Part Three

WRITING HISTORY

Coat of Arms of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1542). Above the image is an example of a scribal hand characteristic of notarial documents of the mid-sixteenth century. The drawing is part of the case made against Cabeza de Vaca following his failure to govern the River Plate; he was accused of flying his own coat of arms from his ships instead of the royal banner as required. (Courtesy of Archivo General de Indias; MP Buenos Aires 220)

9

OVIEDO AND CABEZA DE VACA

THE HISTORIAN’S CRAFT is both the writing of history and the gathering and interpretation of evidence that makes such writing possible. It has been traditional to separate, as much as possible, these two aspects of the process, largely because it is generally desirable to do so for the sake of the reader, and because the detective maintains a sense of mystique by revealing no more than a glimpse of his methods. But from time to time it is necessary for the historian to tell the story of how a particular passage in history has come to be told in a certain way. This usually happens because the passage now needs to be rewritten, as is the case with my retelling of Esteban’s tale.

Esteban’s American adventure began when Pánfilo Narváez was granted a license by the Spanish king, Charles V, to conquer and settle the vast unknown lands that the Spaniards called Florida. Fortunately, there are two long contemporary accounts of what happened to the Narváez expedition and how Esteban and his three Spanish companions came to be the only survivors out of the 300 men who landed on North American soil in 1528. Those two accounts essentially tell the same story, but they differ in many ways, and many of those differences are significant. In fact, it is possible to write Esteban’s personal history only by analyzing those differences, while also looking at other documents that provide facts and details about the expedition. Therefore, before continuing with Esteban’s story and the history of what happened to Narváez’s expedition to Florida (which will begin again in Part Four), it is necessary to first explain something about the people behind the documentary evidence and the documents themselves.

By far the best-known version of the story, the account which most fascinates scholars and specialists, is a book produced by a commercial publisher in the Spanish city of Zamora, in 1542: Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s account of what happened to him in the Indies during the expedition on which Pánfilo de Narváez went as governor. It tells a sensational story, filled with awesome dangers and miracles that made it instantly popular. Readers soon began to call it Shipwrecks—Naufragios in Spanish—and this is the title by which it is usually known today. At the heart of this story is Cabeza de Vaca, who comes across as the hero of every adventure and the savior of his companions. Modern scholars sometimes seem just as bewitched by Shipwrecks’ improbable tale as Cabeza de Vaca’s sixteenth-century audiences were.

Before I read Shipwrecks I had the good fortune to come across the adventures of the four survivors in a work that is not nearly so well-known: The General and Natural History of the Indies, written by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés in the 1530s and 1540s. Oviedo, as he is usually known, was the official court chronicler of the Indies, appointed by Charles V to document the Spanish Empire in America.

So whereas Cabeza de Vaca gave an account of his adventures for his own benefit and to make a profit for his publishers, Oviedo had a corporate responsibility as historian royal. The two men wrote for very different reasons and from very different perspectives, and they were also very different in character and temperament.

Oviedo was born into the minor Spanish nobility in 1478, in Madrid, long before it became the capital of Spain. When he was still a child, his parents sent him to live as a servant in an aristocratic household. Strangely, for a man who wrote much about himself and his own worth, Oviedo had almost nothing to say about the mother and father who brought him into the world and so quickly gave him up. That silence has led some scholars to speculate that he may have been illegitimate or perhaps had Jewish ancestry, at a time when Spain was notoriously cruel to Jews and their descendants, even those who had converted to Christianity. But it is more likely that the snobbish royal chronicler preferred to forget the parents who had abandoned him to an uncertain and unloving childhood in the courtly world.

Almost from birth, Oviedo was destined for his long career as an acolyte to the ruling class. He spent his early childhood in the aristocratic household of the Duke of Villahermosa, who recommended the growing boy to the Catholic Monarchs as a suitable companion to Prince Juan, the sickly heir to the Spanish throne. The young Oviedo joined the royal court, a world of aristocracy and privilege that he knew would never be his. But for a time he lived like a prince. He was educated by the most erudite scholars and learned firsthand the ways and intrigues of the court. He also found his place in the world. The institutions of crown, court, and courtier were as parents to the future chronicler of the Indies, providing him material security and the opportunity to serve God and the King. In a sense, his only family was the world of government.

It tells us something of Oviedo’s essential warmth of heart that as he matured, this young man, who had suffered such a lack of intimacy and love in youth and childhood, should have fallen in love with his first wife deeply and devoutly. He met Margarita in Madrid, his birthplace, and they were married in about 1507, or perhaps before. He wrote that she was “one of the most beautiful women in the kingdom,” and, ever the historian, noted that there were many who could confirm that statement. His description of her beauty first focuses on her hair, which must have been striking. “In truth,” he wrote, “I have never in all my life set eyes on a woman with” such locks. Her hair, he said, was “so full and long that she always kept it plaited and doubled over to prevent it from dragging on the ground, for it was more than a hand in length longer than she was tall. Not that she was short,” he added, “but of medium build and with the perfect stature for a woman so well proportioned and as beautiful as she.” But this “exterior beauty” was the least important of her glories, for she was also virtuous, more so than any of her friends.

“As soon as we were married my dearest Margarita fell pregnant and after nine months she gave birth to a child. But it was a labor that lasted three days and nights, for the baby had died and they had to yank it out. And because only the top of the little creature’s head was showing, they had to smash open its skull and remove the brains in order to get a grip. Thus it was born, broken and putrid. And its mother was almost dead.” During that awful birth “her mass of golden locks went as white as the margins of the paper” in which Oviedo later wrote, he said. For six months, his beloved hovered on the brink of death, bedridden, paralyzed, and in pain. But she survived to bear him another child, a son, Francisco. Yet in that second birth death took Margarita for her own and left Oviedo to grieve even as he took solace in his newborn heir. Oviedo’s life was marked by such brutal highs and lows, swinging from tragedy and tribulation to hope and joy in a continual battering of his emotions. “God lent Margarita to me little more than three years,” Oviedo lamented. “But,” he concluded, “I cannot do justice in praising her and nor is it pertinent to this history to do so.”

Even in an age of brutal childbirth and maternal mortality, it is clear that the young Oviedo’s heart was broken by this tragedy. A chance to escape his grief was offered by war with France, and he readily accompanied his sovereign on that campaign. But he went as a bureaucrat, not as a soldier. He then served as secretary to the “Great Captain,” his namesake Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, the general of a Spanish army sent to fight in Italy. But Oviedo was unhappy as a secretary, and without his beloved Margarita. He determined, at the age of thirty-six, to begin a new life in the New World. He was neither the first nor the last to seek escape from personal tragedy by fleeing to America.

We can only imagine his excitement as he stood on deck as his ship sailed from Spain on April 11, 1514, heading for a continent that had first been discovered when he was only fourteen years old. As a teenage courtier, he himself had seen Columbus beg for royal support and had then seen that support given, in 1492. He then saw Columbus arrive triumphantly at Barcelona to claim his prize as Admiral of the Ocean Sea, with the Atlantic conquered but with almost all America still a blank space on European maps. Now he would see that strange New World for himself.

He now had the title “inspector of mines and slaves.” No longer a mere secretary or notary, he was a high-ranking crown official, and he would remain an official of the Crown throughout his years of service in the Indies. He sailed in hope, but would soon be disillusioned by the dishonesty of politics in the colonies, where life was cheap and great wealth was at hand for unscrupulous and self-serving men.

Oviedo opposed those self-serving Spanish captains who were loyal only to themselves. But in those lands, far from court and king, where strength was the law, the priggish, supercilious Oviedo with his aristocratic pretensions must have aroused fury in the breast of every Spanish brigand who hoped to enrich himself. There was an apparent attempt on his life, ordered by the corrupt officials he had angered with his impractical loyalty to the Crown. Oviedo survived, but he had been warned.

Around this time Oviedo escaped these traumas by writing Claribalte, a clichéd chivalric romance in the style of Amadis of Gaul, a work that is perhaps best left unread, but which has been described as the first American novel—although it has nothing American about it and was simply the first novel to be written in America. In any case Oviedo had become part of the New World, and he would soon embrace that new sense of an American identity in an extraordinary act of official homage to his new home: his General and Natural History of the Indies.

Oviedo learned many useful lessons from his fiery American baptism. Most important, he learned that reality in the New World was quite different from the outlandish stories usually told by adventurers when they returned to Spain. In time, he became determined to write a true account of what he had seen. He went to Spain and in 1526 published his Summary History of the Indies, a short work, which demonstrated his ability to convincingly document the Spanish experience of America with a strong sense of reality. Charles V was impressed and commissioned Oviedo to write the comprehensive General and Natural History of the Indies.

Oviedo combined his role as historian royal with the post of sheriff of the castle at Santo Domingo on Hispaniola, then the administrative center of the Spanish Empire in America. He settled into the comfortable life of a middle-aged bureaucrat and chronicler, documenting everything he could about the New World. But he wrote with the spirit and vision of a pioneer who had experienced great swings of fortune in America and, most importantly, he wrote most of the History while he was actually in the New World.

The History is a monumental compilation of information and stories. Writing it took Oviedo half his life, and it developed and evolved over time as Oviedo himself changed with age and experience. It was the first attempt ever by a European to give a comprehensive account of the Spanish conquest and exploration and to describe in depth what the Spaniards knew about both North and South America. As a result, Oviedo is rightly remembered by the few who know his work as the “first historian of natural history,” the “father of ethnography,” and “a High Priest of Truth.” But although he wrote the first great study of the New World and may correctly be described as the first European historian of America, Oviedo has been shamefully ignored by all but the most specialized scholars and experts.

Only the first of the three parts of the History were printed during his lifetime. For centuries, most of this encyclopedic source of information about sixteenth-century America remained unpublished. The manuscript was filed away, a quietly censored victim of Spanish imperial politics. It was not until the eighteenth century that Spanish historians began the arduous task of preparing his scattered notes and manuscripts for publication. But those historians fought petty campaigns amongst themselves over the bragging rights to write about Spain’s history. Oviedo’s manuscript was perhaps the most valuable prize in that bureaucratic battle.

Finally, in the 1850s, the Spanish Royal Academy published the first edition. But then, unbelievably, all those papers of incomparable value to the early history of America, which had been so carefully gathered together, were once more inexplicably and disgracefully scattered to the winds of fate. Some parts ended up in Seville, others in Madrid, and still others at the Huntington Library in California; the editor’s manuscript, from which that first edition had been typeset, ended up at the Hispanic Society of America in New York.

 

FOR THAT REASON, one bitter morning in December, I was looking for a bus on Madison Avenue. All about, signs may have wished me “Happy Holidays,” but the cold was bruising and no one was in the mood to stop and be helpful. After a while I could no longer feel my numb thighs. I finally found the bus stop and the bus, shaking and shuddering as though it too were shivering with the cold. I sat down by a window and watched us go through Manhattan, all gray and dreary with the winter in spite of the seasonal lights. The bus was busy and crowded at first as we headed north, but by the time we reached 102 Street I was the only passenger. I thought I must have made a mistake. The streets outside also seemed deserted.

Then we swung around a corner and I saw a little group waiting at another bus stop. Within a couple of stops the bus had filled up again, but the passengers were all African-Americans and the whole atmosphere changed. The driver struck up a conversation with a woman he knew and the man she was with, who was in a wheelchair. The gentle banter and chatter of the passengers reminded me of Seville.

But the yuletide spirit and bonhomie were short-lived. As we approached the looming mass of the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, a block or two north of Central Park, the bus once more began to empty. As it climbed toward Morningside Heights, I was again the last one left.

Then the tide turned again. Yuppie students and preppie academics and postgraduates crowded aboard, with their hushed conversations and gravitas. This was Columbia University, and for a few blocks I was reminded of Oxford or Cambridge and the homogenizing purpose of university life. But not for long—as we continued down the long hill to where the A train comes out of the tunnel and goes over a viaduct, I was once more the only person on the bus. And then Puerto Ricans and Domincans began getting on and I began counting the cross streets, keeping an eye out for the Hispanic Society of America.

It is a coincidence that Spanish Harlem expanded up the hill and around the run-down neoclassical grandeur of the Hispanic Society. The building dominates Audubon Terrace, a discreetly monumental plaza flanked by the kind of porticoed stone buildings that appealed to learned societies and museums in the nineteenth century. It was all meant to be the centerpiece of a rich men’s suburb, conveniently on the way to Washington Heights. But today the Hispanic Society is instead surrounded by Hispanic immigrants, many of them Hispanic African-Americans.

Audubon Terrace is a strange and unexpected place, slightly sinister. The paltry shadows cast on the piles of graying snow by the half-light of a prolonged December dawn gave it an almost unbearable melancholy. Beyond the double swinging doors of thick glass and solid wood, the hallway was dark, as though still lit by gaslight. Ahead, the courtyard—with its gallery of ancient Spaniards gazing down from their lacquered, or gilded frames—was more peaceful than the medieval monasteries of Spain from which the architectural fabric of the collection had been acquired and brought to New York. It feels like a place of prayer, a labyrinth of the past in which to meditate, but I was briefly puzzled about how far into the past it might really take me. The Hispanic Society had evidently changed little since the nineteenth century. When it opened, it was a brave new world of American scholarship that Prescott, Wright, or Fiske would have entered with wonder, probably awed by its brash, very modern atmosphere of ambition. But today, like Miguel de Cervantes’s great literary character Don Quixote, who tried to go back to a life of medieval chivalry, the Hispanic Society of America is stuck in its Victorian past. Also like Don Quixote, it inhabits a distant and almost forgotten corner of the world. As well as being a museum of Spanish artifacts it is also a living reminder of what a museum was like in the nineteenth century; it teaches us how our ancestors tried to understand their past and their history.

To the left of the hallway there is a narrow vestibule with a relatively modern coatrack, perhaps dating from the 1970s. I hung up my coat as instructed by the half-lit concierge, an old man wearing a uniform cut to the dictates of yesteryear. There was an electric bellpush by a wooden door set in the paneling across the end of the room. I pushed the button and heard the bell ring inside.

I was soon admitted to the library. I had traveled here, to an alien corner of a foreign land, so that I could get to know, as best I might, a man who died almost 500 years ago. But that journey was more a pilgrimage than a mission, for I had in fact brought with me a photocopy of a more reliable manuscript of Oviedo’s account of the Narváez expedition the original of which is in the Columbus Library, La Colombina, in Seville.

Oviedo had died brokenhearted because he never saw his completed History in print, and at the Hispanic Society I was filled with a tragic sense of the past, overwhelmed by my feelings of proximity and distance from the actors who walked the stage of history and the people who wrote about them. With the documents in front of me, I could almost reach out and touch some of that history, but there were too many sights that had to be left unseen, and far too many voices that had to be left unheard. There is a deep melancholy in that incompleteness, a melancholy Oviedo could understand. I was thankful when the day came to an end and I left the Hispanic Society and went back out into the real world again.

In the winter twilight, I began to walk back downtown along Broadway. I had agreed to meet some friends at the steps of the New York Public Library, partly to make a familiar cliché of modern cinema part of my own reality, but also because the library owns one of the very few original, 1542 editions of Cabeza de Vaca’s Shipwrecks. I had already worked with another of these rare copies at the British Library in London, so my visit to the New York Public Library was capriciously symbolic rather than a scholarly necessity, rather as my time at the Hispanic Society had been. But, as the gloom of evening gathered and I watched downtown Manhattan light up in the night sky beyond Central Park, I realized that strange forces of coincidence and history were at play. It was as though the Fates had symbolically determined that that first edition of the sensational and much published Shipwrecks should find a home within that quintessentially popular icon of western learning, the New York Public Library, while, by contrast, Oviedo’s scholarly History, with its more understated account of the first crossing of North America, lies almost abandoned in a nearly forgotten library on the fringes of the scholarly world, at 155 Street and Broadway. Nothing could reflect better the way historians have misused these two sources, always preferring the storytelling of Shipwrecks to Oviedo’s more sober History.

 

THERE IS A moment in Oviedo’s History—a moment that has gone unnoticed by many scholars—when the Historian Royal passes judgment on Cabeza de Vaca and Shipwrecks. Oviedo explained that to write his version of how Esteban and his companions survived the Narváez expedition, he worked closely from a letter or “report sent to the royal officials residing in this city of Santo Domingo by the three noblemen, called Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, Andrés Dorantes, and Alonso del Castillo. They went with Pánfilo Narváez himself and gave account in written form of what had happened on their journey and where they went.” (Esteban is not mentioned—an indication that, as far as the Spanish administration was concerned, he was not considered an important witness to the events.) This report, Oviedo noted, had been mailed from Havana, Cuba, in 1539, where the three Spaniards had stopped off on their way to Spain.

Oviedo then wrote his account of the expedition from the letter of 1539 while he was still in Santo Domingo, probably in 1540 and 1541. He then took the growing manuscript of his History to Spain, and in 1547 he met with Cabeza de Vaca in Madrid. After that meeting, and after Oviedo had read Shipwrecks, he added an extra, final chapter to his account of the first crossing of America. In effect, that extra chapter is a commentary on Shipwrecks.

“I believe,” Oviedo concluded in this review, “that the better account is the one written by all three survivors, for it has greater clarity than this other one, Shipwrecks, which was written by just one man.”

As a conscientious historian, Oviedo would have preferred an account based on the corroborative testimony of three witnesses, as he states. He was no doubt also influenced by the fact that the 1539 letter was the first version of the story that he had read. But he also made it very clear that he was skeptical about Shipwrecks because of two definite failings: implausible information supplied with insufficient attention to detail; and, perhaps even more damningly, inaccurate sensationalism.

Oviedo pointed out that in this “later account Cabeza de Vaca claims that where they found the mountains [the Sierra Madre] they also saw samples of gold, kohl, iron, copper, and other metals.” But Oviedo goes on to comment sarcastically that, “I would like this explained with much greater clarity and detail.” By the time he was writing, Oviedo could be as good as certain that they had found nothing of the sort. He could be quite sure that Cabeza de Vaca was misrepresenting reality.

But Oviedo was even more thoroughly irritated by Cabeza de Vaca’s tendency to dramatize his story in a way that turned it into fiction. He was particularly annoyed by an account of an island on the Texas coast (probably Galveston) where some members of the expedition were shipwrecked in 1529.

“I cannot accept that Cabeza de Vaca gives this island the name Misfortune (Malhado) in his printed work,” Oviedo complained, “because it was not called anything in the first account.”

For Oviedo, the invention of the label Malhado must have been a particularly irritating example of Cabeza de Vaca’s love of embellishment and make-believe. It epitomized for Oviedo the way in which Shipwrecks shamelessly perverted history in the interests of a good story. Malhado was in fact the name of a fictional island in a best-selling chivalric romance, Palmerin of Olivia, a piece of pulp fiction second in popularity only to Amadis of Gaul. In Palmerin of Olivia, the wicked witch Malfada lived on the island of Malhado, where she turned visiting mariners into wild animals and then kept them prisoner, refusing to allow them to return to their ships. These victims were eventually saved by the hero of the novel, who used his chivalric magic and his supernatural, aristocratic powers to kill Malfada and rescue the unfortunate sailors from their spell.

As far as Oviedo was concerned, there was no place for such fantasies in serious reports about America.

In the case of Malhado, Oviedo was doubly troubled. The appearance of a fictional island in a “true” story upset his sense of historical decorum, and it also resulted in a dishonest and therefore innaccurate impression of the Texas Indians on the real island—who, far from casting evil spells over the survivors and turning them into animals, had given them food and shelter.

Cabeza de Vaca “has no right to give” the place “that name,” Oviedo stated bluntly. “On the contrary, he himself admits in both accounts that the Christians were well treated by the natives of that island.”

Oviedo’s antagonism toward Cabeza de Vaca is understandable at a personal level as well as professionally for they were quite different men. As the sun was setting on the Middle Ages, Cabeza de Vaca and Oviedo represented the old and the new, and when they met in Madrid in 1547, in a sense the past and the future of Spain met too.

Oviedo is an archetype of the “new men” needed by the Spanish crown: bureaucrats and administrators, men of government, not men of war. Although Oviedo was a child of the court, his lineage was not exalted, and his early experience made a strong foundation for his views on the social hierarchy. To him, a man’s birth was a matter of luck. He considered it madness for a bad man to claim nobility on the basis of lineage, but instead insisted that the root of nobility was individual virtue. Actions, for Oviedo, spoke louder than ancestry. Above all, Oviedo was a servant of Spain, a man who owed everything to his sovereign and the Spanish crown.

Cabeza de Vaca, by contrast, was born into a proud, ancient aristocratic family; his claim to nobility was unquestioned, and in that tradition he was a man of action and a man of the sword. Spanish aristocrats were imbued with a noble tradition of fighting on the frontier with Islam; their medieval forebears had won great estates on the battlefield and had shed their blood to make Spain Christian again. That, at least, was the legend by which the current aristocrats lived, a semifictional history on which they based a code of honor which dominated their public image and which had to be upheld.

Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was born in the 1490s amongst the sherry cellars and sun-blest wineries of Jerez de la Frontera, the paternal grandson of Pedro de Vera, conquistador of the Canary Islands. But in a period when people often changed and amended their names to suit whatever purpose might please them, he took his even more illustrious maternal surname, Cabeza de Vaca, aligning himself with a widespread and influential noble family of late medieval Spain. Without doubt, he had a pedigree and a noble birthright that would forever be denied Oviedo and his heirs.

Cabeza de Vaca’s immediate family was not rich, but as a child he served as a page boy, and later as a soldier in the Italian wars to which Oviedo had gone as a secretary. He then joined the household of Alonso de Guzmán, Duke of Medina Sidonia, head of one of the most powerful aristocratic families in Spain. He served the duke as a steward, a position that brought him responsibility for managing the household finances, and no doubt led him to be appointed treasurer of Narváez’s expedition to Florida.

For all his titular power and great wealth, the duke was effete and ineffectual, with a childlike mind trapped in the body of an adult man. In due course, his wife, Anne of Aragon, sued for divorce, saying that he was impotent. At a time when divorce was all but impossible, evidence was required, and so witnesses were called. One of these men testified that he and Cabeza de Vaca had agreed to send “a woman” to the duke’s bedchamber. She was a classy kind of call girl, and she “arrived clean, perfumed, and wearing a well-washed night-shirt that gave easy access…. They did this,” the witness explained, “in order to find out whether the duke was impotent, and the woman promised that she would work hard at the task.” Cabeza de Vaca and the witness secretly let the woman into the duke’s bedroom and shut the door, but almost immediately they heard their master cry out, “Leave me alone!” Listening intently at the door, the two servants then heard the woman talking lovingly to the duke, praising him, but even so he ordered her to leave. The woman then rushed out complaining that it was all a complete waste of time and she had gotten nowhere. “He is worthless!” she cried. Cabeza de Vaca was involved in two or three further attempts to get the duke interested in women, in the hope that he might learn how to satisfy his wife. But even though these experienced professionals kissed him and caressed him, “holding his member in their hands and trying to stimulate him,” it was all to no avail.

Such was the level of intimacy in courtly households of the period.

It is perhaps no surprise that the bookish parvenue Oviedo appears to have personally disliked the aristocratic Cabeza de Vaca, whose adventures in America seemed to outmatch anything Oviedo himself had experienced, and who had usurped the historian’s tools, his pen and paper, to write his own account of those adventures, an account which was promptly published, unlike Oviedo’s History. Oviedo no doubt wrote with considerable personal rancor, but he was also a loyal servant of the empire and he had political motives for finding fault with Cabeza de Vaca’s storytelling, for in 1547, Cabeza de Vaca had fallen out of favor with the Spanish crown and was under house arrest in Madrid.

Ten years before, in 1537, Cabeza de Vaca had skillfully wooed his royal audience in Spain with his thrilling tales of North America. He wove such a convincing story that Charles V offered him the governorship of a benighted colony on the River Plate, in modern Argentina and Paraguay. This gift was a poisoned chalice from which Cabeza de Vaca was reluctant to drink, but he knew that success in rescuing that outpost of empire could bring him unimagined glories. He fell into temptation and accepted the challenge. His rule on the River Plate, however, was an unmitigated disaster. The colonists and most of his own men turned on him, imprisoned him, and sent him back to Spain in chains. He had failed as a governor in South America just as he had failed as a conquistador and treasurer in North America. He was no asset to the empire; he was a commander whose men had mutinied. Cabeza de Vaca was now destitute, and Oviedo saw him as simply one more failed conquistador who had not understood the complexity of life in the Americas.

Despite Oviedo’s skepticism and despite the obvious embellishments and fantasies that make Shipwrecks an exciting story, Cabeza de Vaca’s storytelling has captured the hearts and minds of modern scholars and seduced readers ever since it was published. It is a gripping narrative worthy of Hollywood, a quintessentially American story of revenge and redemption familiar from westerns. The usual roles of Spanish conquistador and conquered Indian are reversed with brutal honesty. Now, the European is enslaved and harshly treated. But not for long—for this is also a story of Christian glory, and the four survivors eventually become revered holy men by spreading the gospel of Christ.

The secularizing western world has never been able shake off its cultural and religious heritage, and so Cabeza de Vaca’s confessional account of trial by tribulation and hardship that leads to final redemption and a restored sense of order in the peaceful subjection of Indians by Europeans appeals to something deep within the western psyche. The central figure who suffers and is redeemed is Cabeza de Vaca; his sufferings remind us of Christ or the travels of Saint Paul; his experience closely resembles the story of the prodigal son.

As a failed conquistador, Cabeza de Vaca has become an antihero for left-leaning critics, who can use him to assuage their sense of western guilt at the horrors of colonialism and the forging of modern America. But Cabeza de Vaca was no turncoat who “went native.” He did not betray his cultural heritage. He never ceased to be a European, and so his survival is the story of a white man’s struggle, the story of a founding father or a pioneer. “Our heroes suffered too,” is the cry of liberal pain.

And Cabeza de Vaca claimed that he had used his culture and knowledge to bring the benefits of western morality to a primitive people. He is a missionary, a man of God, of the true God. This image is so Christlike that for almost anyone steeped in modern Judeo-Christian culture he could never seem to be anything but a peace-loving hero. Amongst the chorus of voices convinced of his liberal sanctity there are few dissenters who suggest an alternative image of Cabeza de Vaca.

But Oviedo’s skepticism about Cabeza de Vaca’s version of events resonated with my own misgivings and doubts that had arisen as I read Shipwrecks. The basics of the two accounts were the same, but Shipwrecks was filled with surreal and supernatural stories about miraculous shamanism and divine intervention. Dead men stood up and began to walk; bushes burst into flames, providing heat on freezing nights; Cabeza de Vaca performed major surgery with a blunt knife. More than anything else, Cabeza de Vaca seemed to be the hero of every moment, always the center of attention, always the protagonist. Quite simply, I did not believe him.

Then, as I reread Oviedo’s History, I discovered that although it omitted the more bizarre and implausible miracle stories, it too seemed heavily biased. Andres Dorantes seemed to be Oviedo’s hero, always at the heart of the story. I began to wonder why. Why were the two versions different? Why were they different in the ways they were? What might these differences mean?

The origin of the differences between the two versions is relatively easy to explain, for the main storytellers, Cabeza de Vaca and Dorantes, parted company in 1537 and went on to lead very different lives, so that each had the opportunity to develop his own account to suit his own ends.

Almost as soon as the survivors reached the administrative center at Mexico City, they were required to make the official report to the Audiencia, and Viceroy Mendoza then sent that report to Spain. The following year, Dorantes and Cabeza de Vaca took ship for Spain; but they ended up on different vessels, and while Cabeza de Vaca reached Spain, Dorantes’s ship became lost on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and struggled back to Mexico eight months later.

Cabeza de Vaca took his own copy of Mendoza’s report with him and began to tamper with it during the voyage, adding stories of miracles and putting himself at the center of some of the more daring escapades. He no doubt tested these additions on his fellow passengers, to see which of his audacious embellishments would be believed. But he was not fibbing and boasting simply out of vanity; he had a very good reason to do so—he wanted to be appointed governor of Florida himself. These were the first embellishments and changes which Cabeza de Vaca made and which would end up in Shipwrecks.

Cabeza de Vaca was to be disappointed, for when he arrived in Spain he discovered that Hernando de Soto had already been appointed governor general of Florida and the preparations for a new expedition to the region were well advanced. His destiny was further disaster on the River Plate. But to ensure the success of Soto’s expedition, Charles V and his officials were eager to question Cabeza de Vaca; they wanted as much information about Florida as possible.

In the summer of 1537, unaware that Cabeza de Vaca had already landed in Lisbon and was on his way to court, Charles V ordered his officials in Seville to ensure that “if Cabeza de Vaca had not yet left for [the Royal Court] by such time as you receive this [order] send for him and have him make a sworn, written statement…describing everything he saw and learned and heard about the land, settlements, and peoples and then send it to us by the first post.”

Clearly the original report that the four survivors made in Mexico City lacked detail. Moreover, we know that once Cabeza de Vaca reached the court, he did indeed supply hundreds of such details, because Oviedo compiled a list of those additions. These were another layer of additions to the story, made by Cabeza de Vaca under interrogation by royal officials, which also found their way into Shipwrecks.

When Cabeza de Vaca reached the court, Soto invited him to take part in the expedition, but a Portuguese nobleman commented that he pompously refused “to go under another man’s flag.” Despite this, Cabeza de Vaca gave a glowing account of Florida, telling all those who asked that although he was sworn to secrecy “he could advise anyone to sell up everything they owned and go there and that by doing so they could not go wrong.” Given the experience of the four survivors, one has to wonder whether these reports were not deliberately and maliciously misleading. No doubt the publishers encouraged Cabeza de Vaca to include some of these exaggerations and fictions in Shipwrecks, to increase sales.

All this is enough to explain why Cabeza de Vaca was the hero of his own Shipwrecks and why it grew to be so different from the original report. He was painting a picture of himself as a tenacious survivor, a commander of Spaniards, and trusted by Indians. But while this explains the differences between Shipwrecks and Oviedo’s account, it does not account for why Dorantes was so obviously the hero of the latter.

I was to come across the answer to that question thanks to an extraordinary stroke of luck. I discovered a document that convinced me, beyond all reasonable doubt, that Dorantes alone had posted the 1539 letter which Oviedo used as his source for the story. That document also proved that, like Cabeza de Vaca before him, Dorantes was on his way to Spain to ask Charles V for some kind of favor—a job, some land, perhaps a pension. But whereas Cabeza de Vaca had very obviously turned Shipwrecks into a story that was almost as much fantasy as fiction, Dorantes’s changes and editing had been much more subtle—subtle enough to be overlooked by the assiduous Oviedo.

I avidly read the two versions of the story yet again. I began to read between the lines, not simply comparing the two, but trying to analyze the differences. As I did so, to my astonishment, I realized that in both accounts, whenever anything important happened, Esteban was there. His presence often went unremarked in the accounts, but it could be deduced from other references, which made it impossible that he had been anywhere else. Esteban quickly became an ever-present protagonist, concealed in the silence beneath the noisy words of the Spaniards.

Only then did the implausible stories about medicine men and witch doctors start to make sense. The question I asked myself was this: if it was true that those four survived because they became successful shamans, then which one of the four seems to you to be the most likely candidate for initiating that process?