A land so strange : the epic journey of Cabeza de Vaca : the extraordinary tale of a shipwrecked Spaniard who walked across America in the sixteenth century / Andrés Reséndez

Includes bibliographical references (p. 229-302) and index.

"In 1528, five ships set out from Spain to colonize Florida. But the expedition went horribly wrong. It was first delayed by a hurricane and knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation. But the worst came when the expedition leader tragically decided to send a band of three hundred men into the interior, thus separating them from the ships. The mission soon turned into a desperate journey of survival." "The explorers who headed inland quickly lost their way in native North America. Some were killed by Indians and others died of disease during their horrific march through Florida. As their numbers dwindled, the survivors risked everything to escape. Crafting makeshift rafts out of logs tied together with the hair of their own sacrificed horses, they endured a harrowing raft passage in the Gulf of Mexico. Those who survived were the unlucky ones: stranded without weapons, they were subjected to six years of enslavement by the indigenous inhabitants of the coast of Texas." "In the end, only four survived - three Spaniards and an African slave. They suffered greatly but in the process also gained an understanding of the societies in which they lived, and shrewdly used this knowledge to escape from enslavement and recast themselves as medicine men." "Amazed by the strange appearance and mystifying religious practices of the castaways, several indigenous groups came to believe that the three Spaniards and the African possessed supernatural powers. As the four survivors made their way across the Southwest all the way to the Pacific coast, various native tribes protected and guided them." "Ironically, this extraordinary journey came to an abrupt end when the castaways ran into a group of Spanish slavers traveling north from Mexico. This encounter set the stage for a final showdown between the medicine men who had become the protectors of the Indians and the slavers bent on subjugating them." "The castaways were the first outsiders ever to explore the interior of the North American continent, they were forever changed by their experience. In the course of their odyssey they lived with a variety of nomadic Indians and learned half a dozen indigenous languages. They saw lands, peoples, plants, and animals that no outsider had ever seen before." "In A Land So Strange, historian Andres Resendez brings to life four extraordinary explorers and the vast and dynamic continent they witnessed just before European settlers would transform it forever."--BOOK JACKET.