Faith & Spirit Quote by Alvar N. C. de Vaca

The line lands with the blunt piety of a man whose plans are already collapsing. Cabeza de Vaca frames movement as both logistics and liturgy: they "recommended ourselves to God" and then immediately "fled". The pairing is doing quiet work. Prayer isn’t presented as serene devotion; it’s a survival reflex, a ritual that tries to impose moral order on a landscape that won’t cooperate. The theology functions like a map when the actual map has failed.

The most revealing word is "fled". Explorers like to narrate forward motion as conquest, discovery, progress. Fleeing admits vulnerability, even panic, without fully surrendering authority. He keeps the grammar of control by sliding into managerial language: "hoping", "although", "by remaining in the field" - as if endurance were a strategic choice rather than necessity. "Field" is especially telling: it turns unfamiliar territory into something like a worksite or campaign ground, a space meant to be traversed and extracted from.

Then there are the tunas - prickly pear fruit - the unglamorous detail that punctures any heroic fantasy. Their seasonality sets the real clock of the expedition. Empire doesn’t run on grand visions; it runs on whether food is still on the plant. The sentence’s long, breathless structure mirrors that precarity: clauses stack like improvised decisions, each one hedging the last. Contextually, this is the New World stripped of romance: a Catholic worldview and an imperial mission forced to negotiate with drought, timing, and hunger, where "getting over a good portion of the land" reads less like triumph than like simply making it through alive.