The Kind Conquistador : A Social Studies Report

   Cabeza de Vaca was born in Spain around 1490. Little of his early life is known except that at one point he joined the Spanish military. He later was asked by Panfilo de Narvaez to go on an expedition to the Americas. He gladly agreed to come, thinking that he would find gold and other riches, but what he found was better than gold.

   The expedition left Spain in 1527 and landed in Florida in 1528. The expedition went downhill when Narvaez told his troops to split into land and sea groups. De Vaca was in the land group and Panfilo de Narvaez was in the sea group. Suddenly a hurricane came out of nowhere and wiped out all the sea units, and Narvaez was never seen again. De Vaca’s crew ended up on Galveston Island, Texas.

  Cabeza de Vaca’s unit was starting to die from disease and hunger. They were so hungry that they even started to eat their precious horses. In a few days there were only a few people left out of the hundreds that joined the expedition. At one point, there were only ten or so people left, Cabeza one of them, and they sat down on a beach and wept. Some Indians arrived and sat down and wept with them. Cabeza wondered why they were crying for them when the Indians weren’t in misery. Then he saw that they were compassionate and they were crying because they didn’t like to see other humans in despair.

   De Vaca lived with the Indians in East Texas, first as a captive then later regarded as an expert healer. During this time he transformed himself from thinking and living like a conquistador and became almost like an Indian. He thought that he was the only Spaniard still alive from the expedition. Then news arrived that there were three other survivors from the expedition. De Vaca was overjoyed. Soon he met the two Spaniards and an enslaved African named Estevan. They wanted to find a way back to Mexico. 

    They followed the Comanche Trail for a short time. Then they got an Indian guide that led them along the shell trade route in the American Southwest. Soon they found the Pacific Ocean. The group walked along the edge of the Pacific Ocean like it was a trail. Finally the group headed inland and found Spanish slave hunters who, to Cabeza’s horror, captured their friendly Indian guide and enslaved him and Estevan, both of whom de Vaca liked. The slave hunters took de Vaca and the two other Spaniards to a local Spanish city where da Vaca’s adventure ended in 1536. When he returned to Spain, he asked the crown for fair treatment for the Indians.

   Cabeza’s adventure was different from other conquistadors’ because he didn’t go around destroying civilizations, killing hundreds or thousands of native people. He became kind and caring. He had found riches, and they were friendship and the discovery of who he really was as a human being.