EVERY YEAR, IN THE late summer, the relentless rotation of the seasons brought together all the Karankawa groups and other Indian tribes in an area somewhere south of the Nueces River. They came to eat tunas, the red-purple fruit of the prickly pear cactus, a sprawling, olive-green plant that is ubiquitous in the deserts of the American Southwest. These plants were a rich source of sustenance in the harsh world of the Texas Indians.
“It was the best time of year for these people,” Dorantes told the Mexican Audiencia. “For, although they have almost nothing else to eat other than these prickly pears and a few snails they search for, they fill their bellies day and night. That makes them very happy, because for the rest of the year they waste away from hunger.”
The same, of course, must have been true for the survivors. But they had another important reason to look forward to the prickly pear season. The great gathering of tribes and nations throughout the tuna fields was a vibrant social occasion, a time to make alliances and find a mate. As the Indians socialized, the four survivors also had the chance to spend time with each other.
During the prickly pear season of 1533, Dorantes, Esteban, and Castillo began to plan their next move. The ripe fruit made a convenient food for travelers, so this was the right time of year for a journey.
Dorantes later claimed that Esteban and Castillo were reluctant to leave the Karankawa lands and people. That was no doubt because they had established a good if simple life for themselves as medicine men among the ancient Texan tribes, while their conservative companions lived perilously, disengaged from the world and people around them. But it is clear from both accounts that all three men eventually agreed it was best to move on. The fact that they had not once glimpsed a ship on the horizon in the gulf was perhaps decisive in persuading Esteban and Castillo to move away from the coast. With no hope of rescue, they knew that they would be entombed forever in the endless circularity of life on the coast. They yearned for action, for difference, for change. They wanted to be masters of their own futures.
Their first attempt at flight failed when a group of Indians quarreled over a woman. The different Karankawa bands exchanged punches and battered one another with sticks, until, enraged, they all went their separate ways and took the survivors with them, one hither, another thither, so that they were apart once more. The survivors endured the repetitious life for yet another year.
Throughout the prickly pear season in the summer of the following year, 1534, the survivors bided their time, waiting for an opportunity to escape. “Often,” Dorantes remembered, “we were on the verge of leaving, and yet it seemed our sins were our undoing, for we were split up and each of us was isolated from the others.” They then agreed that they must risk everything before the prickly pears ended. They decided on the next full moon as their trysting night, when they were to meet at an inland heath that they knew would be filled with ripe prickly pears. Their plans laid, they returned to their respective Indian families.
Each man struggled with his fears as the new September moon waxed each night, slowly unveiling her face as she rose evening by evening. Their eager impatience grew, tempered by paranoid reticence. Andrés Dorantes, by his own account, was again the first to take the risk and make the break. When he arrived at the rendezvous, he found the heath crowded with Indians who were eating the prickly pears. He approached them fearfully, but they welcomed him warmly. They were, it turned out, mortal enemies of his former tormentors, the Mariames.
Then, Oviedo reports, “after Dorantes had been there for three or four days, the black man arrived, following in his footsteps, and also Alonso del Castillo (for they came together).”
It is an important moment in Oviedo’s hierarchically minded History, a point at which the veil of his social prejudice briefly lifts to reveal the truth. Oviedo typically relegated Esteban to an almost invisible role and described him simply as el negro, barely ever mentioning him by name and frequently making no mention of him at all. It is therefore completely out of character that when describing the joint arrival of the noble, aristocratic Castillo and the lowly negro, he should refer to Esteban first and mention the Spaniard only as an evident afterthought.
The explanation must lie in the actual events of late September 1534. Dorantes, as he gave his testimony in Mexico, vividly remembered his first sight of the strong, powerful, reassuring figure of Esteban emerging from the undergrowth to greet him. Dorantes was overjoyed to see Esteban again. By contrast, he seems to have remembered the moment when Castillo appeared, lagging behind, as of secondary importance. In the Audiencia, Dorantes, perhaps unwittingly, revealed his true emotions of five years before, and the established social order was turned upside down in his account. Once again, history can be made to uncover the truth.
Someone—either Mendoza, a magistrate, or Oviedo himself—was so surprised by this strange narrative that he double-checked the information, and a note was added in parentheses to confirm that Castillo and Esteban had indeed “arrived together,” but that Esteban was described first in the account.
Dorantes had discovered from these friendly Indians that another stranger was waiting for them at a place farther on along the trail, clearly marked by columns of smoke visible in the distance. They all knew that the other fugitive must be Cabeza de Vaca, and Esteban and Dorantes set out at once in the hope of making contact with him before nightfall. The Indians were reluctant to let them go, and so Castillo remained behind. He reassured the Indians that his companions would soon return, explaining that they had gone to find their friend and bring him back. It seems that Castillo had, in effect, become a hostage.
As dusk gave way to night, Esteban and Dorantes came upon an Indian who led them to Cabeza de Vaca.
Providence now treated these resilient men kindly. In the morning, the Indians struck their camp and decided to go in search of a late harvest of prickly pears that, fortunately, was close to where Castillo was playing hostage. By this good luck the four were brought together once again. It was no time for hesitation.
“And so,” Oviedo recorded, “believing that it were better to do their duty as Christians and as noblemen, which each of them was, than to live like godless savages, they entrusted themselves to Our Lord” and fled. “And Jesus Christ in his infinite mercy guided them, showing them the paths they should follow, while God tamed the wild hearts of those indomitable savages.”
And so, that same day, they escaped and rushed headlong, with no idea of where they were going, through a hitherto hostile land. But just as Athene watched over strong Odysseus, so too the Virgin Mary or some pagan goddess of the Southwest now watched over the four survivors as the waxing moon nightly withdrew her presence from the wine-dark sky.
Although the four men found few ripe fruits on the prickly pears, there were enough to keep them going. Fear now drove them onward, until, in the late afternoon, “it pleased the Mother of God,” according to Oviedo, “that the very same day, at sunset, they came upon some Indians of the kind they had hoped for. They were very gentle and although they had heard something of the Christians, they knew nothing of how badly they had been treated.” This, the acerbic royal historian pointed out, “was a very good thing from the point of view of that bunch of sinners.”
Shipwrecks describes this felicitous change in the survivors’ condition in greater detail. “As we traveled, terrified that the Indians would follow us, we noticed smoke and we headed for it. Just before nightfall, we saw an Indian, but as soon as he saw that we were heading toward him, he ran off without waiting for us.
“We sent the black man after him.”
The Spaniards told their tale so that it reflected well on them, and as their superiors expected to hear it. Esteban remains, in the words on the page, an exemplary slave, subservient even under such a strain. By the perverted mores of slavery, even Esteban benefited from this lie. Yet the reality, in Texas in the fall of 1534, must have been otherwise. There was no subjugation among these wanderers, brothers now in a venture of survival. If Esteban went on ahead, it was because he agreed to do so.
And that tells us a lot about Esteban. It tells us that he was brave and that he was confident in his ability to communicate with the Indians. It also tells us something quite fundamental about his relationship with his former masters. It tells us, in fact, that in practice Esteban had become their leader, at least in the sense that he went first and blazed their trail. In this spirit of “nothing ventured, nothing gained,” he led the way, more intrepid than his former masters, more robust in temperament.
Because he went first, ahead of the party, Esteban now controlled the Indians’ understanding and image of the survivors. He was the first to meet the Indians, to talk with them, to tell them who he was and who the white men were. From this moment onward, Esteban became the agent of the survivors’ constant movement, negotiating with the Indians, choosing the roads they would take, the byways they would explore, and the nations and tribes they would meet.
For the Indians, the four survivors were an astonishing sight. They were amazed by the single mysterious figure at the forefront who was burned jet black by the southern sun. It was stranger still that the dark-skinned harbinger of hope should be accompanied by rude, ruddy, golden-skinned white men with flowing blond beards. But Esteban controlled that potentially powerful language of pigment and identity with precise dexterity and the Indians soon came to worship all the survivors as “Children of the Sun.”
So, Esteban alone followed the frightened Indian who had retreated from the four survivors. As soon as the Indian saw that the figure approaching him was alone, he stopped and waited, full of wonder.
“We are looking for the people making the smoke,” Esteban explained as best he could.
“I will take you to some houses near here,” the Indian replied.
All four survivors now followed this Indian guide and by the light of the setting sun, they saw the Indian encampment, the smoke rising out of the creeping darkness. As they came close, they found four Indians waiting for them beside the trail, ready to welcome them as gods. “In the language of the Mariames, we told them that we had come in search of them. They seemed happy to have us among them and took us to their dwellings.”
These Indians were known as the Avavares, and with winter approaching and the prickly pear season now finished, the survivors decided to spend the cold weather among these friendly people.
During the bleak winter of 1534 to 1535 they suffered terrible hunger, worse even than they had experienced during the years they spent on the coast. The Avavares were constantly on the move, in search of whatever food they could find, but often there was nothing to be had and the children “swelled up like toads” with malnutrition. Many nights death visited the tribe, and at first light they woke to find another Indian dead from disease, hunger, and cold.
They existed in that timeless world of mourning and survival, until August came, bringing another prickly pear season and very welcome relief from the privations they had suffered.
That summer of 1535, as soon as it was practicable to do so, Esteban set out with Cabeza de Vaca to make contact with a band of friendly Indians camped nearby. After a long day of travel during which they covered twenty miles across rough country without a trail, they reached the Indian camp. Three days later, Castillo and Dorantes caught up with them and they all then set out with the Indians to eat some kind of bean or pea, the fruit of some unidentifiable tree that has been subject of much scholarly speculation.
The beans were not yet ripe, and the survivors were once again desperately hungry. They managed to trade some of the animal pelts that had kept them warm over the winter for a couple of creatures described as “dogs.” They sat down to breakfast on the meat of these animals. Even proud Cabeza de Vaca, who had refused to eat horse meat on the shores of the Mexican Gulf, now feasted on the flesh of these quadrupeds of uncertain provenance.
They then continued their journey. All that day they traveled across a desert empty of people and sustenance. Suddenly, they were overtaken by a summer storm and in the deluge they lost their way and were forced to take shelter in the dense bush. They dug out a pit oven and filled it with pads from the prickly pear cactus, which they roasted overnight so that their breakfast would be ready at dawn.
The following day they came across a large Indian encampment of forty or fifty wigwams or tepees. They had crossed an important cultural frontier, leaving behind the Texas Karankawa and entering the Mexican world of the Coahuiltecans.
“And it was there,” Oviedo recorded, “that the Indians first began to fear these few Christians, holding them in great esteem and showing reverence for them. The Indians came up to them and began to rub themselves, gesturing to the Christians to rub and stroke them. They brought some sick people to be cured, which the Christians did,” Oviedo remarked, perhaps with considerable skepticism, “for all that they were more used to hardships than performing miracles.”
IT IS EVIDENT from Oviedo’s account that the letter Dorantes posted in Havana, in 1539, first described the survivors’ work as medicine men at this point in his story. Dorantes’s first experience of the survivors’ shamanism, it seems, was in the summer of 1535, when they initially made contact with the Coahuiltecans.
The same episode is also reported in Shipwrecks, although quite differently.
Because the editors of Shipwrecks had introduced a fictional first account of the survivors’ supernatural powers into the description of Malhado, they had left an unbridgeable gap between that fictional episode and the real first experience of shamanism, whichever of the four initiated it and wherever it had really taken place, whether among the Iguaces, or here among the Coahuiltecans. The editors then tried to fill that gap with a more elaborate account of shamanism, which was based on the same real events described by Oviedo as taking place in 1535 among the Chuihaltecans, but which they now set among the Avavares, in 1534, so that the episode took place earlier in the book.
The Avavares Indians, according to the rewritten Shipwrecks, took the survivors to their camp, where Esteban and Dorantes stayed with one Indian doctor and Castillo and Cabeza de Vaca with another:
The very same night that we arrived, some Indians came to Castillo and they explained that they were suffering from terrible headaches. They asked him to cure them and as soon as he made the sign of the cross over them and prayed for them, they claimed that they were cured. Then they went off to their dwellings and came back bringing plenty of tunas and some venison and there was so much that we had no idea what to do with all that meat.
Shipwrecks tells, in due course, that many Indians arrived one morning, bringing five comrades “who were paralyzed and very sick.” They came in search of “Castillo, so that he might cure them, and each of them offered him their bows and arrows. Castillo welcomed them and then at sunset he made the sign of the cross over them and prayed to Our Lord God.” All four survivors joined him in these prayers, hoping for a miracle, beseeching God to bless the Indians with good health, for they believed it to be the only way of persuading those people to help them escape “such a miserable existence.”
In the morning, the sick men, even those who were paralyzed, awoke fully recovered, astounding the Indians.
The survivors now moved on and joined another band who were eating prickly pears, and the Indians now flocked from far and wide in search of Castillo.
In Shipwrecks, Castillo at first seems, without doubt, the Indians’ preferred medicine man. This is not surprising, as his healing powers seem quite extraordinary. It was a relatively mundane achievement to cure the severe headaches suffered by the first group of patients, but his fame spread quickly when the paralyzed people began to walk. In Shipwrecks, whether we believe it or not, we read about an astounding miracle of biblical significance.
But then in Shipwrecks we are told that these people had heard about the marvelous cures that the survivors performed while trading with the coastal bands of Karankawa—an account which supports the idea that Esteban and Castillo had first worked as doctors in 1533 and 1534, among the Iguaces, who were a Karankawa clan.
That argument seems, at first, to be further supported by the fact that Castillo is central to the account in Shipwrecks of these first miraculous cures among the Avavares. Yet the tone then suddenly changes. Shipwrecks now tells us that because word had spread far and wide about the survivors’ miraculous cures, a delegation of Susola Indians arrived in search of the famous shaman, Castillo. They begged him to go with them to help others who were very sick, including one man who was on the verge of death.
“Castillo,” Cabeza de Vaca now claimed, “lacked confidence as a doctor, especially when faced with a terribly risky and dangerous case. He was convinced that God would count his sins against him and that this would sometimes prevent his cures from working.”
On the previous page, Castillo had worked miracles like those in the New Testament: paralyzed men had gotten up and walked. Now, a sentence or two later, he is robbed of that role and instead described as a shy, ineffectual shaman—and as a terrible sinner guilty of nameless crimes.
Our sense of what really happened begins to fade as the text becomes uncertain. According to Shipwrecks, the Susola Indians now turned to Cabeza de Vaca, because they remembered that he had performed successful cures a year or two earlier, during the pecan harvest. This is palpably nonsense: Shipwrecks gives a rather full description of the pecan harvest in which there is absolutely no mention of shamanism, of miracle cures, or of medicine of any kind. Even more damning, with regard to Cabeza de Vaca’s claim, is the fact that in Dorantes’s account, as transmitted by Oviedo, these first major episodes of shamanism began later, among the Coahuiltecans, who had never gone anywhere near the pecan harvest. But Cabeza de Vaca somehow had to explain to his readers why in the next episode he was about to become the main medicine man, or, rather, appear to become the main medicine man. I say “appear” because a careful reading of Cabeza de Vaca’s account reveals that he did not actually record himself as being responsible for the miraculous cure at all.
Because of Castillo’s timid reluctance, “I had to go with the Indians,” Cabeza de Vaca boasted. “And Dorantes and Esteban came with me. As I approached the Indian camp, I saw the patient we had come to cure.’ Note that “I,” Cabeza de Vaca, gives way to “we,” Dorantes and Esteban, when it comes to doing the healing.
They were sure the man was already lost, “because he was surrounded by people and his wigwam had been dismantled, which is a sign that the owner is dead. And so, when I arrived, I found the Indian with his eyes rolled back and without a pulse. It seemed to me that he showed all the signs of being dead and Dorantes agreed.
“I removed a grass mat that was covering him and, as best I could, I prayed to Our Lord for the good health of the man and of all the others who were sick.”
But while “I,” Cabeza de Vaca, did all this, in the next sentence we read that “the man had the sign of the cross made over him and was blown on many times.” Cabeza de Vaca makes no attempt to say that “I” made the sign of the cross, or that “I” blew on the patient. For some reason he tries to imply that he was the medicine man by suppressing the protagonist’s real identity, rather than simply making a false claim. But, because of that curious honesty, he in fact implies that it must have been someone else who did the cure by shifting from “I” to the impersonal passive voice at the crucial moment. There is little question that had Cabeza de Vaca made the sign of the cross and done the blowing, then he would have said so loudly.
So, if Cabeza de Vaca did not make the sign of the cross over this dead Indian, did not blow on the patient, and therefore did not perform the cure, who did? Shipwrecks states clearly that Dorantes had by then not effected any cures—a statement which may or may not have been true but which is all we have to go on. Therefore, by a process of elimination, the only possible answer is that on this occasion Esteban was the doctor.
The three men now returned to Castillo, and that night some of the Indians who had accompanied them on their visit to the Susola returned, bringing news that they had seen the dead man up and about, looking well. They said he was walking, eating, and talking with them, and was fully recovered.
This struck awe and terror into Indians across all that land, and they now spoke of nothing else. By sleight of hand, Cabeza de Vaca gave his readers the impression that he had raised a man from the dead. But he did so without actually claiming directly to have either personally performed the healing rituals over the dead man or to have seen the results for himself. Shipwrecks appears to offer something of the truth, and it seems that in fact Esteban may have tried to perform the miracle, but also that there was no evidence a miracle had even taken place.
Between these two episodes of miraculous, biblical healing—between Castillo’s cure of the paralyzed patients and someone’s raising a man from the dead—the publishers of Shipwrecks offered their customers another marvelous episode, seemingly more fiction than fact.
The episode is described as happening to Cabeza de Vaca, but in reality it might have been experienced by any one of the four survivors, or it may never have happened at all. One of them became separated from the others while searching for food in thick scrubland and wandered lost for five days in the winter cold, without shelter. However, in the midst of the Texan bush, this solitary survivor came across a burning tree and was able to warm himself by this miraculous, heaven-sent fire. It saved his life.
It is not surprising, perhaps, that most scholars have interpreted this biblical “burning bush” as a figment of Cabeza de Vaca’s imagination. Today, the story seems outrageous, but to Charles V, his Spanish courtiers, and the readers of Shipwrecks, it may simply have reinforced their impression of America as a New World filled with wonders and marvels. Interestingly, those presumably gullible Spaniards may have been right.
John Sibley was a physician from Louisiana who explored Texas at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Texas was still part of the Spanish Empire. In his explorations, he came across the Karankawa, living in the bay of Saint Bernard on a strip of land ten miles long and five miles wide. On one side of their island home, there was, he recorded, “a high bluff, or mountain of coal, which has been on fire for many years, affording always a light at night, and a strong thick smoke by day, by which vessels are sometimes deceived and lost.” He added, “From this burning coal there is emitted a gummy substance the Spaniards call cheta, which is thrown on the shore by the surf, and collected by them in considerable quantities, which they are fond of chewing; it has the appearance and consistency of pitch, and a strong, aromatic, and not disagreeable smell.”
Below the surface of Texas is a reservoir of fossil fuels, ready to spontaneously combust at any time. So perhaps one of the survivors did indeed come across a burning tree somewhere in the thick scrub.
But the publishers of Shipwrecks had an urgent need to include wonders—a need which was not satisfied by burning bushes, cured paralytics, and resurrected cadavers. There was more. The Indians of the west Texas hinterland, we are told, believed in a creature called Mala Cosa, “Evil Thing.” “He was small of stature, wore a beard, and they could not see his face clearly.” He terrorized them, brandishing a burning torch, entering their homes, and stealing whatever took his fancy.
“He slashed three long cuts into a man’s side with a sharp flint” and thrust his hand inside, carefully drawing out the entrails. He would then “cut off a small slice of intestine and throw it into the coals of the fire.” This strange ritual continued, with Evil Thing engaging in further, equally peculiar practices. Sometimes he appeared dressed as a woman; at other times he dressed as a man. He never ate the food the Indians offered him. He could pick up a wigwam and throw it high in the air—yet despite all the violence he did to the Indians, afterward he would heal their wounds. He was a character seemingly straight out of the spirit world, and according to Shipwrecks, the Spaniards at first believed that Evil Thing was no more than a myth. But then they were shown victims who had scars from the monster’s vicious attacks, and they began to believe the story.
The whole description might be a metaphor for the schizophrenic Spanish policy toward the Indians, with the brutal conquistadors on the one hand and the gentle missionaries and priests on the other. The survivors reckoned that Evil Thing had visited the Indians about fifteen or sixteen years before, leading some scholars to link this myth with the first Spanish raids and incursions into the area north of Pánuco and along the coast of the Mexican gulf.
Whatever the true origins of the myth of Evil Thing, the description of his bizarre behavior completes this series of wondrous episodes in which reality seems to give way to myth and fact is replaced by marvels. For page after page, Shipwrecks flirts with fiction, presenting the survivors’ experiences between the fall of 1534 and the prickly pear season of 1535 as steeped in divine miracles and supernatural occurrences.
With the marvelous, wonderful episodes complete, Shipwrecks now falls into line with the history that was recorded by Oviedo. In contrast to the preceding picture of plentiful food supplies given to the survivors in gratitude for their miraculous cures, Shipwrecks soon describes the reality of mundane drudgery and the hard winter they spent among the Avavares. “We were always treated well, but we had to dig for the food we ate and carry our own loads of drinking water and firewood.” They suffered even more than they had among the Karankawa. They spent their days naked, like their hosts, and at night they covered themselves with deerskins. The Avavares, we are told, “had neither corn, nor acorns, nor pecan nuts.” It is the same picture of the Avavares that Oviedo paints for us—the true picture, one feels, and a picture from which miracles were conspicuously absent.