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Jun. 26th, 2018 09:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI picked up Andrés Reséndez's A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca because nextian made it sound ... terribly hilarious .... and honestly she was not wrong, like, it was definitely a disaster and lots of people very much died, but it was a hilariously avoidable disaster ...
Also, you know, if all the other Spanish attempts to Colonize the New World had gone the way of Cabeza de Vaca's the world would be a very different and quite probably better place now, so there's that too!
Cabeza de Vaca, by the way, was not the head of this particular expedition at its start, but he gets top billing because he was the quirkiest and most high-profile individual of the four dudes (out of a initial cast of 400) who managed to survive their terrible, horrible, no good, very bad North American vacation.
The series of unfortunate events kicks off with a hurricane that sank two of the expedition's ships. Now, the Spanish cannot really be blamed for getting caught in a hurricane. A hurricane could happen to anyone!
The following people can, however, very much be blamed for all of the following incidents:
- the navigators who decided that they had definitely reached the point that they were aiming for, cheerfully writing off the fact that the sun was in completely the wrong place, because figuring out why seemed hard
- expedition leader Narváez , who decided it would be fun to take every able-bodied man on a march through Florida and meet up with the boats later (spoiler: they got completely lost and would never meet up with the boats; the boats eventually gave up and went home)
- the entire cast of four hundred who could not figure out how to sensibly store water, a fact which boggles the generally very polite and even-handed Reséndez to the point of (my) hilarity:
Making pots out of clay would have been the simplest solution: such containers could have been maade impermeable by baking them with fire. Historically, most agricultural societies around the world, including the native people of Aplachee, have stumbled up on this same basic solution, but it seems to have eluded the expedition members.
Anyway instead they killed all their horses and tried to make water bags out of their skin, which promptly went rancid
- relatedly, whichever trusting person decided that it was a good idea to give the expedition's only clay pots to some irritated locals who indicated that they would bring back fresh water in the clay pots, then promptly kept the pots and disappeared
- Narváez again, who got everyone onto three giant rafts in an attempt to float back to Cuba, then instead of trying to keep anyone together panicked and shouted back that it was every raft for themselves
- Narváez yet again, who, after his own crowded raft had gotten back to land, announced that only he, a helmsman, and his page would be accorded the privilege of sleeping on the relative safety of the raft instead of on shore with everyone else where they could be ambushed ... and was promptly swept out to sea overnight while he was asleep, where he starved to death!
GREAT EXPEDITION. EVERYONE'S DOING GREAT.
Anyway, we can montage over some more crashed rafts, summer storms, seawater-drinking and general hapless starving to the point where a sad group of survivors -- including Cabeza de Vaca, two more Spanish aristocrats, and a slave named Estebanico, plus a collection of various redshirts -- got adopted by some reasonably friendly locals who decide to nurse them back to health.
However, since the Spanish (as has been amply demonstrated by the rest of this saga) were all totally useless, their hosts got sick of them relatively quickly and demanded they earn their keep by acting as general valets and errand-boys for the community. This was a rough job over the course of a rough winter and Cabeza de Vaca was the only member of his group who somehow not only survived the experience, but made it good -- because he was very clearly Not From Around Here, he became a useful sort of neutral go-between between the various indigenous groups and would broker trade agreements and so forth.
By the only piece of good luck anyone on this particular expedition ever experienced, he then managed to meet up with the other three survivors, who were stuck working for a different group of indigenous locals. (Cabeza de Vaca in his memoirs describes their situation as being enslaved, but it's tough to work out what is really 'slavery' and what is, you know, 'we are subsistence hunter-gatherers with no resources to spare for people who don't work'; Reséndez points out that far from being valued commodities, Cabeza de Vaca and crew would sometimes have to beg other tribes to take them on.) The four of them took two years to sort out an escape/survival plan and strike off towards other Spanish colonies ...
... except then they got halfway there, and decided to go in another direction and wander all the way to California, because WHY NOT? ADVENTURE!!
Personally, at this point I think I myself would be a little sick of adventure, but who am I to judge?
I mean it probably helped that by this point the whole Spanish crew had somehow become established as faith healers, and were traveling with a rotating cast of people who would apparently show up in the next tribe's neighborhood, say "hey! We brought you some faith healers! now we get to take all your stuff!" and shove them on to the next group of people, who would repeat the entire process. (This is all, of course, according to the rather bewildered account Cabeza de Vaca wrote when he got home and one can probably assume the expedition had an internal logic to it that Cabeza de Vaca did not fully grasp.)
Cabeza de Vaca and crew finally did meet up with some other Spaniards and get home, after which Cabeza de Vaca committed himself to trying to negotiate peaceful (albeit definitely missionary) interactions rather than the horrifically violent conquest that was at that point already the general Spanish modus operandi for interactions in the New World. This, of course, is why he gets his name on the letterhead, and the reason beyond the comedy of errors that we tell this story -- Reséndez is interested in the path not taken, and what an ongoing interaction between the Spanish and the indigenous peoples of the Americas might have looked like in the Cabeza de Vaca mode, rather than the Cortés mode.
But of course Cabeza de Vaca's story is not the only interesting one involved in this adventure and apparently someone has written a prize-winning novel from the point of view of Estebanico, which I am definitely going to attempt to hunt down, although I emphatically do not expect it to be funny.
nextian made it sound ... terribly hilarious .... and honestly she was not wrong, like, it was definitely a disaster and lots of people very much died, but it was a hilariously avoidable disaster ... Also, you know, if all the other Spanish attempts to Colonize the New World had gone the way of Cabeza de Vaca's the world would be a very different and quite probably better place now, so there's that too!
Cabeza de Vaca, by the way, was not the head of this particular expedition at its start, but he gets top billing because he was the quirkiest and most high-profile individual of the four dudes (out of a initial cast of 400) who managed to survive their terrible, horrible, no good, very bad North American vacation.
The series of unfortunate events kicks off with a hurricane that sank two of the expedition's ships. Now, the Spanish cannot really be blamed for getting caught in a hurricane. A hurricane could happen to anyone!
The following people can, however, very much be blamed for all of the following incidents:
- the navigators who decided that they had definitely reached the point that they were aiming for, cheerfully writing off the fact that the sun was in completely the wrong place, because figuring out why seemed hard
- expedition leader Narváez , who decided it would be fun to take every able-bodied man on a march through Florida and meet up with the boats later (spoiler: they got completely lost and would never meet up with the boats; the boats eventually gave up and went home)
- the entire cast of four hundred who could not figure out how to sensibly store water, a fact which boggles the generally very polite and even-handed Reséndez to the point of (my) hilarity:
Making pots out of clay would have been the simplest solution: such containers could have been maade impermeable by baking them with fire. Historically, most agricultural societies around the world, including the native people of Aplachee, have stumbled up on this same basic solution, but it seems to have eluded the expedition members.
Anyway instead they killed all their horses and tried to make water bags out of their skin, which promptly went rancid
- relatedly, whichever trusting person decided that it was a good idea to give the expedition's only clay pots to some irritated locals who indicated that they would bring back fresh water in the clay pots, then promptly kept the pots and disappeared
- Narváez again, who got everyone onto three giant rafts in an attempt to float back to Cuba, then instead of trying to keep anyone together panicked and shouted back that it was every raft for themselves
- Narváez yet again, who, after his own crowded raft had gotten back to land, announced that only he, a helmsman, and his page would be accorded the privilege of sleeping on the relative safety of the raft instead of on shore with everyone else where they could be ambushed ... and was promptly swept out to sea overnight while he was asleep, where he starved to death!
GREAT EXPEDITION. EVERYONE'S DOING GREAT.
Anyway, we can montage over some more crashed rafts, summer storms, seawater-drinking and general hapless starving to the point where a sad group of survivors -- including Cabeza de Vaca, two more Spanish aristocrats, and a slave named Estebanico, plus a collection of various redshirts -- got adopted by some reasonably friendly locals who decide to nurse them back to health.
However, since the Spanish (as has been amply demonstrated by the rest of this saga) were all totally useless, their hosts got sick of them relatively quickly and demanded they earn their keep by acting as general valets and errand-boys for the community. This was a rough job over the course of a rough winter and Cabeza de Vaca was the only member of his group who somehow not only survived the experience, but made it good -- because he was very clearly Not From Around Here, he became a useful sort of neutral go-between between the various indigenous groups and would broker trade agreements and so forth.
By the only piece of good luck anyone on this particular expedition ever experienced, he then managed to meet up with the other three survivors, who were stuck working for a different group of indigenous locals. (Cabeza de Vaca in his memoirs describes their situation as being enslaved, but it's tough to work out what is really 'slavery' and what is, you know, 'we are subsistence hunter-gatherers with no resources to spare for people who don't work'; Reséndez points out that far from being valued commodities, Cabeza de Vaca and crew would sometimes have to beg other tribes to take them on.) The four of them took two years to sort out an escape/survival plan and strike off towards other Spanish colonies ...
... except then they got halfway there, and decided to go in another direction and wander all the way to California, because WHY NOT? ADVENTURE!!
Personally, at this point I think I myself would be a little sick of adventure, but who am I to judge?
I mean it probably helped that by this point the whole Spanish crew had somehow become established as faith healers, and were traveling with a rotating cast of people who would apparently show up in the next tribe's neighborhood, say "hey! We brought you some faith healers! now we get to take all your stuff!" and shove them on to the next group of people, who would repeat the entire process. (This is all, of course, according to the rather bewildered account Cabeza de Vaca wrote when he got home and one can probably assume the expedition had an internal logic to it that Cabeza de Vaca did not fully grasp.)
Cabeza de Vaca and crew finally did meet up with some other Spaniards and get home, after which Cabeza de Vaca committed himself to trying to negotiate peaceful (albeit definitely missionary) interactions rather than the horrifically violent conquest that was at that point already the general Spanish modus operandi for interactions in the New World. This, of course, is why he gets his name on the letterhead, and the reason beyond the comedy of errors that we tell this story -- Reséndez is interested in the path not taken, and what an ongoing interaction between the Spanish and the indigenous peoples of the Americas might have looked like in the Cabeza de Vaca mode, rather than the Cortés mode.
But of course Cabeza de Vaca's story is not the only interesting one involved in this adventure and apparently someone has written a prize-winning novel from the point of view of Estebanico, which I am definitely going to attempt to hunt down, although I emphatically do not expect it to be funny.
no subject
Date: 2018-06-27 03:22 am (UTC)I have actually read Cabeza de Vaca's rather bewildered account! Penguin published an English edition under the title The Shipwrecked Men in 2007; I picked it up a couple of years ago and can vouch that it reads like a cross between travel literature and horror comedy, so much so that even the jacket copy notes that the survivors of the Narváez expedition were the first Europeans to cross what is now the American Southwest and . . . had no idea.
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Date: 2018-06-30 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-06-30 03:46 am (UTC)I'd watch that.
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Date: 2018-06-27 04:41 am (UTC)(I mean. I too am now interested in the path that might have been taken, and wasn't. But... I'm also not sure after all this that if I were a 16th century Spaniard I would trust Cabeza de Vaca to organize or lead his way out of a paper bag, let alone spearhead any kind of national policy... But to be fair, it's hard to think of anything WORSE than the Cortés et al model, so some relatively peaceful incompetent negotiations would certainly have been preferable, I would think.)
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Date: 2018-06-30 03:46 am (UTC)....but, I mean, this was also written with the benefit of a GREAT DEAL of hindsight so really WHO CAN SAY. But he did manage to survive and communicate successfully where three hundred others did not, and that's something!)
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Date: 2018-06-27 05:53 am (UTC)ETA Wait, I have read this! I thought the faith healing sounded familiar! It was a library book though. Maybe it's time to read it again. I'm reading about Magellan at the moment. Disasters aplenty ...
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