Shipwrecks have a way of igniting the imagination, symbolizing the start of many historical and fictional narratives. Do these sunken artifacts contain long-lost treasure? Were those treasures cursed or magical in nature? What fates awaited their survivors? Were pirates or other fringe members of society involved? How can they bring history back to life centuries later?
I am a premodernist who specializes in socioreligious cultural contact originating in Iberia. I think about the above questions as I read Laila Lalami’s 2014 historical fiction, The Moor’s Account, and watch the latest Season 4 Fall 2024 release of the Netflix (2020-) hit show, Outer Banks. These popular contemporary adventures echo historical documents and occult objects while elevating marginalized or often disregarded voices.
After all, the Outer Banks focuses on the social divide between the haves, the “Kooks”, and the have-nots, the “Pogues”, with the added novelty of treasure hunting and magical artifacts. The Moor’s Account retells the famed Narváez expedition that began in 1527 from the fictional perspective of the real Moroccan slave, Mustafa Azemmouri, nicknamed Estevanico. He was one of only four survivors, as preserved by Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s 1542 account, which was later retitled Naufragios y comentarios (Shipwrecks and Commentaries).
Granted, Laila Lalami’s award-winning historical fiction and the popular Netflix series do not share the same target audience. However, intentionally or not, they spark curiosity in the complexity of the Spanish past, whether mirrored reflections, as in The Moor’s Account, or playful riffs, as in Outer Banks.
In Outer Banks, for example, the first two seasons focus on a presumed sunken 19th-century English ship, the Royal Merchant, that carried billions of dollars worth of Spanish gold with a sole survivor, a former slave named Denmark Tanny. This mirrors the real-life lost 17th-century ship by a similar name, whose captain, John Limbrey, was the sole survivor. Unlike the Outer Banks version, though, the shipwreck and its treasure remain to be discovered.
In the series, this Spanish gold connects to real legends of “El Dorado” or other documented 16th-century Spanish explorers like Diego de Ordaz, who presumably unsuccessfully searched for an El Dorado-like city. Outer Banks even weaves in presumed academic research via the rogue professor Tommy Sowell in Season 3 and the fictional book owned by Big John Routledge, John B’s late father, detailing the origins and stories connected with the imagined Blue Crown in Season 4. In Outer Banks‘ historical fictional telling, this crown promised invincibility, favor, and the ability to grant wishes.
As the viewer learns, the crown was worn by Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar before coming into the possession of the famed historical pirate Blackbeard. Like the show, premodern historical fictions attributed other magical occurrences to Alexander the Great, like prophetic talking trees, submarine-type contraptions, enchanted automatons, and flying gryphons, as seen in the anonymous 12th/13th-century Spanish epic poem Libro de Alexandre.
Indeed, the epic’s protagonist and the crown’s previous owner, Alexander, was real, but some magically connected exploits or objects represent more fictional liberties. This, however, does not detract from the value of establishing those connections. Let’s take Blackbeard, for example. He was a real English pirate born Edward Teach, c. 1680, and died in the Outer Banks of present-day North Carolina. That said, the specifics regarding his treasures and his fictional wife Elizabeth are fabrications of the show.
One final thing I wanted to mention from Outer Banks, despite slightly humorous issues of translation (which may indeed have been intentional on the fictional interpreter), is the incorporation of Arabic and the interconnection of Iberia, the Americas, and North Africa that this detail represents. The fictional cursed amulet in the show contains a clue to finding the Blue Crown via an engraved message in Arabic. This Islamicate connection not only informed many premodern historical fictions like the previously mentioned Libro de Alexandre and its often understudied influence in the colonial Americas. Outer Banks, whether intentionally or not, reminds its viewers of this triangular connection across continents.
This leads us to Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account. While fictionalized, its core inspiration is Cabeza de Vaca’s travelogue of the presumed actual events—events that the protagonist from The Moor’s Account clarifies had some strategic liberties on Cabeza de Vaca’s part as he leaves out many details surrounding the survivors’ assimilation into indigenous tribes and manipulates the details appearing as the hero of their eight year adventure of shipwrecks, starvation, and cultural contact.
Lalami’s retelling is excellently crafted and well researched. It weaves in Arabic expressions, cultural practices, and even presumedly magical objects like amulets and divinatory practices like palm reading and prophecies. Just as was the case in many premodern sources, occult knowledge was often relegated to socio-religious groups that differed from the dominant practice of the target audience, whether implicitly or explicitly.
This simultaneous interest, curiosity, and distinction among cultures attracts readers across centuries. Despite the fictionality, both of these contemporary narratives increase curiosity for history. Not everyone who has read Lalami’s The Moor’s Account may have read Cabeza de Vaca’s premodern publication. The same is true for viewers of the Outer Banks regarding pirate accounts or Spanish colonial travelogues or epics like Cabeza de Vaca’s, but also others like Bartolomé de las Casas’s 1561 Historia de las Indias and Martín del Barco Centenara’s 1602 La Argentina. This last one even contains details about 16th-century English pirates like Francis Drake and Thomas Cavendish, which in some ways echoes the repeated presence of Blackbeard from a few centuries later.
All in all, perhaps these historical fictions appeal to broader audiences that, while not without their liberties, invite their fans to dig into the historical inspirations for the mentioned characters and objects. Doing so underscores the Arabic and Islamicate connections in both Spanish and Latin American history.