Moor's Account

An exquisite piece of historical fiction (Winnipeg Free Press), The Moors Account is brilliantly imagined fictionrewritten to give us something that feels very like the truth (Salman Rushdie).In 1527, the conquistador Pnfilo de Narvez left the port of San Lucar de Barrameda in Spain with a crew of more than five hundred men. His goal was to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States for the Spanish crown and, in the process, become as wealthy and as famous as Hernn Corts. But from the moment the Narvez expedition reached Florida it met with incredibly bad luckstorms, disease, starvation, hostile Indians. Within a year, there were only four survivors: the expeditions treasurer, Cabeza de Vaca; a Spanish nobleman named Alonso del Castillo Maldonado; a young explorer by the name of Andrs Dorantes; and his Moroccan slave, Mustafa al-Zamori. The four survivors were forced to live as slaves to the Indians for six years, before fleeing and establishing themselves as faith healers. Together, they traveled on foot through present-day Florida, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, gathering thousands of disciples and followers along the way. In 1536, they crossed the Rio Grande into Mexican territory, where they stumbled on a group of Spanish slavers, who escorted them to the capital of the Spanish empire, Mxico-Tenochtitln. Three of the survivors were asked to provide testimony of their journeyCastillo, Dorantes, and Cabeza de Vaca, who later wrote a book about this adventure, called La Relacon, or The Account. But because he was a slave, Estebanico was not asked to testify. His experience was considered irrelevant, or superfluous, or unreliable, or unworthy, despite the fact that he had acted as a scout, an interpreter, and a translator. This novel is his story.