Castaways

I can’t stop going back to this book, which I have read in various translations under various titles. No book I know better documents the transformation of a human being. Abandoned, shipwrecked, and enslaved, Cabeza de Baca, a conquistador in the model of Cortez, begins a barefoot trek across the American Southwest as one kind of man and ends it as the opposite of the man who started out.

His memoir has the shape and structure of an adventure novel, and, truly, this narrative is where American literature begins. He leaves me in awe of his will to survive, his… show more.

I love this adventure story for the ages.

In 1528 a Spanish expedition landed in Florida. Three hundred men set out by land while the others sailed. They marched north along the Florida coast in a region abounding in swamps, poisonous snakes, and harsh vegetation while hoping to join the ship-borne men later. They never did.

I felt their despair, chronicled by Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, as they spent eight years of slavery, indescribable suffering wandering through deserts, amid severe weather, naked, unprotected making their way west into Texas and northern Mexico. In the end, of the 300 men who… show more.