Naufragios y comentarios

Naufragios y comentarios (original Spanish title Naufragios y relación de la jornada que hizo a la Florida) is the chronicle of the ill-fated expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez to Florida in 1527, of which the author Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca was a member. The work was addressed to the King of Spain, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

Description

The book recounts the experiences of Núñez Cabeza de Vaca as a member of Pánfilo de Narváez’s expedition (1527), which was shipwrecked on the coast of Texas after attempting to colonize Florida. Along with the few other survivors—Andrés Dorantes, Alonso del Castillo, and the enslaved Estebanico—he describes ten years of wandering among the indigenous peoples of the Gulf of Mexico, Texas, and northern Mexico, until reaching San Miguel de Culiacán in 1536. After returning to Spain in 1537, Núñez Cabeza de Vaca wrote an account of his adventures, which was printed in Zamora in 1542 under the title La relación que dio Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca de lo acaecido en las Indias. A second, expanded edition was issued in Valladolid in 1555, sometimes associated with the later Comentarios.

Naufragios is one of the earliest written testimonies of contact between Europeans and the native peoples of North and South America, and an important document for the study of Iberian exploration in the sixteenth century.