The Power Within Us : Cabeza de Vaca's Relation of His Journey from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536. New York : Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1944; previously published as Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca. (Out of print. Available used or, perhaps, through your Library.)
"My account of Nuñez is not the account he sent the King, apart of course from the actual facts. But I believe it to be the account he wished to send the King." -- Haniel Long
When Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca reached Mexico City, after eight years of wandering, he wrote La Relación, a report for the King of Spain. In it, he shared what happened during an expedition meant to bring prestige and fortune to the King. From the King's point of view, the expedition was a disaster, but for Cabeza de Vaca it was a story of spiritual triumph.
Believing that Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca had something to say to "us four hundred years later, in this world of ours where human relation is still the difficult problem, and exploitation the cancer," Haniel Long composed a short Interlinear to Cabeza de Vaca, a reading between the lines of La Relación, reflecting on what Cabeza de Vaca might had shared had he felt free to do so.
Readers follow Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca on an expedition led by the greedy and ignorant Pámfilo Narvaez. Six hundred men dwindle to 400, then 40, and finally only a "handful...crawled ashore" near present day Galveston, Texas. The native people care for the starving, depleted men, even though they have little themselves. The more the Spaniards lose, however, the more they gain spiritually. At first, Cabeza de Vaca feels that the worst loss is "in parting little by little with the thoughts that clothe the soul of a European, and most of all of the idea that a man attains strength through dirk and dagger, and serving in your Majesty's guard." Gradually, though, they "surrender such fantasies." "Several years went by," Nuñez recalls, "before I could relax in that living plexus for which even now I have no name; but only when at last I relaxed, could I see the possibilities of a life in which to be deprived of Europe was not to be deprived of too much."
Reduced to four, they move farther westward -- "no trails," "lost," healing the native people who ask for help, feeling a "power to render life and happiness to others." It is a new thought to them, this helping, "but," he tells the King, "after one accustoms oneself to the idea, it is good to be able to give out health and joy...." "Your Majesty," Cabeza de Vaca writes, "I found myself treating all human beings alike."
Haniel Long, following the "core" of La Relación, ends Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca's eight years of deprivation with "a sign of our countrymen," countrymen who had "burnt all the villages." Back in "civilization," Cabeza de Vaca begins to feel a "reluctance...to do good to others." And, so, he ends his letter to the King by writing: "If one lives where all suffer and starve, one acts on one's own impulse to help. But where plenty abounds, we surrender our generosity, believing that our country replaces us each and several. This is not so, and indeed a delusion. On the contrary the power of maintaining life in others, lives within each of us, and from each of us does it recede when unused."
Haniel Long, a poet as well as a prose writer, considered The Power Within Us : Cabeza de Vaca's Relation of His Journey from Florida to the Pacific, 1528-1536, "the dearest of all my books and I believe that it expresses best the key idea of all my writing, namely: that each of us has, in a degree, the power of giving health and happiness to others." Haniel Long's book still speaks to us today, during a time when "human relation" remains "the difficult problem."
"My attention wanders from the perfunctory narrative to the thing he refrains from confiding to the royal ear. That thing is a mystical feeling about the increase of life in a man from effort and from taking thought of his fellows." -- Haniel Long
Websites
Both websites contain information on Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca and the text of La Relación.
The Center for the Study of the Southwest Texas State University and The Witte Museum in San Antonio
http://www.english.swt.edu/CSS/Vacaindex.HTML
Southwestern Writers Collection
http://www.library.txstate.edu/swwc/cdv/