20 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periodsmeant captivity. An account of the expedition of Hernando do Soto of 1539–1543,
for instance, by an anonymous “Gentleman of Elvas” (fl. 1537–1557), The Discovery
and Conquest of Terra Florida (1557; translated by Richard Hakluyt, 1611), tells how
members of the party came upon a group of “ten or eleven Indians.” Among them,
we learn, “was a Christian, which was naked and scorched with the sunne, and had
his arms razed after the Indians, and differed nothing at all from them.” When the
Spanish party approached, the account goes on, the naked Christian “began to crie
out, Sirs, I am a Christian, slay me not, nor these Indians for they have saved my life.”
The Christian turns out to be Spanish; and he explains how he was captured,
prepared for death but saved by the mediation of an Indian woman, a daughter of
the chief. His story anticipates one that was to become common, made most famous
in the tale of Pocahontas saved by John Smith. Quite probably, it reveals European
misunderstanding of a Native American ritual: the visitor is being “saved” in a
ceremony of welcome and bonding. Certainly, it allows for acknowledgment of the
humanity, the saving graces of at least some of the “savages.” What is more remark-
able here, though, is the recognition of how the Christian may be changed by the
Indian rather than change him. The Christian, so we are told, has come to differ
“nothing at all” from his captors; his is a story, not of conquest, but of acculturation.
That story is told at more length by Alva Nunez Cabeza de Vaca (1490?–1556?),
who accompanied an expedition to the Gulf Coast in 1528 led by Panfilo de Narvaez.
After floating on rafts from Florida to Texas, nearly all in the expedition were lost.
Cabeza de Vaca and three companions, drifting somewhere off the coast of Texas or
Louisiana, were captured and enslaved by Indians. However, they adapted to Indian
customs over the several years of their captivity, so much so that they were trusted to
move freely between tribes. Eventually, journeying through the Southwest into
northern Mexico, they came across Spanish settlements and were returned to Spain.
There Cabeza de Vaca wrote his memoirs, published in 1542 and later translated as
Relation of Alvar Cabeza de Vaca (1871), which were intended both to justify him
and to promote royal support for further expeditions to the New World. He could
hardly claim conquest. So what he did was to write a captivity narrative, one of the
first, in which the experiences of being lost in America and then living among its
natives were all seen as part of one providential plan. As Cabeza de Vaca describes it,
his perilous journey through the wilderness was attended by miracles. On one occa-
sion, “thanks to God,” he found “a burning tree” in the chill and darkness of the
woods, “and in the warmth of it passed the cold night.” On another, he survived by
making “four fires, in the form of a cross.” And, on still another, he prayed and
“through the mercy of God, the wind did not blow from the north” any more;
“otherwise,” he says, “I would have died.” “Walking naked as I was born,” Cabeza de
Vaca recalls, stripped of all the signs of his civilization except his faith, he is captured
but then proceeds to convert his captors. Like one of the early saints, he becomes
both missionary and savior, using the beliefs of the Old World and the herbs of the
New to heal the sick and creating a new religion out of Christian prayer and Native
American custom. Captivity tale, in effect, modulates into conversion narrative;
and, in a way that was to become familiar in American writing, material failure isGGray_c01.indd 20ray_c 01 .indd 20 8 8/1/2011 7:54:54 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 54 AM