Narratives from America:

The Spanish Exploration

By Benjamin J. Fowler

for Literary Non-Fiction

November 28, 2003

[ Benjamin Fowler is a senior at ETSU and hopes to graduate, eventually. One day he will teach English to children. He has a storied background and at one time wanted to be a Broadway star. ]

Colonial Narratives are the stories and tales sent from the explorers, soldiers, and settlers of a conquered distant land to the home country. Fictional accounts of colonial life, like The Last of the Mohicans or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are very vivid and paint a marvelous picture of colonial America. Yet even more vivid are the Spanish non-fictional narratives, such as Columbus’s letters to the Spanish Crown or Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s account of Cortez’s conquering of the Aztec empire, that are often forgotten when discussing colonialism in the Americas. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca describes his forays into trouble while exploring the Spanish possessions across what is now the southern United States, from Florida to New Mexico. The juicy descriptions of landscapes unseen are vivid and evocative, promoting a sense of bounty in the new virgin land. Accounts of the battles waged by Western countries to secure the foreign land make fascinating reading. However, the theme of exploration, of lands of promise and mystery, battles and peace, friendships and enemies, permeate these personal narratives, almost actively pulling future colonists over to the new lands and delighting readers for years to come. With true accounts like these, who needs an adventure novel?

Many Western and Eastern countries have tried to colonize other lands, for a variety of reasons: god, gold, and country. Yet the narratives all have the same descriptive vigor. The details in these early writings make fascinating reading. Take Christopher Columbus’s letter to Luis de Santangel, a courtier in the imperial court of Ferdinand and Isabella, as translated by Cecil Jane, dated February 15, 1493:

Its [present day Haiti and the Dominican Republic] lands are high, and there are in it very many sierras and very lofty mountains, beyond comparison with the island of Tenerife [Canary Islands]. All are most beautiful, of a thousand shapes, and all are accessible and filled with trees of a thousand kind and tall, and they seem to touch the sky. And I am told that they never lose their foliage, as I can understand, for I saw them as green and as lovely as they are in Spain in May…And there are large tracts of cultivatable lands, and there is honey, and there are birds of many kinds and fruits in great diversity. In the interior are mines of metals, and the population is without number. Española is a marvel.

The land is seen as blessed and better than anything in Europe of the time. The entire reason for Columbus’s voyage was to find a western route to China, a land filled with gold and spices and silks and a thousand other wonderful things unable to be found in Europe. The description of the overflowing resources of the New World lead to further exploration and conquer by Spanish conquistadors and leads us to Hernán Cortes’ conquest of Mexico as seen through the eyes of Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Díaz was a soldier who was born in 1492, and, befitting his birth year, spent most of his life in “New Spain,” the American territorial possessions of Spain. He wrote his memoirs a great deal later in his life with a vivid, “artless power.” (Baym, 25) The rough prose of the soldier was clear of the official justifications of the enslavement and conquering of the Aztecs as it was also free of excess moralizing, showing no flinching at the excessive deaths.

Hernan Cortés lead his army towards Tenochtilan, or present day Mexico City. The city was the capital of the Aztec empire and the development of temples and buildings grew greater as they marched from Vera Cruz at the Gulf of Mexico in. Cortés was looking to overthrow Montezuma’s hold over the Aztec empire, which is made up of many city-states, like the Texcoco, the Tepaneca, and the Mexica. Cortés could barely describe it to Emperor Charles V, saying of Montezuma’s main palace, “that in Spain there is nothing to compare it with.” Díaz’s astonishment at the natives’ palaces along the way to the capital city filled him and his men with a sense of dreaming:

Next morning, we came to a broad causeway and continued our march toward Iztapalapa [A large city that was friendly towards Cortés]. And when we saw all those cities and villages built in the water, and other great towns on dry land, and that straight and level causeway leading to Mexico, we were astounded. These great towns and cues [temples] and buildings rising out of the water, all made of stone, seemed like an unchanged vision from the tale of Amadis [a medieval French romance tale]. And when we entered the city of Iztapalapa, the sight of the palaces in which they lodged us! They were very spacious and well built, of magnificent stone, cedar wood, and the wood of other sweet-smelling trees, with great rooms and courts, which were a wonderful sight, and all covered with awnings of woven cotton… We followed the causeway, which is eight yards wide and goes so straight to the city of Mexico that I do not think it curves at all.

One can almost see a Golden Brick Road towards Oz, the overwhelming sense of a land incredibly different than home, with Díaz descriptions. However, the descriptions of battles, where Díaz watched captured Spanish soldiers vivisected and their hearts pulled out of their chests still beating, all while his men barely escaped over a jetty, makes our own souls quiver.

By this time, we had got our allies off the causeway; and facing the enemy and never turning our backs, we gradually retired, forming a kind of damn to hold up their advance. Some of our crossbowmen and musketeers shot while others were loading, the horsemen mad charges, and Pedro Moreno loaded and fired his cannon. Yet, despite the number of Mexicans that were swept away by his shot we could not keep them at bay. On the contrary, they continued to pursue us, in the belief that they would carry us off that night to be sacrificed.

The dismal drum of Huichilobos [Aztec war god] sounded again, accompanied by conches, horns, and trumpet-like instruments. It was a terrifying sound, and when we looked at the tall cue [temple] from which it came, we saw our comrades who had been captured in Cortés’ defeat being dragged up the steps to be sacrificed. After dancing, the papas [priests] laid them down on their backs on some narrow stones of sacrifice and, cutting open their chests, drew out their palpitating hearts which they offered to the idols before them. Then they kicked the bodies down the steps, and the Indian butchers who were waiting below cut off their arms and legs and flayed their faces, which they afterward prepared like glove leather, with their beards on, and kept for drunken festivals. Then they ate their flesh with a sauce of peppers and tomatoes.

Again, Díaz’s non-prosaic way of writing captures the scene in a powerful way that still affects the reader today and still affected him some decades later. He couldn’t sleep more that a few hours a night and still sleeps fully clothed, ready to jump to the ready. The powerful description of the subjugation of the Aztecs makes Díaz a reading experience.

Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was a Spanish explorer whose family was renowned for their military service to the Spanish crown. An ancestor was highly decorated for a large defeat of the Moors by using a cow’s head to show a strategic route through an unguarded mountain path, hence his honorific, Cabeza de Vaca. When Columbus’s exploration opened the American continents for further exploration, Cabeza de Vaca went with Panfilo de Narváez to explore Florida. After many disasters, including slavery, disease, starvation, hurricanes, and shipwrecks, Cabeza de Vaca managed to travel from the pan handle of Florida to New Mexico over the course of seven years 1527-1536. He lived by trading with and being traded as slaves by many Indian clans.

Cabeza de Vaca made many friends among the Native Americans and achieved many great works in the South Western United States. Only three Westerners survived the trip with him, two Spaniards and one Algerian slave. After making so many friends, he had a large party of Indians that traveled with him. When he encountered Spanish slave traders in New Mexico, he immediately felt repugnant at the practices of “Christian slavers.” He was clapped in irons and sent to Spain. His followers were captured and sold as slaves. His account, written to the Emperor, Charles V, attempted to sway the Crown’s policy towards American Indians and make a renewed effort for further colonization in the areas he explored

Here is one of the passages from The Relation of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, written in 1536, revised, expanded, and republished in 1540:

We hastened through a vast territory, which we found vacant, the inhabitants having fled to the mountains in fear of Christians. With heavy hearts we looked out over the lavishly watered, fertile, and beautiful land, now abandoned and burned and the people thin and weak, scattering or hiding in fright. Not having planted, they were reduced to eating roots and bark; and we shared their famine the whole way. Those who did receive us could hardly provide anything. They themselves looked as if they would willingly die. They brought us blankets they had concealed from the other Christians and told us how the latter had come through razing the towns and carrying off half the men and all the women and boys; those who had escaped were wandering about as fugitives. We found the survivors too alarmed to stay anywhere very long, unable or unwilling to till, preferring death to a repetition of their recent horror. While they seemed delighted with our company, we grew apprehensive that the Indians resisting farther on at the frontier would avenge themselves on us. When we got there, however, they received us with the same awe and respect the others had—even more, which amazed us. Clearly, to bring all these people to Christianity and subjection to Your Imperial Majesty, they must be won by kindness, the only certain way.

Cabeza de Vaca’s attitudes are clear. He and his associates detest the picture of Christianity that these slave traders present. They are astounded when the same terrorized people greet them in a friendly and respectful way. Cabeza admits that in his situation, they would fear reprisals. Because the people are so nice, Cabeza pleads with the Emperor to treat them with “kindness.” A further passage convinces the Indians, and the readers, the injustice and non-resemblance between Cabeza and his associates and the slave traders under Diego de Alcaraz.

Alcaraz bade his interpreter tell the Indians that we were members of his race who had been long lost; that his group was the lords of the land who must be obeyed and served, while we were inconsequential. The Indians paid no attention to this. Conferring among themselves, they replied that the Christians lied: We had come from the sunrise, they from the sunset; we healed the sick, they killed the sound; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed, horsed, and lanced; we coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone.

After we had dismissed the Indians in peace and thanked them for their toil in our behalf, the Christians subtly sent us on our way in the charge of an alcalde named Cebreros, attended by two horsemen. They took us through forests and wastes so that we would not communicate with the natives and would neither see nor learn of their crafty scheme afoot. Thus we often misjudge the motives of men; We thought we had effected the Indians’ liberty, when the Christians were but poising to pounce.

Essentially, they were under arrest. Cabeza’s denunciation of Alcarez is very clear. His purpose was to expose the trickery that “Christians” were committing in the name of the Spanish Crown. He wrote and revised his account over a five-year period. He continued to push for American Indian policies that were friendlier. His accounts of the coasts of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, as well as his travels across Texas, New Mexico and into the Gulf of California, made his text required reading for future explorers like Francisco Vásquez de Coronado and Hernando de Soto. However, his outrage could not readily topple the bourgeoning wealth that the mistreatment and exploitation of the native people allowed the Spanish settlers. He was eventually jailed and sent back to Spain. He was given a second chance to govern a small area known as Rio de la Plata, but the townsfolk refused to mend their ways and shipped him back to Spain. He was later exiled to Algeria and forbidden to ever return to America.

In today’s world of literary study, a lot of time is devoted to fictional literature. However, the study of non-fictional accounts can be just as entertaining as the fictional. The essence of reality is steeped in these writings and gives a depth that most fictional writers attempt with great difficulty to instill in their prose. These narratives are firsthand accounts of a historic period that changed the face and culture of the world. They show that history isn’t black and white, but lived in glorious Technicolor. The Spanish are not all evil Indian killers and these narratives will lead to a better understanding of the Americas and are well worth the time spent.

Works Cited.

Cabeza de Vaca, Álvar Núñez. The Relation of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Norton Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition, Volume One. Trans. Cyclone Covey. Comp. and Ed. Nina Baym et al. New York: W.W Norton & Company, 1999. 49, 51-52.

Columbus, Christopher. “Letter to Luis Santangel Regarding the First Voyage” Norton Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition, Volume One. Trans. Cecil Jane Comp. and Ed. Nina Baym et al. New York: W.W Norton & Company, 1999. 12

Diaz Del Castillo, Bernal. The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. Norton Anthology of American Literature, Fifth Edition, Volume One. Trans. J.M. Cohen Comp. and Ed. Nina Baym et al. New York: W.W Norton & Company, 1999 27, 32-33

- Note: While I read the Spanish explorers' narratives from the Norton anthology, the editors of that anthology in turn derived their texts from the following sources:

The Relation of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, edited by Cyclone Covey (1961)

The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, by Bernal Díaz Del Castillo, translated by J.M. Cohen (1963)

Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus, translated and edited by Cecil Jane (1930-33)