When Cabeza de Vaca entered the landscape of the New World, his first dramatic experience of the environment was a devastating hurricane in which more than half of his companions perished. It was August or September of 1527 and the Narvaez expedition had just arrived in Santo Domingo. Their journey would lead them astray and leave almost all of the men dead. In the autumn of 1527, the hurricane likely seemed the most tragic event that would befall the Spanish explorers. Although Cabeza de Vaca wrote his narrative as a reminiscence some 15 years later, his descriptions of the landscape of America are shaped by this chance encounter with the destructiveness of nature.

During the storm Cabeza de Vaca is on land. He is not threatened by rough seas, but by powerful winds. He writes: “We were as fearful of being killed by walking under the trees as among the houses, since the storm was so great that even the trees, like the houses, fell.” Cabeza de Vaca emphasizes his inability to find shelter during the entirety of the storm as native houses went flying and trees fell down, leaving him in “continual danger.” The men who remained with the ships, were lost but it is not Cabeza de Vaca’s perception of the sea that changed; it is his perception of the land that conveys the mental effect of the storm upon Cabeza de Vaca. Of his experience of the hurricane he writes, “such a fearful thing had never been seen.”

While Cabeza de Vaca’s fear of the storm itself is not surprising, it is remarkable that his descriptions of the landscape in the early part of his narrative almost exclusively revolve around fallen trees. Even more than the swamps it seems, it is the trees that pose the greatest obstacle. After acquiring Indian guides, Cabeza de Vaca writes:

[T]hey took us through land very difficult to maneuver and glorious to see, because in it there are very great forests, and the trees wonderfully tall, and there are so many that are fallen upon the ground that they hindered our progress, so that we could not pass without making many detours and having very great difficulty. Of those trees that were not downed, many were split from top to bottom by lightning bolts that strike in that land where there are always great storms and tempests.

The hurricane is over, but the landscape Cabeza de Vaca describes is filled with its ruins, serving as reminders not only of the past storm, but the imminent possibility of another. Although the landscape is glorious, it is only so because of the trees—standing, fallen, or on the verge of falling. After his experience dodging trees in the storm, downed trees represent Cabeza de Vaca’s own tenuous existence in this hostile wilderness he later calls, “the land in which our sins had placed us.”

In addition to shaping his view of the forest landscape, Cabeza de Vaca’s experience of the storm shapes the way he sees Indian culture. He describes their grass houses, mentioning their construction and placement, “they…are built low to the ground and in protected places, out of fear of the great tempests that commonly occur with great frequency in that land.” Cabeza de Vaca aligns his own fear with that of the natives. Recalling his inability to find shelter he is acutely aware of the innovations natives make to survive. After this interlude of human adaptation to natural disaster, Cabeza de Vaca brings us directly back to the landscape. The houses “are surrounded by very thick woods and great groves and many lagoons where there are many and very large fallen trees that form obstructions and make it impossible to traverse the land without great difficulty and danger.” In the very next paragraph, Cabeza de Vaca names some species of “very large trees” and writes of lagoons, “some very difficult to traverse, in part because of their great depth, in part because of the many downed trees in them.” His constant repetition reveals the extent of his obsession with this one aspect of the landscape.

In addition to the difficulty caused by the down trees, standing trees posed another threat beyond the possibility of falling. When in the midst of a lagoon that was once again, “difficult to traverse” because of downed trees, a group of Indians hid behind standing trees and approached on top of logs, attacking Cabeza de Vaca and his men. Here the trees become a symbol of Indian strength, skill, agility, and enormity. “[T]wo oaks,” writes Cabeza de Vaca, “each one of them as thick as a man’s lower leg, pierced through and through by the arrows of the Indians, and it is not to be wondered at, having seen the strength and skill with which they shoot them.” Cabeza de Vaca takes the strength of these trees for granted, and he may well be right in doing so, but he never questions the health of the forest or the species of tree as answers to why they fall so frequently or are able to be pierced by Indian arrows. Instead, he assumes the trees are strong and stabile, but the Indians and the hurricanes even stronger. In other words, trees are the constant in nature, Indians and hurricanes the chaos.

Cabeza de Vaca’s awe of the Indians’ ability to live in this landscape is apparent in his text: “All the Indians we had seen from Florida to here are archers, and as they are of large build and go about naked, from a distance they appear to be giants.” The image of Indians as giants returns in his text a handful of times and seems to mirroring the largeness of the trees. The Indians are able to navigate the landscape Cabeza de Vaca finds so impassable—a feat his ego, perhaps, can only contribute to physically larger beings. The Indians not only navigate this impenetrable wilderness, but are a part of it. After an attack, the Indians take “refuge from us in the woods.” While the woods is refuge to the native people, they are continually rugged and impenetrable to Cabeza de Vaca. He does not find his refuge until he reaches the open landscape further west where cattle roam indicating that “it must be a land inhabited by Christians,” a “countryside.”

“Throughout the land there are many and very beautiful grazing lands and good pastures for cattle,” he writes, “and it seems to me that it would be very productive land if it were worked and inhabited by men of reason”—not men who seek refuge in the terrors of the forest. When Cabeza de Vaca arrives at the land of four rivers where civilization seems to exist, we are reminded of the four rivers in the Garden of Eden and assume Cabeza de Vaca did the same. But this perception of the landscape is shaped by culture; his perception of the forested landscape of Florida was shaped by experience.

In Florida all is impassable, unknown. While we might expect his cultural reactions to this landscape to stress the darkness of the forest, the danger of watery swamps, possibility of attack by wild animals, Cabeza de Vaca’s danger focuses explicitly on the trees themselves—just one element of the wilderness landscape. He even frames the danger of Indian encounters in the context of the trees. Cabeza de Vaca’s perceptions of the environment change throughout his text in response to his increasing familiarity with the environment, as well as the change in landscape itself as he moves further west but when he first hits the mainland, his descriptions are shaped by his recent experience, more than by cultural symbols. He is experiencing a wilderness anew. It is not a static, but a dynamic wilderness, where what should be permanent is transient.