Castaways: Volume 10 (Latin American Literature and Culture) - Softcover

Núñez Cabeza De Vaca, Alvar; López-Morillas, Frances M.; Pupo-Walker, Enrique

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520070631 ISBN 13: 9780520070639

Publisher: University of California Press, 1993

Synopsis

This enthralling story of survival is the first major narrative of the exploration of North America by Europeans (1528-36). The author of Castaways (Naufragios), Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, was a fortune-seeking nobleman and the treasurer of an expedition to claim for Spain a vast area that includes today's Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. A shipwreck forced him and a handful of men to make the long westward journey on foot to meet up with Hernán Cortés.

In order to survive, Cabeza de Vaca joined native peoples along the way, learning their languages and practices and serving them as a slave and later as a physician. When after eight years he finally reached the West, he was not recognized by his compatriots.

In his writing Cabeza de Vaca displays great interest in the cultures of the native peoples he encountered on his odyssey. As he forged intimate bonds with some of them, sharing their brutal living conditions and curing their sick, he found himself on a voyage of self-discovery that was to make his reunion with his fellow Spaniards less joyful than expected.

Cabeza de Vaca's gripping narrative is a trove of ethnographic information, with descriptions and interpretations of native cultures that make it a powerful precursor to modern anthropology. Frances M. López-Morillas's translation beautifully captures the sixteenth-century original. Based as it is on Enrique Pupo-Walker's definitive critical edition, it promises to become the authoritative English translation.

About this title

Review:

"Even if your collection has one of the earlier translations of this basic southwestern document, you'll want to add this one."--"Books of the Southwest

Synopsis:

One of the first narratives of the exploration of North America by Europeans, this is the first-hand account of a fortune-seeking Spanish nobleman whose shipwreck on the south-east coast of North America forced him and his crew to walk across the continent in order to join Hernan Cortes.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0520070631
• ISBN 13: 9780520070639
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 188