Exploration and Insights: Cabeza de Vaca's Journey in North America

Cabeza de Vaca became the first Spanish Europena to explore North America in the sixteenth century. The following eights years of living with native Indians in North America, he would become enslaved, used for as a trade labor, a healer, but also be considered a spiritual leader by thousands of natives. Immediately after escaping Galveston Island in the coming Spring of 1530, Cabeza de Vaca began his journey from Native villages while also managing to set himself up as a nomadic seller, traveling barefoot endless miles to and from.

The trading routes between Native villages lacked for the most part use at that certain point was due to massive wars between multiple tribes and de Vaca’s appearance meant that he could fairly move from tribe to tribe even when this conflict was at play.

Cabeza De Vaca learned to speak various native languages within a few years of being with the Natives. He became accustomed to a difficult circumstances as well as a roving lifestyle, and regularly remained in villages and camps of the Indians, meanwhile all by sharing their food and learning their ways of life.

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In this time there was a great chance that Cabeza de Vaca became one of the first Spaniards to set eyes on the Buffalo roaming in the Great Plains. They were cattle that complemented the native’s concealed sights. By 1532, Cabeza de Vaca had moderately settled into such nomadic lifestyle when he met a group of Indians whom had informed him that they had encountered others of his kind, which were the remaining expedition survivors from the Narvaez Expedition, living in slavery on the Texas coast of Galveston.

Cabeza de Vaca began his path to help them escape, however, “he was captured and once again, forced to live as a slave (William).”

Even after being enslaved Cabeza de Vaca presented an uncommonly, atypical level of appretiation for his detainers. De Vaca frequently wrote about their generosity, high ability in battles and greatly developed senses while supporting a continuous “sense of cultural superiority (William),” de Vaca, who was a sixteenth century honorable conquistador persisted that the Natives are fellow people of equal existence in the almighty eyes of God and should be shown kindness and respect. Eventually not everything de Vaca observes in his accounts while living with the Natives was joyous and peaceful, but while expressing on the peaceful nature of various tribes de Vaca also noted that the Indians living in “Yguaces and Mariames killed most of their children at birth, but kept some of the sons but systematically killed every daughter (William).”

Ultimately, Cabeza de Vaca’s exploration was unexpectedly open minded considering the surroundings of the time period and his social standing. Cabeza de Vaca in his return to civilization “the bright light that he had been walking towards for eight years, years of being a slave, a trader, healer, and a spiritual beacon for the natives (William).” He writes about how he could not tolerate the feeling of clothing on his skin, or the shoes on his feet, how he could not sleep in a bed, but rather sleep on the floor comfortably wrapped in a buffalo hide and ultimately, the brutality of his countrymen.