It was in unimportant routine work of this kind that the inquisitors employed the intervals of their quarrels with the civil and ecclesiastical authorities. Cartagena numbered a population of only five hundred Spaniards; the rest were negro slaves, Indians and the half-castes so numerous in the Spanish colonies. The Indians were not subject to inquisitorial jurisdiction and among the whites there was not intellectual energy sufficient to produce serious heresy. Mañozca, in fact, in a letter of March 17, 1622, to the Suprema describes them as wholly devoted to the pursuit of gain and utterly regardless of honor and reputation, from the Governor down. There is no one, he says, who will trouble himself with useful works, and virtue and honor are contraband, for they are only prized where there are virtuous and honorable men.[773] There were left the negroes and mixed races, ignorant and superstitious. The slaves had brought from the Guinea coast the mysteries of Obeah and dark practices of sorcery. The native Indians had ample store of superstitions, to cure or to injure, to provoke love or hatred; the colonists had their own credulous beliefs, to which they added implicit faith in those of the inferior races. The land was overrun with this combination of the occult arts of three continents, all of which were regarded by the Inquisition, not as idle fancies, but as the exercise of supernatural powers, involving express or implicit pact with the demon. Had the tribunal seriously labored to eradicate them, it would have had ample work for its energies, but the offenders were slaves or paupers; there was neither honor nor profit in their prosecution, and consequently no energy. Indeed Mañozca, in the letter just quoted, endeavored to be released from the task—perhaps the only instance on record of an inquisitor desiring to abandon a portion of the jurisdiction for which the Holy Office was wont to struggle so desperately.
He gives a fearful account of the witchcraft practised by the negro slaves in the mines of Saragossa, in Antioquia, who kill, cripple and maim men and women and suffocate children and destroy the fruits of the earth. There are about four thousand of them, brought from Guinea, who, though baptized, are wholly untaught in the faith, and are more like brutes than men. The missionaries among them pay no heed to their instruction but are wholly absorbed in the search for gold. The district is remote and mountainous and only to be reached by footpaths; the smallest coin there is gold and to arrest a culprit costs more than his value as a slave. The tribunal has no funds to bring them hither for trial and their maintenance in gaol is a heavy burden on the owners. Four have been tried and condemned to reconciliation and perpetual prison, but the Inquisition has no penitential prison and, if there was one, they would starve to death, as they could not earn their support and the alms of the pious would not reach so miserable a set of beings. They have therefore been put into the Hospital General, where they can be employed and hear mass and perform their penance. As for the great mass of the culprits, it would be impossible for the tribunal to arrest and try them—the cost would be enormous and the result, according to law, would be to set them free, which would fill the land with demons, nor would the owners permit their capture, in the certainty of losing them. To meet these difficulties Mañozca therefore suggests a general pardon, after which the civil authorities shall have cognizance of their crimes and punish them otherwise than with the benignity habitual with the Inquisition. The Suprema was hardly prepared thus to surrender even so unprofitable a portion of its jurisdiction and, in forwarding this letter to the king, urged that an Edict of Grace should be proclaimed; that he should assist the tribunal with the funds necessary for the support of the officials and the expense of its functions, and that the Council of Indies should order the royal officials to inflict severe punishment, in so far as they had jurisdiction, and should assist the Inquisition in making arrests and other acts. To this Philip IV drily replied that the Council of Indies would order the governors to apply such remedies as they deemed advisable.[774] All parties thus sought to wash their hands of this troublesome and costly affair, and witchcraft and sorcery continued to flourish.
They were not confined to the slaves in the mines of Antioquia and, some ten years later, there was an outburst which offered fairer inducements to repay prosecution. A great assembly of witches was discovered among the negroes of the town of Tolú—an accessible sea-port, about sixty-five miles from Cartagena—where the witnesses testified to all the classical features of the Sabbat—flying through the air, dancing around a goat, kissing him retro and all the customary performances. Since the great auto de fe of witches at Logroño in 1610, the Suprema had grown skeptical and cautious as to these superstitions, and had impressed on the tribunals the necessity of acting with great reserve in all such cases. In reporting this matter therefore, September 25, 1632, the inquisitors said that they had observed these instructions and had arrested only a mulatto woman and a mestiza, who had persistently denied the charges. Still the testimony continued to pour in, spreading the epidemic to Cartagena and implicating Spaniards of consideration and property, for witnesses who confessed to having been at the Sabbat were free to designate whomsoever they chose as having been present—a fact which explains the rapid multiplication of accomplices, whenever a persecution commenced. Animated by the prospect thus opened, the inquisitors threw aside their caution; they accepted the most absurd stories and attributed to witchcraft many cases of ordinary sickness occurring in the town. They erected additional prisons to receive the culprits and sentenced to burning two of those accused as leaders—negresses named Elena de Vitoria and Paula de Eguiluz, but the sentence of the former was revoked by the Suprema and, when that of the latter was received, it sent orders that no sentence of relaxation should be executed until a copy of the process was submitted to it.
Torture was freely employed, resulting in an auto de fe held, March 26, 1634, where twenty-one witches were exhibited, whose punishment mostly consisted of scourging, although one, Ana de Avila, a mestiza widow, who had overcome seven turns of the mancuerda in her torture, was fined 1000 pesos. A sentence of absolution was read of Ana Beltran, who had been tortured without confession for an hour and a half and had died of its effects. This was followed, June 1, 1636, by another auto with sixteen penitents, among whom was Elena de Vitoria. Another was Guiomar de Anaya, who had overcome the torture and was sentenced to exile and a fine of 200 ducats. Paula de Eguiluz was reconciled in an auto of March 25, 1638, after six years of imprisonment, and was condemned to two hundred lashes and irremissible prison. It seems that she enjoyed a high reputation as a physician and was allowed to leave the prison in the practice of her profession, numbering among her patients even the inquisitors and the bishop, Cristóbal de Lazárraga. She was permitted to cast off the sanbenito and appeared in a mantle bordered with gold and in a sedan chair; she earned much money and was charitable in relieving the necessities of her fellow-prisoners.[775]
In the other chief source of inquisitorial business—blasphemy—the mercifulness of the Suprema brought about a curious and unexpected result. The most usual expletive, reniego á Dios—I renounce God—was reckoned as heretical and therefore subject to the jurisdiction of the Holy Office, but it was so frequent that the Suprema ordered it to be punished only with a reprimand. As the inquisitors complained, in a letter of June 28, 1619, the effect of this was that, when a master flogged a slave, at the first lash the latter promptly renounced God; he thus became, on the spot, subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the tribunal; the flogging ceased and he was handed over to it, to go through the formality of a trial, at the end of which he was discharged with a scolding. This was a process which might be repeated indefinitely, to the manifest detriment of the discipline indispensable to slavery.[776]
It was not till the tribunal had been established for more than ten years that it had any serious business in vindicating the faith. In an auto de fe celebrated March 16, 1622, there were four negro witches reconciled, two negro sorceresses punished and one bigamist banished from the Indies. In addition to these there was a Protestant burnt alive—an Englishman named Adam Edon (Haydon?). He had been sent, in 1618, by an English merchant, to purchase tobacco in Cumaná, where he was arrested in 1619 and sent to Cartagena. For two years the most earnest endeavors to wean him from his errors were fruitless, and his fate was inevitable. Mañozca, in his report, described him as a most engaging person; at the quemadero he was not chained as usual to the stake, but he calmly sat on a faggot and remained motionless till life was extinct, a veritable martyr to his convictions.[777]
After this auspicious beginning there opened a prospect of greater usefulness. At an auto de fe of June 17, 1626, solemnized with great magnificence, there were twenty-two penitents, of whom one was a Calvinist and seven were Judaizers. Of the latter, Juan Vicente had already been reconciled in Coimbra and again in Lima. Under the canon law, a single relapse entailed relaxation; this he had been spared in Lima, and his persistent backsliding left no hope of ultimate conversion, so he was duly consigned to the flames.[778] After this there was an interval during which inquisitorial energy had to be content with witches, blasphemers and the like, until the raid made on the Portuguese merchants in Lima gave occasion for similar action in Cartagena. One of the accused, in the former city, gave evidence against a compatriot in the latter; it was duly forwarded and the arrest was made March 15, 1636. The circle spread until there were twenty-one in prison. Torture was savagely employed and one of the prisoners, Paz Pinto, a man widely esteemed, died from its effects. Most of the cases were ready for an auto held March 25, 1638, at which eight were reconciled and nine were absolved. There were no relaxations, but the confiscations, as we shall see, put the tribunal in possession of ample funds.[779]
Little remains to be said as to the activity of the tribunal in its appropriate sphere, although its contributions from time to time to the Suprema show that it occasionally obtained some wealthy penitent to strip, among the inconspicuous mass of blasphemers, bigamists and sorceresses. Its energies became more and more devoted, during the remainder of the century, to internal dissensions and quarrels with the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, leaving small leisure for its proper functions. Such was its inertia in this respect that we are told that there was no publication of the annual Edict of Faith between 1656 and 1818.[780] Then it was dealt a heavy blow in the capture of Cartagena, in 1697, by the French adventurers under the Baron de Pointis and his buccaneer allies, after which it was sacked by the latter. A few days after the commencement of the bombardment April 10th, the tribunal abandoned the city, carrying some of its prisoners to Majates, about fourteen leagues distant, where an auto de fe was held, with three penitents, and those whose cases were not ready were sent further inland to Mompox. When the fort of Bocachica was taken, the French found there nine prisoners accused of bigamy; eight of these joined the enemy and the ninth, Pedro Sarmiento, voluntarily went to Mompox and surrendered himself. The town capitulated May 6th and, when the French entered, they promptly sought the Inquisition, where they took the vestments of the officials and the sanbenitos and mitres of the penitents and held in the plaza a mock auto de fe, reading sentences and parodying the solemnities. Inquisitor Lazaeta was anxious to obtain possession of certain papers and employed the good offices of Don Sancho Jimeno, the castellan of Bocachica, whose gallant defence had earned the respect of the enemy. He had been rereleased but returned to Cartagena to defend himself against certain charges, after which he requested of the leaders permission to get the papers; the mere mention of the Inquisition provoked a tempest of passion, but after it had cooled off he asked leave to get some papers of his own and, while collecting them, he succeeded in including those desired by the inquisitor. After the invaders had sailed, Lazaeta returned to Cartagena, June 22d. He found the building much damaged by the bombardment; it had been sacked and the chests broken open and left empty, but the records were untouched. With a donation which he begged and 12,000 pesos obtained from the governor, he had everything in order by the end of August, but this proved the turning-point of the tribunal which thenceforth declined rapidly.[781]
Repairs to its habitation became necessary in 1704, but these were inefficiently performed and, in 1715, the tribunal was obliged to shift its quarters to the house of the senior inquisitor and even this had been so maltreated in the bombardment that it threatened to fall. The trouble culminated in 1741 when Admiral Vernon bombarded Cartagena; a bomb dismantled the Inquisition and it had to be torn down, though the records escaped as they had prudently been transferred in advance to Tenerife, near Santa Marta. It was a quarter of a century before Carlos III, in 1766, granted for the rebuilding 12,600 pesos from the revenues of the vacant archbishopric.[782]
All this was but a symptom of the general decadence of the tribunal. In 1747 the Inquisitor, Francisco Antonio de Ilarduy, wrote that the only consultor he had was also the advocate of the fisc and of the accused; for three years there had been but one calificador, and the provincial at Seville had been vainly urged to send out frailes; there were but two familiars, who were engrossed in earning their living and no one cared to accept the position; for seven years the Suprema had not taken the trouble to reply to the applications for advice and instructions. Ilarduy vainly tendered his resignation, but it was not accepted until at length he obtained a transfer to Córdova and left Cartagena in 1754. Under such conditions there was little done and the Inquisition lost its terrors. The royal permission to draw articles of necessity from foreign sources brought to Cartagena Danish, Dutch and other heretic ships, in which there came Jews whom the governor, in spite of the reclamations of the tribunal, allowed to establish themselves and to walk the streets like natives. The tribunal appealed to the Archbishop-viceroy, Antonio Caballero y Góngora, who contented himself with ordering that the limitation of importations to articles of necessity should be enforced.[783]