Ep. 31: Cabeza de Vaca’s Fantastic Journey | The American West

Almost exactly 500 years ago, a shipwrecked Spaniard named Cabeza de Vaca and three companions made the first trans-continental journey in the history of the American West. Then he wrote down his account of eight years in Native America, one of the great First Contact stories of all time. Subscribe now wherever you listen to podcasts. YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIQv7voZWHy4X3UFECqr3ggFIj9uQJT2O, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0wrs79YL0Jw2AjQrCBKUUu, Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-american-west/id1811365050, iHeart https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1248-the-american-west-273702538/, Pandora https://www.pandora.com/podcast/the-american-west/PC:1001101272, Amazon https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/17657fa8-7388-4983-8b26-c1d5505ed2e5/the-american-west. MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAaa0mleeU128Ad5iM1RFIg, and Youtube Clips https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterClips Check out more MeatEater's American History audio originals "The Long Hunters https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-long-hunters.html?lang=en_US&persistUserId=MT777dfccfb5ad885f&_gl=1*1wsssmp*_gcl_au*OTE4NjU0MjA1LjE3NDE4MDEzNTI.*_ga*MTUzMTAxNzcxNC4xNzQwNTEzMzQ0*_ga_J3M86GMH9B*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuNTMuMC4w*_ga_VNCSXFY0BW*MTc0NjIyMDU5My41MC4wLjE3NDYyMjA2MDAuMC4wLjA." and "Mountain Men https://store.themeateater.com/products/meateaters-american-history-the-mountain-men.html?lang=en_US" Subscribe to The MeatEater Podcast Network on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Shop MeatEater Merch https://store.themeateater.com/ See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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  Cabeza de Vaca was one of the only survivors of a shipwreck that stranded him on the Texas shore in the 1520s, but turned misfortune into one of the great journeys in Western history. I'm Dan Flores, and this is The American West.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Cabeza de Vaca's Fantastic Journey.

• 2:17Speaker 03

  After 10,000 years, how would you intuit that the world as you've known it is about to change forever? Maybe you dream it, which at one insightful moment in the 1500s is how a group of native people located far inland on today's Lake Superior first understood that everything was on the verge of shifting. In this band of Ojibwas, a prophet had a dream that disturbed him. And although he took a long time analyzing and thinking about it, eventually he shared it. In his dream, "strange people with baffling customs had crossed the big waters in canoes of giant size and landed on the distant coast," he said.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  "They had pale skins and bushy hair on their faces and knives that were frightfully sharp." "What else?" his listeners asked. "They also possessed long, black tubes," the dreamer related, "which they pointed at animals and birds and from which smoke and a noise so terrific emanated that he was startled even in his dream." In the version that has come down to us, the dreamer didn't say what had befallen those animals and birds when the smoke cleared and the den faded.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  There's a good chance that by the time the Ojibwas sensed this impending alteration in their world, the unprecedented newcomers were already probing at various parts of North America. Fishermen and whalers from ports hundreds of miles across the Great Eastern Ocean, which for so many centuries had isolated America from the human history unfolding on Earth's largest landmass, had been sailing west to exploit Outer Banks whaling and fisheries. Already by the 1520s, far to the south, there had been shipwrecks of the giant canoes on North American coasts.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  By the 1580s, the strange people with hair on their faces and black tubes that spewed thunder and smoke were coming ashore up and down the coast, wearing bizarre garments and speaking languages no one had ever heard before. The natives tried to make sense of them. "Do you come for firewood to warm yourselves?" some of them asked. There's a theory of how first contact between cultures unfamiliar with each other unfolds. It bears a resemblance to what's called biological first contact, when creatures wholly new

• 5:07Speaker 03

  to a landscape, say mongooses released in Hawaii, encounter birds, and birds encounter them, that have never seen one another before. The theory goes that humans making first contact experience it in two stages. In the initial stage, you can only interpret someone standing before you through the history of knowledge already in your head. They may be in strange or no garb, vocalizing unintelligibly, gesticulating or making expressions and body language signals you can't decipher. But your reading of them rests on how your culture has prepared you to see.

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Misunderstandings at this stage can be epic. In the science fiction classic, The Sparrow, written during the 500th anniversary of Europeans arriving in America, first contact with a civilization among the stars happens when a scientific and religious order on Earth receives a marvelous and beautiful auditory signal from space. Interpreting it as a musical tribute to the deity, Earth dispatches a ship that includes a religious ambassador entrusted to make first contact. He discovers that the gorgeous music that lured Earthlings across vast distances

• 6:35Speaker 03

  are indeed poems sung into space by a planet's beings, who are joyous he has come and expect joy from him. In First Contact's second stage, both sides produce a more realistic assessment of one another. In The Sparrow, Earth's ambassador realizes the songs that drew him across space are not, in fact, celebrations of God, but tributes to lurid sexual encounters with the alien species attracted by the song's oral splendor.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  The singers discover that a celibate Jesuit from Earth doesn't react as they expected. Five centuries ago, at the outset, American natives and old-worlders widely misinterpreted one another and their motives. Over time, they came to see one another with more discerning and realistic eyes. In the next thousand years, we Earthlings may have a chance to see first-contact theory in action if we encounter some new form of intelligence. For now, the confrontations that took place in America and on Pacific islands in the 1500s and 1600s are the most instructive examples we have.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  In the Caribbean and on Atlantic Gulf and Pacific shores, natives isolated from the rest of humanity for 15,000 years now stood face-to-face with Europeans and Africans on missions of discovery, exploitation, colonization, and survival. The stakes for accurate mutual understanding could not have been higher.

• 8:25Speaker 03

  But every encounter was filtered and mediated by the information already in people's heads. The most famous instance in American history was the conviction on the part of the Aztec king, Motzuma Xochocotzin, that the shocking appearance and technological wizardry of the Spaniard Hernán Cortés was a fulfillment of a prophecy that their culture hero, Quetzicotl, would one day return from the sky. There are other remembrances from North America. On first encountering Europeans, the New England Abenakis believed they were seeing the cannibal giants of their ancient stories.

• 9:09Speaker 03

  Witnessing strange newcomers apparently unharmed by strange afflictions devastating their own villages, native peoples in Virginia concluded that Europeans were the spirits of their own dead come back to life. Those misses were far from a one-way street. Encountering American natives, Europeans also struggled. Once they figured out America was not Asia, but a new unsuspected continent, they had to decode their religious and cultural beliefs that neither the continent nor its inhabitants were supposed to exist.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  As did these people they called Indians, Europeans of the age interpreted the world through religion, in their case, a religion that had spread during the Roman Empire's colonization efforts throughout Europe a thousand years earlier. The Judeo-Christian tradition sprang from Middle Eastern agricultural and herding origins. Its first-caused deity resembled a human, and he presided over Earth from somewhere in space. Springing from a highly localized beginning, this religion had nothing to say about the wider world Europeans now confronted. America, its peoples, its often bizarre new animals were entire new mysteries.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  Ransacking that religious story for clues, Europeans could come up with only one: A reference in the first volume of their sacred text, the Old Testament. And it's in Kings 17:6. "To ten lost tribes that had left the Middle East, were never heard of in the known world again, and never returned." It was well into the 1800s before the idea that Indians must be descendants of Old World Hebrew speakers crashed on the rocks of reality. But reality didn't prevent the American-born religion of Mormonism

• 11:22Speaker 03

  from emerging out of the puzzlement of first contact with this idea still intact. With so little to go on, Europeans seeing tattooed Americans wearing odd hairstyles, clothing fashioned from the skins of strange animals, and feathers from unfamiliar birds drew on the memories of their religious traditions and history. This was how European pagans, whose nature religions Christianity had long ago defeated, once looked and acted. So the conclusion came readily: These were people who had never heard of the deity Old Worlders called Jesus. They apparently regarded animals as sacred and godlike.

• 12:07Speaker 03

  They believed in sexual freedom for both men and women. They thought women had the same rights to divorce that men had. Therefore, the newcomers concluded, "These Indians must be disciples of the supernatural force the colonists believed a source of evil." If Indians embraced animal deities and trees and nature and had never heard of Jesus, then in the Christian worldview, the only other option was satanic worship. European and American teachers of religion spent the next 300 years attempting to banish the devil from the New World.

• 12:48Speaker 03

  First Contact Theory predicts these kinds of wide misses, cultural misconstructions based on the idea that truth is found in one's own belief system. But with more experience with one another, evidence-based conclusions eventually replace most predetermined reactions. Spending time among Europeans, native people realized the newcomers were not, after all, a realization of their storied traditions and prophecies. They were merely a group of ordinary humans, previously unknown, who for some reason possessed interesting and effective tools that possibly could provide new ways of controlling the world. By the 1620s and 1630s,

• 13:33Speaker 03

  as native people watched the newcomers struggle to learn their languages and saw them appear helpless living off the land, savvy observers formed a different impression. One of them, a highly intelligent and widely-traveled Huron or Windat headman named Kanderok, who debated the Jesuits who were attempting to convert his people to Christianity, apparently traveled to Europe. Kanderok later appeared as native antagonist in a widely-read 1703 book about the relative merits of native and European worldviews. Wherein, he concluded that while Europeans possessed many remarkable technologies,

• 14:17Speaker 03

  as a people, they seemed generally dim-witted, greedy, and ignoble. In this second stage, European conclusions about the natives soon enough settled on a new assessment as well. Native religions might matter to members of the European clergy who would stubbornly continue efforts at converting tribal people to Christianity for centuries. But in the larger game that was now afoot in North America, the worldview of the natives wasn't nearly as important as their obvious interest in old-world technological marvels Europeans were unloading on American shores. The more experiences Europeans had with native people,

• 15:00Speaker 03

  the more they concluded that, like themselves, Indians were self-interested and therefore rational. First Contact: Stage 2 now revolved around a new question: Exactly what were these indigenous Americans willing to trade for a transformative technology?

• 15:30Speaker 03

  Cabeza de Vaca, the shipwrecked Spaniard who would lead a small group of survivors on a fantastic trans-west overland journey in the mid-1530s. It was the first transcontinental crossing of America ever by an old-worlder. Offers one of history's best examples of the wild misunderstandings of First Contact. Over the years, I've read Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca's Relación at least five times, and I've never gotten over the sense that none of the better-known journeys of Western exploration equals the tale this one tells. I can't think of another real-life American adventure story

• 16:15Speaker 03

  that outdoes it. Coronado, Lewis and Clark, Fremont, at least on all his trips except for one, even John Wesley Powell going down the Grand Canyon, all remain far more in control of their circumstances than Cabeza de Vaca and his companions did. Those other Western explorers were never forced by fate into the kind of Joseph Conrad "heart of darkness" world Cabeza de Vaca faced among the many, literally indecipherable nations of the interior of America 500 years ago. No one else in early American letters enacted the classic shaman's journey

• 16:58Speaker 03

  from the known to the unknown and back again the way Cabeza de Vaca said he did. His was a completely singular experience in a part of Earth Europeans hadn't even known existed three decades earlier.

• 17:19Speaker 03

  Washed up on the southern shores of the new continent, De Vaca wondered if the people Spaniards were calling Indians were, in fact, rational beings. The Gulf Coast peoples he was among regarded their dreams as more real than waking reality was. The Spaniards discovered that if the natives dreamed you had committed some offense, the dream itself was sufficient evidence of guilt. When he finally returned to civilization to tell his tale of almost a decade spent among native people, De Vaca argued that the tribes of the American Southwest had allowed him safe passage because they were convinced the Europeans were wizards who could cure

• 18:03Speaker 03

  the sick and bring back the dead. And De Vaca had not attempted to disabuse them of those notions. What kind of man was this? One of the best modern editors of Cabeza de Vaca's Relación, or Relation, describes De Vaca as "an honest, modest, and humane man who underestimated rather than exaggerated the many strange things that came under his notice." That is, this editor continues, "if we accept the account of his marvelous healings," by which he means if we actually believe this part of the man's story.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Anticipating some pushback, De Vaca himself tells us that "better than to exaggerate, I have lessened in all things in the story I tell."

• 19:02Speaker 03

  When he left his hometown in southern Spain in 1527, Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca never imagined himself the future author of a North American first contact chronicle. Born just before Columbus stumbled into the Americas in 1492, de Vaca curiously bore his mother's last name from an ancestor who guided a Spanish army through a mountain pass hid marked with the head of a cow. The family must have been an important one for somewhere de Vaca acquired a well-rounded education. He also had good

• 19:41Speaker 03

  contacts. King Charles himself had made de Vaca treasurer of a major expedition to the southern coast of North America. No small thing. It turned out a good head for figures was wasted on the Pedro Narvaez expedition to colonize Florida. Narvaez, with whom Cabeza de Vaca sailed, had petitioned for a grant somewhere in America, and without once consulting the tribes who lived there, and one of those acts of astonishing colonial-era arrogance, the Spanish crown had given Narvaez North America from Florida south to Tampico, Mexico.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  The colonizing party set out in five vessels from San Lujar de Barameda in June 1527, 600 strong, but reduced to 300 after a storm and desertions in Santa Domingo. Somewhere off the Gulf coast of Florida, the entire fleet was sunk by what was most likely a hurricane. The survivors managed to assemble a flotilla of small craft to push westward along the Gulf shore. But at Narvaez's insistence, what remained of the expedition became an everyman-for-himself

• 21:05Speaker 03

  disaster. At some point during this dark time, the tiny vessels passed the Mississippi's mouth and finally crashed on an island they called Malhado, misfortune, probably today's Galveston Island on the coast of Texas.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  Here they found themselves among people they called the Capocas and the Hans, large and well-formed natives whose occupation of the island was only seasonal. Eighty-two Spaniards were shipwrecked on this island in November of 1528. By the spring of 1529, only 15 of them were left.

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  Some members of the Spanish Party had been sick since their approach to Florida. De Vaca would describe in his Relacion what happened next. After this, the natives were visited by a disease of the bowels, of which half their number died. They conceived that we had destroyed them. But because some of the Spaniards were dying of the same affliction, the native shamans on the Gulf Shore finally resisted this explanation. On Gulf Shores almost exactly five centuries ago, this first meeting of Europeans and Western Indians was becoming an inexplicable and epic disaster.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  Six hundred settlers aboard five sailing ships had initially set out from Mexico on the Narveas Expedition. Now, four years later, by the end of the year 1529, three Spaniards, one African, and no ships remained. And in the country where these survivors still lived, native people now were dying by the thousands. Nor, as De Vaca renders it, was this continent Europeans had barely touched, a revered virgin land with exotic animal and bird life in staggering abundance, which English, Dutch, and French observers would describe a century later.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Spaniards like Cabeza de Vaca were in America earlier, and for both native people and wildlife, those few decades between the 1520s and the 1620s were more critical than anyone knew. As the dwindling cadre of shipwrecked old whalers had struggled earlier in their sodden horsehide rafts from Tampa Bay to Galveston in the months after their 1528 shipwreck, they found a different America than later Europeans would.

• 25:54Speaker 03

  As their expeditions collapsed in the Gulf of Mexico, the Spaniards had rummaged the coast for cornfields, fan palms, and whatever wildlife they could find. Amazingly, there didn't seem to be much. And the animals and birds they saw largely were made up of creatures the Spaniards recognized from Europe. There were deer, bears, and lions, along with rabbits, hares, and civet martens. An animal with a pocket on its belly dismayed the Europeans, who had never seen a marsupial before. But then the American possum would puzzle colonists for the next 150 years. The Gulf Coast lagoons did hold vast numbers of birds.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  They saw geese, ducks, herons, flycatchers, and quail in great numbers, along with many different birds of prey soaring above the waters. But the wild creatures they saw weren't numerous enough to feed them. They ended up killing and eating all their surviving horses to keep themselves alive. Both along the Gulf shore and later in Texas, Cabeza de Vaca's account seems to portray a pre-contact America, many thousands of years old and densely enough populated that wildlife at this point in history was scarce. The so-called virgin soil epidemics, caused by dozens of diseases introduced from the

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Old World, was in the future and about to change all that, slashing America's native population from nearly 5 million to fewer than a million just a few decades away. Cabeza de Vaca and the dwindling Spanish survivors were almost certainly advance agents of that change. But meanwhile, the natives they were among enslaved and sometimes executed them.

• 27:51Speaker 03

  Likely the capocas and the hans were various bands of the coastal hunter-gatherers today known as the carancas. According to Devaca's Relacion, the Spanish survivors were among bands of natives who regularly seemed short of food. "For three months of the year," Devaca says, "everyone ate nothing but oysters. Deer and other wildlife were so scarce that it seemed an accident that anyone possessed a deer skin." "Many times," Cabeza de Vaca wrote, "I was three days without eating. The fat season was when the tunas of the prickly pear cactus were ripe, but that season lasted only three months."

• 28:34Speaker 03

  Southern Texas in the 1520s seemed a long way from a New World Eden. Slowly, their situation began to change. By the time they were down to only four, a pair of developments allowed the final surviving castaways to escape their lives as slaves. "First," Cabeza de Vaca said, "I set to trafficking," by which he meant that he became a trader, exchanging skins, ochre for paint, flint for points, seashell and conches, and a fruit

• 29:13Speaker 03

  like a bean of the highest value among them, which they used as a medicine and employ in their dances and festivities. That new occupation exposed him to a larger world, inland of the coast. And as a result of a classic first-contact misunderstanding and tragic circumstances early Europeans unwillingly released across America, all four Old Worlders discovered now that in the eyes of the natives, they were becoming sacred beings.

• 30:02Speaker 03

  It happened this way. The ill Spanish castaways who'd made it to Texas had obviously infected the local natives. As English colonists would discover a century later, every town the Europeans visited suddenly seemed to suffer from mysterious afflictions the native shamans could not cure. But as Indians continued to die, while the remaining group of castaways did not, word of that strange circumstance began to spread. The native conclusion was that the Spaniards must be wizards and healers.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  As Cabeza de Vaca would write it, "They wished to make us physicians without examination or inquiring for diplomas." At first, De Vaca insists, "We laughed at what they did, telling them it was folly, that we knew not how to heal." Then, seeing the changed reaction to them, they fell silent and did what was necessary. Somewhere near the present-day city of San Antonio, Texas, in 1535, Cabeza de Vaca did what was necessary, and, so he claimed at least, brought a dead man back to life.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  After that, he wrote, "We all became physicians, and that saved them." Hearing from inland groups that there were Christians like them far to the west and the south, the four of them, Cabeza de Vaca, Andres Dorantes, Alonso Maldonado, whose father in Spain actually was a doctor, and the African Estevan, were able to perform the first transcontinental crossing of North America by old worlders.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, much of it became a blur for them. Even three centuries later, large areas of the southwest that they traveled were still unknown to mapmakers. A common passage in De Vaca's account reads, "We left there and traveled through so many sorts of people of such diverse languages, the memory fails to recall them." He did recall that on their entering native towns, the residents rejoiced over the famous healers, hoisting them like heroes and carrying them without letting us put our feet to the ground.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  "The tribes they traveled through," he concluded, "were all very fond of romance." In town after town, the inhabitants would line up by the hundreds to be touched and cured. Words spread ahead of them that they were "the children of the sun." As they moved through an increasingly desert landscape, they were soon accompanied by a retinue of 4,000 or more natives attentive to their every need. What Cabeza de Vaca conveys in his remarkable First Contact account is the state of a Native

• 33:18Speaker 03

  America that had been richly inhabited for 10,000 years. It's the story of a truly historic moment in time. In it, America is not a virgin of any sort. The part of the continent they traveled through was brimming with people. As a result, it was not always brimming with other kinds of life. As the healers and their followers moved westward, they left the America most like Europe and entered the more Asian-like part of the continent. Here, three kinds of deer, mule deer and elk, now joined whitetail deer, appeared and became more numerous.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  One evening, locals brought the healers five dressed deer apiece. There were also burly creatures the Spaniards called wild cattle, which their informant said sometimes migrated from a northerly direction all the way to Florida.

• 34:15Speaker 03

  Cabeza de Vaca only saw these new and unfamiliar creatures three times. "They had small horns and flocky coats," he said. "Some were tawny and coloring, others were black." The next Spaniard to write a description of buffalo, Pedro Castaneda of the Coronado Expedition, added intriguing additional details about this new animal. "They had manes like lions," he said. "They carried their tails over their backs like scorpions, and they were as numerous as fishes in the sea." So populated was the America these Spaniards moved through that they stayed in towns virtually every night of their journey. But of the villages they visited,

• 35:00Speaker 03

  only among the cattle hunters, the most southerly peoples who lived among the buffalo, did the Spaniards get a sense of American natives who lived very well off a great surplus of wild animals. This cow nation seemed rich, with many skins to gift. "They had nothing they did not bestow," Cabeza de Vaca said. One of the Spaniards, Dorantes, traveled farther north and found himself among the farming masters of the Southwest, the pueblo descendants of the Chacoan Empire. These, he said, lived in the fixed dwellings of civilization. That line in Cabeza de Vaca's account would spin off events ultimately leading

• 35:45Speaker 03

  to the founding of the Spanish Southwest and luring a steady stream of incoming Old World settlers to places like Arizona, New Mexico, and California. Eventually, the Spaniards reached the west coast of Mexico, where frontier troops rescued them. In present Sonora, the European influence was immediately noticeable. The lands became vacant and native people scarce.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  And where they were not, Spanish slave hunters rode the Indians down. Devaca concludes his relación with the wonderful evocation of the shaman returning groggily from his journey through a strange world that seemed less real by the moment. “Other Europeans were astonished at the sight of me, so strangely habited as I was,” he said, “and in company with Indians. They stood staring at me a length of time, so confounded that they neither hailed me nor drew near to make an inquiry.” These four had lived through one of the contact period’s most harrowing experiences.

• 37:01Speaker 03

  What might seem a grand adventure to us now, from another perspective, was a tragedy on an operatic scale. At the heart of Cabeza Devaca’s account are stories of native people growing sick and dying of contagions his fellow Europeans had unleashed among them. Yet everywhere these agents of the Old World traveled, they were among native people who treated them the true source of so much death and grieving, not as pariahs of the apocalypse, but as holy saviors. As reward for his tribulations, Cabeza Devaca was appointed governor of the Rio de la Plata in Brazil.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  But he suffered the outcome so many Spanish colonial officials underwent in the Americas: charged with crimes by a rival, and arrested and removed from office in 1543. Cabeza Devaca passed away in 1557, after his relación had gone through two additions and had made him famous in Spain and its colonies. As for his companions, Maldonado and Durantes, they found wives and married and settled down with stories that intrigued all who heard them for the rest of their lives. And Esteban, in a demonstration of how truly fleeting the fame that had carried them

• 38:27Speaker 03

  across the continent could be, in 1539, Esteban guided the Franciscan padre Marcos Denezza into the American Southwest in search of rumored cities of gold. Outside the walls of Hawicu, the first Zuni village they came to in today's western New Mexico, they must have encountered natives who were farther along in their first contact experiences. Outside those walls, they put Esteban to death, apparently for falsely impersonating a shaman.

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• 41:14Speaker 05

  So Dan, in this episode, you're describing the incredible adventure of Cabeza de Vaca. But before we get into the argument that you outline in this as it relates to sort of first contact. I want to just take a minute to acknowledge or marvel at the fact that this story has even been passed down to us.

• 41:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:40Speaker 05

  Right. It's one of those.

• 41:43Speaker 05

  It's one of those historical episodes that's that for no, there's, there's so many reasons why these guys could have or should have died along the way, and then we wouldn't have any knowledge of this. But in the end, the, the information that resulted from it gives us sort of unprecedented insight into pre-contact North America.

• 42:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it really does. I mean, most of our early accounts of America from say, the Dutch or the English, even the French are from 70, 80 years later. And one of the problems with that is that those accounts from say, 1600, 1620, uh, from the Plymouth settlement.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  Those give you an idea of North America as this mythic virgin continent that is just brimming with wildlife and riches of all kinds and has, in fact, a small native population that, in some respects, the later European arrivals seem to almost ignore. I mean, it's as if they believe, and some of them actually make this argument, that God has sort of scoured the landscape of the indigenous people to make way for these Europeans to settle the Americas.

• 43:20Speaker 03

  And what Cabeza de Vaca allows you to see as a corrective to that is what North America looked like 70 or 80 or 100 years earlier, before there had been any large-scale introduction of European diseases, which were the agents that had wiped out so much of the native population. So he's there, I mean, and as the story goes, it's clear, he's an agent of some of those infections, but he's there at a time prior to what we usually get an account of, particularly from the English, a century later.

• 43:58Speaker 05

  And he describes, at one point, you mentioned that it seems as though almost every night they're staying in towns while traveling on foot. And to the modern imagination, you look at that part of the country and you think it'd be difficult to achieve that in the 21st century if you're traveling by foot, but he's describing a landscape that's sort of alien to our historical imaginations.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, we tend to think of, you know, America as being lightly populated. I mean, what demographic scholars have sort of figured out over the last 30 or so years is that prior to contact, North America had a population of native people that was probably getting pretty close to about 5 million north of the Rio Grande, so including what is now the United States and Canada. And that's, of course, a part of the world where we have well over 400 million people now. And, but nonetheless, the population had grown to almost 5 million north of the settlements, the Indian settlements in Mexico.

• 45:08Speaker 03

  And what we also know is that in the wake of these disease epidemics, the native population of that same region dropped to about 900,000 people. So these disease epidemics, they're, it's one of the great human disasters of all history. In fact, a lot of scholars refer to it as the great dying. They think that the Americas probably had one-sixth of the world's population of people at about the time that Europeans arrived and ended up losing somewhere between 85

• 45:47Speaker 03

  and 95% of that population as a result of the exposure of these American natives who have been isolated from the rest of the world for 15,000 years. And what that meant was they had been isolated from all these diseases that had emerged in the Old World, in Europe, in Asia, and Africa, that had come about as a result of the domestication of animals. Most of our major diseases are the result of living in close contact with domesticated hogs and chickens and ducks and cattle and horses. I mean, smallpox, influenza, all these common diseases are part of a domesticated

• 46:32Speaker 03

  kind of agricultural model. And North American and South American native people had never been exposed to these diseases. So they really get taken out by what scholars refer to as the virgin soil epidemics. And this Cabeza de Vaca story gives you a kind of an insight on the ground as to not only what America was like before these disease epidemics swept like a conflagration across the landscape, but also how native people reacted to these very first Europeans that they saw. And that was very much a kind of a classic first contact story.

• 47:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, and this, a lot of your argument in this episode is about the nature of first contact.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 05

  And you, you explain a sort of a two-stage

• 47:34Speaker 05

  Model where there's this um attempt by both parties to understand one another in the context of what they already know.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:46Speaker 05

  And and and then at some point it becomes clear that's not that's not the case. But um you you you draw on some science fiction as well to sort of explain or help help us understand what what's going on. And so just broadly speaking, in terms of like thinking about history in terms of models, how you like, how useful do you find that? I mean, it helps. I think it it gives us a very clear understanding of what's happening on the ground during all of this chaotic interaction. But there's also like a very messy reality of the past that not everything happens the same way. So I kind of wonder if you could just speak to that in terms of the big picture,

• 48:28Speaker 05

  how you think about using models like this in your in your historical analysis?

• 48:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is definitely a model of first contact. It's a theory of how first contact works, which essentially argues that uh when two completely different cultures confront one another for the first time. I mean, in the initial sort of interactions, the only way you have of evaluating the other is from what's already in your head.

• 48:55Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 48:55Speaker 03

  And this American uh old worlder versus indigenous Native American kind of confrontation is a really great look at how that worked because we do have some examples from both sides. Sort of how the native people look at, I mean, very, and it's obviously a varied kind of interpretation depending on what your culture is telling you. But we have some examples of how native people looked at Europeans. And then also what the Europeans brought that was in their heads, where they tried to interpret these people who. Shouldn't actually even exist.

• 49:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  This continent shouldn't exist. These people shouldn't exist. So how do we explain who they are? And those kinds of, uh, of settings and those periods, those pregnant moments, I think, are just rife with the possibility of huge misses. And one of the reasons I wanted to tell that, that science fiction, uh, story about the sparrow, and the sparrow was written by a woman who was very definitely writing her novel at the time of the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the Americas, because she wanted to write a novel about first contact and sort of,

• 50:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  and delve into this particular model. Uh, I think it's probably a good, uh, novelistic analogy of how big the misses can be. And then over time, this model argues, people settle out and began to learn more about one another and start making more realistic appraisals of what the other group is like. Uh, but it, I mean, you're exactly right. It's messy. It proceeds in different, at different speeds in different places. And I think the outcome, for example, of Estevan's

• 50:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:55Speaker 03

  journey into New Mexico at the end of this story is an example of, so that kind of information is proceeding more quickly for the Zoonies, maybe.

• 51:06Speaker 05

  Right.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  than it was for some of these interior people in what is now Texas.

• 51:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think what's so interesting about that episode is the way the group had survived during the whole course of this journey was by quote unquote impersonating a shaman.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 05

  And that's what allowed them to, to travel freely and, and be welcomed among different communities. And then ultimately what Estevan is killed for is the, the, um, transgression of quote unquote impersonating a shaman. So there's, you can see here in these two different stages. These two different contexts.

• 51:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:51Speaker 05

  The same actions bring about different results.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, they do. And, uh, yeah, and you know, one of the just kind of crazy aspects of this story is that these four survivors from this huge expedition, I mean,

• 52:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  The expedition that the four survivors come from is started out with 600 people and five ships and, and only four of them end up alive after about three or four years.

• 52:18Speaker 05

  Mm hmm.

• 52:19Speaker 03

  And they sort of accidentally discover that the way to not only live amongst all these native people, but to travel, because they've heard that far to the west, there are people like them.

• 52:34Speaker 05

  Right.

• 52:35Speaker 03

  The way to get there and make this transcontinental crossing is to do so as healers, as shamans, as physicians, as Kabazza Devaka's account puts it. And what's kind of crazy about it is that the diseases they're healing are the ones that they themselves have brought to the people. And so this population of the interior of the southwest of native people is they're all completely being struck down by diseases their shamans can't cure. And what strikes them about these Europeans and the African Estevan is they seem to be immune.

• 53:18Speaker 03

  And so if they're immune to this, while everybody else is being taken out, then they must be special and, and physicians. And so that's in effect, the story of how Kabazza Devaka and his three companions managed to do the first European transcontinental crossing in American history and finally get back to their compatriots.

• 53:38Speaker 05

  And you make, putting into that context of a transcontinental crossing, you make the case at some point in this that Devaka's journey surpasses Lewis and Clark and John Wesley Powell and all of these, um,

• 53:57Speaker 05

  Cross continental journeys that are maybe come to mind more immediately when you think about the American West.

• 54:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:04Speaker 05

  What specific qualities do you think about this episode make it stand out? It's there's like the loss of control that they experience. There, there's this cultural immersion aspect to it. It's also sort of a psychologically, it seems like a very strange transformation that they go through. I just wonder what your big takeaways are from this when you think about what stands out the most about Davaka's travels.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  I think all those things you just mentioned, I mean, unlike John Wesley Powell or Lewis and Clark, Davaka and his companions are the, their journey is out of their control for most of the time they're in North America. So they're not on top of what's happening the way, for example, Lewis and Clark are with, I mean, Meriwether Lewis setting out every morning and knowing we're going to go this many miles and, and we're looking for this particular landmark and all of that. Cabeza Davaka and his companions, for one thing, the continent is completely unknown in front of them.

• 55:16Speaker 03

  They have no idea what it's like, how big it is, how far you have to go to finally get to other Spaniards that the Indians tell them are far to the West. And I think another aspect of it is that clearly they're the four survivors of a group that started out 600 strong. And so, I mean, Lewis and Clark, you know, they lose one guy who has an app, an appendix rupture on the trip out and they have another couple of guys who, one of them gets shot through the buttocks.

• 55:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 55:53Speaker 03

  In a hunting accident, but.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  There's nothing like losing almost everybody where only a very tiny percentage of people manage to survive. And then the other thing, and you, you mentioned it as well, Randall, is in order to survive, they have to become a part of the cultures that they're intertwined with. They have to, to a degree, go native and, and join, uh, uh, the worldview that they find themselves within. And of course, John Wesley Powell, John C. Fremont, none of those people ever have to do anything like that.

• 56:34Speaker 02

  No. Yeah, it's, it's a, it's a remarkable story. It's almost too good to be true. Uh, so it was fun chatting with you about it.

• 56:44Speaker 03

  I can't wait till, uh, somebody does a movie with Antonio Banderas, no doubt.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:48Speaker 03

  That's a complete fuck.

• 56:49Speaker 02

  That'll be a, that'll be a blockbuster.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, no kidding.

• 56:52Speaker 02

  Thanks, Dan.

• 56:53Speaker 03

  You bet.

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