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Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca - Cabeza de Vacas Adventures in the unknown interior of America

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Cabeza de Vaca came to the New world in 1527 as part of a Spanish expedition to conquer the region north of the Gulf of Mexico. His exploration party lost contact with their ships, set out northward on foot, and traveled, their numbers soon reduced from 300 to 4, across Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and northern Mexico for the next eight years. In addition to being one of the great true adventure stories of all time, Cabeza de Vacas account of their travels is an unparalleled source of firsthand information on the pre-European Southwest--the variety of its climate, its flora and fauna, the customs of its natives. They were the first to see the opossum and the buffalo, the Mississippi and the Pecos, pine-nut mash and mesquite-bean flour. This book contains the first description in literature of a West Indies Hurricane. Cabeza de Vaca was not only a physical trailblazer: he was also a literary pioneer, and he deserves the distinction of being called the Southwests first writer.... The Relaci????n, while not fiction, possesses most of the attributes of a good novel.--William T. Pilkington

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title Cabeza De Vacas Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America A Zia - photo 1

title:Cabeza De Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America A Zia Book
author:Nunez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar.; Covey, Cyclone.
publisher:University of New Mexico
isbn10 | asin:082630656X
print isbn13:9780826306562
ebook isbn13:9780585187242
language:English
subjectNez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar,--16th cent, America--Discovery and exploration--Spanish, Indians of North America--Southwestern States, Southwestern States--Description and travel, America--Early accounts to 1600, Narvez, Pnfilo de,--d. 1528, Explorers
publication date:1983
lcc:E125.N9A3713 1983eb
ddc:970/.01/6
subject:Nez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar,--16th cent, America--Discovery and exploration--Spanish, Indians of North America--Southwestern States, Southwestern States--Description and travel, America--Early accounts to 1600, Narvez, Pnfilo de,--d. 1528, Explorers
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Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America
Translated and Annotated by Cyclone Covey
with a new Epilogue by William T. Pilkington
Cabeza de Vacas Adventures in the unknown interior of America - image 2
University of New Mexico Press
Albuquerque
Page 4
{Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America}
Ninth Printing, University of New Mexico Press, 1998
Page 5
Cordially dedicated to
Vernon A. Chamberlin
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Preface
This sixteenth century odyssey of Cabeza de Vaca's is one of the great true epics of history. It is the semiofficial report to the king of Spain by the ranking surviving officer of a royal expedition to conquer Florida which fantastically miscarried.
Four out of a land-force of 300 menby wits, stamina and luckfound their way back to civilization after eight harrowing years and roughly 6,000 miles over mostly unknown reaches of North America. They were the first Europeans to see and live to report the interior of Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and northernmost Mexico; the 'possum and the buffalo; the Mississippi and the Pecos; pine-nut mash and mesquite-bean flour; and a long string of Indian Stone Age tribes. What these wanderers merely heard and surmised had just as great an effect on subsequent events as what they learned at first hand.
Their sojourn "to the sunset," as they told certain of the Indians in the latters' idiom, took on a great added interest and value in the 1930's with the convergent discovery of Carl Sauer and Cleve Hallenbeck that Cabeza de Vaca and his companions had traveled, for the most part, over Indian trails that were still traceable. The thorough work of these two distinguished professors, plus that of innumerable others in such disciplines as archaeology, anthropology, cartography, geology, climatology, botany, zoology and history, has given surprisingly sharp definition to much of the old narrative that had hitherto seemed vague and baffling. The present translation is the
Page 8
first to take advantage of the scientific findings of half a century which culminate in Sauer and Hallenbeck. Hallenbeck, in fact, incorporates and supersedes all previous scholarship on the subject (Alvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca: The Journey and Route of the First European to Cross the Continent of North America: Glendale, Calif.: Arthur H. Clark, 1940).
It was Alvar Nez's mother, Doa Teresa, whose surname was Cabeza de Vaca, or Head of a Cow. This name originated as a title of honor from the decisive Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in the Sierra Morenas on 12 July 1212, when a peasant named Alhaja detected an unguarded pass and marked it with a cow's skull. A surprise attack over this pass routed the Moorish enemy. King Sancho of Navarre thereupon created the novel title, Head of a Cow, and bestowed it in gratitude upon the peasant Alhaja. Alvar Nez proudly adopted this surname of his mother's, though that of his father, de Vera, had a lustre from recent imperialism. Pedro de Vera, the sadistic conqueror of the Canaries, was Alvar Nez's grandfather. Alvar Nez, the eldest of his parents' four children, spoke proudly of his paternal grandfather. It may have been significant for the boy's later career in America that he listened to old Pedro repeat his tales of heroism, and that he had a childhood familiarity with the conquered Guanche savages with whom the grandfather staffed his household as slaves.
Alvar Nez Cabeza de Vaca, who was born about 1490, grew up in the little Andalusian wine center of Jrez, just a few miles from Cdiz and fewer still from the port San Lcar de Barrameda at the mouth of the Guadalquivir. This is the port Magellan sailed from in September 1519and Cabeza de Vaca, seven years and ten months later. Cabeza de Vaca was about ten years old when Columbus, aged forty-nine, returned to Cdiz in chains. The boy may well have seen the autocratic admiral thusjust as he himself was to be returned to the same city in chains at the age of fifty-three.
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In the tradition of the landed gentry, Cabeza de Vaca turned to a military career while still in his teens. When about twenty-one, he marched in the army which King Ferdinand sent to aid Pope Julius II in 1511, and saw action in the Battle of Ravenna of 11 April 1512 in which 20,000 died. He served as ensign at Gaeta outside Naples before returning to Spain and to the service of the Duke of Medina Sidonia in 1513 in Seville, the metropolis of his home region. In the Duke's service, Cabeza de Vaca survived the Comuneros civil war (including the recapture of the Alczar, 16 September 1520, from the Sevillian rebels), the battles of Tordesillas and Villalar, and finally, warfare against the French in Navarre.
He was a veteran of sufficient distinction by 1527 to receive the royal appointment of second in command in the Narvez expedition for the conquest of Florida, a territory which at that time was conceived as extending indefinitely westward. This appointment saved him from another Italian campaign; Charles V's Spanish and German troops ingloriously sacked Rome itself barely a month before the Narvez expedition sailed. Cabeza de Vaca married, apparently, only a short time before the sailing, though there is a bare possibility that he postponed marriage to his return.
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