Chile today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

Escobar.—Aguirre.—Sarmiento.—European Corsairs.—Decay of Power

The history of the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Chile follows the familiar lines of the work in other countries, and is chiefly interesting in the side-lights shed upon colonial life. The veil drawn over its acts during its period of activity was only lifted by the discovery, in the Archives of Simancas, of the Inquisitors’ meticulously-kept records. The counts against the Tribunal do not include those of suppressing or distorting its own history.

The first great Inquisitor, Torquemada, died six years after the discovery of the West Indies by Cristobal Colón, and, under Pope Adrian VI, a branch was soon established in the island of Española (Santo Domingo), with authority extended to Mexico as early as 1524. It was not, however, until 1569 that the royal cedula of King Philip II opened all the Americas formally to the Tribunal, although for many years previously the local dignitaries of various churches in Spanish America were delegates of the powerful functions of the Inquisitors. As, for instance, when Bishop Loaysa burnt the Flemish heretic Juan Millar at the stake in Lima in 1548; and as in the curious case of Alonso de Escobar.

Escobar was a Spaniard of good family who came to Peru with the first conquistadores; he was a resident of Cuzco when the two captains of Pedro de Valdivia, Monroy and Miranda, arrived, almost starving, from the camp of their leader to beg help, and he promptly lent 14,000 pesos to buy supplies and aided in raising a new force. He had been twenty-three years in the service of the crown in the New World when somebody happened to hear him say, in the plaza of Santiago de Chile in August, 1562, that he always listened when Father Gil read the gospel, but shut his ears to the moral. Witnesses, old brothers-in-arms, admitted that he said this, but a suggestion that it was a joke, and that the listeners laughed heartily, was received coldly. Escobar added that the Father always abused the residents too much, and that he did not like the dictum that Spaniards who killed Indians would go to hell. But the representatives of the Inquisition found that he was guilty of Lutheranism, that his goods should be confiscated, that he should suffer imprisonment, etc. Escobar protested, asked for a “lettered person” to help in his defence, and the end seemed to be reached when the Fiscal reduced the sentence to the payment of costs. But the militant Father Gil objected to aspersions upon his loyalty made in the course of the trial, and a series of quarrels followed, resulting in the excommunication of the judge, another priest, and the lawyer Molina. When the scandal took, presently, the form of a contest between different ecclesiastical Orders, we find a new list of twenty-five excommunicated persons, including the Lieutenant-Governor, a bishop-elect, a number of friars, and a couple of Negros. When the monks set upon and beat a notary, the brother of Molina assaulted a monastery, and later Molina, imprisoned, escaped and fled to Concepción, while most of the other disputants carried their loud complaints to Lima.

The case of Francisco de Aguirre is more tragic. A trusted captain of Valdivia’s, he was the founder of La Serena (elder sister of Coquimbo) and was afterwards in charge of the expedition sent across the Andes and into the present Argentina, by way of Tucuman and Santiago del Estero, the most cruel desert that even these hardened explorers had encountered. As the wretched party made its way towards the Spanish settlement already existing on the Atlantic border, at La Plata, mutineers seized Aguirre one day, and, apparently not daring to kill him, pretended that they acted for the Inquisition. To the Bishop of La Plata they presently handed him over, and as this worthy thought that the newly discovered provinces might as well be governed by a protégé of his own, he kept the conquistador in jail while formal charges were arranged. At the end of three years ninety counts against Aguirre’s Christianity had been made: amongst them, the accusation that he had said that if he ruled over a republic where there lived a cleric and a blacksmith, and he was obliged to exile one of them, he would send away the cleric. He had also said that little men might fear excommunication, but he didn’t; and that he was not convinced of the efficacy of prayer, because he once knew a man who prayed much and yet went to the nether world. He was sentenced, in addition to the imprisonment, now declared just, to do penance in Tucuman church, and to pay a fine of 1500 pesos ensayadas. Probably to save trouble, the old soldier agreed to confess his guilt and to do penance, and was able to secure the privilege of performing it in La Plata, instead of Tucuman, by the payment of another 500 pesos. The authorities then wrote to the King an account of the case, and suggested that Aguirre was no fit person to rule Tucuman. But before this letter reached Spain a royal order had arrived in La Plata, appointing Aguirre as Governor of the provinces he had discovered, and as soon as he could equip a small expedition of 35 men who came to his banner the pioneer set out. He had not gone far when the Bishop sent a priest after him, ordering him to return to face new charges. Aguirre answered that now he was in “tierra larga”—open country—and going up to the cleric and looking him straight in the face, he asked him, “If I killed a priest, what punishment should I get?” With blanched face and hurried feet the cleric went back. But the troubles of Aguirre were not over. The hand of the Inquisition was still over him. He was eventually processed again, imprisoned for five years, deprived of the remainder of his fortune and of his Governorship, and when released made his way back to the beautiful bay where stood La Serena of his own foundation. He had lost three sons, a brother and three nephews, in the King’s service, was a valiant and loyal pioneer, and died poor and lonely through the Tribunal’s enmity.

The continuous petty persecution of another great pioneer, Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, forms a curious chapter in the story of the Inquisition, but in this case the protection of the Viceroy Toledo, and the strong character and invaluable services of the man attacked, outweighed the views of the Inquisitors. Sarmiento’s historical studies, surveying and sea-discoveries in South Chile give him high rank among the Spaniards in the New World, but his scientific bent was heretical in the eyes of the Church. The event bringing Sarmiento under the suspicious eye of the Inquisitors was the death of the Viceroy, the Conde de Nieva, murdered in a street in Lima in February, 1564. His successor Lope de Castro was active in the investigation of the mysterious affair, and Sarmiento, who had been an intimate of the house, was presently accused, not of complicity, but of knowledge of witchcraft. He had talked to a woman servant of the dead Count about a magic ink which made the writer of a letter beloved by the recipient: he had two rings engraved with astrological characters. Sarmiento’s confessor had seen and guaranteed the harmlessness of the rings, but this did not save him from a sentence of naked penance in Lima cathedral, banishment from the Indies, and, until his departure, imprisonment in a monastery. Sarmiento complied with the penitential part of the decree, but appealed to the Pope and obtained a commutation of the banishment order. A few years later his discovery of the Solomon Islands added so much to his renown that upon the arrival of the new Viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, in 1569, Sarmiento was received with great distinction, accompanying the ruler’s official visit throughout Peru and subsequently writing a History of the Incas. In 1572 the Inquisition again accused him of black magic in connection with the two rings, pronounced him a dangerous person and re-ordained his banishment. At the moment he was fighting against Indian tribes of the Andean forests, and the Viceroy told the Inquisitors that he required his services; but they came forward presently with an accusation that he had foretold deaths by the lines on his hand. He was declared guilty, imprisoned in 1575, and only released upon the insistence of the Viceroy. Sarmiento was no doubt chiefly suspect because he was a scientific man of penetrating mind, and, though his own writings show that he was a devout son of the Church, the fact that he was an author rendered him dangerous. Forty years previously a royal decree (August, 1534) had prohibited shipment to the Indies of any books other than those dealing with the Christian religion and virtue, so afraid was Spain of any ideas reaching the Colonies. A letter from the King to the Casa da Contratación in Seville protested: “I have been informed that many books of romances are sent to the Indies, profane and foolish histories like that of Amadis and kindred productions; this is a bad practice for the Indians, and the kind of thing which they should not read nor be occupied with.” It was with the same perfectly genuine and logical desire to maintain a dead level of thought and conduct that, shortly after the above decree was promulgated, a rule was enforced that no sons or nephews of people who had been burnt alive by sentence of the Inquisition, and no converted Jews, Moors, or other proscribed persons or “New Christians” should go to the Indies.

European Corsairs

The economical as well as intellectual fences put round the New World colonies of Spain were threatened most terrifyingly by the bold raids of corsairs. Preservation of these barriers demanded severe treatment of such persons as were caught in piratical attempts, the Inquisition acting in full accord with the civil authorities when, for instance, in the auto da fé held in Lima in 1592, four English sailors captured after the wreck of their ship off the island of Puna (at the entrance to Guayaquil) were paraded. Walter and Edward Tillert were imprisoned for five years before their execution; their companion Oxley was burnt alive after four years in the jails of the Holy Office; but the life of the eighteen-year Morley was saved when he was permitted to be a convert to Roman Catholicism—a grace denied his older associates, as the Inquisitors suspected the genuineness of the change of heart experienced by men in the shadow of the torture chamber.

John Oxenham, friend of Drake, captured by a curious accident in Panama, was hanged in Lima with several of his sailors, their English heresy adding a useful weapon to the hand of the enemy.

A group of Dutch corsairs was brought before the Inquisition in 1615. These men were taken at the port of Papudo, having arrived with the fleet of Admiral Spilbergen, naval supporter of the Count Maurice of Nassau, whose wise rule was chiefly responsible for the Dutch hold upon North Brazil enduring for thirty years. The Spilbergen voyage is part of the story of Holland’s plans for overseas dominions in the Americas, and one of the strokes of fate by which outposts of a nearly-won empire were successively lost.