The Wrath of God

THE WRATH OF GOD TheWrath of God Lope de Aguirre, Revolutionary of the Americas EVAN L. BALKAN e University of New Mexico Press Albuquerque © 2011 by Evan L. Balkan All rights reserved. Published 2011 Printed in the United States of America 16 15 14 13 2 1 1 2 3 4 5 6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Balkan, Evan, 1972– The wrath of God : Lope de Aguirre, revolutionary of the Americas / Evan L. Balkan. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8263-5043-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Aguirre, Lope de, d. 1561. 2. Insurgency—South America— History—16th century. 3. South America—Discovery and exploration—Spanish. 4. South America—History— 16th century. 5. Explorers—Spain—Biography. 6. Explorers— South America—Biography. I. Title. e125.a35b35 2011 980´.013092--dc22 [b] 2010051033 Design and compostion: Melissa Tandysh Text composed in Dante MT St 11.2/14 . night is here but the barbarians have not come. And some people arrived from the borders, and said that there are no longer any barbarians. And now what shall become of us without any barbarians? Those people were some kind of solution. —Constantine P. Cavafy This traitor would sometimes say that he already knew for cer- tain that his soul could not be saved; and that, even while he was alive, he was sure he would burn in hell. And, since the raven could be no blacker than its wings, that he must needs commit acts of cruelty and wickedness by which the name of Aguirre would ring throughout the earth, even to the ninth heaven. —Francisco Vásquez CONTENTS Acknowledgments 000 Introduction 000 prologue: Revenge in Bare Feet 000 Part I chapter 1: Aguirre’s Place in the World 000 chapter 2: Arrival in the New World 000 chapter 3: The Madman 000 chapter 4: The Discharge of the Land 000 chapter 5: Models and Failures 000 chapter 6: Warnings and Omens 000 chapter 7: Ursúa’s Sepulcher 000 chapter 8: El Traidor and the Prince 000 chapter 9: “Birds mourned on the trees” 000 chapter 10: The Wrath of God 000 chapter 11: Emergence from the Jungle 000 vii Part II chapter 12: The Sack of Margarita 000 chapter 13: Llamoso’s Fidelity 000 chapter 14: Rebel until Death 000 chapter 15: Death Comes 000 chapter 16: Legacy 000 Notes 000 Selected Bibliography 000 Index 000 viii contents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I want to thank the following people for their help as I wrote this book: principally, Frank Starr and Christine Stewart for their thoughtful critiques, as always. Thanks go to Carlos Stohr and Pedro Bellorin for meeting me and sharing their knowledge while I was on Margarita Island. Likewise, my gratitude extends to Dr. Carolina Acosta-Alzuru at the University of Georgia. Lastly, I need to thank Dena Ritter and Cheryl Brown at the Community College of Baltimore County library system. ix INTRODUCTION There is an old joke that goes like this: “What do you call someone who speaks three languages?” “Trilingual.” “What do you call someone who speaks two languages?” “Bilingual.” “What do you call someone who speaks one language?” “American.” When you grow up where I did, in the mid-Atlantic United States, it is a long trip to a foreign country. The desire to learn another language, or about another culture, is one driven not by necessity but rather curiosity. From my earliest memories, the desire has been there. When I was first able, I traveled. My travels took me across the Atlantic to Europe, the continent most congruous to my curiosities. The reasons for this were obvious enough: I grew up in Maryland, my home a mere twenty minutes from the colonial capital of Annapolis to the east and from Washington, D.C., that most European of American cities, to the south. The language I spoke was a European one; the people whose names lent themselves to the towns where I lived, the schools I attended, the fathers and mothers of my state—all were European. Indeed, my own family members a mere two generations removed were Europeans. But most significantly, the history and cultures I learned about in school were entirely European. It was as if no civilization ever existed in the Americas until Europeans arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first time I visited Mexico—in my late twenties, I am embar- rassed to admit—was a revelation. Of course, intellectually I knew that this neighbor to the south was a fascinating and colorful country with a 1 different language, national culture, traditions, and history. But the immen- sity of the place—its historical legacy mixed with its modern character— overawed me. The pull, from that moment on, was to points farther and farther south. By this time I knew all about the Aztecs, the Mayas, and the Incas. But there were many more indigenous groups throughout Central and South America, ones I never learned about in school, many of them still speak- ing ancient languages and carrying on in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in ways similar to their ancestors’ many centuries earlier. With each trip I took south, my fascination in Latin America grew—these were places relatively close but worlds away from where I grew up. During my first trip to the Amazon, in southeast Peru, I stayed in a comfortable lodge on the Tambopata River, a few hours’ journey from the Bolivian border. Each afternoon, the attentive staff at the lodge boiled water, let it cool, and then parceled it out in tall glass pitchers set in the bathroom of each of the huts. The staff smoothed squares of plastic wrap around the pitchers’ necks and sealed them. When I went to bed at night, the water pitcher sat unmolested in the bathroom. When I woke pre- dawn, I stumbled to the bathroom with my flashlight. The beam fell first on the pitcher. Through the prismatic glaze of the glass, I could see that a singular transformation had taken place during the evening: my water had grown fur. A centimeter-thick layer of mold or scum ringed the surface of the water even though the plastic wrap looked to be completely intact. I tapped at the glass and watched the scum move along the surface as if it was one single organism. It was fascinating, and it contributed to my impression of life pulsing all around in that jungle. I do not want to overstate the matter or be too hyperbolic. After all, life pulses in my suburban Maryland backyard, too. In spring and summer, a riot of songbirds; rabbits, and red foxes prove adept at evading whatever barriers I erect to try and keep my strawberries and melons safe. But in the Amazon, the fecundity of life was something altogether different, like my backyard on steroids. All night long, the dissonance of whirring and chirp- ing from the abundant insects kept me awake for long stretches. When dawn announced itself as a hint of struggling gray through the canopy, the insects largely clocked out and gave way to the birds and monkeys—twits, cheeps, howls, cries, caws: a cacophonous symphony of life and competi- tion so intense and pervasive that after only a couple of days in the jungle you have to remind yourself to listen. Otherwise, it becomes mere back- drop, the way the whoosh of tires on wet roads outside your house can 2 introduction become so much a part of your auditory experience that you do not hear it at all. Back in the lodge, I had an hour to kill before breakfast, so I walked out beyond the collection of cabins along the river and followed a path into the jungle. As before, the overwhelming impression was of life: activ- ity and movement. But apart from the furry black disjointedness of a tarantula, I could not catch up to any of it. Instead, it was the flicker of a tail, the beat of a wing, the plunge of detritus from a branch. All around me, things snapped and cracked. But it was as if I were a millisecond or two behind, even when I stopped by the crook of a massive lupuna tree and let the jungle pulse around me. Every time I thought I caught sight of something in the trees, massive banana fronds obscured it. I turned instead toward the hollow cavern of the tree and saw a gar- gantuan wolf spider clinging inside. The length of this spider’s legs from end to end roughly equaled the diameter of my head. I moved away, stricken—irrationally—with a feeling that this thing would leap from its perch and wrap itself around my face like starfish do to cartoon charac- ters. It did not, of course, and the jungle continued to hide its secrets. Back home, I read and read and read about the jungle, trying to crack its mysteries as best I could from afar. Over the years I often came across the name Lope de Aguirre. Invariably, each mention of Aguirre reduced him to a one-dimensional madman, the epitome of maniacal evil. Each mention was also abbreviated, part of a larger discussion of the pursuit of El Dorado or the rowdy early years of the Spanish Conquest. Naturally, my curiosity was piqued: who exactly was this man? That question led to this book. In my investigations, I first came across Fray Pedro Simón’sExpedition of Pedro de Ursua and Lope de Aguirre in Search of El Dorado and Omagua in 1560–1, originally published in 1626.

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