The travels of Pedro de Cieza de Léon; part 2

by Pedro de Cieza de León

INTRODUCTION.

THE present volume, which has been selected for issue by the Hakluyt Society, contains the Second Part of the Chronicle of Peru, by Pedro de Cieza de Leon. The First Part formed one of the Society’s volumes for 1864, having been translated from the Antwerp edition of 1554.

When I translated and edited the First Part, no other had been printed. I then had reason to believe that the author completed the second and third parts of his Chronicle, and that one of these parts had come into the possession of Mr. Lenox of New York, in manuscript. I lamented the disappearance of the Second Part, and referred to it as one of the greatest losses that had been sustained by South American literature.[2]

It has now been discovered that the manuscript narrative which Mr. Prescott frequently refers to, in his History of the Conquest of Peru, as “Sarmiento”, and which he considered to be one of the most valuable of his authorities, is in reality the Second Part of the work of Cieza de Leon. Mr. Prescott quotes the title in his critical notice,[3] “para el Illmo Señor Dn. Juan Sarmiento, Presidente del Consejo Rl. de Indias”, and assumes that this Don Juan Sarmiento was the author, who, after having travelled in all parts of Peru and diligently collected information from the Ynca nobles, subsequently became President of the Council of the Indies. In reality, the word para means “for”, and not “by”, and the manuscript is simply addressed to Dr. Sarmiento, who never crossed the Atlantic in his life, and who only held the post of President of the Council of the Indies for twenty months.[4]

Mr. Prescott made much use of both parts, and considered them to be works of great merit. If what he says in praise of the author he supposed to be Sarmiento,[5] is added to what he says of Cieza de Leon,[6] it will at once be seen that the latter, really the only author, is a very important authority indeed.

It is with a feeling of reverential regret that the present editor refers to any mistake, even one so slight as this, of the illustrious American historian. Some of my brightest and happiest memories are of the ten days I spent at Pepperell with Mr. Prescott, when I was on the eve of commencing my studies in the land of the Yncas. He it was who encouraged me to undertake my Peruvian investigations, and to persevere in them. To his kindly advice and assistance I owe more than I can say, and to him is due, in no small degree, the value of anything I have since been able to do in furtherance of Peruvian research.

The evidence that the work attributed by Prescott to Sarmiento is in reality the Second Part of the Chronicle of Cieza de Leon is quite conclusive. There are no less than ten occasions on which the author of the Second Part (Prescott’s “Sarmiento”) refers to passages in his First Part, which occur in the First Part of Cieza de Leon.[7] In one place there is a reference in the Second Part to the actual number of the chapter in the First Part.[8] In the Second Part, the author mentions having gone to Toledo to present the First Part of his Chronicle to the Prince Don Felipe;[9] and this statement is equivalent to having signed his name. For only one First Part of a chronicle relating to the Indies was dedicated to the Prince, namely that of Cieza de Leon. The author of the Second Part also mentions having been to Bahaire, near Cartagena, and to the province of Arma—places visited by Cieza de Leon, and mentioned in his First Part.

The manuscript of the Second Part was preserved in the library of the Escurial,[10] in a bad copy dating from the middle, or end, of the 16th century. The first sheet is missing, and the second begins in the middle of a sentence towards the end of the third chapter. Thus the two opening chapters and part of the third are lost.

The text of the Escurial manuscript has been printed by two accomplished scholars—the Peruvian Dr. Manuel Gonzalez de la Rosa in 1873; and the Spaniard Don Marcos Jimenez de la Espada at Madrid in 1880. Both, independently, detected the mistake of Prescott as soon as they began to examine the text critically. The text was reprinted by Dr. de la Rosa with scrupulous care; the spelling, imperfect punctuation, and capricious use of capitals in the manuscript being very carefully preserved. But instead of retaining the manuscript numbering of chapters, Dr. de la Rosa omits the fragment of chapter iii, and calls the fourth chapter, chapter i. An edition was printed off by Mr. Trübner, but soon afterwards Dr. de la Rosa left London for Peru, without completing the editorial work. So that this edition of the second part of Cieza de Leon has never been editorially completed or published, and remains on Mr. Trübner’s hands.

Don Marcos Jimenez de la Espada, to whom the student of Peruvian history is so much indebted for other precious editorial work, delayed his publication of the text of the Second Part of Cieza de Leon, because he had heard from Don Pascual de Gayangos that the learned Peruvian, Dr. de la Rosa, was engaged upon the same work. It was not until 1880 that the edition of Espada was published at Madrid.[11] The Spanish editor has corrected the spelling and punctuation, and has supplied many useful notes. Five copies appear to have been made of the Escurial manuscript. One, very carelessly executed, is in the Academy of History at Madrid. The second was in the collection of Lord Kingsborough, from which was copied, through Mr. Rich’s agency, the one supplied to Mr. Prescott, which is the third. The fourth and fifth are those from which the versions of Rosa and Espada were printed.