A Field Guide to Getting Lost

In this chapter, Solnit uses captive narratives to explore the themes of transformation and metamorphosis. She opens with the 1527 story of the Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. After hearing a tale about gold and plenty north of modern-day Florida, Cabeza de Vaca followed the rumor. However, his journey was riddled with turmoil. He led two barges of men, losing one to a storm. The few that survived only lived because of the generosity of Indigenous communities. Cabeza de Vaca was captured and enslaved by a tribe in what is now Texas. When he escaped, he established a career as a tradesman, bringing red ochre and mesquite beans to different tribes. His party was welcomed by these communities, and he was hailed as a shaman.

Cabeza de Vaca was captured more than once. In his journals, he describes living naked and shedding his skin twice a year like a snake under the blistering heat of the sun. By the time Cabeza de Vaca met up with a group of Spaniards, he had become disillusioned with his old way of life:

He had gone about naked, shed his skin like a snake, had lost his greed, his fear, been stripped of almost everything a human being could lose and live, but he had learned several languages, he had become a healer, he had come to admire and identify with the Native nations among whom he lived; he was not who he had been (68).

Cabeza de Vaca’s story is not unlike many other records of European colonists who were captured. In 1704, Eunice Williams was captured by the Iroquois and adopted to replace a child who had died. Although almost all of her captured party had chosen to return to white settlements, Eunice stayed and built her life among the Iroquois. She got married and had children. Later in her life, she reconnected with her biological family while maintaining distance, carving out her identity and way of living according to her own terms. Her story, like the stories of Mary Jemison and Cynthia Ann Parker, reveals how being lost leads to transformation.

Solnit closes the chapter by drawing a thread between these captive narratives and the metamorphosis of butterflies. While visiting a butterfly house, she watched multiple butterflies emerge from their cocoons, taking note of the decay they left behind to embrace the new.