Conquistador Voices (Vol II): The Spanish Conquest of the Americas as Recounted Largely by the Participants, Paperback

Conquistador Voices, a two-volume work by Kevin H. Siepel, is intended for the general reader. The book presents the history of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas principally through the voices of those who participated in that signal event. Its goal is to make this story engaging by substantial use of first-person narrative--much of it newly translated from Spanish and Italian sources.

The overall story is told in five parts, each part featuring a principal actor of the Spanish Conquest--an explorer or conquistador. Volume II is devoted, in the first place, to the conquest of Peru and the Incas by Francisco Pizarro and his brothers. This is followed by the story of the Narvaez expedition and the subsequent years-long odyssey of Alvar Nunez Cabeza de Vaca through North American deserts. Lastly, the book delves into the disastrous expedition of Hernando de Soto to today's southeastern United States.

Climbing into the Andes with Pizarro's 168 men and 62 horses, the reader soon comes face to face with the young Inca ruler Atahualpa, who sees no threat in this tiny force of newcomers to his kingdom. Atahualpa is soon shaken from his equanimity by being taken prisoner in a stroke that immediately neutralizes his vast superiority in numbers. The book describes the slow advance of the Spaniards through Atahualpa's mountain kingdom following his capture and execution, their awe at their surroundings, their greedy seizure of gold and silver, and the final degeneration of their once-united effort into bloody civil war.

The story then moves to the Florida peninsula where the ill-prepared Narvaez expedition soon comes to grief and is forced to escape by crude rafts across the Gulf of Mexico in hopes of reaching safety in New Spain, today's Mexico. Cabeza de Vaca, whose raft crashes upon the Texas coast, goes on to wander with three companions for nearly eight years in the deserts of Texas and northern Mexico, the four men living as slaves among the poorest and sometimes the cruelest of Indians. Using Cabeza de Vaca's own account of this remarkable tale of endurance, the book follows him back to Spain where he is assigned to the governorship of South America's Plata River region, today's Paraguay.

In the final section of volume II the reader is taken on the ill-fated expedition of Hernando de Soto into today's southeastern United States. We see the strong organizational and leadership skills of this conquistador, strengths that soon, however, degenerate into confusion and loss of purpose in an unraveling that culminates in Soto's own death and that is followed by the total collapse of the mission. The book chronicles the de Soto expedition survivors' unsuccessful attempt to reach New Spain overland, as well as a later, successful attempt to escape down the Mississippi River to safety across the Gulf of Mexico.

An effort has been made throughout Conquistador Voices to avoid moralizing on these events, but to report them--with all possible filtering of fact from fantasy--as we have been told that they occurred. Eight maps accompany the text. An index, copious footnotes, and brief bibliography are included.