The Narrative of Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca

On 17 June 1527, five ships and six hundred men leave Sanlúcar de Barrameda under the command of Pánfilo de Narváez. They are setting out to conquer Florida. On board, the expedition's treasurer is a man named Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.

Everything falls apart. A hurricane in Cuba, a pilot who cannot find his harbour, then three hundred men sent on foot towards Apalache, where gold had been promised: they find nothing there but forty straw huts. Cut off from their ships, the survivors forge nails from their stirrups, sew sails from their shirts and put to sea in five boats. On 6 November 1528, Cabeza de Vaca's boat runs aground on an island off the coast of Texas.

Then another life begins. A slave, then a trader in shells from one tribe to the next, the conquistador becomes a healer through the sign of the cross and the breath. With Andrés Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo and Estevanico, a black slave from Azemmour, he sets out to cross an unknown continent on foot, from people to people, soon followed by thousands of Indians.

Written in the first person and addressed to Charles V, this account takes the reader among the peoples of Texas and northern Mexico, described from the inside by a man who lived naked among them. What remains of a conquistador after eight years of walking among those he had come to subdue?