Review: The King's Fifth by Scott O'Dell

Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

I came to The King’s Fifth in a roundabout way. As a kid, I watched this quirky animated show called The Mysterious Cities of Gold. Almost nobody else seemed to know it existed. I think I’ve met maybe two or three people in my entire life who watched it. But it stuck with me, and it probably had as much influence on me as Star Wars, for I remember watching it ceaselessly when I could.

Decades later, watching a YouTube video about the show, I discovered that it was very, very loosely based on Scott O’Dell’s The King’s Fifth, a children's historical novel from 1966.

The novel’s Esteban Sandoval is very different. He’s a fifteen-year-old mapmaker who gets pulled into an expedition by Captain Mendoza, a man obsessed with finding the legendary cities of gold. We already have some sense of where this is going as the story moves from the present to the past.  In the present, Esteban is imprisoned in Veracruz, awaiting trial for failing to deliver the King’s Fifth—the portion of treasure owed to the Spanish crown.

A story delivered in media res is often appealing to me.  Shifting between Esteban awaiting trial and his account of the expedition works well. We get to see through the past the ways Esteban has been forged into the person he is in the present: more skeptical, thoughtful, and critical of the people around him.

Esteban initially isn’t particularly interested in gold. He wants to make maps. Mendoza tempts him with the possibility of going somewhere no mapmaker has gone and having his name attached to those maps. There’s already pride and hubris in that desire, but there’s also something compelling about Esteban wanting to capture and make sense of the world around him. It's a clear passion of his at this young age.  

The adventure starts in dubious moral territory and only gets more questionable from there. Esteban sees it and tries to, in many ways, be apolitical about it.  But then, he finds his own gold nugget that he keeps from others.

His relationship with it reminded me a little of Sméagol finding his precious in The Lord of the Rings. Suddenly gold isn’t merely something he can watch other people destroy themselves over. It’s his. He hides the nugget among his mapmaking tools, which feels particularly fitting. Those tools represent his craft, his knowledge, and the way he understands the world, while hidden among them is this other thing that is slowly changing how he sees it.

By the time Esteban is literally carrying bags of gold and becoming determined to receive his share, the distance between the person he was and the person he is becoming is pretty stark. For a young adult book (fits more there than children's novel), the story offers an interesting exploration of professional success and fame, riches, and relationships in interesting ways, asking what Esteban actually values and what each of those things might cost him.

Unsurprisingly for a book from the 1960s, it is less successful in its depiction of the Indigenous characters. It repeats the disregard and poor representation familiar from a lot of Westerns and colonial literature of the 20th century. 

Zia is the clearest example. Her relationship with Esteban works insofar as she helps him think and feel differently about what the expedition is doing. But we only get glimpses of her own interiority. She feels less like a person with a life of her own and more like a character being used for Esteban’s development. Even when his perception of her shifts from child and friend toward potential romantic interest, it feels more like the novel using Zia than allowing Zia to become her own person.

Father Francisco offers a different alternative to Mendoza, but he is problematic in his own way. He sees Indigenous people primarily through his desire to convert them. His goals may be different from Mendoza’s, but he still sees the people they encounter through the lens of what he wants from them.

Yet, the novel still contains some criticism of colonialism showing that it is not just individual greed that drives characters but uphold the entire system of justice to which Esteban must later navigate with everyone interest in their profit than justice being served. Still, for a broader cultural critique to really stick, the Indigenous people would need to be presented as more human than props in someone else’s story.

For Esteban’s story, it was mostly an effective progress. O'Dell gives us a narrative has some parallels with Huck Finn, including some attempts to reject it all in the end.  By the time we meet Esteban in prison, those experiences have left their mark. He hasn’t simply learned that greed is bad. He has become more skeptical and thoughtful because he has experienced firsthand how easily the things we think we value can start determining who we are and how the system reinforces that thinking.

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