The Spanish conquistador Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was shipwrecked in 1528. Out of 258 men sent to explore Florida, only four survived. He lived among native peoples for the next eight years - the first European to explore what is now Texas and the Southwest. His La Relacion, offers a remarkable historical portrait. It is also one of the great adventure stories of humankind.
Cabeza de Vaca, once sat calmly astride his stallion and watched his underlings massacre 2,500 Indians. His journey, the events that marked his life from 1527 to eight years later, was a metamorphosis: shipwrecked and tossed naked upon the shore, he crossed the breadth of a continent, a stranger in a strange land - who in entering that landscape came to know it - not spellbound with mythology and a lust for golden treasure, but as a place draped in an ordinary beauty & wonder found in the actual landscape, the earth underfoot. Terra firma. Cabeza de Vaca became a healer, worked miracles and was welcomed by the various peoples of the Americas as he travelled westward and his ways became known. Cabeza de Vaca: "The power of maintaining life in others lives within each of us and from each of us does it recede when unused." Denuded of the supposed civilized ways of Europe & his homeland Spain, he tapped into an energy & power that lay beneath the burnished steel of the one time conquistador, an energy & power that reaches into the spirit&source of it all - he became a shaman and a holy man.
Stripped of the affluent armor of civilization, he transcended enslavement to the vanities of empire. At the end of that journey 'through the unknown interior', he emerged with a native sense of place and a deepened humanity. He walked six thousand miles - emerging from the wilderness after eight years having travelled from the coast of Florida to Galveston Island to Mexico City. His story stands as a prelude and allegory for what came later: slavery and killing, not healing and humanity became the marks of Spanish conquest. The children of the sun were a murderous brood. This is the narrative of that miraculous tale, writ by Peter Lourie, nearly 500 years later.
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