61 pages • 2 hours read
Laila LalamiThe Moor's Account
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2014A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “The Story of the Three Rivers”
Two men are swept away during a river crossing, leaving only 10 survivors. They come across Léon, a man from Cabeza de Vaca’s camp who reached the mainland by canoe shortly after arriving on the island. Dorantes reprimands him for not telling Cabeza de Vaca about the canoe and blames him for all the deaths suffered over the winter on the Island of Misfortune. Léon is unphased by Dorantes’s rebuke. In contrast, Friar Anselmo welcomes Léon, and the men take his unexpected reappearance as a good sign.
A few days later, the men encounter a second river and an abandoned raft from their party. There’s no sign of the 49 men who traveled on the raft. The raft reminds Mustafa that their odds of escaping the wilderness alive are slim. Castillo recalls that there was a Moorish woman on Dorantes’s ship who predicted that all the men on the expedition to La Florida would die in the new world.
When the men reach a third river, natives appear and offer to bring them across. When they arrive on the opposite bank, the natives bring another European named Martín. He is one of the five deserters Cabeza de Vaca told them about; he swam from the Island of Misfortune to the mainland. Martín explains that the other deserters died. He also describes what happened to Narváez and his party. Narváez ordered all the men who survived the storm to travel by land while he stayed on the raft. Narváez’s raft was swept out to sea, and the men on land cannibalized each other until only one remained.
Father Anselmo is horrified and refuses to believe the story, but Mustafa believes it to be true. Martín tells the men that the port and ships are probably very far away and that he intends to live among the natives. The men are greatly disturbed when Father Anselmo also decides to give up on finding the ships to join Martín and the natives.
In the morning, they discover that two more men have died in the night. At first, Mustafa is overcome by despair and even contemplates suicide, but his will to survive returns: “I had to survive, I told myself, if not for me, then for the sake of all those I had left at home” (194).
Chapter 14 Summary: “The Story of the Carancahuas”
Mustafa, Dorantes, and Castillo encounter a native named Balsehekona who tells them that he has already heard about the Europeans. In exchange for deer meat, Dorantes offers Balsehekona the golden earring he received when he bought Mustafa. The men realize that their chances of survival are greater if they stay with Balsehekona’s tribe, the Carancahuas, than if they venture into the wilderness again.
The tribe leader visits the men and informs them that they must start hunting their own food. That night, as they are enjoying a rabbit they clumsily managed to kill, Léon reveals that he was part of the band of men who raped the native women in Apalache. Mustafa attacks him as he boasts to the men about his exploits.
The Carancahuas deny them food and beat them when they don’t follow orders. Mustafa learns the local language from the children, who tease him. He becomes a translator for the natives and is summoned when the natives discover that some dried fish has been stolen from their reserves.
When Léon accuses Mustafa of being the thief, he strongly denies it. However, the natives believe Léon’s accusation, and Mustafa is badly beaten. The injustice hurts Mustafa deeply:
Of all the humiliations I had endured in the Land of Indians, this was the hardest one for me, because I had been entirely innocent of the charge and because the word Léon had used—slave—had a revived a pain I had been trying to bury (203).
When Mustafa later catches Léon eating food from the tribe’s winter stores, he turns Léon in, and Léon is immediately killed.
Diego is accused of visiting Balsehekona’s pregnant wife in a dream and stealing and killing her baby. Believing the dream to be an omen, Balsehekona cuts Diego’s throat. Dorantes is devastated by the loss of his younger brother.
When three other Castilians go into a tent they’d been forbidden to enter and are immediately killed, only Dorantes, Castillo, and Mustafa are left. Dorantes disappears, and Balsehekona beats Mustafa and Castillo as punishment for his escape.
Mustafa realizes that Dorantes is not the man he thought he was, noting that “he had left just when I had begun to let myself believe that the bond between us had evolved into one of fellowship” (207). Mustafa suspects that Dorantes left because young Castillo reminds him of his dead brother.
With Dorantes gone, Castillo and Mustafa grow closer. Castillo tells Mustafa that he joined the expedition because Dorantes promised him riches and power. Like Mustafa choosing a life in the souq, Castillo went against his father’s wishes by joining the mission. Mustafa learns from a Carancahua boy that Dorantes joined a nomadic tribe called the Yguaces.
Chapter 15 Summary: “The Story of the Yguaces”
Castillo and Mustafa escape the Carancahuas and travel toward the Yguaces. The first person they encounter is a Yguaces healer named Chaubekwan. Chaubekwan asks them how they managed to survive the bowel disease that killed so many. Mustafa explains that they drank a brew made from oak leaves.
Chaubekwan invites them to his village, where they encounter Dorantes. Castillo criticizes Dorantes for leaving them behind. Dorantes dismisses his criticism and tells them that the new tribe is not much better than the Carancahuas.
When Dorantes decides to leave, Castillo tries to talk him out of it, but Dorantes rebuffs him. Castillo and Mustafa find life with the new tribe bearable. Mustafa, realizing how much he has to be thankful for, begins to appreciate the beauty of his surroundings. He grows out his hair, dresses like a native, and learns the art of being a healer from Chaubekwan. Castillo also changes while living with the Yguaces:
Life among the Indians had tempered both his candid belief that he was right all the time and his constant need to have the approval of others. Now, free of those pressures, his true nature blossomed; I discovered he had a good sense of humor and a great resilience (212-13).
Castillo and Mustafa visit Dorantes’s new tribe and find that he is now working for a native family that was blinded by the pox brought by Europeans. The men also find Cabeza de Vaca, who is living with yet another tribe. Cabeza de Vaca warmly greets his fellow survivors, including Mustafa. He tells his story, explaining that he moved to the mainland with the Han tribe, though many of them had died of bowel disease. His native wife gave birth to a son, but both his child and his wife died of fever. Cabeza de Vaca has been trading among the coastal tribes ever since.
Cabeza de Vaca asks the men to tell their story. He’s enraptured by Mustafa’s tale:
Cabeza de Vaca listened with great attention, neither interrupting nor hurrying me to reach the end of my tale. Here was a man, I felt, who knew how to tell stories and how to listen to them, who appreciated their purpose and value. A kindred spirit, a fellow storyteller (217).
Cabeza de Vaca joins Dorantes’s tribe, but when they fall out of favor with their tribe, the four men agree to travel together again. Upon learning that the tribes of the south kill white men on sight, they decide to travel west.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
The Spanish explorers, who once blithely gave Spanish names to everything they encountered, have lost their sense of dominion over the new world. When they encounter a new river, they don’t give it a Spanish name because “they had stopped thinking of themselves as unchallenged lords of this world, whose duty was to put it into words” (185). To remake the world, The Power of Names must be backed up by political and military power. As this bedraggled band of would-be colonizers wanders through the jungle, whatever names they might bestow have less power than the Indigenous names that already exist.
As the Spanish lose their sense of mastering the new world, Mustafa reclaims his name and finds his voice. During early encounters with native tribes, the Spanish do all the speaking. But when he first meets Kwachi and Elenson from the Capoques tribe and Balsehekona from the Carancahuas tribe, he immediately introduces himself as Mustafa. By reclaiming his name, he reasserts ownership of his identity and history—as the jungle robs the colonizers of their power, it restores some of the autonomy they have stolen from Mustafa.
The men who once enslaved and killed the Indigenous people they met are now enslaved by the Carancahuas. When they join the Yguaces, they adopt their language, customs, and dress—effectively allowing themselves to be colonized by those they had intended to colonize.
Mustafa’s relationship with the Castilians also evolves. When Cabeza de Vaca is reunited with Dorantes, Castillo, and Mustafa after three years, he hugs Mustafa “like a brother” (216) and listens with great interest to Mustafa’s account of their journey in the wilderness. Castillo treats Mustafa like an equal and confides in Mustafa about the woman he fell in love with on the journey to the new world. This exchange of stories illustrates an important point about The Tension Between Storytelling and Recordkeeping. Unlike the official records that function mainly to solidify inequality—marking one person as the property of another, or marking territories and peoples as subject to the power of the king—these stories establish an equality between Castillo and Mustafa. By telling and listening to each other’s stories, they demonstrate mutual respect for each other’s humanity. Despite former disagreements, the four survivors ultimately join together to make their way through the wilderness.
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By Laila Lalami
