The Spanish Polemic on Colonisation
Part six - Cabeza de Vaca and what the Indians wanted (1)
Introduction
In previous articles I promised to say something about the experience of a Spaniard who spent eight years in Indian territories. He was Álvar Nuňez Cabeza de Vaca, a man of the hidalgo class (minor nobility). In 1527, when he was about 40 years old, he joined an expedition setting out from Spain intending to conquer Florida. There were five ships with about 600 men. Cabeza de Vaca was treasurer of the expedition, and he also held the position of alguacil mayor, which was something like chief enforcer. He was an experienced soldier who had served in Italy, Spain and Navarre.
The expedition went first to Hispaniola to take on supplies. About a quarter of the men immediately deserted, because the local Spanish colonists made attractive proposals about how to get rich without having to go any farther. The ships went on to Cuba for more supplies, and the same thing happened. By the time they finally got to the Florida coast there was not much more than half of the original troop number. And then the expedition began to fall apart.
The main reason for this, according to Cabeza de Vaca, was the incompetence of Panfílio de Narváez, the overall commander. He was interested in making explorations inland, even before he had found a proper harbour. The local Indians were generally hostile. They struck threatening attitudes and signalled to the Spaniards that they should leave, or they fired showers of arrows, or they gave a welcome and then made surprise attacks. When captured they would talk about a territory some way distant that had lots of gold or was worth visiting for some other reason, and Narváez would follow their suggestions. After futile explorations the Spaniards returned to their ships, but then a violent storm scattered them. Cabeza de Vaca and some other men were shipwrecked on what is now Galveston Island, off the coast of Texas.
After that no further contact was made with the commander or with any large group of Spaniards. Cabeza de Vaca’s group was soon down to 15 people. They spent the next eight years first on Galveston (which they called The Island of Ill-Fate) and then on the mainland, in territories where no Spaniards had ever been before. Various people have tried to reconstruct their journey. There are estimates of about 8000 kilometres covered in the eight years (not wildly different from Cabeza de Vaca’s own estimate of 2000 leagues). Anyhow, the castaways seem to have wandered through great stretches of what is now the southern United States and northern Mexico. Finally, in 1536 Cabeza de Vaca and three companions reached Spanish-held territory and were soon telling their story in Mexico City, where they made a great sensation.
The following year Cabeza de Vaca returned to Spain. While there he wrote a memoir of the Narváez expedition and his own life among the Indians. This was published as a book in 1542; later it became known as the Shipwrecks (Naufragios). But originally what he wrote was addressed to King Charles V and it was less a memoir than a kind of “grant proposal”, as Juan F. Maura calls it. (1) Cabeza de Vaca was applying for another and bigger job. His account was meant to show that he was an able and resourceful man with rich American experience: he understood the Indians, knew how to treat them fairly, and was well equipped to win them over to be good Spanish subjects and good Christians. The King was impressed, and in 1540 Cabeza de Vaca was made governor of the River Plate colony, which included parts of present-day Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay.
The new governor’s main task was to find a viable route linking the River Plate colony with Peru. During his few years in the job he seems to have done a good deal of exploration. Among other things, as protector of the newly-Christian Guaraní people he successfully made war on their not-yet-Christian enemies, the Guaycurú. But he was outmanoeuvred by his Spanish rivals in the River Plate, and in 1544 he was arrested for maladministration and sent for trial to Spain. Though eventually he was exonerated, he never returned to America. However, he did produce a further memoir (Comentarios) describing and justifying his actions in the River Plate, and this was published in 1555.
What interests me here is the Shipwrecks. In the course of it Cabeza de Vaca remarks that “the Indians are great storytellers and liars” (Chapter 29). He himself is undeniably a great story-teller, and it has been suggested he’s a great liar. According to Maura, who calls him el gran burlador, the great joker or con man, “the author of the Shipwrecks included or omitted to include whatever suited him, as and when it suited him”. (2) I have no doubt that he omitted things. For example, he claims to have become an outstanding medicine man; elsewhere he says that the medicine men could have two or three wives, while the ordinary Indian was monogamous. So the question of marriage or polygamy must have arisen for him, but he says nothing about it (as one would expect). Also, some things in his account are definitely tall tales, and to what extent he knew that they were tall tales is not easy to judge.
However, I think much of the Shipwrecks rings true. I am not concerned with the misleading image which, according to Maura, has predominated in works published during the past 25 years: “a Christian martyr who, after a slow transculturation from conquistador to quasi-native, would defend ‘the weak Indian’ in the purest style of Las Casas”. (3) Maura rejects this modern academic notion, but he seems to end up confusing it with the image of himself that Cabeza de Vaca is trying to convey. “Cabeza de Vaca the conquistador, with an army of up to 10,000 natives and Spanish infantry and musketeers, fighting against the Guaycurú of Paraguay, has very little to do with the almost hagiographic self-portrait that he paints in the Shipwrecks, with reference to the treatment given to the Indians”. (4)
But what happened, according to Cabeza de Vaca, was that the newly-converted Guaraní Indians came to him as governor, appealing for protection against their ferocious Guaycurú neighbours who were killing and plundering them. The governor first asked the leading clerics whether in these circumstances he could make just war on the Guaycurú. When the clerics declared that he could, he sent messages to the Guaycurú demanding that they stop oppressing the Guaraní and give allegiance to the King of Spain. Only after their contemptuous refusal did he assemble his huge army. And even when he caught up with the Guaycurú and launched his attack on them, he tells us that he took care to leave them a path of flight to the mountains, “so that there would not be great butchery”. (5) And when the Guaycurú had been routed (purely due to the tremendous impression made by a Spanish cavalry charge) and they came to him as the vanquished offering themselves as slaves, Cabeza de Vaca received them kindly and told them that if they were peaceful subjects and good Christians they would always have favoured treatment, better than any other tribe! Besides, he goes out of his way to praise not only their excellent physique and their splendid qualities as fighters but also their treatment of women. They treated even captive women well, never harming them. (6) As for their own women, “the Guaycurú women have more liberty than what Queen Isabella gave to the women of Spain”. (7) So in terms of explicit attitudes towards the Indians, I cannot see much that much difference between the Shipwrecks and the Commentaries. As will be seen below, even in the Shipwrecks he envisaged the possibility of waging war against Indians and explained how it could best be done.
From here on I will only be concerned with the Shipwrecks, and purely with what it has to say about relations between the Spaniards and the Indians. When the former arrived in large groups, with weapons, and evidently with motives more ambitious than survival, they were generally met with arrows, and any peaceful encounters were ambiguous and could never be depended on. But as vulnerable, unthreatening people who could be assimilated in some fashion into Indian society, Cabeza de Vaca and his companions had a different experience. The communities they were with seem to have been some of the poorest, living the most precarious lives, in all of America.