SOURCE: Epilogue to Cabeza de Vaca's Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, translated by Cyclone Covey, University of New Mexico Press, 1997, pp. 145-51.

The following essay was first published in 1983 as an afterword appended to a reissue of Cyclone Covey's 1961 translation of the Relación. Pilkington argues that the literary importance of the Relación outweighs its historical significance, stressing that its racial themes, allegorical style, and parable of the human spirit have come to characterize American literature.

“How shall a man endure the will of God and the days of the silence?” asks the narrator of Archibald MacLeish's poem Conquistador. This is the kind of riddle that Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca might have posed himself during the eight years he roamed the coastal marshes and mountains and deserts of what is now the American Southwest. Like the great conquerors he marched by “a king's...