A Land So Strange Quotes

“The natives called the four travelers “the children of the sun” because they seemed to have come from such unimaginably remote lands. It is tempting to narrate their journey as an extreme tale of survival: four naked men at the mercy of the natural elements, facing an extraordinary array of native societies. Comparisons to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness are difficult to avoid. It was certainly a hellish journey. But it was also much more. At its heart, it is the story of how a handful of survivalists, out of necessity, were able to bridge two worlds that had remained apart for 12,000 years or more. Deprived of firearms and armor, the castaways were forced to cope with North America on its own terms.”
― Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca

“What the castaways saw and recorded constitutes our very first and frequently our only window into a continent before and during this great devastation. They depicted a world that was alive. Wherever the survivors went they found Native Americans, all vigorously exploiting the environment by setting fires to hunt deer or replacing large tracts of North American Eden with plots of corn. These groups moved about in deliberate circuits to take advantage of different edible sources, possessed intricate trading networks, and waged war on one another with the same cunning and vindictiveness of their European counterparts.”
― Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca

“the natives said that “very far away from there, there was a province called Apalachee in which there was much gold, and they made signs to indicate that there were very great quantities of everything we held in esteem.” It is almost certain that the Indians were embellishing the truth in hopes that the intruders would leave.29”
― Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca

“Indeed, superior weapons had enabled Spanish expedition leaders to vanquish large numbers of indigenous opponents. When Hernán Cortés first reached the coast of Mexico, he had his ships grounded to prevent his men from going back and would go on to bring down Mexico-Tenochtitlán, a city of 250,000 inhabitants, with a little more than 1,000 soldiers. Similarly, in 1536- 1537, Francisco Pizarro and some 180 Spaniards held off perhaps 100,000 indigenous attackers for more than a year in the heart of the Inca Empire. Thousands of Indians perished, but only one Spaniard died, a man who had failed to wear his helmet.3”
― Andrés Reséndez, A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca