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Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (c.1490-c.1557) THE MAN Alvar Nùñez Cabeza de Vaca was born into the Spanish aristocracy around 1490. He took the honorific title Cabeza de Vaca, meaning “head of a cow,” from his mother’s side of the family. (One of her ancestors-a shepherd named Mart’n Alhaja-had helped the Spanish Christians win a decisive battle against their Moorish oppressors in the year 1212 by marking an unguarded mountain pass with …

…countrymen, the Indians scoffed. First among themselves and then aloud, the Pimas compared the noble wanderers to the hated soldiers: “We had come from the sunrise,” Cabeza de Vaca remembered them saying, “the soldiers from the sunset; we healed the sick, they killed the sound; we came naked and barefoot, they clothed, horsed, and lanced; we coveted nothing but gave whatever we were given, while they robbed whomever they found and bestowed nothing on anyone.”