The history of exploration has some of the world’s best stories – many of them made up by explorers whose accounts no one could put to the test. Few are more intriguing or sensational than the tale of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of the most extraordinary of Spanish conquistadors. He was greedy and ambitious, but his head was full of bookish theory he had picked up in Spain. In particular, he followed Dominican critiques of Spanish neglect and maltreatment of native peoples in conquered lands. When he campaigned on the Paraná in the 1540s, he virtually banned violence, distributed gifts to the natives and tried to win them over “with love”. But his policy owed almost as much to experience as to dogma or fantasy. He had, by his own account, lived among Indians for years, and loved and was loved by them.

His American career began when he was a royal nominee in a reconnaissance of Florida in 1528. Castaway on the Texas coast in the debacle of the expedition, he led a party of survivors – two fellow Spaniards and a resourceful black slave named Estebanico – on a seven-year odyssey, via enslavement by hostile natives and adoration by friendly ones, to safety in New Spain. On arrival, he was clad in skins, long-bearded, and with waist-length hair. Not only did he look like a holy man: he also behaved like one. To the astonishment of the Spanish slavers who met him on the frontier, over a thousand native followers accompanied him. His own narrative of his adventures is unsurpassable as a gripping story, and no historian of the episode can escape its spell. Andrés Reséndez relies on it heavily in his retelling in A Land So Strange and perhaps defers to it too much. But his indefatigable scholarship, knowledge of the context, and craftsmanlike storytelling provide a model account: concise, solid, moving.

It was a remarkable achievement to reach Mexico at all, picking a path across potentially lethal country amid potentially murderous enemies. To have emerged as the head of what seems to have been an extraordinary, almost Messianic, mass movement of indigenous people was a staggering outcome. How did he do it? Alvar Núñez´s own explanation was Providential. God procured his survival by a miracle and endowed him with “special powers” – almost like a comic-book hero with a supply of Kryptonite – in order to help bring the natives he met to Christianity. In particular, God gave him powers of healing. At first, our hero relied on the rudimentary medical knowledge of one of his Spanish companions to swap cures for kindnesses along the road. One night, however, the little expedition’s resident physician cried off, and Cabeza de Vaca was left to handle one of the most difficult cases the party had encountered: the patient, according to local opinion, was already dead. Alvar Núñez made the sign of the cross over the body, and imitated native physicians by blowing breath over it. In the first of his many supposed miracles, the corpse revived, ate, strolled and chatted. Other, less advanced victims of ailments, whom Alvar Núñez treated later that day, “had become well and were without fever and very happy”. For the autobiographer, the miracles became evidence of validation by a higher authority, like the battlefield deeds of prowess asserted by conquistadors in the statements of merits with which they plied the Spanish Crown in search of offices and titles.

On the face of it, the stories are incredible. Andrés Reséndez shows, in his unostentatious way, that Alvar Núñez and his companions relied on more than miracles. They were also war leaders; and their followers were not just pilgrim bands, but hell-bent marauders, determined, as Alvar Núñez confessed, “to take us wherever there were many people, and . . . wherever we arrived to steal and loot what the others had, because such was the custom”. Such passages also make it clear that Alvar Núñez exaggerated his agency: he was at the mercy and whim of his native entourage. The strange route his party took, across northern Mexico or southern Texas to Mexico’s Pacific Coast, was the result of native priorities. Naturally, his account did not emphasize his role as the natives’ dupe or his part in war unauthorized by Crown or Church.

Still, much of the story remains perplexing. Above all, we want to know how and why Alvar Núñez got the chance to parade his charisma as a native figurehead. Why did the natives need him as the poster boy for their inspired wanderings? Would they not be equally effective in war and migration without him? Reséndez’s account offers, I think, a possible clue. When they got to New Spain, members of Alvar Núñez’s entourage refused to believe that he and the Spaniards they met on the frontier could be fellow countrymen. Cabeza de Vaca put into their mouths words which he no doubt modified, but which – in their general sense – have the ring of truth:

"We came from where the sun rose, and they [the Spanish slavers] from where it set . . . we cured the sick, and they killed those who were well . . . we came naked and barefoot, and they went about dressed and on horses and with lances; and . . . we did not covet anything but rather, everything we later returned and remained with nothing, and . . . the others had no other objective but to steal everything they found and did not give anything to anyone."

These lines need to be interpreted sceptically. They relate to an agenda the writer shared with his friends among the friars, who campaigned to keep lay Spaniards out of Indian lands. But they also point to an important truth: Alvar Núñez was credible as a holy man because he was unidentifiable as anything else. He was strange to his hosts, and his acceptance among them attests to what I call the “stranger-effect” – the propensity of some cultures to honour the stranger, sometimes to the point of conferring authority on him.

The stranger-effect cannot be relied on. Even in hospitable traditions, the stranger is marginal – literally marginal, as he approaches a potential host community across its frontiers. He is dangerous – and though one can respond to danger by harnessing it, it is safer to destroy it. Most of Alvar Núñez’s fellow-castaways died in captivity, or, after enforced conscription into host communities, remained on sufferance and at risk.

More interesting, however, are the instances of collaboration between strangers and host communities, such as many Spanish conquistadores experienced. Because the stranger is unimplicated in existing factions and networks, he can arbitrate with objectivity, marry with impartiality, confront the esoteric with esoteric wisdom, and perform sacred rituals without fear or favour. So he often becomes holy man or king or judge. He brings to these roles the magic of distance. Just as we value goods more or less in proportion to the distance they travel to get to us, so, in some cultures, at least, we value people according to the nearness of their provenance to the divine horizon. This does not mean that natives treated the Spaniards as divine – a mistake in which Alvar Núñez followed many other conquistadors bamboozled by the reverence they received. On the contrary, it means that the natives knew the Spaniards were men, whose exotic origins deserved special respect.

But the stranger-effect has its limits. The most harrowing moment in Andrés Reséndez’s masterfully understated story comes at the end, when the black slave Estebanico returns as a Spanish scout to the lands of his former triumphs and becomes a celebrity again, showered with women and turquoise. But he presses ahead, into unknown territory, where a different kind of culture responds differently to the stranger, and he dies “as full of arrows as St Sebastian”.

Andrés Reséndez
A LAND SO STRANGE
The epic journey of Cabeza de Vaca
352pp. Basic Books. £15.99 (US $26.95).
978 0 465 06840 1

Felipe Fernández-Armesto is Professor of History at Tufts University, Massachusetts. He is the author of nineteen books, most recently Pathfinders: A global history of exploration, Amerigo: The man who gave his name to America, and The World: A history, all of which were published in 2006.

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