Daily Inspiration Quote by Alvar N. C. de Vaca

The sentence wears admiration like a polite mask, then slips in the blade. De Vaca opens with an almost painterly inventory of abundance - “vast and handsome pastures,” “good grass for cattle” - the kind of landscape description that reads less like travel writing than an early prospectus. The land is framed in terms of inputs and outputs, already translated into a European economic grammar: cattle, fertility, improvement. Nature isn’t being encountered; it’s being priced.

Then comes the tell: “were the country inhabited and improved by reasonable people.” The subtext is a colonial conditional. The land is obviously inhabited, but “inhabited” here means populated in a way the author recognizes as legitimate: settled, enclosed, made taxable, made legible. “Improved” is the key verb in the imperial toolkit, a word that pretends to be neutral while smuggling in a whole ideology of property, agriculture, and hierarchy. And “reasonable” is the moral alibi - not just different people, but better people, whose “reason” conveniently matches Spanish and Christian norms.

As an explorer, de Vaca is writing within the pressures of report-making: to justify journeys, attract patronage, and provide usable intelligence for expansion. The line performs a dual function. It praises the landscape to stoke appetite back home, while quietly delegitimizing Indigenous presence to clear an ethical path for takeover. The elegance of the phrasing is the point: it turns dispossession into common sense, making conquest sound like simple stewardship.