How was this?
Because there had been no rain for two years. Seed put into the fields was stolen by the moles, who could find nothing else to eat, since nothing grew in the dry years. The summer sun destroyed what the winter cold had not killed. The people begged the doctors to invoke rain for them from the sky, and the doctors acquiesced.
Where did the corn come from?
From that place where the sun went down.
Ah. And how did a man reach that place?
The shortest way to it was in that very direction, to the west, but the proper way was to go up the river toward the north. Even so, anyone would have to walk for seventeen days before finding anything to eat except chacan (juniper berries) which even when ground between stones was too dry and bitter to enjoy, though birds ate it, and brown bears in the mountains. Here, they said, try it, producing some. The strangers tried, but could not eat it.
And the river trail, then, how was it?
Passable, until the river turned west at the point of a mountain which could not be followed, for it came sharply down to the river and there was no path. All the way there were many people who spoke the same language as here, but who were enemies. They likewise, in towns, had little food in the dry years, but they would be friendly to the doctors, and present them with gifts of their riches, such as hides and cotton cloth. But it would be wise not to go that way, but take another journey toward the buffalo plains where the village hunters were.
Hunger was everywhere in the immense land, through which the river crawled brown by day, white in the twilight, shadowed by the vast moving clouds, walled now near, now far, by mountains of bare rock against which the pale dust stirred upward off the deserts whose constant change in motion could be seen only from great distance. Which way to turn? The strangers debated, remaining two days with their informers, who gave them beans and squash to live on, and who showed them how to cook. They took a large dried gourd which they half-filled with water from the river, and making fire with a hard wooden drill which they rapidly palmed to make its point turn in a small pit let into a flat piece of wood from which embers would presently come, they heated small stones readily picked up from the crusty gravel of the desert. When the stones were hot they were taken up with sticks and dropped into the water in the gourd. When the water boiled, the cooks dropped their raw food into it, and replaced stones that cooled with others just heated.
There was much to consider if the strangers were to take their way safely toward the goal they blindly sought. At the end of two days they made up their minds not to go directly to the west, or to cross the deserts northeastward toward the hunting plains, but in spite of the advice they had received, to go up the river as far as possible, and then turn west for the corn country; for it was in going always toward the sunset that they believed their salvation lay. Leaving the people, who would not go with them, they walked on the trail up the river’s east bank. Every night they came to other people who received them with gifts of buffalo robes, and offered them chacan, which they did not eat, but lived instead on little stores of deer suet that they had hoarded against starvation. For fifteen, sixteen, or seventeen days the three white men and the black man made their way along the depleted river from village to village. And then, below the shoulder of the mountain that made them change their course (the southern tip of the Caballo range) they crossed over to the other bank, and diminishing as they toiled away from the river until they were mere specks in that speckled land, they finally vanished into the west.
Behind them were seven years of impossible endurance and determination to survive—impossible, except that they endured and survived; for these four were all that remained free and alive in 1536 out of the whole armored and bannered company that had landed in April of 1528 on the west shore of Florida with Pánfilo de Narváez, by royal charter hereditary Grand Constable, Governor, Captain-General and Adelantado of that kingdom in fantasy. The mission of Narváez—to know the country from Florida to the Rio de las Palmas—was at last carried out by members of his company, however unexpectedly.
One of the four starving travellers was the royally appointed Treasurer of the Rio de las Palmas. His name was Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, and he came from Jerez de la Frontera in Spain. He did not know his own river when he found it. The others were Captain Alonso del Castillo Maldonado, of Salamanca, and Andres Dorantes de Carrança, of Béjar, who owned the last man of the four, the Moorish Negro slave Estebanico.*
The river saw them no more. But with them they carried its image and its legend. Weeks later they came among people who told them more of life to the north. There was a great river—and again it was the same river—where lived many people in big towns with immense houses. They were people of wealth, and had many fine and desirable things, like these blue stones, and these green arrowheads, five of them—here, take them—which, the Spaniards thought, shone like emeralds. Emeralds treated like common flint for arrowheads! For such treasures, Indians went on a long trail crossing the deserts and mountains to the great house-cities of the north on the river, and traded yellow, scarlet, blue and orange macaw feathers, and the tiny green breast feathers of little parrots for them. At the right times of the year the trail was well-travelled.
The four travellers followed it to the south, and took with them in experience and memory all they had seen and all they had been told, that would soon reveal a whole new world to those whom they at last met—Spanish soldiers bearded and helmeted, mounted on horses, armed with swords and lances, at the outposts of the slave trade in the province of New Galicia whose governor was the former governor of the River of Palms, Nuño de Guzmán.
They were delivered from their prison of space. The wilderness of their tremendous passage ceased to be an abstraction as soon as they found succor amongst those who could hear what they had to tell, Spaniard to Spaniard.
* One more survivor of the Narváez entry was still alive, a prisoner of Indians in Florida. He was Juan Ortiz, who suffered abominable captivity before his rescue a few years later by De Soto, and died before seeing his Spanish homeland again.
4.
The Travellers’ Tales
They were given clothes to wear, and after seven years of nakedness they could scarcely endure the feeling of cloth. They were given beds to sleep in, but for many nights could not sleep anywhere but on the ground. Their rescuers wept and prayed with them giving thanks for their delivery out of the barbarian lands. But there were bitter discoveries to make again of rapacity and greed among their own kind as represented by Governor Guzmán’s men at Culiacan. Still, every sense of the value inherent in their extraordinary—and exclusive—news of vast new kingdoms helped to urge Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his companions on to the city of Mexico, where they arrived on Sunday, July 25, 1536. Here there were two men who, more than anyone else, wanted to see them, to question them, and to glean their treasure of information.
One was the Viceroy, Don Antonio Mendoza, maintaining in his palace a state proper to the direct representative of the Emperor Charles V, with sixty Indian servants, three dozen gentlemen in his bodyguard, and trumpets and kettledrums.
The other—how could it have been otherwise so long as he breathed?—the other was the Marquis of the Valley of Oaxaca, Cortés, starving for a renewal of conquest, and gnawing on his pride like a dog on a bare bone. Still restless, he still saw the new continent as exclusively the vessel of his aging energies.
The sabbatical refugees were splendidly received, now by the Viceroy, now by Cortés, and given fine clothes and other gifts. On the feast day of St. James the Apostle, a bull fight was arranged with a fiesta to honor the heroes. Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was put up at the viceregal palace. Interesting interviews followed.
What was the extent of the seven-year journey?
The travellers drew a map for the Viceroy and on it traced their immense passage that spanned