Fills in the missing pieces of the Cabeza de Vaca saga.

books:

	• Brutal Journey: Cabeza de Vaca and the Epic First Crossing of North America Paul Schneider Holt Paperbacks, 2007 - 384 pages average customer review:based on 28 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Fills in the missing pieces of the Cabeza de Vaca saga.

I am fascinated by this topic, and have read several books about it - not only different translations of "The Account", but also the more academic works of Adorno and by Alex Krieger. I have also read the wonderful fictionalization by Morris Bishop. I was therefore skeptical that a new offering on this topic had anything useful to add. Boy, was I wrong!

Schneider does a great job of setting the stage for, and filling in the many aggravating holes in "The Account" in a very thoughtful and plausible manner. Even if you've already read all of the other books about the "brutal journey" of the Narvaez expedition - you must read this one as well.

Very gratifying, very well done!

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Stranger than Fiction

This a brilliant interpretation of a hazy piece of history. Four hundred Spaniards under the leadership of Panfilo de Narvaez invade "La Florida" with disastrous consequences. There is starvation, disease, despair and running fights with the natives. The much reduced in number survivors build rafts to sail from this wretched place. Most of the rafters also die one way or another but a few pitch up close to Galveston Island. More die but four tough, resourceful and fortunate Spaniards survive...years...to finally make it back to Spanish held Mexico.

This is a study in human nature and of sixteenth-century European attitudes. They have no problem with squeezing the natives for what little wealth they have and they certainly have no problem with slavery or land theft. Then again, the native Americans had little problem with these things, either. They lived in veritable gardens of war where torture and slavery were commonplace and superstition was everything. The four surviving Spaniards become great healers and, even, in one memorable episode, raise the dead.

Well, I loved it and loved how the natives move with the seasons as food dictates. Living in South Texas with it's great nopal [prickly pear] flats, I was especially fascinated by the story of various tribes migrating to this region on a seasonal basis to partake of the great abundance of "tunas" i.e. the fruit of the prickly pear. Heck, I enjoy making jam from these things, myself.

Ron Braithwaite, author of novels--"Skull Rack" and "Hummingbird God" on the Spanish Conquest of Mexico

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Spanish discover more of America than they planned!

Schneider's account of this indeed-brutal journey describes the misadventures of a group of erstwhile Spanish conquerors who were licensed by the King to explore and colonize the land North of Cortes's Mexico. The effort ended in failure when the four survivors of the original 300-plus who landed on the west coast of Florida in 1528 staggered out of the wilderness on the Pacific coast of Northwestern Mexico nine years later!

The story is inevitably episodic, as it relies on the only two first-hand accounts of the journey, one of which was written years later with royal patronage in mind, the other available only in a paraphrase in a contemporary history, as the original has been lost to history. Schneider does a nice job of calling on archaeological studies and secondary sources to plug as many of the gaps as possible.

To see this journey in context of other voyages of discovery, see Tony Horwitz' excellent A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World

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Conquistadors for Dummies

Excellent book, interesting premise -- 16th century Spaniards lost in the New World. Covers pretty much every aspect of the experience. At times reads like Conquistadors for Dummies. Although the author touches on it, overall he goes a little light on the culture of the Indians, so you never REALLY get the feeling for what the Spaniards were up against.

The author feels that the most interesting individual in the book is the slave that accompanies the 2 other lost explorers. I might agree with this but only in the context that even the slave had the heart of a conqueror. Why? is my question, a question which goes unanswered in the book.

What is most interesting to me about the whole conquistador thing is the confidence these guys had. The most interesting aspect of this book was the right turn the 3 conquerors took to trek across the continent to the Pacific to FULFILL THEIR MISSION. With 3 guys! Forget that the initial plan was to conquer a continent with 150-200 men. We're talking 3 guys here. What was it in the Spanish make-up that allowed this? The author doesn't delve into it. In fact, he comes close to lampooning it, treating the gang as an almost Pythoneque group of Don Quixotes. It's a testament to the age we live in, I believe, that such displays of self-confidence are ridiculed -- out of fear, bewilderment, guilt, I don't know. The author admits that he is most interested in the aspect of these particular conquistadors moving from conquerors to conquered. A typical 21st century view. The 3 Spaniards, slave included, apparently didn't see it that way.

Anyway, a good entertaining read, but one that misses an opportunity to address deeper issues.

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Fascinating

This is the story of the travels and travails of Cabaza de Vaca; it is a survival story that is not only stunning within its period, 1528 -1536, it is astounding in its magnitude, over 5,000 miles on foot.

Sometime in April 1528, the Narvaez expedition, four hundred members strong, drops anchor in Tampa Bay under the command of this middle aged conquistador, hoping for a repeat discovery of Cortez' gold drenched Mexico. They promptly disappeared without a trace into the swamps and were soon assumed dead.

But then eight years and thousands of miles later three Spaniards and one Moroccan emerge at a Spanish settlement on the other side of the North American Continent, on the West Coast of present day Mexico. That's right, only 34 years after Columbus discovered America, these men spent 8 years circumnavigating the US portion of the Gulf of Mexico, from Tampa Bay westward to Brownsville, Texas, then moved up the Rio Grande to close to the headwaters in New Mexico, striking southwest through Arizona and Sonora to the Sea of Cortez, and finally linking up with their countrymen again around present day Mazatlan.

This is one of the greatest survival epics in the history of North American exploration. By drawing on Vaca's first hand accounts and recent findings of archaeologists and historians this remarkable achievement is presented in surprising detail.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

?Schneider?s thorough research and vivid writing create a fast-paced, moving story, one that is difficult to believe and impossible to forget.? ?The New York Times Book Review A gripping survival epic, Brutal Journey tells the story of an army of would-be conquerors, bound for glory, who landed in Florida in 1528. But only four of the four hundred would survive: eight years and some five thousand miles later, three Spaniards and a black Moroccan wandered out of the wilderness to the north of the Rio Grande and into Cortes?s gold-drenched Mexico. The survivors brought nothing back other than their story, but what a tale it was. They had become killers and cannibals, torturers and torture victims, slavers and enslaved. They became faith healers, arms dealers, canoe thieves, spider eaters. They became, in other words, whatever it took to stay alive.

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