultures, even different continents. The sign for “ascend” is to make a fist with one hand and then use the other to point up—it looks like the finger of one hand is climbing up the other, which is exactly what it’s supposed to stand for. In order to sign “fish,” a person just has to use their hands to imitate the way that fish swim, and “flag” is to hold one hand up—like a pole—and wave the other hand around right next to it, like a flag. And “fight” is exactly what a modern western person would think it would be—holding up fists and moving them back and forth a little bit. Sometimes, signs are as simple as pointing. Colors are communicated by making the sign for the word “color” and then pointing to something brown or red or black. And to say “footprints,” one would sign “walk” and “see” and then point to the ground. They also combined two or more easily signed words to suggest more complicated ideas. “Infantry,” then, is made up of the signs for white, solider, and walk. And “ugly” is “face” with “bad.”

A pretty interesting, if seemingly sparse, dictionary of the Plains Indian Sign Language is available here, and there’s a pretty interesting description of the history of the language too.

The New World

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación tells the meticulous stories of the first conquests on the North American continent in the mid 16th century. The title of his log is translated as “The Account,” but the word “relación” is commonly used as meaning “connection” in the Spanish language. The duplicity of the title reflects the text itself. While Cabeza de Vaca’s chronicle falls under the category of travel literature—accounts of what he found and where he found it, it is fundamentally a story about the connection between two separate cultures. As with Christopher Columbus, Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow officials, invade the new world with an ethnocentric mindset. Instead of respecting the cultures of the people already occupying the space, they have no intentions of trying to justify ‘savage’ actions and try to impose their own belief systems. Of course, the natives could care less about Christianity and the details conveyed through signing/hand gestures aren’t detailed enough to present a persuasive argument. There are many parallels as well as contrasts to Columbus evidenced in Cabeza de Vaca’s “The Account.” Like Columbus the foreigners were well received by the natives at first and, with good reason, relationships go south. Starting in chapter 11, “What Happened to Lope de Oviedo with Some Indians” and then continuing into “How the Indians Brought us Food” there is a striking similarity to Columbus and company’s first account of the Indians. As Cabeza de Vaca approaches a group of natives, they initially feel threatened and out numbered, but after exchanging a series of signs, they make a peaceful agreement: “As best we could we tried to reassure them and ourselves, and gave them beads and little bells. Each of them gave me an arrow, which is a sign of friendship. In sign language they told us that they would return in the morning and bring us food, since they did not have any at the time”(55). Not long after this peaceful exchange illness, starvation, and fighting erupts between both parties, forcing the Spanish “Christians” to resort to cannibalism. Cabeza de Vaca, as well as other of his predecessors, likes to make very clear distinctions between themselves and the so-called “savage” natives of the uncharted territories. Strangely enough, when times get rough, this line dissolves and the two parties seem more similar than different.Cabeza de Vaca’s discoveries read in a similar way that Herodotus’s do—in as close to a narrative form we’ve come. This was an interesting contrast to Columbus as well, whose writing was much more scientific. Instead of the monotony of everyday encounters, we feel the story of the discovery. In an article I read at PBS.com, they describe Cabeza de Vaca as being of noble birth, which also contrasts Columbus and his desire to social climb himself to eternal fame.

Shipwreck art

Unlike Columbus, who for some reason pretended to be fluent in the Arawak language, Cabeza de Vaca lets his readers know that, just as Columbus probably did, he often had no idea what the American Indians he encountered were saying to him. Columbus (or whoever put together his writings) always “knew” exactly when the Arawak thought he was a god, wanted to give him gold, and were amazed by his gifts. Cabeza de Vaca, on the other hand, encounters a number of American Indian peoples, but admits his lack of understanding in his writing. For instance, he writes, “the Indians of the town came and spoke to us; but as we had no interpreter we could not understand what they meant. They made many signs and menaces, and appeared to say we must go away from the country. With this they left us and went off, offering no interruption.”

In fact, there are a number of places where Cabeza de Vaca admits to a failure of communication. Later when talking of a different encounter with the American Indians, he writes “Above all, that we were going without being able to communicate with the Indians by use of speech and without an interpreter, and we could but poorly understand ourselves with them, or learn what we desired to know of the land.”

Then he goes on to write, “We were…entering a country of which we had no account, and had no knowledge of its character, of what there was in it, or by what people inhabited, neither did we know in what part of it we were; and beside all this, we had not food to sustain us in wandering we knew not whither.” Here Cabeza de Vaca even displays what looks like fear and humility, which seems like it must have been a rarity among the Europeans who set out to conquer the Americas. He seems unsure about traveling in the vast foreign unexplored land before him.

He also writes extensively about the hardships of exploring the “New World.” He gives almost heartbreaking accounts of the storms at sea, ships capsizing, comrades shot down in ambushes, and the starvation he experienced. Cabeza de Vaca gives us what looks to me like a more honest account of European exploratory travels to the Americas – a story of hardship, fear, and amazement at the completely foreign world the writer has entered. I felt that Cabeza de Vaca gave the most honest account of his experience in the Americas, and because of that it felt to me like it was maybe the most accurate and complete travel account we’ve read yet.