European Expansion and Representations of Indigenous and African Peoples

A Distorted Vision

Ignacio Gallup-Díaz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351106719
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This book presents a bold, multifaceted interpretation of early English imperial actions by examining the ways in which English empire-builders and travelers interacted with Indigenous and African peoples during the long process of colonization in the Americas.

Ignacio Gallup-Díaz argues that early English imperial actors were primarily motivated by practical concerns rather than abstract ideologies—from reacting to, learning from, and avoiding the ongoing Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects to the dynamic collision of English imaginings of empire with the practical realities of governing non-European peoples. The text includes an appendix of primary sources that allows students and instructors to engage with English imperial thinking directly. Readers are encouraged to critically examine English accounts of this period in an attempt to see the Indigenous and African peoples who are embedded in them.

European Expansion and Representations of Indigenous and African Peoples provides an invaluable new framework for undergraduate students and instructors of early American history, Atlantic history, and the history of race and imperialism more broadly.

1
A SPANISH TYPOLOGY OF BLACK RESISTANCE

The Rebel Slaves of Panamá

This chapter examines the process through which Spanish chroniclers created a unitary narrative of the slave rebellions in Panamá, shaping a standard description through which a set of succinct chapters was meant to describe neatly to the reader a process that was long, messy, and complex. These Spanish writers normalized the experiences of the rebel slaves, whom they called cimarrones, placing them at the core of early colonial activity in Panamá. An examination of the various methods through which Spanish authors engaged in a process of world-creation reveals how Panamá’s rebel slaves were firmly situated within a set of larger narratives describing the nature and importance of the Iberian conquest of the Americas.

Spanish writers fit the slave rebellions in Panamá into a set of descriptive and narrative frameworks, drawing upon pre-existing biblical and classical story-lines and characteristics to describe the motivations of the rebels and their leader. In doing so, they established a typology for the region’s rebellious peoples of African descent. This typology was transmitted out of the Iberian world over to the English one as a bundle of ideas that traveled from Spain to England as Englishmen invaded Spanish America. The bundle represented rebel slaves as figures rather than as individuals, and, in the chapter that follows, I examine how English writers and ideologues “domesticated” the cimarrones for an English reading public, describing the rebel slaves in their accounts as symerons.

A group of sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers bestowed the name “War of Vallano”¹ upon what they interpreted to be a single, specific, self-contained event: a major slave uprising that wracked the Isthmus of Panamá in 1555–1556. This chapter will investigate the contemporary descriptions of the event with the goal of illuminating how an agreed-upon understanding of the rebellion, specifically a triumphalist interpretation that glossed over many of the actions of Vallano himself, became the standard account embellished and retold by several writers who fashioned chronicles that included descriptions of the uprising.

Several chroniclers writing in the period between 1580 and 1620 embedded a narrative of the War of Vallano in their extensive and wide-ranging histories of the Indies. Juan de Castellanos devoted several lines of his massive heroic poem Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias to it;² Toribio de Ortiguera described the event in his Jornada del Rio Marañón;³ Pedro de Aguado devoted several chapters of his Recopilación Historial to the War;⁴ and Garcilaso de la Vega (known as “El Inca”) wrote of Vallano in his Historia General del Perú.⁵ I explore the accounts of the event in order to establish a description of it that is more satisfactory than those that have appeared previously and to investigate the methods and motivations of the chroniclers who worked to minimize Vallano’s central role in the action as they fit the event within their broader narratives of Spanish conquest.

Antonio de Alsedo, writing in his exhaustive geographical compendium published in the late 1780s,⁶ provided a helpful thumbnail entry for “Bayano.” As a work of the European Enlightenment, Alsedo’s entries took an objective, fact-based tone, with the author’s apparent goal being the deployment of his considerable knowledge to confront and dispel the myths and half-truths that had accreted to the peoples and the place-names of the Indies.

“A curvaceous river in the reign of Tierra Firme, in the province of Panamá,” Alsedo began and, proceeding to more detailed information, continued:

It has this name from a black man, a slave and fugitive from his master, to whom there aggregated many others of this class, making themselves feared in those mountains due to the atrocities that they executed upon the Spaniards who fell into their hands. Their actions reached such a level that the Viceroy of Peru, Marquis de Cañete, then passing to his realms in the south, commissioned captain Pedro de Ursúa to destroy and punish those grave enemies. This he accomplished in a long and difficult campaign in 1555, leaving in perpetuity the memory of the accomplishment in the name of the river.⁷

After reading Alsedo’s entry, it would hardly seem justified for an educated, late eighteenth-century Spaniard consulting the dictionary to view the event as a war at all.

Alsedo meted out a final telling insult in his discussion of the event, going so far as to inform his readers that the name Bayano graced a Panamanian river not to mark the freed slave’s own noteworthy achievements but, rather, to enhance the memory of Pedro de Ursúa, the Spanish soldier who ultimately vanquished him. Alsedo’s entry provides a proof that the sixteenth-century Spanish chroniclers of the event succeeded in their rhetorical goal. Their writings successfully transformed Vallano from an active historical agent, someone who had instigated and shaped events, into a passive figure who, in the end, contributed little to the accounts of the rebellion that bears his name.

The chroniclers treated the War of Vallano as a single event in which Vallano rebelled against the Crown, and the representatives of the Crown vanquished him and his followers in 1556. Because Vallano was the supreme leader of the insurgents, his defeat marked the clear end of the insurgency. However, the documents produced by Spanish officials in Panamá tell a different story. While Vallano may well have been vanquished in 1556, officials operating in the 1580s, long after the rebel’s death, still wrestled with the problem of uncontrollable rebel slaves.

Historians and anthropologists have focused the bulk of their attention upon the periods of protracted and intense conflict between Spanish forces and the maroons, whom the Spanish termed cimarrones.⁸ However, a process of “pacification” is recorded by Spanish officials in the treaties that brought these rebellions to a more clear-cut conclusion at the close of the century. The pacts recognized a group of leaders of the newly chartered free black towns, and these men, in concert with imperial bureaucrats, practiced a form of contested and erratic colonial collusion. Spanish officials worked to delineate and enforce the duties and norms of behavior that they expected from Afro-Panamanian leaders; the former slaves equally endeavored to define what it meant to be free, black, and the leader of a chartered town in the Spanish empire. At present, our interpretations of how this process evolved have been guided by the points of view of the Spaniards who attempted to control the situation. A source-based ethnohistorical study of these developments is lacking in the historiography.

Part of the reason for this lacuna is that the process of Afro-Spanish collusion has been partially hidden from researchers due to the way that local Spanish officials described the cimarrones’ pacification to their superiors. The officials’ descriptions often bore little resemblance to the situation on the ground; they confidently portrayed themselves dictating terms to the defeated rebel slaves, forcibly reducing them to a “civilized” state. However, a close reading of the actual agreements and careful study of the accounts relating the peopling of the free black towns reveal that both sides contributed to the process in equal measure.⁹

Historiographical Issues

The historian of the rebel slaves of colonial Panamá must begin by confronting several difficulties. The first involves the status of imperial Panamá itself. William Paterson, one of the central figures behind a late seventeenth-century Scottish attempt to colonize eastern Panamá, grandly called the region the “door of the seas and key to the universe.”¹⁰ In the early modern period Panamá was vitally important to the Spanish empire, because it served as a key trade route and transportation hub. The Isthmus needed to be held not for its Indian population nor for its precious minerals, though it had both in some abundance. Rather, the Isthmus of Panamá was a core component of the Spanish imperial construct because it served as the literal door that, when opened, connected the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. In 1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa, with the assistance of Indigenous allies, discovered the trans-isthmian route.¹¹

Because Spanish ships could not navigate around Cape Horn until the seventeenth century, everything and everyone passing to or from the southern realm of Peru and, later, Quito had to experience, as a portion of the journey, an overland trek across the camino real that traversed the Isthmus of Panamá.¹² A sojourn in Panamá became a part of the life experience of hundreds of Spanish officials, missionaries, and merchants. Consequently, men of political importance and missionaries possessing literary ambitions developed strong opinions regarding the region’s Indians (truculent and rebellious) and African slaves (rebellious, brutal, difficult to subdue) and were willing to comment, write, and act upon their Panamanian experience.

Panamá occupied an intriguing place in the Spanish imperial structure. It was an undeniable fact that men and goods needed to pass freely across the Isthmus in order for the empire to operate with some level of useful cohesion.¹³ After the conquest of the Inka state in Peru in 1532, however, the Spanish population of Panamá diminished as the richer realm siphoned off unattached adventurers. Furthermore, economic and social development in New Spain to the north and Peru to the south soon relegated Panamá to the position of a tertiary economy reliant on shipping and the transportation of goods from other realms across the Isthmus.¹⁴ Due to developments to the north and south of it, after 1532 the Isthmus failed to attract Spanish settlers and the population languished. One of its cities, Nombre de Dios, came to life only when the Spanish fleet was anchored there.

By the latter part of the sixteenth century, English and French pirates, recognizing the value of attacking the Spanish empire at its vulnerable isthmian chokepoint, stepped up their disruptive attacks, establishing a durable model for future intruders by coordinating their activities with the region’s Indigenous people and African rebels.¹⁵ Panamá, a core region in the Spanish imperial system, possessed in its meager population and impossible-to-defend borders two decidedly peripheral qualities.

The reason we can speak of a historical figure named Vallano at all is the result of a historical accident, an oddity in the generation of a specific set of historical sources. The chroniclers who described the initial slave uprisings of Panamá, and grouped these events into a single War of Vallano, did so for a very specific reason. For them, the War was a brief episode in the eventful life story of Don Pedro de Ursúa, the shrewd, Odyssean conquistador who vanquished Vallano. For, after dealing with the fugitive slaves of Panamá, Ursúa was enjoined by the viceroy to embark upon his infamous expedition to explore the Amazon River. That journey produced the spectacular mutiny of Lope de Aguirre. Aguirre had Ursúa murdered after leadership of the expedition was wrested from him. These events were shocking to Spanish sensibilities, and they were much written about and commented upon.¹⁶

Consequently, the chroniclers who deal with Ursúa’s activities in the Isthmus of Panamá bracket the War of Vallano as a minor incident in the conquistador’s eventful life. Although his interactions with the rebel slaves are worthy of mention, the focal point of Ursúa’s life is deemed to be the momentous Amazonian events that took place in his life after he departed from Panamá. The War of Vallano is clearly t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• CONTENTS
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Empire Is Cruelty, and You Cannot Refine It
• 1 A Spanish Typology of Black Resistance: The Rebel Slaves of Panamá
• 2 Symerons, Sultans, and Specimens: Binary Opposition(s) in English Vernacular Imperialism
• 3 Ambulatory Cartography: The English De-Hispanicization of America
• 4 Roanoke Through an Irish Lens: Inconstant Lords and Their Love of Conspiracies
• 5 Ralegh’s Empyre: Collusion and Misperception
• Necessary Paradoxes
• Appendix
• Index