The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca by Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca

This account of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca's journey from the coast of Florida through Texas to what is now the US Southwest blends a variety of genres. In part, it's an official relation to the king, part of Cabeza de Vaca's attempt to get the king to give him permission to keep exploring in the New World. As such, there's a fair amount of natural history (about the geography and the plants and animals that fill the land) and ethnography (about the people Cabeza de Vaca encounters). At times, Cabeza de Vaca's called upon to practice medicine, which usually consists of him conforming to indigenous expectations about ceremonial gestures and ritual actions (there's some cutting and cauterizing going on) while praying to the Catholic god to cure the people. Once he actually performs surgery to remove an old arrow. Cabeza de Vaca also uses his religious faith as a means of understanding his experience and as a possible motivation for getting the Spaniards to spend more time and energy settling the region. At the end of his captivity, when Cabeza de Vaca encounters Spaniards again, he seems estranged from them as well as from the native peoples with whom he's been living.