At the very beginning of chapter 6, Résendez describes Cabeza de Vaca’s failed attempt to escape and island inhabited by Indians. Cabeza de Vaca and his men are caught off guard by the large waves of this region since waves of such monumental size and force are foreign to Europe, specifically Spain. In addition, those who survive the treacherous waves fight the effects of hypothermia. Given that it was the middle of summer in Florida, this would not normally be a problem. However, when Résendez points out that the earth was undergoing a unique period of cooling, specifically harsh during the years of Narvaez’s expedition, this supports thesis of increased level of challenge to Narvaez and his men, due to change in environmental conditions. Had there been normal environmental conditions during this time, the water would have felt refreshing rather than dangerously cold, especially when compared to the well-known hot summertime air in Florida.

Cabeza de Vaca is surely right about surrendering to the Indians because, there are too many dangers regarding lack of food and undernourishment. These problems are detrimental to his crews health. This was made worse buy the crewing falling into call water, leaving them susceptible to hypothermia.

A Land So Strange: The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, by Andres Resendez. tells the story of  a mission set out from Spain to colonize Florida. The expedition went ominously wrong: Shipwrecked by a hurricane, knocked off course by a colossal error of navigation, and eventually doomed by the decision to separate the men from their ships, the mission quickly became a desperate journey of survival.  Throughout this journey, Andres Resendez describes the challenges that Cabeza de Vaca and his party faced, their interactions with the native people, the hurricane, their challenges with navigation, and their quest to spread Roman catholicism across the New World.

The general opinion is that the central theme this book explores is the history that unfolds in the meeting of these two cultures. While the interactions between Cabeza de Vaca’s group and the native people, and their eventual enslavement, captivity, and eventual freedom are fascinating, the effect Cabeza’s time in enslavement have a very interesting effect on Cabeza. While I agree that the Spanish party venturing into The New World does so engaging into conflict with the native people, Cabeza de Vaca returns to Spain to be a proponent of the importance of peaceful interaction and contact as a policy for encounters of the Spanish with native peoples. His arduous journey alters his perception of the native people and allows him to help influence war and combat with native peoples towards a more peaceful direction.

While they engaged in conflict with the Indian populations they encountered, who bore inferior and unfamiliar weapons ( bows and arrows) to theirs, and unfamiliar methods of warfare too, and lost many men to these conflicts, it is important to understand and focus on the longer term evolution of this conflict and its progression into enslavement, and finally integration as healers. Cabeza de Vaca and the three surviving members of his party survive these conflicts and Cabeza comes to influence a pacifist approach to the Spanish interaction with these native people.

In A Land So Strange by Andréz Reséndez he re-accounts the journey of Cabeza de Vaca and his fellow survivors. Cabeza de Vaca and his friends had many trying experiences including being slaves for six years. After six years the men escape and end up becoming healers. The men do not choose to be healers but instead one of their owners made them blow on a sick Native American and because Cabeza de Vaca and his friends are Catholic they made the sign of the cross and prayed. Strangely the Native American lived and Cabeza de Vaca and his friends got a reputation of being faith healers. Reséndez explains that in the 16^th century in Spain miracles were not an unheard-of thing, so the survivors believed that they were merely the instrument and that God was healing the Native Americans. Reséndez also states that in today’s age one would try and explain the miracles through science. I agree with Reséndez that the survivors believed that God was helping them and I think that is ultimately became their biggest strengths.

In the 1500s religion was very important to people so this is how Cabeza de Vaca and his friends rationalized their survival. As Reséndez explains Cabeza de Vaca believes God was testing him and it was no mere coincidence that he lived while 296 other people that were with him died. It is logical that Cabeza de Vaca would believe there was some greater purpose for his survival and it wasn’t mere luck. Cabeza de Vaca and his friends’ belief in a higher power helped them cope with the harsh world and unfortunate circumstances they suddenly found themselves in. Without their belief in God they most likely would never have agreed to become healers, because they had no justification to their healing, and would not risk blowing on someone with the hope that they would get better. Without a belief in God they most likely would have given up and died.

Estevanico was an amazing, resilient person who lived a difficult life and is deserving of coverage on Wikipedia. Unfortunately, his Wikipedia page is not fantastic. The first problem I noticed was a problem with the sourcing. The Wikipedia page has a good amount of important information but unfortunately the majority of that information comes from a few sources while the majority of the sources are only there to provide citation for a single sentence or detail. As I continued to read, I was distracted by the short but necessary tangent about Juan Garrido. Next, I couldn’t help but feel that the article did not focus on Estevanico, it seemed to focus on the group of four men from the Narvaez expedition. I understand that because Estevanico was a slave, there is less information about him but if the vast majority of the article focuses on the group of four that survived the Narvaez expedition, then the article should not pretend to be about Estevanico. The final thing that I noticed while reading the Wikipedia page on Estevanico was that the author of the page had poor grammar that didn’t seem appropriate for academic writing.

When I finished reading the Wikipedia article, I moved on to look at the sources. It was difficult for me to evaluate many of the sources because many of them were print and, at the moment, I do not have the time or the energy to track down those print sources to find information on Estevanico. That being said, none of the sources appeared to be blatantly biased and all seemed to be reliable enough to provide the information used on the Wikipedia page. All of the online sources that I could evaluate were good sources except for one. The fifth source in the bibliography was actually a pdf of a copyrighted source which is illegal and should not be on Wikipedia unless the copyright has expired. The last thing I looked at when evaluating this article was the talk page. There was not a ton of activity on the talk page but it did look like multiple people had contributed to the page, updating it, formatting it, and adding sources but unfortunately there was no banner from a Wikipedia reviewer.  Overall, this was a fine article but maybe should be edited to focus more on Estevanico and to fix the gramar.

Critique over “Estevanico” in Wikipedia.

The wikipedia page for Estevanico is informative as well as well-illustrated, though, some parts of the illustration may seem a little imprecise.

When I first took a glance at the wikipedia page for Estevanico, I was astounded to see there is only little information about the one of the four survivors of the expedition compared to other surviving expeditioners in the wiki page. However, when I dig through the page and other materials concerning about other survivors, I understand why. Estabanico was a slave to a Spanish noble when he conduced the expedition.That means it was actually meaningless for the people at that time to write a descriptive illustration of his life and his experience on the voyage. Therefore, I understand why there is literally nothing about him compared to lengthy description of ÁLVAR. Even the book “a land so strange”, which is considered an important book to give great insights and a large amount of information to the readers about the expedition, only have one sentence for him, “only four surviveD Cabeza de Vaca, two other Spaniards, and Estebanico. No wonder why there is little introduction about him in the wiki-page.

The wikipedia, indeed, gives a relatively informative description about Estebanico. It has four sections regarding the black slave “Estebanico”, from early life to its representation in other media. The wikipedia gives us brief summary of the life of Estabanico, and a lot of information for Estabanico regarding his identity as the American Explorer. It serves to demonstrate his voyage life as the explorer. In my opinion, the wikipedia editors have done a great deal to try to enrich the information for Estabanico. But, in debating whether he was the first black African to set foot on the continent of America, the editor only says that “some books claim him to be the first to land in U.S”, while he gives us the link of the black African who has completed the expedition before Estabanico. The editor does not provide us with which books are saying Estabanico was the first one. In my opinion, this could be inferred as not writing the information in a neutral stance or probably the editor is writing based on facts. The way the editor writing the article about Estabanico on wikipedia probably contradicts the basic idea that all information on Wikipedia should be based on facts and on a neutral standpoint.

Except for some little mistakes, the passage still succeed in giving us a well-demonstrated introduction.

The Wikipedia article on Estevanico seemed like it was of decent quality. I would say that everything in the article is relevant. It has four subsections after the main introduction: Estevanico’s Early Life, his North American Explorations, other names he is called, and representations of Estevanico in media. All of these sections are relevant to Estevanico’s life and are thus relevant to the article. Additionally, I could not detect any bias in the article. It covered his enslavement and his achievements from a neutral perspective.

I did think the article needed a bit more. While the “North American explorer” subsection gave a detailed but brief account of Estevanico’s travels in North America, the “Early Life” subsection was merely a few sentences. Thus, I felt that the “Early Life” section was a bit underrepresented. However, one must consider that Estevanico lived a couple hundred years ago, and because he was a slave, historians today may have trouble finding much information about his childhood and specifically his life.

Some citations are good and some are not as good. In the “Early Life” section there is a citation after a sentence saying that Estevanico’s skin color was described as ‘brown’, however there is nothing about his skin being brown in the article that was cited there. Another sentence in the article states that some historians suggest that the Zuni did not believe Estevanico was a representative of a party of white men, and that he was killed for demanding turquoise, but the citation after that statement does not mention turquoise once. Also, that statement doesn’t specify which historians suggest such things. The sources that the article references don’t seem to be too outdated. One source the article draws from was last updated in 2010, which seems pretty outdated but is pretty new when one considers that Estevanico lived and died several hundred years ago.

All things considered, it is a decent article, but it could use a lot of work. I feel like the article should be a lot more detailed and be lot longer, but I’m assuming part of the reason why it isn’t longer is because of a lack of information about Estevanico and his life.  However, there’s no excuse for bad citations.

I read the article Álvar Núñez on wiki and all of the information seemed to be on point with the topic and relevant. The article talks about Álvar Núñez in a comprehensive way it gives a very broad non-selective view of him without declaring any opinion on him or portraying im in any one individual’s perspective. The article while being fairly long gives and gives a lot of detail it hits a lot of the important facts about Álvar Núñez that people may want to read the article to quickly find fun facts (i.e birth/death dates, parents names, resting place etc.) The article is also broken down into very topic specific sections that stay on target and make it easy to find specific information about Álvar Núñez. Within these sections there is a lot of important need to know facts about where he explored, what he discovered, who “funded” him and his crew. As I read I realized almost every key person, artifact or place in his life had a working link attached so the reader could completely understand him and the things he did by learning deeper into each individual milestone or event. None of the links or sources are outdated as far as I can tell all of the information in them were still relevant. A Lot of the questions on the talk about it page have been addressed or added to the article which is good and reinforces the the fact that the article is up to date, also on person asked about the origin of where he got the name Cabeza de Vaca and ask is the story about him getting it from his ancestors just a “charming story” or was that actually how that came to be his name. The person who presents the question suggest it may be more likely he got the name Cabeza de Vaca because his mother was from the village Cabeza la Vaca in what today is Badajoz. Some one also states that they believe that the articles rating should be higher rated than its current rating of low importance. This was a very solid article and in my opinion it hit all if the needed marks i feel are required on Álvar Núñez to be a good source of information.

The wikipedia article on the Narváez expedition was informative, although obviously less so than A Land So Strange. However, the talk page brought up some interesting points that I wouldn’t have considered myself. Technically the Narváez expedition ended with Narváez’s death, but the iconic part doesn’t occur until after his demise. One commenter suggested that wikipedians could just write as much about the de Vaca journey on the Narváez expedition page as they could, and then break it up into two separate Wikipedia pages, one for the Narváez expedition and one for de Vaca journey. Interestingly, that never happened and the page is more heavily skewed towards the de Vaca journey.

At the top of the article it has a little window saying that it needs citations for verification. The citations and links the article did have all worked, although I think the references section is longer than the footnotes sections, which seems slightly problematic. The article isn’t rated, and it’s missing what I consider to be considerable information in the South Texas and Southwestern Northern America sections. It isn’t very clear and it has some gaps in events and time. Other than that, it seems neutral to me, although there hasn’t been a ton of heavy editing since it was written it seems.