First Contact

What follows is the story of a Spanish sailor named Gonzalo Guerrero, and of the day in the year 1519 when he was given the chance to come home, and refused.

The refusal is recorded in a single paragraph, written down by Bernal Díaz del Castillo — a foot soldier in the conquest of Mexico who, in his eighties and half-blind, set out to correct what he considered the lies of the official histories. He called his book The True History of the Conquest of New Spain. He wrote from memory. He had been there.

Guerrero was shipwrecked on the Yucatán, enslaved, and then rose. He became a Maya war captain. He married a noblewoman named Zazil Há — clear water. He had three of the first mestizo children born in Mexico. His face was tattooed, his ears pierced, his lip plugged in the warrior's fashion. When Cortés sent word inviting the bearded captives to come home, the friar Aguilar wept and went. Guerrero folded the letter and stayed.

"What would the Spaniards say about me if they saw me like this?" he said. "Go, and God's blessing be with you." Then he spent seventeen years making it impossible for his own people to take the land where his wife and children lived — and died defending it, an arquebus ball in his sixty-six-year-old body, the only thing about him still legible as European being his beard.

The book is small. It is called La Relación — The Account. It was published in Zamora, in northern Spain, in 1542, by a man who had been given up for dead a decade earlier, and who walked out of the wilderness of North America with a story so strange the King of Spain summoned him to court to tell it in person.

In 1527 Álvar Núñez was appointed treasurer of a royal expedition to Florida — three hundred men under Pánfilo de Narváez. Four came back alive. Their journey took eight years. They walked, naked and starving for most of it, from the Gulf coast of Texas across the southwestern desert and down into northwestern Mexico — roughly six thousand miles on foot.

He did not come home as the same man who left. He left as a royal treasurer, an officer of the conquest. He returned as something the Spanish language had no word for. He had begun as a soldier. He came back a healer. By the end the Indigenous people of northern Mexico were calling him a Child of the Sun and following him in escorts of thousands — and he was arguing with his own countrymen for the right of those people not to be enslaved.

His book is the first European document about the interior of North America, the first ethnography of the peoples of Texas, the first captivity narrative, the first conversion narrative in reverse — and the first evidence that the great conquest could have gone a different way.

What follows is one event, told twice, across a gap of two hundred and nine years.

The first telling was written on a wooden ship in the autumn of 1609 by an English sailor named Robert Juet, mate of the Halve Maen — the Half Moon — under Henry Hudson. He wrote in the flat, terse, present-tense voice of a working seaman: the depth in fathoms, the wind in compass points. When he wrote about the people his crew met, he wrote about them the way he wrote about the weather. Some entries are a single sentence.

The second telling was written in 1818, in eastern Pennsylvania, by a Moravian missionary named John Heckewelder, who had spent more than fifty years among the Lenape, learned their language, and in his old age set out to record what they remembered. What he wrote down was an oral tradition carried inside the Lenape nation for seven generations — their memory of the same arrival, on the same river, that Juet had logged in eighteen lines two centuries before.

Almost no first-contact event in eastern North America survived from both sides. Usually we have only the European document, written the same week, by men who did not yet know what they were looking at. Here, for once, we have both. The telling is short on the Dutch side and long on the Lenape side — which is right. The Dutch were passing through. The Lenape were home.