Asher Sisneros

Asher K. Sisneros

American Literature

Dr. Gary North

August 26, 2024

Cabeza de Vaca was a Spanish explorer who joined the Narvaez Expedition (1527) to explore the Americas. In the few years they spent in North America, Vaca and the survivors managed to travel from Florida to the Texas Gulf, and finally to Mexico, where they encountered Spanish civilization and were saved. Throughout the mission, tragedy after tragedy befell the expedition until only four of the initial four hundred soldiers were still alive. Vaca was one of those men, and he chronicled the events in his book Adventures of the Unknown Interior of America (1542), the first book on Native American culture, the Plains Indians, and West Texas. During the long trip between Florida and Texas, they encounter various tribes—some friendly and some hostile—going from hated slaves to deified “medicine men,” acting as missionaries, yet worshiped as gods. The entire book is a gripping tale and published 49 years after Columbus first discovered the New World in 1493, it helped fuel curiosity about America and the allure behind the American Indians, making it a classic in American literature. 

The most intriguing aspect of the book is Cabeza de Vaca’s portrayal of the Indians. He did not paint a demeaning picture of them as dumb rubes and savages, incapable of grasping deep thoughts and engaging in inhumane behavior. Rather, he painted an unbiased picture, commending the positive aspects of Indian culture and condemning the negative. For example, in chapter 21, a group of Indians were repulsed by cannibalism, which goes against Western intuition. To quote Vaca, “Five Christians quartered on the coast came to the extremity of eating each other … The Indians were so shocked at this cannibalism that, if they had seen it sometime earlier, they surely would have killed every single one of us.”¹ 

However, this was not universal in all the Indian cultures across North America. Some tribes were crueler than others. For example, infanticide was prevalent among the Mariames and Ygauces tribes. As Vaca says, “They cast away their daughters at birth; the dogs eat them. They say they do this because all the nations of the region are their enemies, with whom they war ceaselessly; and that if they were to marry off their daughters, the daughters would multiply their enemies … Thus [they] preferred to annihilate all daughters than risk their reproduction of a single enemy.”² These two examples illustrate the differences between Native American tribes and why their morality should be criticized on a tribe-by-tribe basis, not as one universal, identical group of people. 

Cabeza de Vaca did just that, and he looked at the Indians as fellow human beings who deserved respect. More importantly, however, he looked at them as fellow humans who needed salvation. Trusting in God’s providence, he interpreted being stranded in the Americas as an opportunity to evangelize to the Indians. His basic knowledge of Western medicine proved advantageous among the primitive Plains Indians who honored him as a God-sent physician. Sent from tribe to tribe, he did many miracles in the name of Jehovah; miracles only attributable to the hand of God.³ 

After exploring the continent and spending years with the Indians, Vaca concluded that they were a people with potential: agricultural potential, industrial potential, and spiritual potential. His final plea to the Spanish King at the end of the book was simple: He wanted the natives to be treated with dignity and respect. As he put it, “To bring all these people to Christianity and subjection to Your Imperial Majesty, they must be won by kindness.”⁴ 

1.  Alvarez Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Adventures of the Unknown Interior of America, (Translated by Cyclone Covey: Public domain), pg. 28, PDF https://www.ronpaulcurriculum.com/Vaca-Adventures.pdf ↩︎
2. Vaca, Adventures, pg. 40 ↩︎
3. Vaca, Adventures, pg. 31, 45-48, 63 ↩︎
4.  Vaca, Adventures, pg. 70 [emphasis added] ↩︎