The Moor's Account

by Laila Lalami

Brings us the imagined memoirs of the first black explorer of America--a Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official record. In 1527, the conquistador Pánfilo de Narváez sailed from the port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda with a crew of six hundred men and nearly a hundred horses. His goal was to claim what is now the Gulf Coast of the United States for the Spanish crown and, in the process, become as wealthy and famous as Hernán Cortés. But from the moment the Narváez expedition landed in Florida, it faced peril--navigational errors, disease, starvation, as well as resistance from indigenous tribes. Within a year there were only four survivors: the expedition's treasurer, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca; a Spanish nobleman named Alonso del Castillo Maldonado; a young explorer named Andrés Dorantes de Carranza; and Dorantes's Moroccan slave, Mustafa al-Zamori, whom the three Spaniards called Estebanico. These four survivors would go on to make a journey across America that would transform them from proud conquis-tadores to humble servants, from fearful outcasts to faith healers.

• ISBN10: 0307911667
• ISBN13: 9780307911667
• Publish Date: 9 September 2014 (first published 1 January 2014)
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 11 October 2023
• Imprint: Pantheon Books
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 336
• Language: English

Reviews

[Lianne]

I received an ARC from the publishers in exchange for an honest review. This review in its entirety was originally posted at caffeinatedlife.net: http://www.caffeinatedlife.net/blog/2014/09/17/review-the-moors-account/

I don't know anything about Panfilo de Narvaez' expedition, so I was intrigued by this novel. The choice of telling the story from Mustafa’s perspective was what intrigued me about the book, and provides the author with creative room to approach the expedition and the experiences of these characters from another angle.

The storytelling itself was very interesting, initially going back and forth between the exploration in the New World and flashbacks to Mustafa’s story prior to his inclusion in the expedition. I honestly found his backstory more interesting than present events in the New World, which in the process revealed the realities of slavery and the times in which he lived in. But his story in the “present day” of the exploration was also revealing and just as gritty: the hunger they experienced, disease, the in-fighting amongst the survivors, the uncertain terrain they faced…It was all quite realistic and brutal.

Overall,The Moor’s Account was a fascinating look at 14th century Spain and the experiences of being on a New World expedition from a different perspective.