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“From Gold Camp to Ghost Town:
Bonanza Denied in the 16th-century Andean Piedmont”
Kris Lane, College of William & Mary
“Lost Colonies” Conference, March 26-27, 2004
(Please do not cite, quote, or circulate without written permission from the author)
Abstract: It has been generally assumed that wherever mineral treasure was found in the
Americas, permanent Spanish (or Portuguese, or other European) settlements soon
followed, indigenous resistance notwithstanding. This was certainly true in a number of
backcountry regions, but an important exception might be South America’s equatorial
Andean piedmont, or Upper Amazonia. Here, in the eastern foothills of modern
Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, a number of early colonial gold-mining towns, some of
them extraordinarily rich, were snuffed out by indigenous “rebels,” many permanently.
The mines themselves had not worn out, but rather the foreign interlopers’ welcome.
Bonanza was in fact so successfully denied that only recently -- with a relative rise in
gold prices -- have many of these ghost town sites, and their treasures, been rediscovered.
And as in colonial times, indigenous peoples are fighting back tooth and nail.
“All gold is fool’s gold” -- Edward Abbey
Few incidents in the early history of indigenous-European relations in South
America have been as compelling, or as poorly understood, as the so-called Jívaro Revolt
of 1599. According to the standard, 214-year-old account, a confederation of lowland
Jivaroan peoples (the modern Shuar, Achuar, Huambisa, and Aguaruna of southeastern
Ecuador and northern Peru) rose up to snuff out a series of Spanish gold camps and
administrative centers after fifty years of ruthless exploitation. In the north Andean
context, the contemporary Paezes and Pijaos of central New Granada, the Sindaguas of
the Pacific Coast, and the Mocoas of the upper Putumayo (all in southern Colombia)
rebelled in similar circumstances, but only the Jívaros completely foiled Spanish attempts
at reconquest. While recognizing this unique achievement, this paper examines several
potentially revealing fragments in the documentary record and reviews recent research
challenging the standard account. (A substantial chunk of what follows is drawn from
my book, Quito, 1599: City & Colony in Transition [University of New Mexico Press,
2002], but with different emphasis and substantial added and updated material.)
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Michael Harner’s classic 1972 ethnography, The Jívaro: People of the Sacred
Waterfalls, introduced a generation of North American anthropology students to organic
hallucinogens and shamanic “journeys” in the jungles of southeastern Ecuador, for some
a kind of South American complement to Carlos Castañeda’s popular Yaqui anthology.
Harner’s vivid descriptions of the Untsuri šuarä shaman’s “hidden world”—not to
mention an unblinking demystification of the practice of head shrinking—are still
compelling after thirty-plus years, but there was also history in The Jívaro. Indeed, the
introduction begins as follows:
“Only one tribe of American Indians is known ever to have successfully revolted against
the empire of Spain and to have thwarted all subsequent attempts by the Spaniards to
reconquer them: the Jívaro…of eastern Ecuador. From 1599 onward they remained
unconquered in their forest fastness east of the Andes, despite the fact that they were
known to occupy one of the richest placer gold deposit regions in all of South America.”1
What an image: indigenous rebels free for centuries amidst rivers of gold!
Furthermore, even casual readers tend to remember Harner’s lengthy translation of Padre
Juan de Velasco’s 1790 recounting of “the great Jívaro rebellion of 1599.” This is what
the Quito Jesuit had to say about the Jívaro, in summary: 1) in 1599 the corrupt governor
of Macas, a small Spanish settlement in the rainforest east of Cuenca, set out to tax his
subjects, claiming gold was needed to celebrate Philip III’s coronation; 2) though
recognizing the injustice, the governor’s Spanish subjects and most indigenous subalterns
submitted; 3) the Jívaro alone balked, but wisely followed instructions given by a cacique
called Quirruba, who advised them to dampen suspicion by enthusiastically collecting
gold “for the new king”; 4) when the governor visited the isolated mining town of
Logroño, the Jívaros struck, massacring all but the women, who were taken as prizes, and
1
Michael J. Harner, The Jívaro: People of the Sacred Waterfalls, (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1984 [1972], 1. Harner wrote, he said, to correct some of the errors of Rafael Karsten’s monumental
Head-Hunters of Western Amazonas: The Life and Culture of the Jibaro Indians of Eastern Ecuador and
Peru (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Fennica, 1935).
362
the unlucky governor.2 His fate is what most readers, casual and otherwise, remember
most vividly:
“They stripped him completely naked, tied his hands and feet; and while some
amused themselves with him, delivering a thousand castigations and jests, the
others set up a large forge in the courtyard, where they melted the gold. When it
was ready in the crucibles, they opened his mouth with a bone, saying that they
wanted to see if for once he had enough gold. They poured it little by little, and
then forced it down with another bone; and bursting his bowels with the torture,
all raised a clamor and laughter.”3
Having taken their revenge on the greedy governor, the Jívaros then moved on to attack
the neighboring gold camp of Sevilla de Oro. On the point of repeating their success at
Logroño, Quirruba and his followers, apparently due to some disagreement with
temporary allies, suddenly withdrew. According to Velasco, the few survivors of this and
a series of related attacks retreated to the highlands, never to return to the golden land of
the Jívaro.
Today it would be considered sloppy even for a field anthropologist to rely so
heavily on a two hundred year-old history written in Italy and peppered with obviously
embroidered if not wholly fabricated moral tales. But Harner, like Velasco, had an eye
for a good story, and the anthropologist did not want to give this one up. Desperately
searching for an indigenous counterpoint to the Jesuit’s tale, Harner questioned an elderly
Shuar man about past encounters with whites, hoping for a breakthrough. Only the
following enigmatic fragment was proffered:
“A very long time ago there were the ai apacï [“ai” white men]. They were
many. They were all of bone to their elbows and to their knees. They could
move their arms and legs only beyond their elbows and knees. They had shirts
and pants. They were fierce and tall. There were many, many of them, and they
had women and children. All were the same in not being able to move except for
their forearms and lower legs. They didn’t have hats but wore something like the
helmets of the [present-day Ecuadorian] soldiers. These men had machetes of
iron that they used for killing. They carried their machetes on the left hip. The
machetes were somewhat yellow. These machetes had handles of human bone.
They said that they had killed many whites with their machetes. They also had
shoes. These whites had machu…they rode on top of these. I think these must
2
Juan de Velasco, Historia Moderna del Reyno de Quito y Crónica de la Provincia de la Compañía de
Jesús del mismo Reyno, tomo I: 1550-1685 (Quito: Reyes y Reyes, 1940 [1790]).
3
Harner, Jívaro, 21.
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have been horses. The šuarä were scared of them. These whites also had mua. I
do not know what they were.”4
Harner suggests the bonelike articulations that so fascinated his Shuar informant were
pieces of body armor (he was further told they resembled turtle shell), the left-hip-borne
“yellow” machetes, swords, and the machus and muas, he-mules (machos) and she-mules
(mulas). All these details hint at early colonial Spanish entradas, but even when pressed
the old man made no mention of fighting between whites and Jívaros, much less
memorable acts like pouring molten gold down a governor’s throat. Had the 1599
uprising been entirely forgotten by the Shuar in the 350-year interim, or had it perhaps
not happened in the way described by Velasco? Or both?
Like his stories of the Inka general Rumiñahui’s hidden ransom and of the rise
and fall of the ancient Quiteño Kingdom of the Shyris, this tale by Velasco has remained
enormously influential for over two centuries despite the absence of corroborating
evidence in either the written colonial or archaeological records. But like most legends, at
the heart of the Jívaro rebellion tale is a kernel of truth.
The objective of this paper is not to debunk the legend -- that has already been
done, though with very little fanfare, by other historians -- but rather to examine the
kernel, really a series of fragments of stories that may shed light on the early neo-feudal
mining economy of southeastern Ecuador and how exactly the Jívaros ultimately
managed to snuff it out when so many others failed in similar circumstances. How
exactly was this particular colony, or string of colonies, lost? I’ll end with some
reflections on Spanish gold camps in general as a “lost colony” type.
The French historian Anne Christine Taylor, along with her ethnographer husband
Philippe Descola and Ecuadorian anthropologist Cristóbal Landázuri, have recently
shown that the Jívaros and neighboring groups, not to mention rebellious Spaniards,
mulattos, and mestizos, had in fact made the southeastern Audiencia of Quito unstable
from the opening of the goldfields around 1549; the better-remembered attacks from the
4
Harner, Jívaro, 26.
364
turn of the seventeenth century were simply the death rattle of a long-sick colonial
fringe.5
What led Taylor, Descola, and Landázuri to challenge the Velasco/Harner story in
the first place was their growing collection of colonial documents painting a far messier
and perhaps more interesting chain of events. In short, various attempts at Spanish
settlement in Shuar country were stymied by continuous but never truly federated
indigenous and mixed-alliance attacks from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth
centuries; other factors, such as geographical isolation and periodic demographic shocks,
were of course also at play. It is worth noting that even the Jesuits, who subsequently
established a powerful presence in the vast Mainas district downriver (near modern
Iquitos, Peru) were unable to penetrate the rugged Andean piedmont inhabited by the
Shuar, Achuar, and other Jivaroan groups until just before their expulsion from the region
in 1767-68.
But the earlier period is of central interest here, and Taylor divides the century or
so following contact into four phases: 1) the early conquistador explorations along the
upper tributaries of the Marañón, beginning with Alonso de Alvarado in 1535 and ending
with Francisco de Orellana’s complete Amazon navigation in 1541; 2) town-founding in
the same area by followers of both factions of the Peruvian civil wars, 1543-49 (the
Spanish “city” of Zamora was established on the river of the same name by Alonso de
Mercadillo in 1549); 3) “imperial recuperation,” gold exploitation, localized rebellion,
and abandonment, 1550-1616 (the nebulous district of Yaguarsongo and Pacamoros was
here created by viceregal order in 1557, its first governor Juan de Salinas Loyola); and 4)
failed reconquest, beginning with the 1616 expedition of Diego Vaca de Vega and ending
with that of Martín de la Riva Herrera in 1650.6
5
See Anne Christine Taylor’s “Estudio Introductorio” in A. C. Taylor and C. Landázuri, eds., Conquista de
la region Jívaro, 1550-1650 (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1994), 1-32, along with part 2 of F.M. Renard Casevitz,
Thierry Saignes, & A. C. Taylor, Al este de los Andes: relaciones entre las sociedades amazónicas y
andinas entre los siglos XV y XVII (Quito: Abya-yala, 1988, French ed. 1986). Descola has written
extensively on the modern Achuar, Jivaroan neighbors of the Untsuri šuarä studied by Harner. See In the
Society of Nature: A Native Ecology in Amazonia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and The
Spears of Twilight: Life and Death in the Amazon Jungle (New York: The New Press, 1996).
6
Taylor, “Estudio introductorio,” 19-24. See also Soledad Castro Ponce’s tables and summaries in her
brief study, Yaguarsongo y Pacamoros (Quito: Abya-yala, 2002).
365
Velasco’s famed “Jívaro revolt” was thus not concentrated in one year, or even
ten, but rather stretched across the sixty-six-odd years of period three (1550-1616).
Based on the findings of Taylor and Landázuri, along with my own reconnaissance of
colonial documents in Ecuador and Spain, no significant event appears to have occurred
in Shuar country in the year 1599. In fact the record shows news of Philip II’s death in
mid-September 1598 only just arriving in the city of Quito in mid-1599. It is not
impossible that word reached Macas sometime in late 1599, but Spain was nevertheless
quite a ways away, a fact apparently lost on Velasco.
Harner and Taylor both emphasize Spanish greed as a catalyst for indigenous
rebellion, whenever it may have occurred, but neither treat gold mining in any detail. Let
me begin my small corrective with two letters not discussed by these authors:
“Alonso de Sosa to his father, Juan de Sosa, Santiago Parish, Toledo:
Sir,
Directed by doña Sebastiana de Loaysa from those parts to New Spain [and then
to] this city of Zamora, province of Peru, I received letters from her and from my
brother Gabriel de Sosa and Mr. Luis de Sosa, my cousin. It pained me greatly to
see no word from Your Mercy [the writer’s father], making me imagine you have
forgotten me in the midst of everything, but then it has been more than six years
since I last saw Your Mercy and the Lady doña Francisca [the writer’s mother].
For the love of Our Lord, remember that you have a servant in these parts, so
remote and distant from all recreation that without the hope of receiving the
consolation of your letters, no amount of willpower would suffice, nor forces be
sufficient to suffer the travails of this land, and those up to now, without doubt,
have been great, and this [absence of letters] only adds to them. I have already
written Your Mercy of the reason for my coming to this land from New Spain,
namely the perdition of that place due to the inability of men to sustain
themselves either with or without charges, and having had news of some rich gold
mines in this land…and having had some Indians who if they did had not
died…might have made me very fortunate, [but] with their death all fell apart,
though I had and still have some small mines that give me ten and twelve pesos
each day, which is more than fifteen ducats, and if supplies were not so
expensive, I would soon go to serve Your Mercy; it is not just that so much time
goes by…
In the hour of my writing this I am filled with doubt, for they plead with me more
than a little to go as captain in charge of others to populate a town called
Santiago, and the province Masquisinango, very near this city, where much gold
has been seen, and many domesticated Indians [indios domésticos] who will serve
upon our arrival. If I go I will have means to eat, and very well, and could, with
the passing of time, serve Your Mercy well, and aid my brothers and sisters, and
366
if I do not go, I shall go as soon as I can to Spain, Our Lord giving me health, to
fulfill this, the greatest desire that any man, I believe, has ever had. Although it
would not be with much money, because all this land is lost in the extreme, and
only this tiny corner amounts to something on account of the gold, which provides
a means of support.
I plead with Your Mercy because I imagine that boy they say is my son must be
as I was at his age, and Your Mercy could not do me a greater favor than to send
him from that land to this as soon as he so desires, for if I decide to go on this
expedition, these Indians will be left for him, and I could go to serve Your Mercy
as I have said, or if not, with little at stake, he could go [i.e., return] with me. And
if he should come understand that he will be well paid for his work, and if he does
not want to come by way of Nombre de Diós he could come via New Spain,
embarking again at Nicaragua, where storeships come, and disembarking at
Guayaquil, and from there by land come to a town called Cuenca, from which I
would get news and would send them [sic] necessary supplies, or go out myself to
get them. I am not sending the sample of this gold since there is no private
messenger; it would be like throwing it in a fire to be burned, never to get there.
If a brother of mine should desire to come, perhaps needing some shelter (?), he
should waste no time, and I will pay the costs and charges with interest; it would
do me the greatest favor and convenience if we could all return together, I like
that boy coming to serve you. To my lady doña Francisca I do not write since the
carrier of this [letter] leaves me no space, and because, Your Mercy having this on
my behalf, it does not seem necessary. Doña Sebastiana and my brother Gabriel
de Sosa have written me saying Your Mercy does not give them my letters. I
plead with Your Mercy so as not to create unnecessary mystery Your Mercy give
them this small contentment. To my sister doña Isabel I do not write because I
cannot send, as I have said, anything, and though one may amuse oneself with a
gold nugget such as one finds here, one would rather a hundred thousand letters
than a hundred pesos. With my desire that Our Lord watch over thee for many
years, and with as much happiness as I wish for my own soul. From Zamora,
September first, 1560. I kiss the hands of Your Mercy, your son, Alonso de Sosa”
Accompanying letter by Diego de Sosa from Lima to Juan de Sosa, in Chozas de
Canales, Oct.1562?:
“Very magnificent sir:
A letter of Your Mercy’s that came directed by Pedro Gómez de Cáceres, who
went to that land [i.e., Spain] from New Spain, but had also been in this land of
Peru, it came into my hands, and I guarded it for some days until I could direct it
to Mr. Alonso de Sosa [the writer’s brother], and within the two months that it
was in my power news arrived in this city that he was killed with eight other
Spaniards, killed by the Indians where they had recently populated and had been
367
at peace and fully calmed, and having gone those whom I mentioned to see
certain Indians of theirs, given to them in that province, among them Mr. Alonso
de Sosa, befallen by luck his repartimiento there, and there he went to end his life.
I did not want to write Your Mercy for the sorrow with which I know my Lady
doña Francisca will receive this, but as there are things not to be remedied by the
hands of men, I thought I should let Your Mercy know what is happening here so
that Your Mercies may order that which you deem best, and that the remainder of
his wealth may be disposed of properly.”7
These poignant letters from the early 1560s plainly reveal the contemporary
dangers of assuming that the Jívaro (perhaps the so-called jiuarra sub-group of the lower
Santiago River, in this case) would be willing servants in the gold mines, and they also
help put a human face on Spanish gold seekers from the first part of Taylor’s third phase.
Account books from the royal smeltry of 1560s Zamora have also survived thanks to
Crown fears of tax evasion, and they reveal a thriving gold mining economy in the heart
of Shuar territory in spite of attacks like the one that killed Sosa (Sosa himself shows up
in the books for the last time in January 1562). Local and transient miners alike
registered nearly 210,000 pesos (c. 875 kg) of high-karat gold in the five-and-a-half years
between September 1561 and April 1567,8 suggesting that although it would get a lot of
them killed, in Jívaro country the Spanish had indeed hit pay dirt.
Placer, or stream-bed mining, was practiced throughout the district, and early
miners of Zamora encountered some of the largest gold nuggets (puntas) ever found in
the Indies. One weighed over eighteen pounds (c. 8 kg), and others weighing four to
eight pounds (1.5-3.5 kg) routinely turned up in streams and among the roots of trees.9
As mandated by cédula, or royal proclamation, the largest nuggets were not melted down,
but rather purchased by the royal treasury to be sent to the king as curiosities.10 The
abundance of large nuggets suggests a previously unmined district, and the chroniclers
generally agreed that most of the so-called Yaguarsongo/Pacamoros area was never
subjected to Inca control. Nevertheless, an encomendero who visited the mines in 1556
7
Enrique Otte, Cartas privadas de emigrantes a Indias, 1540-1616 (Mexico, D.F.: Fondo de Cultura
Economica, 1993), 366-67. Alonso de Sosa (“estante en esta ciudad”) also shows up in the Zamora smeltry
records on 2 January 1562, when he paid the diezmo, or ‘tithe’, on 1 tejuelo de oro de Nambija, 22.5k, 99p.
8
Alfonso Anda Aguirre, Zamora de Quito y el Oro de Nambija (Loja: Casa de la Cultura, 1989), 53-60.
9
Ibid., 101.
10
See Archivo Municipal de Quito (hereafter AMQ) Miscelánea No.104, Minas de Zamora, ff.125v-126.
368
or 1557 claimed that “in the time of the Incas [these mines] were theirs, worked by them
and for them, the source, it is said, of most of the gold they carried and possessed.” He
went on to suggest that upon hearing of Spanish gold-lust at Cajamarca, native workers
had sealed up the mines.11
Whatever the pre-Columbian past, much of the gold registered in Zamora by
Sosa’s time was taken not from rivers but from vein deposits located high in the
Tzunantza and Condor Cordilleras, east of the Zamora River. The Shuar heartland -which Taylor argues was located farther south than it is today, i.e., closer to the modernday town of Zamora -- contained more than just the placer deposits mentioned by Harner,
and this fact multiplied the hardships of indigenous charges like the “domesticated” ones
that killed Alonso de Sosa around 1562. The most significant hard-rock deposits were to
be found at Nambija, several days’ travel from Zamora and 1800m up in some of the
wettest and most rugged terrain on the continent. Here the Spanish forced indigenous
workers deep underground, where they sunk shafts into solid rock with crude hand tools
by candlelight.
Nambija, in a word, must have been the kind of place Theodor de Bry had in mind
when he set out to illustrate the Black Legend. The site’s peculiar geology (skarn-type
deposits in very hard igneous and metamorphic rock) led miners to follow quartz
stringers into either huge pockets of high-grade ore (bolsonadas) or nothing at all.
Months of labor and investment could easily be wasted. Meanwhile, near-constant rain
made land-slides and cave-ins commonplace, and because of the altitude nighttime
temperatures could plunge to the single digits centigrade, challenging the immune
systems of wet and weakened miners. Other laborers, some of them African slaves, built
and maintained water-powered stamp mills which they were forced to tend around the
clock. Mine owners like Alonso de Sosa concentrated their attention on the clean-up,
overseeing the tricky business of mercury amalgamation at the mill.12 Still others, almost
always recently-acquired encomienda charges, served as porters, carrying beams, iron
11
Pilar Ponce Leiva, ed., Relaciones Historico-Geográficas de la Audiencia de Quito (hereafter RHGQ), 2
vols. (Madrid: CSIC, 1992) 1: 549 (1592 relación of encomendero González de Mendoza).
12
An excellent summary of sixteenth-century Spanish mining technology is Julio Sánchez Gómez, “La
técnica en la producción de metales monedables en España y en América, 1500-1650,” in J. Sánchez
Gómez, Guillermo Mira Delli-Zotti, y Rafael Dobado, La Savia del Imperio: tres estudios de economía
colonial (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca, 1997), 19-264.
369
bars, jugs of wine and olives, and virtually everything else needed to sustain the mining
camps. They climbed and slipped and tripped over trails deemed impassable even for
mules.
Based on early explorer accounts and modern lowland Jivaroan settlement
patterns Taylor suggests a contact-era indigenous population from Macas to Santiago de
las Montañas of about 20,000 (see map).13 By 1567, Zamora was said to have twentyseven Spanish householders (vecinos) who held some 8,000 indigenous subjects in
encomienda, but many of these latter were not Jívaros but rather resettled highlanders,
mostly from around Cuenca.14 By 1572 a census showed some thirty-two Spanish
vecinos in Zamora, but complaints of rapid indigenous population decline were on the
rise.15 (It is unclear if the “Indians” mentioned at the beginning of Alonso de Sosa’s
letter were highlanders or lowlanders, or if they had come with him from say, Nicaragua.)
Visitas and other census records for Zamora and other parts of the Governorship of
Yaguarsongo have not survived, but the rate of demographic collapse was undoubtedly
more rapid here than in the neighboring highlands. Mustering all accounts, Linda
Newson has argued that indigenous peoples in the southeast Oriente suffered the most
dramatic demographic collapse in the Audiencia of Quito outside of Guayaquil, a decline
of some 97% by 1600.16
We do not know exactly when, but some time around the turn of the seventeenth
century the mines of Nambija were abandoned by Spanish miner-encomenderos. We
may assume this was due to the usual factors of indigenous rebellion and flight, isolation,
and demographic decline, but we have no way of dividing them up with certainty. The
moment for historical archaeology is probably already past, unfortunately, since (in one
of the more amazing stories of modern Ecuadorian history) a North American prospector
who had read about the sixteenth-century bonanza in Velasco and other colonial accounts
rediscovered Nambija in 1979, setting off a massive gold rush. The wealth and relatively
13
Taylor, “Esudio introductorio,” 13.
Ponce Leiva, RHGQ, 57. Governor Salinas (104) said that Zamora’s Spanish vecinos had originally
numbered thirty-five, but that the dearth of native men available for encomienda service had caused a drop
to “little more than twenty.”
15
Ponce Leiva, RHGQ, 1: 115.
16
Linda Newson, Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press,
1995), 296.
14
370
easy access of the deposits even then suggested the old mines had been abandoned in a
hurry, perhaps in response to an attack, fire, or other disaster.
We will probably never know what really happened in these remote reaches of
Upper Amazonia some four hundred years ago, but we may ask if there was something
about the Jívaro specifically, culturally, that made them successful rebels besides
geography. Here of course the ethnographic work of Harner, Descola, and others is most
suggestive, as considerable attention has been given to two traits in particular that may
have helped thwart would-be colonizers.
One tendency among all Jivaroans is (and presumably was then) a widelydispersed pattern of settlement, the single houses of each loosely-affiliated “clan” built in
near-total isolation from one another and scattered over many square kilometers.
Furthermore, house sites are frequently abandoned after a few years for ecological or
spiritual reasons, to be replaced by others built perhaps 10-20 km distant. This
exceptional dispersion, and of course the highly decentralized political system that gives
rise to it, would have made the Jívaro extraordinarily resistant to the usual Spanish
methods of domination, namely co-optation of indigenous headmen and forced
congregation.
Corroborating colonial evidence is occasionally available. For example, a 1587
series of documents regarding disputed encomiendas in the mining town of Sevilla de
Oro (another of Velasco’s “lost” settlements, though a modern town carries this name)
center on the inability of both local indigenes and Spaniards to identify a real, undisputed
cacique.17 Among the modern Achuar there are no caciques, only shamans and juunt, or
occasional charismatic warriors capable of mustering a dozen or so junior male
relatives.18
Another distinctive trait is endemic feuding, almost always intra-ethnic but
occasionally extending to outsiders. Thus Jívaro manhood has long been defined in terms
of ability to defend one’s family and annihilate one’s enemies, not infrequently cousins
17
The documents are transcribed in Piedad & Alfredo Costales, eds., Los Shuar en la historia: Sevilla de
Oro y San Francisco de Borja (Quito: Mundo Shuar, 1978), 15-79. Even though this collection includes a
town council document from Sevilla de Oro dated 1608 the authors refuse to question Velasco’s story
(recall he claimed the town was abandoned by terrified survivors in 1599).
18
See, for example, Descola, Spears of Twilight, 175-78.
371
and other blood relatives. House structures are thus not only isolated, reached only by
paddling up winding tributaries or hacking through jungle over near-invisible footpaths,
but also fortified, another impediment to Spanish military advances. Likewise vigilance,
and conversely stealth in stalking victims is learned from a very early age, rendering
nearly all Jívaro males first-rate guerrilla warriors, perpetually on guard.
Yet although Harner clings to the possibility, Taylor and Descola reject outright
the idea of tens of thousands of Jívaros banding together in some sort of grand federation
to destroy Spanish mining towns. Far more typical in the historical record are the
isolated incidents of local rebellion that killed naïve adventurers like Alonso de Sosa.
The cumulative effect of such attacks would certainly have dampened the enthusiasm of
would-be replacements, however gold-hungry, and as Sosa’s letter reminds us, life in the
jungle took a psychological toll on urban- and family-minded Spaniards accustomed to a
drier climate.
Beyond the tricky issue of culture, or rather shameless upstreaming, one may also
ask if there were specific incidents that inspired Velasco. The following document,
reprinted in the Taylor/Landazuri collection, may serve as one lead:
“Information from the city of Cuenca regarding the uprising of the Jíbaros, 1606”
“….and having already been at peace [with] the Jíbaro Indians, [they] having been
baptized, catechized, and reduced to the service of Your Majesty, they rebelled,
burning the city which they had populated, killing its citizens and residents, and
afterwards here [near Cuenca] they have committed other crimes, attacking the
royal roads, robbing and killing peaceful neighboring Indians, and so that all this
should cease and Your Majesty be served, for the good of this republic and for the
utility of your vassals, it seems to me that it would be very expedient that by the
best and most efficient means [the Jívaros] be reduced again and drawn back into
the fold and unity of our Holy Catholic Faith and the service of Your Majesty as
much for this [end] as for the hope of discovering and adding to the Christian
Religion many other provinces of Indians not inhabited by Spaniards which
border these Jíbaros; all inhabit lands very rich in gold, which would go a long
way toward the conservation of this city [Cuenca], so poor and needy, as it would
be meaningful to Your Majesty, and this would be a great addition to the Royal
Treasury of Your Majesty, whose Royal Catholic Person may God Our Lord
372
guard for many happy years and likewise your Christianity which benefits these
kingdoms.”19
This sounds vaguely like the events described by the Jesuit historian, and the date is
encouraging, but in fact there are so many such requests for aid against the Jívaros
(usually from Cuenca officials) that mention burnings, killings, and so on in an almost
generic fashion that we cannot put much faith in them.
More promising is a 1572 document now in the National Library of Spain
describing a “mutiny” that took place in the town of Logroño, site of Velasco’s molten
gold incident.20 In this bizarre case two mestizo soldiers, Francisco Hernández Barreto
and Juan de Landa, rebelled against the leader of the “jornada,” or expedition, of which
they were a part. The particular mission of this jornada was to rebuild a town called
Nuestra Señora del Rosario, the original site of Macas. What had happened in the interim
is not mentioned, but one may assume indigenous attacks or the fear of them had led to
its abandonment or destruction.
In any case Landa and Barreto, whom the narrator and apparent jornada-leader
Juan de Vargas Escalona calls “tyrants” (playing on the royalist terminology of the
Peruvian civil war), were said to have planned to overrun not only the administrative
center of Zamora and surrounding mining camps, but also Cuenca and Loja. Barreto
would be crowned “prince” alongside his indigenous mistress, Catalina, who would
thenceforth be called “Señora.” Upon her accession, “Lady Catalina” was to be adorned
with jewels taken from the Spanish women of Zamora. Reminiscent of the madness that
had gripped Lope de Aguirre not far downstream and only about a decade before, Barreto
and Landa promised reluctant soldiers 10,000 gold pesos each if they would only join in
forging this new, indigenous-mestizo empire. Few apparently did, and soon the
mutineers fell to guerrilla-style attacks on the jornada, picking off night watchmen in an
attempt (according to Vargas) to assassinate the captain (himself).
Rather like Aguirre, however, Barreto and Landa had no luck, and the fort they
had built to defend themselves was soon captured by Vargas and his faithful followers.
19
Signed Martín de Ocampo, Corregidor of Cuenca, 12 April 1606 (in Taylor and Landázuri, Conquista de
la region Jíbaro, 295-6).
20
Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), ms. #3044, ff.330-34v.
373
The fighting continued inside, and according to the narrator the rebels not only
denounced their adversaries as “vile sodomites” (putos bellacos) but also denied the
sovereignty of the king. Worse, they died “like heretics,” never uttering a word about
God or Mary, faces down, eyes open. So here we have more strange and enigmatic
images from the backcountry, but no Great Jívaro Revolt of 1572, much less 1599.
Given the fragmentary nature of the record, it is difficult to make sense this
incident, but it comes up again in a 1580 letter to the Indies Council written by Quito’s
Bishop, Juan de la Peña. In his letter Peña actually takes a more sympathetic approach
than Vargas Escalona, claiming these “rebellious mestizos” were simply “old soldiers”
who should have been “given [means] to eat” (i.e., an encomienda or pension). There
were many such individuals in Quito, in fact, and they would help incite yet another
rebellion, the Alcabala Revolt of 1592-93. In the case of Barreto and Landa, however,
“the Devil and Passion took them and they allied with the Indians of that land and killed
many Spaniards.”21 Here it was not the Jívaros, and certainly not “Jívaro culture,” that
was to be blamed or credited for a deadly uprising and failed entrada. Rather it was
disgruntled soldiers of the kind everybody knew and nobody wanted in their backyard
that had done the damage. These were the men the Crown liked to flush into the “infidel
fringe” at every opportunity, often with unexpectedly unpleasant long-term
consequences.
Still one more incident deserves mention, and this final example, from a letter in
the Archive of the Indies, perhaps rings truest in terms of the details given by Velasco. In
1584 the Crown accountant in Cuenca, Miguel Sánchez de la Parra, wrote to Madrid
requesting a raise. Sánchez de la Parra did not claim to be a particularly hard or efficient
worker, but rather (in keeping with the times) stressed his distinguished military service
(à la standard probanza de mérito protocol). In particular, he had participated in an
expedition two-and-a-half years earlier (c.1581) against presumably Jívaro rebels in
21
AGI Quito 76, #31, f.6v., 24-I-1580. See also the published Seville notary Protocols, t.III, p.325
(#1347); here Tomas Ricarte of Sanlúcar de Barrameda had testimony of military service in the colonies
written down, 14-xi-1580. He claimed to have aided Vargas Escalona against Juan de Landa and other
rebels in Macas, then later fought indigenous rebels on the Río San Juan, Popayán district, before returning
to Spain. See also AGI Quito 24:8, Juan de Escobar, Escribano de Minas of Zaruma, 15-xii-1593, letter
requesting confirmation of title. His only outstanding service was in Logroño during an uprising of Jíbaro
and mestizos (no year given).
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Logroño (again Velasco’s preferred site). According to Sánchez de la Parra, indigenous
subjects there had risen up and killed sixty Spaniards, then burnt the town.
Yet a small number of survivors had managed to hole up in a fortified house,
where they expected to either starve or be killed. Somehow word of their predicament
reached Cuenca, and Sánchez de la Parra and his brother-in-law, Bartolomé Pérez de
Cárdenas, were the first to respond. They quickly mustered thirty “Spanish” soldiers and
300 indigenous auxiliaries before marching down the Paute River gorge and across the
jungle to Logroño. In the end the Cuencanos were successful, and supporting testimony
credited Sánchez de la Parra with “freeing [the captive] Christians.”22
We know from subsequent documents that the Jívaros won their independence by
continuing these sorts of small scale attacks, essentially out-terrorizing those who sought
to terrorize them. With time even “old soldiers” lost interest in the quagmire of the
eastern piedmont, and the Spanish simply retreated to the highland cities of Loja and
Cuenca, turning their attention to livestock raising and textile production. But the mines
were never totally forgotten, and from time to time highlanders would organize another
entrada, or armed expedition, always without success and often without even locating the
Jívaros at all. Thus the eastern goldfields passed from the realm of memory into that of
legend, giving rise to equally legendary indigenous leaders and acts of fantastic cruelty.
Today the Shuar and many Ecuadorians, indigenous and otherwise, are quite
proud of the 1599 rebellion as related by Padre Velasco. Its supposed leader, Kirruba
(the updated spelling of “Quirruba,” and now the name of Ecuador’s top female pop act),
is held in high esteem, a powerful counterpoint to the “failed” Quijos leader Jumandy
(put down in 1579). Simply put, the story that gripped Harner still compells. What one
gathers from the early documentary record, however, is a sense that the truth of the Great
Jívaro Rebellion was much stranger than this late colonial fiction. We know the gold
mines were “lost,” but no narratives have emerged to replace Velasco’s -- only broken
bits of tales with half-revealed characters and no clear heroes or villains.
Abandoned Spanish gold camps: “lost colonies” or something else?
22
AGI Quito 22:52, 1584.
375
Having surveyed the details of this particular early colonial frontier story, perhaps
it would be useful to distinguish between Spanish American mining ghost towns and
other types of lost colonies. A large proportion of failed European enterprises in the early
modern Americas were of course intended to be permanent, often geopolitically strategic:
ports of trade, coastal plantations, forts built to guard straits, and so on. Mining towns,
by contrast, may not have always been established with the goal of permanence in mind,
although as in the case of Potosí, Bolivia, or Guanajuato, Mexico, this might be desirable.
And with the possible exception of some silver camps in northern Mexico23, few mining
towns would have been thought “strategic,” at least in the sense of a defensible outpost of
empire. (On the other hand, precious metals sources were always strategic, money being
the sinews of war.)
Unlike silver mines, gold mines, particularly scattered river placers, or alluvial
deposits, were probably not expected to last more than a decade or two. In fact it was
assumed by some sixteeenth-century crown officials that many “flash-in-the-pan” gold
camps would fade quickly, their temporary inhabitants to pick up and move on, hopefully
to new diggings. Exceptions were places like southern Ecuador’s Zaruma, in the Pacific
Coast range, where extensive lode, or vein, deposits were discovered in the hills above
the initial placers. Here gold mines have been in constant operation since the 1550s,
although the adjacent town of San Antonio de Zaruma never grew into a bona fide city.
In many parts of neighboring Colombia, early colonial camps at lode mines
became satellites of larger cities that served as trade posts, crossroads, administrative and
religious centers, and so on. As a counter-example, some lowland placers, such as those
on Colombia’s Pacific coast, proved surprisingly resilient due to a combination of
geological, climatic, and political-cultural factors. Here camps and towns could shift and
mutate in surprising ways, particularly after the introduction of large-scale African
slavery.
23
Susan Deeds, in Defiance and Deference in Northern Mexico: Nueva Vizcaya under Spanish Rule
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003), describes the advance of northwest Mexico’s silver mining
frontier in great detail. Indigenous attacks on mining camps in the early seventeenth century, in particular,
closely resemble early colonial north Andean patterns.
376
Aside from “geological exceptionalism,” though, what other factors might
challenge our assumption that gold towns were somehow more “doomed” and by
definition temporary than other lost colonies? One would be the Spanish obsession with
founding towns, or “ciudades,” as they were often too-optimistically called. Sixteenthcentury Spaniards didn’t just pitch tents like soldiers on campaign when a gold deposit
was discovered. Rather, they almost always ceremoniously founded towns. This was
primarily done, it seems, for legal reasons (town serving as base for “citizen” action).
Even if barely distinguishable from surrounding forest, encomendero-claimants
marked out their “cities” in standard gridiron form. This could be quite difficult in hilly
mining country, but it was almost universally tried -- the nearer the mines, the better.
Magistrates and aldermen soon materialized, along with women and children, priests,
artisans, merchants, and others, all taking their proper places within the traza, or confines
of the grid. “Poblar es conquistar,” as the Spanish saying went, “To populate is to
conquer,” whether in gold, farming, or cattle country. But “to populate” in this case was
specifically “to urbanize.” Colony was city, its lifeblood gold.
A perhaps typical if relatively late example of a mining camp’s founding comes
from southeastern Ecuador in the year 1600 (significantly just after the alleged Jívaro
uprising). A document in Ecuador’s national archive describes the process in some
detail. The first step was to create a so-called real de minas, or “royal mining town.”
The mines and adjacent townsite, christened Nuestra Señora de Copacabana, had been
discovered, or at least claimed, by a citizen of nearby Valladolid. Leaving aside the
important matter of how site names were chosen -- and how citizenship was defined --,
Valladolid was by this time a mining town of urban pretensions, although it boasted only
a dozen or so Spanish residents. Copacabana was formally established by Valladolid’s
alcalde mayor de minas, or mine magistrate, after it had proved productive over some
unspecified period of time.
The alcalde drove a large post into the ground, nailed a cédula -- probably one of
Philip II’s town-founding royal ordinances from the 1570s -- to it, and then kneeling at its
base delivered two blows to the post with his sword, saying, “in the name of Your
Majesty there shall be a washing of metals (lava) in this real de minas.” The alcalde then
rose and took formal possession of the site, “peacefully and without contradiction,” as
377
mandated by law. The document does not describe what this entailed beyond the
ceremonial panning for gold, but similar ones from the later seventeenth century note also
a choreographed and duly witnessed pulling up of weeds or a chunk of turf. Individual
placer mining claims were marked with buried tools at each corner. Special mines -presumably not the most promising ones -- were also set aside for the king.
Finally, a doctrinero or missionary priest, assigned to the native inhabitants of
another nearby town named for Ignatius Loyola, added that a chapel had been constructed
on site in honor of Our Lady of Copacabana. A first mass consecrated the new town,
with sacraments administered to all present.24 Apparently the indigenous inhabitants of
the region, who had by now been “reduced” to gold-washing cuadrillas, or work gangs,
had no chance to object to these no doubt baffling rituals of possession and town
founding, in short, colonization.
Today we have no idea where Copacabana was -- or is --, although there are still
towns that bear the names Valladolid and Loyola near the Peruvian border in
southernmost Ecuador. These are located along rivers that flow into the Chinchipe, an
upper affluent of the mighty Marañón-Amazonas. Copacabana is a truly lost colony, or
at least mining townsite.
For purposes of argument, this example highlights the Spanish pattern of
combining regal and religious town-founding rituals with the economic activity of
mining. The mining camp, or real de minas, was intended to be the germ of a
permanently settled Spanish and Roman Catholic colony. The ritual washing of gold -proving future productivity of a specific, “treasured” kind -- justified its existence. Since
by law all subterranean wealth pertained to the king, it was as if God had chosen to reveal
the seed capital of colonization to pious and loyal subjects in this particular patch of
landscape, this mineral, or “source.” The subsequent call for quintos, the famous “royal
fifth” in taxes, would of course test the depth of the miners’ loyalty to the monarch.
Another perhaps related factor that pushes the early Spanish American “ghost”
gold camp into the “lost colony” category is contemporary sentiment. As the document
suggests, the most important ingredient for success in all mining ventures was hope;
miners and town builders had to believe that times would not only get better, but that
24
ANE Minas, caja 1, 13-v-1600, ff.4v-5.
378
bonanza would transform the supposed American wilderness into an urbanized, Christian
space, a reflection of home. Like intrepid frontier-dwellers everywhere, the settlers of
gold camps in Upper Amazonia could not but be optimistic despite ominous signs. One
had to believe the good times would never end.
But no matter how sincere the colonists’ hopes for this specific type of future,
others’ hopes could always trump theirs, particularly on the “wild” frontier. The Jívaro
uprisings or raids on the gold camps of southeast Ecuador, whatever their precise form or
sequence, were not unique. Many European gold and silver outposts in the early modern
Americas were snuffed out in similar fashion. This pattern could be traced back to
Columbus’s earliest efforts at colonizing Hispaniola, and a blunt English analogue found
in Martin Frobisher’s fraught adventures off South Baffin Island in the late 1570s.25 One
could of course extend the net to include Pedro de Valdívia in Chile, Walter Ralegh in
both South and North America, John Smith in Virginia, and a host of other gold-seekers
whose ambitions were denied at least in part by indigenous will and armed resistance.
It should come as no surprise, then, that late colonial authors like the Jesuit Juan
de Velasco should look to the “lost colonies” of their childhood for good storytelling and
moralizing material. Like a number of Spanish American creole exiles, Velasco, a Quito
native, blended natural and moral history in his remembrances of home (along with a
kind of standard annals of the martyrs and other heroes of his order). With regard to
colonists’ activities in the southeast Andean piedmont, Velasco appears to have drawn on
legends that had long circulated in Quito and other highland cities. He does not seem to
have consulted documents.26
These older tellings of frontier loss had mostly emphasized the supposed savagery
of the Jivaroans, their bloodlust and mercilessness. It was the “Indians’” fault, in other
words. By contrast Velasco emphasized, in good Las Casian style, the misdeeds of the
Spanish colonists. It was the greed of these “ancient Spaniards,” as Velasco called them,
25
Kathleen Deagan & José María Cruxent, Columbus’ Outpost Among the Taínos (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2003). James McDermott, Martin Frobisher, Elizabethan Privateer (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001), 120-256.
26
Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa mentioned similar tales in circulation around Cuenca and Loja in the
1730s, for example. See their Discourse and Political Reflections on the Kingdoms of Peru, ed. & trans.
John J. TePaske and Besse Clement (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978 [1749]).
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not the vice-ridden Jívaros, that had doomed the gold camps. “Let us ponder,” he more
or less said, “how God chose to punish the wicked.” Suddenly, colonies were lost due to
the moral failings of European settlers -- bonanza denied by God, with native peoples as
holy scourge.
With foreign exile and nearly two hundred years’ perspective on the matter, the
Jesuit historian could of course distance himself from the actions of early colonists and
their indigenous enemies. He could see the “lost colony” as an emblem of a Faustian
bargain gone wrong. But then that’s how all such bargains end, right?