by Hugh Thomas
Monroy and his party of five men meantime journeyed on to Peru till they reached the valley of the Copiapó. There, early in 1542, they were surprised by Indians, and four of the six were killed. Monroy and Pedro de Miranda survived, and were made prisoners. They were led to the cacique Andequín, who had a Spanish adviser in Francisco Gasca—earlier one of Almagro’s men, who had been captured some years before. Gasca had won the admiration of the Indians by playing the flute well, and so he was allocated three wives, who gave him many children. Gasca ensured that Monroy and Miranda were well treated; their lives were saved, if not their possessions. After several months, Monroy and Miranda began to teach Andequín to ride. One day, they drew farther and farther away from the Indian settlement, then Miranda stabbed the cacique, and he and Monroy forced Gasca to escape with them to help them on their way—three men on two horses3—but he soon escaped.
After further difficulties, Monroy and Miranda reached Cuzco in September 1542. By that time, Vaca de Castro was in power, but his authority was fragile. He received Monroy well, but he had no money nor indeed time for them: “Being so busy, trying the guilty, bringing peace to the land, rewarding services, sending out captains to make further discoveries, he could do little.” Vaca de Castro promised to send a ship of supplies to Valdivia once he had restored order in Peru, but that moment was a long time coming. Monroy, with the persistence of an Extremeño, did meet two rich men who were interested in his story. One was a merchant who had been in the Indies since 1531 and who offered 5,000 castellanos to equip seventy horsemen. The other was a priest who lent Monroy a similar sum, with which he returned to Chile.
On his journey back, Monroy stopped at Arequipa where he met an old friend of Valdivia’s, Lucas Martínez Venegas, who was also willing to help him. “Look for a ship, Señor Monroy,” he said, “in which to put the things most needed by your governor. I have only one ship, the Santiaguillo, and I would rather not give that to you since I need it for my mines. But if you do not find a ship on the nearby coast, I am prepared to give it to you even although I should lose much by it.”4 Monroy was not one to hesitate: He took the Santiaguillo, and filled it with arms, ammunition, ironware, clothing, food, and wine. They left for Chile in May 1543, but thanks to adverse winds and ignorance of the route, they did not arrive in Valparaíso till September.5 They found 118 Spaniards there, near skeletons they seemed. But what a wonderful change the Santiaguillo brought about.
Monroy, who part of the way traveled by land, did not reach Santiago till December. His arrival was another infusion of life into the moribund colony. But they brought back no confirmation of Valdivia as governor: To his frustration, he remained just the lieutenant-governor.
Thereafter, Valdivia told Emperor Charles that the Indians did not attack anymore, “nor came within four leagues [twelve miles] round this town and they all withdrew to a remote province and would send daily messages bidding me to come and fight them and bring the new Christians who had come, for they wanted to see if they were as brave as we were; and if they were, they would submit to us but if not, not.6
“When all the men and horse of Monroy had recovered, I went forth with them to seek the Indian strongholds. I found them but the Indians all fled.… leaving all their villages burned down and abandoning the best stretch of land in the world so that it looks as if it never had an Indian in it.”7
Soon after, still with no further communication from Peru, Valdivia began to grant encomiendas. In order to make that easier, he founded a second settlement in the north where colonists coming in from Lima or Cuzco could rest on the last stretch of their journey. The need for this was confirmed by the fate of a ship belonging to an Italian, Juan Albert. He sent a boatload of men ashore to seek freshwater at Copiapó, but all these men were killed. Juan Albert sailed on south, passed Valparaíso, and somewhere south of that port, all his crew were killed by Indians—as was a black slave who was scrubbed to death to see if he washed white.8 Valdivia meanwhile sent the German Juan Bohon and thirty horsemen to found a settlement in the Coquimbo valley, in the north, near the Andacollo mines. Valdivia himself joined him, and they called the place La Serena, after everyone’s happy memories of that magical valley in Spain. They found there a good pitch, which was yielded by certain plants, like a wax. It could be used for careening boats.9
The colony was further reinvigorated by another arrival from Peru: This was Juan Calderón de la Barca in the San Pedro, a vessel owned and piloted by Juan Bautista de Pastene from Genoa, who afterwards would be a strong adherent of Valdivia. Valdivia sent Pastene down the coast to explore the land south of Magellan’s strait. This was seen as an important extra journey: Pastene, a treasurer, and a chief clerk (Juan de Cárdenas Alderete and Cárdenas) were to take possession of all the land in the name of the Emperor. They were to give names to ports and rivers, islands, and districts (Valdivia, Concepción, and Osorno—the latter after the acting president of the Council of the Indies) and load the ship on return with sheep and food. The San Pedro’s voyage would be followed by that of the Santiaguillo, which would sail to the river Maule to assist Valdivia in a more local contest. Both expeditions brought back good news of the fertility of the land in the South, the number of natives, the crops grown, the size of the towns, and the good harbors.
Valdivia was concerned with the gold mines, too: He used Peruvian Indians to work in them, guarded by a Spanish contingent of armed men. In the next nine months, they would produce 60,000 castellanos worth of gold. Valdivia sent one of his would-be assassins, Antonio de Ulloa, back to Spain to represent him before the monarch in the Council of the Indies—a very odd designation by the naïve Valdivia, one cannot but think, for Ulloa was a close friend of Sancho La Hoz’s. Valdivia also dispatched Monroy again to Peru by land, and Pastene by sea for more supplies. Valdivia had further dealings with the equally naïve Michimalongo, to whom the still determined Inés Suárez offered looking glasses, combs, Venetian glass, beads, and trinkets. In reply, Michimalongo presented Inés with a white feather from a bird that lived high up in the snows; the feather did not burn if passed through a flame.
It was at this stage, on September 4, 1545, that Valdivia sent Charles the Emperor a very enthusiastic description of Chile. “This land,” he insisted, “is such that there is none better in the world for living in and settling down in … it is very flat, very healthy and very pleasant … it has four months of winter [but] it is only when the moon is at the quarter that it rains for a day or two … on all other days, the sun is so fine that there is no need to draw near the fire. The summer is so temperate with such delightful breezes that a man can be out in the sun all day long without annoyance. It is a land most abounding in pastures and fields and yielding every kind of livestock and plant imaginable; much timber and very fine [too it is] for building houses, endless wood for use in them; the mines being rich in gold, the whole land being full of it. And whoever wants to take it, there they will find a place to sow and a site to build on and water, grass and wood for their beasts.” He added that, as a result of the expedition of Almagro, Chile had received an evil name but it did not deserve it.10
Valdivia wrote too a curious letter to Hernando Pizarro (also dated September 4, 1545) telling him that there were fifteen thousand Indian families between Copiapó and the Río Maule valley. Assuming an average of five persons in each family, the total population would accordingly have been seventy-five thousand. But Valdivia added that an equal number had died in the intervening years since the conquest of Chile had begun. So one might assume that the total population would have been 150,000 in 1540. But these are guesses. No one knows how accurate Valdivia was, and no one knows how many are to be recognized in a single family.
In early 1546, while Gonzalo Pizarro was still dominating Peru, Valdivia was driving down to conquer the immediate south of his new country. He had sixty horsemen, 150 Indians as porters, and a black ex-slave, Juan Valiente, as doctor. South of the Río Maule, they encountered hostile Indians. Man
y who were captured were asked to put to their fellows a request that they come in and surrender to Valdivia, but instead, three hundred Indians came to bar the Spaniards’ path. The conquistadors fell on them and killed fifty. Later that day, Valdivia said that they reached Quilicura, where they found that a surprise attack was being mounted by seven thousand Indians. The onslaught was cleverly foiled by the Spaniards, but the Indians fought well, “packed together as if they had been Germans.” Rodrigo de Quiroga killed the cacique and routed this force, with the loss of two horses, though with many Spaniards wounded. Having reached the river Biobío, they returned to Santiago at the end of March 1546.11
There they found some disquiet. The settlers there, fully expecting Valdivia to have established a new city in the South, had been busy reassigning the encomiendas locally. Now Valdivia ordered all property to be replaced in the hands of those who had had it before his departure. This caused much grumbling.12 Valdivia worked anew on the divisions, and some twenty-eight persons found themselves actually dispossessed, the number of encomenderos being cut from sixty to thirty-two. The gainers were the men of the cabildo (the town council), the church, the most powerful conquistadors, and Inés Suárez. The dispossessed were assured that they would be assigned wonderful property in the beautiful South, but only when it was conquered.
Sancho de Hoz was among those dispossessed. Still longing for authority in Santiago, or the vara de dos palmos (the symbol of mayoral authority), he approached and won the sympathy of several other discontented men. Thereupon, he sent a message to Valdivia to tell him that he was dying and begging him to visit him. The plan was that once Valdivia had entered Sancho’s house, a friend of Sancho’s would stab him. Valdivia agreed to go but insisted on taking several of his friends. Sancho de Hoz asked Pedro de Villagrán to join his conspiracy. He went to Inés, who immediately informed Valdivia, who in turn at last arrested Sancho.
Soon afterwards, the German Juan Bohon rode in from La Serena to inform Valdivia of further treachery, for Pastene, the Genoese friend of the “perfect captain,” had just arrived back in the port. Bohon said, and Pastene confirmed it, that on their outward journey to Peru, their ship had reached Los Reyes (Lima) in the record time of twenty-four days. There they had news of the war between Núñez Vela and Gonzalo Pizarro. When they arrived, the faithful Monroy died and Antonio de Ulloa, instead of going to Spain, had gone rather to Gonzalo Pizarro. Ulloa had torn up the letters and papers that had been given him by Valdivia for the emperor Charles. He also obtained an order from Gonzalo’s chief justice, Aldana, which enabled him to seize all the gold that had been carried for the Viceroy by the now deceased Monroy. Pastene, the loyal Genoese, had been restrained from leaving Los Reyes. Ulloa gained permission to make off with what was being held of Valdivia’s money in Pastene’s ship. But Pastene was saved by Gonzalo’s evil genius, Francisco de Carvajal, whom he had known—as he had known Valdivia—in Italy.
Ulloa arrived in Gonzalo’s camp just in time to take part in his rebellious activities at the Battle of Añaquito. But by then Carvajal had heard of the plans of Aldana and Ulloa to carry out a maldad galalonesa—that is, a crime of the style of Galalón in the chivalric novel The Twelve Peers. Carvajal might be a scoundrel, but he was a literate scoundrel. He told Pastene, “Aldana and Ulloa are aiming at … Valdivia’s death so that they [and their friends] may govern. And they want to make use of my lord the governor’s friendship with Pedro de Valdivia to gain what they want.”13 Carvajal sent Pastene to Quito to see Gonzalo Pizarro, who authorized him to collaborate with the treacherous Antonio de Ulloa in search of supplies.
Pastene returned to Los Reyes (Lima) where he found Ulloa busy loading the San Pedro. He showed Ulloa his letter from Gonzalo Pizarro. But, despite that, Ulloa sailed down to Arequipa, forcing Pastene to buy another vessel for 1,000 pesos, which left him with the responsibility to pay another 7,000 once he rejoined Valdivia. Valdivia’s name stood so high that the seller of the ship knew that even a debt of that size would be sure to be honored. Pastene found thirty men to sail with him and went down to Tarapacá. Ulloa had already sailed south, planning to kill Valdivia and rearrange the encomiendas under Gonzalo’s rule. Pastene overtook Ulloa, who invited him to confer, but Pastene, realizing that he would be killed, declined the invitation. Ulloa then returned north in order to fight on behalf of Gonzalo.
Valdivia, still preoccupied by his legal position (was he governor or lieutenant-governor?), sent Juan de Ávalos, from the family of the victor of Pavia, an old friend, north to Peru to clarify matters. He took with him, as any responsible well-to-do conquistador then did, 60,000 castellanos in gold, as well as copies of the letters that Ulloa had seized and torn up.14 A little later, having received no answer, Valdivia realized that he ought to return to Peru himself. He left Francisco de Villagrán as his deputy and Francisco de Aguirre as the administrator.
Valdivia had been away from Peru for seven years and was determined to resolve the question of his gubernatorial status. He left Valparaíso with as much money as he could secure. He is supposed to have told all Spaniards who wanted to return to Spain with what they had accumulated in Chile to put their possessions on board his boat. They did so. He gave a dinner on the shore before departure, and then, with Jerónimo de Alderete and Juan de Cárdenas, he left for the ship to take their possessions to Peru, leaving the diners aghast. One of them, Juan Piñelo, outraged, swam after the boat, but was thrown back into the sea. The defenders of Valdivia argued that this was just a change of plan, and that view was sustained by La Gasca in a later enquiry. But the money seized thus came to be known as the “80,000 dorados [gilthead],” netted by Valdivia, “as easily as St Peter brought up his net so full of fish that it broke.”15
Valdivia intended to go back to Spain to establish his position. On leaving Santiago, the city he had founded, he wrote to the cabildo there: “I am leaving for the court of His Majesty, to present myself before his exalted person … to tell him all that his subjects and I in these provinces have done for him; and to ask and request that it be to his service to grant to me this government in order to be better able to serve him and to reward the persons who have helped me conquer this land.”16 There were, however, a few who thought that he might instead be going to Portugal “to live off the gold which he had stolen.” That would have been out of character, but not impossible to imagine in the extraordinary circumstances.
Valdivia set off for Peru with a handful of loyal friends. At La Serena, he received the news that Gonzalo Pizarro had won the civil war in Peru. But a little more to the north, at Tarapacá, he heard that La Gasca was recapturing the country. Valdivia had no doubts about siding with the Crown, despite his old friendships with Carvajal and Gonzalo Pizarro. As we read in chapter 30, Gasca was delighted to welcome him, “knowing him to be a man of great diligence and experience and courage and to whom great credit is given in this land in matters of war.” The “perfect captain” became one of the three most important members of La Gasca’s army, alongside Alvarado and Hinojosa and, as we have seen, it was he who was concerned in deciding the crossing of the river at Jaquijahuana and rebuilding the bridges broken by the Pizarrists.17 This was a decisive contribution to La Gasca’s triumph.
Valdivia’s participation in the battles against Gonzalo Pizarro led to his tardy but welcome nomination by La Gasca as governor and captain-general of New Extremadura, by which was to be understood Chile (April 23, 1548). His dominion was declared as lying between Copiapó at 27˚ in the north and 41˚ in the south, which gave him not only Santiago but the towns of Concepción, Valdivia, and Osorno, too, as well as nearly one thousand miles of seacoast. In the interior, the concession was for one hundred leagues (three hundred miles), which would give him the entire southern Cordillera of the Andes and much of the flatlands of what would become Argentina.
Valdivia left triumphantly for Santiago. La Gasca gave him two ships, unprecedented largesse from the effective authority in Peru. Valdivia loaded them and
sent them by sea under Jerónimo de Alderete down to Atacama, where he planned to greet him himself. Valdivia set off for there with 120 men but was overtaken by Hinojosa, his fellow general, who compelled him to return to Peru to face charges made by the treacherous Pizarrist Antonio de Ulloa, who had successfully maneuvered himself into becoming commander of La Gasca’s ports. The accusations were that Valdivia had taken some Indian servants (yanaconas) with him from Peru and that he had also taken with him some ex-Pizarrists who had been condemned to perpetual imprisonment or to the galleys; Valdivia had also refused to allow Ulloa to inspect his ships.
Valdivia returned and met La Gasca at Callao on October 20, 1548. His bizarre investigation then began. Almost immediately, a letter from the cabildo at Santiago reached La Gasca to tell him that, in the prolonged absence of Valdivia, they would like Francisco de Villagrán to be named as governor. But they preferred Valdivia. If he were alive, “please do us the favour of sending him back to us as soon as possible, because it is conducive to the peace and tranquillity of this land; and if Your Excellency does not favour us by sending him, our loss would be great.”18
In Valdivia’s absence, the ineffable Sancho de Hoz, the thorn in his side in Santiago for so long, had sought to take advantage of the discontent caused by the rearrangement of the encomiendas. He had been living outside Santiago, but he had friends in the city, such as Hernando Rodríguez Monroy, who committed the unwisdom of making a new plot with Fray Lobo and Alonso de Córdoba. They went immediately with their news to the subgovernor, Villagrán, who, more determined than Valdivia had ever been in matters of rebellion, arrested Sancho de Hoz and his friend Juan Romero and had them both executed there and then. Valdivia would probably have hesitated and given them a pardon again.19
