At the very least, Columbus might have walked away with a richer understanding of wonder, one that is a “disclaimer of dogmatic certainty, a self-estrangement in the face of the strangeness, diversity, and opacity of the world.”21 Wonder might have been rescued from Columbus’s profane version, his execrable conflation of wonder and dogmatic certainty. And it would have also been far more faithful to other more ancient, venerable wanderers, like Herodotus. For Herodotus and Mandeville both, dogmatic certainty is denied by wonder if only because there is so much of the world to see and so much variety and difference under the sun. Dogmatic certainty is surrendered the moment these travelers enter foreign lands and confront the bewildering uncertainties of various cultures, the dizzying variety of truths, the plurality of conceptions of the good, the different faces of beauty. Their narratives are thick with wonder because they are at pains to explain phenomena that are like nothing encountered before, like nothing imagined or dreamed. Short of remaining speechless and stupefied—short of remaining silent, that is—they indulge in the language of wonder as a way of remaining silent while speaking, as a way of communicating what is incommunicable.
In reference to the travels of Herodotus, Greenblatt highlights the epistemological significance of his nomadic method: “Herodotus had raised to an epistemological principle and a crucial rhetorical device the refusal to be bound within the walls of a city. Knowledge depends upon travel, upon a refusal to respect boundaries, upon a restless drive toward the margins. . . . Scythian nomadism is an anamorphic representation of . . . the historian’s apparently aimless wandering.”22 If Herodotus’s historical method follows the example of Scythian nomadism, Mandeville follows in the footsteps of the desert nomads of the Bible, including the descendants of Ishmael, Muslim Saracens (the word Saracen derives from the Greek generic term Sarakenoi, for “nomadic peoples,” and was eventually attributed to Arabs in the seventh century as Islam conquered al-Andalus). Herodotus and Mandeville might have never approached these insights if not for their refusal to remain put. These prophets without a home found wisdom in wandering the earth.
In the age of the Conquest of the New World, there were numerous prophets of Mandeville’s breed. They would come to record with their feet as much as the pen the catastrophes of the age. Cabeza de Vaca was one of the most fascinating of them.
Cabeza de Vaca
With Cabeza de Vaca we get another kind of wanderer, even more striking than Sir John Mandeville since Cabeza de Vaca plays a key role in the exploration of the New World, and the account of his adventures and captivity (covering the 1527–36 period) is the first narrative of the land and cultures of North American territory. Cabeza de Vaca’s experience in the New World is the stuff of which fiction is made. The events and circumstances of Cabeza de Vaca’s life seem to have rolled off the pages of some great novel—and a fantastic one at that.23 For nine long years, Cabeza de Vaca fights to stay alive after being shipwrecked off the coast of Florida with three hundred other Spaniards sent to conquer more New World territory. Only four of them survive.
After being separated from the leader of the expedition, Pánfilo de Narváez (a seasoned colonizer who had achieved wealth and fame in the conquest of Cuba and Jamaica), Cabeza de Vaca eventually wanders from Florida to the territories of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and finally into northern Mexico. He survives against all odds after being enslaved, enduring cold winters, fighting various sicknesses, and, most of all, battling against the relentless and cruel effects of hunger and thirst. His extraordinary ability to survive would have made him a star of the recent genre of “reality television.” How he survives is, perhaps, what is most curious and fascinating about his story: he becomes a trader among North American Indian tribes as well as a renowned healer. In that dramatic process, he somehow empties himself of his former identity as conquistador to become, in his nakedness, part Indian, the first mestizo of the Americas.
Like so many of the chroniclers of the New World, Cabeza de Vaca wrestles with naming the unknown. He is another Adam searching for nomenclature for places without names. Everything is strange and new to him, and he reels, body and mind, to assign it meaning, to orient himself in an environment that is profoundly disorienting. In the first pages of the account, he warns (and entices) the reader to prepare for an account of so many new things that many will choose not to believe (CV, 4). His subject matter will be the surprising and unbelievable, the fantastic richness and diversity of human beings. If nothing else, he tells us, his travel account will satisfy the curiosity that human beings have for one another. When he describes a particular manner of Indian cooking, for instance, it serves as a general metaphor of the great diversity and strangeness of human cultures: “Their way of cooking them [beans and squash] is so new and strange that I want to describe it here in order to show how different and queer the devices and industries of human beings are” (CV, 85).
Something so ordinary—the preparing of vegetables—becomes for Cabeza de Vaca an example of how extraordinary and marvelous human behavior is to someone with the eyes of a foreigner. What is banal and commonplace to natives is fantastic and idiosyncratic to Cabeza de Vaca, like reality in the eyes of a child, or ice in the eyes of a Buendía. Perhaps most remarkable, however, Cabeza de Vaca knows that he is seen this way by other peoples, that he and his strange brood of European explorers are just as unusual as the most eccentric of barbarians. And he certainly knows that all the foreknowledge he has brought with him is inadequate in this New World, null and void, empty like the desert. As Cabeza de Vaca travels through these mysterious territories with his small, dwindling band of Spaniards, he is navigating through vast, labyrinthine deserts, and he confesses to us that his knowledge about these lands and cultures is equally desertlike, barren, desolate, and devoid of familiar truths and certainties: “Neither did we know what to expect from the land we were entering, having no knowledge of what it was, what it might contain, and by what kind of people it was inhabited” (CV, 11). Fear is a natural response to this, but he survives by his ability, in Rolena Adorno’s words, to negotiate this fear.24
His most remarkable achievement in this regard is his uncanny ability to alter and transform his identity as a Spanish conquistador and to somehow reinvent himself as an Indian trader and shaman. He is now brother to New World Calibans. In this guise, at times naked and starving, Cabeza de Vaca proves himself valuable to various Indian groups by bringing them hides and red ocher (with which they would smear their faces and hair) as well as flint and canes for arrows, and possibly tobacco and peyote. The service that he provides various native communities gives him brief tastes of freedom during a time when he was otherwise enslaved by various groups (the Malhado Indians, as well as the Quevenes and Marianes Indians).
But now comes the strangest part of the story. Cabeza de Vaca somehow becomes what the Indians of these regions most needed and most revered, a shaman and healer, now resembling Prospero in the ways of magic—and, of course, the figure of Jesus. As physician of the body and soul, Cabeza de Vaca begins to minister to a wide variety of native groups, performing acts of healing for individuals desperate for a touch of the miraculous. By making the sign of the cross, breathing on them, and praying in earnest to God, he is able to heal. His reputation as a wonder-worker soon blossoms and spreads among native groups, so that when he is able to escape from his captivity under the Marianes, he flees to a group called the Avavares and is treated with respect, even reverence, “because they had heard of us and of how we cured people and of the marvels our Lord worked through us” (CV, 55). And he travels to other communities to attend to the sick and dying. In the most dramatic case, Cabeza de Vaca is summoned to heal a very sick man only to arrive and find that he is already dead. He follows the pattern that he has established, making the sign of the cross, breathing on him, and praying to the Lord. Later that night, the Indians rush to him, “saying that the dead man whom I attended to in their presence had resuscitated, risen from his bed, walked about, eaten and talked to them. . . . This caused great surprise and wonder, all over the land nothing else was spoken of” (CV, 60).
Cabeza de Vaca now has an uncanny power at his command. He himself has become a wonder-worker with awesome powers like Shakespeare’s Prospero (“graves at my command”). When Cabeza de Vaca is rescued and returns to the Old World, evidence of his healing power ends. Beyond the borders of the New World, Cabeza de Vaca’s shamanistic power