Cabeza De Vaca's Adventures In The Unknown Interior Of America

I had a very difficult time reading the Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, I constantly found myself blanking out or just skimming the pages. The autobiography was boring and repetitive, it didn’t fully grasp my attention. The writing was mundane, though it provided a perceptive understanding of the failed expedition. Cabeza de Vaca’s writing style is brief. I find that he would start the narrative off with, “Today, the next day, a few days later, then this happened, or next to this, and etc.” it would begin like this on every paragraph or so. It annoyed me how there was so much jumping around from day to day, there wasn’t much detail where he focused on one event. But, I did find that there were times where he did focus on some merely recorded happenings, which were probably enhanced to make it seem believable and realistic. Plus, a lot of events during the expedition and customs of the Indians seemed factually inaccurate. Furthermore, it left me with too many unanswered questions that exhausted me.

Then, while we ambled along unsuspectingly, Indians surprised our rear. An hidalgo named Avellaneda, a member of the rearguard who had already passed the point of ambush when the attack broke, heard his servant-lad cry out and turned back to assist when, just at that moment, an arrow plunged almost all the way through his neck at the edge of his cuirass, so that he died presently.

This is where it got interesting, and where his description of events had drawn my attention. I was finally out of my bored state, I wanted to know what else happened. A couple pages later I