Early Historians of the Indies.

Contemporary with these and less famous authors of commentaries is the long line of writers usually classed together by the Spaniards as Early Historians of the Indies.[48] The desire to record what they had seen and suffered was strong in the conquistadores, and a long list might be made of their names. Only the most famous can be mentioned here. No more amazing story of shipwreck and misery among savages has ever been told than in the Naufragios of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca. He was wrecked in Florida, and remained wandering among the native tribes for ten years, 1527-1537. A power of endurance, wellnigh more than human, was required to bear up against all he suffered; but he lived to hold a governorship in the Rio de la Plata, of which also he has left an account. A much gayer and a more famous book is the account of the conquest of Mexico written by Bernal Diaz del Castillo, one of the companions of Cortés, who survived nearly all his brothers in arms, and died at a great age in Guatemala, on the estate he had won with his sword. His True History was provoked by the earlier narrative of Gómara, and was written to vindicate the honour due to himself and his fellow-adventurers, which he thought had been unduly sacrificed by the official historian of Cortés. Bernal Diaz is a Spanish Monluc, but both ruder and more mediæval than the inimitable Gascon. Francisco de Jerez, Augustin de Zarate, and Pedro Cieza de Leon (the work of the last-named has only been wholly published in our own time) give the Peruvian half of that wonderful generation of conquest.

General Historians of the Indies.

Beside these, the actual eyewitnesses of events, are to be put the general historians of the Indies. The first who published his work complete was Francisco Lopez de Gómara. He was born in 1510, too late to share in the conquest, and was, in fact, a man of letters, who travelled, indeed, but only in Italy. The accident that he was secretary to Cortés when he had returned for the last time to Spain probably directed Gómara’s studies. He was accused of knowing nothing of many parts of his subject except what Cortés had told him, and of having distorted truth in the interest of his patron. But Gómara wrote well, and the immense contemporary interest in the subject gave his History of the Indies and his Chronicle of New Spain, which is a panegyric of Cortés, a great vogue. They first appeared in 1552, 1553, and 1554. An older man, and a much greater authority, was Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes (1478-1557), whose General and Natural History of the Indies was partly published in 1535, before Gómara’s. But the author kept his work in hand till his death, and appears to have made corrections and additions to the last.[49] Oviedo was in the West Indies in official posts for forty years, beginning in 1513, and was therefore a contemporary of, though not a partaker in, the great conquests. He is a garrulous writer of no great force of mind, much more a chronicler than a historian. |Gómara, Oviedo, Las Casas, Herrera, the Inca Garcilaso.| There are two general historians of the Indies of very different value from Oviedo. The first is the Bishop of Chiapa, the justly famous Bartolomé de las Casas (1474?-1566), who supplied the critics of his countrymen (most of whom afterwards showed that they wanted only the opportunity in order to equal the crimes) with weapons by his famous Very Brief Account of the Ruin of the Indies. This, first printed in 1542, was reprinted with other tracts written for the honourable purpose of defending the unfortunate Indians from oppression in 1552, and was made known to all Europe in translations. The general History of the Indies, which he wrote during his old age, remained unprinted till it was included in the Collection of inedited Documents for the History of Spain published by the Spanish Government.[50] Las Casas was a man of a stamp not unfamiliar to ourselves. His hatred of cruelty was equally vehement and sincere. In his perfectly genuine horror for the excesses of his countrymen, which are not to be denied, he sometimes exaggerated and was sometimes unjust. He was perhaps inevitably emotional in his style, yet the fact that he had principle and passion and a cause to plead, gives his book a marked superiority over the mainly chronicle work of Gómara and Oviedo. Antonio de Herrera (1549-1625) was a very different man, an official historian—he was historiographer of the Indies—who served the king as literary advocate, and was supplied with good information. His General History of the Deeds of the Castilians in the Islands and Mainland of the Ocean Sea was published in 1601-1615 at Madrid. While compiling this great book, the most valuable part of his work, Herrera was also engaged in drawing up a General History of the World in the time of our Lord the King Philip II., and other treatises, which are, in fact, statements on behalf of the Government, and have in historical literature something like the place of the yearly summaries in the old Annual Register. Herrera’s style was businesslike, but he can never have been read for the pleasure of reading him. With these writers may be placed the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (1540-1616), an attractive and rather pathetic figure. His father was one of the conquistadores, and his mother belonged to the sacred Inca race. The son was almost equally proud of his pedigree on both sides. The Inca Garcilaso, as he is always called, did some other literary work, including a translation of the once famous Dialogues on Love by Leon Hebreo, an echo of the Florentine Platonists, written in Italian by the exiled Spanish Jew, Juda Abarbanel, but he is best known by the Commentaries on Peru. In this work, published in two parts in 1609 and 1617, he contrived to reconcile a genuine Christian zeal and an equally genuine Castilian pride of descent with a tender memory of his mother’s people. Garcilaso, though weak and garrulous, is touching, and his commentaries have been the great storehouse of the more poetic legends told of the Incas.[51]

Though writers who recorded what they had seen, and others who only recorded what had happened in their time, or near it, cannot be wholly classed together, yet the authors named above have certain qualities in common. Of those mentioned here, almost all wrote in a straightforward manly fashion, with little straining after effect, and a manifest desire to tell the truth. There is little in them of that overweening arrogance which has become associated with the character of the Spaniard. There is no want of pride, which was, indeed, amply justified by the stories they had to tell, but little of the vanity so common in the time of Spain’s decadence.

Mendoza, Moncada, and Melo.

The account of the rebellion of the Moriscoes written by Don Diego de Mendoza supplies a link between the series of histories just named and the histories which belong wholly to learning and literature. The subject was contemporary to the author, and members of his family took an active part in the events; but Don Diego had a literary ambition which is only too visible. It was plainly his intention to make a careful copy of Latin models—chiefly Sallust—and in one passage he slavishly follows the account given by Tacitus of the discovery of the remains of the legions of Varus, by the soldiers of Germanicus. But there was an intrinsic force in Diego de Mendoza which saved him from falling into a mere school exercise, and though the mould of sentence is too much taken from the Latin, the vocabulary is very pure Castilian. He protests in one place against the use of the foreign word centinela for a sentinel, in place of the old Spanish atalaya for the watch by day, and escucha (listen) for the watch by night. The Expedition of the Catalans and Aragonese against the Turks and Greeks of Francisco de Moncada, Count of Osona (1635), which Gibbon said he had read with pleasure, has a great reputation among the Spaniards. It is certainly a well-written account of the expedition of the Free Companions who were led by Roger de Flor to serve under the Paleologi against the Turks, and who, after making themselves intolerable to their employers, ended by expelling the Dukes of Athens of the house of Brienne from their duchy, and then held it for the crown of Aragon. Moncada was a viceroy and general who served with high distinction, and a very accomplished man of literary tastes; but his narrative, which is very brief, is mainly a good Castilian version of the Catalan Chronicle of Ramon Muntaner, and has, in a phrase dear to Mr Hallam, been praised to the full extent of its merits. It appeared in 1623, twelve years before the death of the author, who was then viceroy in Lombardy. A work on the same scale as Moncada’s, which has been praised much beyond its merits, is the account of the revolt of the Catalans against Philip IV. in 1640 by Francisco Manuel de Melo. It contains only the beginning of the war, and though the author seems to promise a continuation, he never went further. The book was published in 1645. Melo had a curious literary history. He was a Portuguese in the Spanish service, and a kinsman of the unfortunate general who lost the battle of Rocroi. He lived long, wrote much, and it was his fortune to survive Góngorism. But his History of the Troubles, Secession, and War of Catalonia was written while he was under a bad literary influence. Without being exactly “Góngorical,” it is written in a strained, pretentious, snappy style, which covers a decided poverty of thought.

General Histories.

The great school of Spanish historians has an unbroken descent from the chronicles of the Middle Ages. It had been the custom of the kings of Castile from the reign of Alfonso XI. (1350-1369), surnamed the Implacable, or “he of the Rio Salado,” from the scene of the battle in which he overthrew the last considerable Moorish invasion of Spain, to appoint a chronicler. With Florian de Ocampo, who held this post under Charles V., the chronicler became the “historiographer.” He was not necessarily a scholar and student of the past, yet he might be if he so pleased, and the spirit of the time invited him to adopt the new character. |Ocampo, Zurita, Morales.| Ocampo himself showed little faculty, though his intentions were good; but his successor, Ambrosio de Morales (1513-1581), was a scholar in the fullest sense of the word. It was his wish to write a real history of Spain, based on chronicles and records. But he obtained his post late in 1570, and his work is a fragment ending so early as 1037. Morales was unquestionably influenced by the example of his friend Gerónimo de Zurita, the historiographer of the crown of Aragon. The unanimous judgment of scholars has recognised the right of Zurita to the name of historian, and even to the honour of being the first of modern historians. His father had been physician to Ferdinand the Catholic, and he was himself one of the many secretaries of Philip II. Zurita, who was born in 1512 and died in 1580, was appointed historiographer of Aragon by the choice of the Cortes in 1548. For a man with the ambition to be a historian, the position was enviable. It gave him independence, a right of access to all records; he had a fine story to tell, and as he had no predecessors, he had no need to spend time in reading the works of others. Zurita was worthy of his fortune. His Annals of the Crown of Aragon down to the death of Ferdinand the Catholic, in six folio volumes, published between 1562 and 1580, has kept its place as a work of scholarship and criticism.

Mariana.