Conclusion

Within this broad panorama, the narrative focus and expectations continually shift as one conflict gives way to another. A reader led by the poem’s full title to expect a poem centred on the wars of conquest would soon be disappointed. Only the opening two cantos, which promise to recount ‘Las armas y proezas militares | de españoles cathólicos valientes’ [the arms and military prowess of valiant Catholic Spaniards] (I. 1), cover the conquest of the Inca Empire and the civil wars between Spaniards that followed. These wars are recounted with a verve and complexity which bring many of the underlying questions of Ercilla and Oña to a new context. Debates surrounding the justice of the conquest and its conduct, the problem of rebellion, and the sway of fortune, virtue and Providence in human affairs are all aired in concentrated form. No sooner are the questions raised, however, than they find an equally summary closure: the second canto ends with the cycles of both conquest and rebellion complete and the realms of Peru serenely enjoying the fruits of peace.

In the third canto, the poem starts afresh, with a new epic proem, an invocation of the muse Erato, and an epic question: ‘¿quién perturbó al Pirú de paz el trato, | quién guerras incitó y Marte sangriento?’ [who disturbed the peace of Peru? Who incited wars and bloodthirsty Mars?] (III. 197). The answer is given indirectly, as the narrative moves to London, where Francis Drake is outlining to Queen Elizabeth and her Parliament his plan to emulate Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe and despoil Peru of its riches. From the fourth canto on, the central subject will be the new war against piracy inaugurated by Drake’s venture. Anachronistically, the voyage of Drake (1577–80) and John Oxenham’s (or Oxnam’s) expedition to Panama (1576–78) are treated as part of a coordinated pincer attack on the Spanish Pacific.1 The two captains did in fact join forces in a 1572–73 expedition to Panama, in which they allied with the cimarrones, attacked Cartagena and Nombre de Dios, and captured a mule train carrying silver across the Isthmus; Miramontes’s imagined alliance between them might be inspired by this previous voyage. While Drake’s Golden Hind crosses the Magellan Strait, Oxenham traverses the Isthmus of Panama with the help of an African maroon community, the cimarrones, which had established itself there in the jungle, and builds and launches a vessel into the Mar del Sur. Halfway through the poem, this sequence too comes to an end with the escape of Drake and the defeat of Oxenham. The narrative then takes a new direction again when Oxenham’s captor, the veteran maestre de campo Pedro de Arana, is asked to recount ‘algún notable caso sucedido | en el Pirú’ [something notable that has happened in Peru] (X. 936) to while away the return voyage to Callao. His story, which in the event takes up no less than seven cantos (XI–XVII), recounts the tragic love story of two Inca nobles, Chalcuchima and Curicoyllor, in an undefined pre-Hispanic past. Returning abruptly to Lima, the poem embarks on a new series of thwarted epic proems, invocations and other beginnings, detailing Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa’s catastrophic mission to found a colony on the Magellan Strait in 1581–87, the passage of the English privateer Thomas Cavendish through the Strait in 1587, his rescue of a survivor from Sarmiento’s settlement, and subsequent pursuit by Spanish forces on land and sea. The work ends abruptly and inconclusively with a bruised Cavendish disappearing beyond the reach of the Lima search expedition which ‘por su rastro se derrota, | mas no deja en el mar rastro la flota’ [sets its course to follow his trace, but the fleet leaves no trace in the sea] (XX. 1704). As with the previous two epics, then, Armas antárticas draws attention to its own openness and narrative fragmentation.

With such dizzying twists and turns, the poem has, understandably, lent itself to piecemeal analysis, most of it subsequent to Paul Firbas’s 2006 critical edition. The themes of piracy and navigation have been best served by critics, although the representation of the cimarrones and the interpolated tale of Chalcuchima and Curicoyllor have also attracted some attention. Most analyses conclude that while the war against piracy is lauded, the pirates themselves are ambiguous and in some ways attractive antagonists who might act as a ‘prism’ for other concerns.2 Lise Segas, ‘Le cycle de Drake: Fortune littéraire d’une épopée transatlantique au tournant du XVIIe siècle’, Bulletin Hispanique, 117.1 (2015), 231–58 (p. 250). See also Segas, ‘El error y la errancia: El pirata “luterano” épico en las Indias’, Les Cahiers de Framespa, 20 (2015) <10.4000/framespa.3543>; Nina Gerassi-Navarro, Pirate Novel: Fictions of Nation Building in Spanish America (Durham, NC, 1999), pp. 47–52; María Gracia Ríos, ‘British Piracy and the Origins of a Colonial Imaginary in 16th-Century Lima’, in Emily A. Engel, ed., A Companion to Early Modern Lima (Leiden, 2019), pp. 385–403; Jason McCloskey, ‘Mythologizing Greed and Betrayal in the Strait of Magellan in Juan de Miramontes’s Armas antárticas’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 90.6 (2013), 665–78; Javier Navascués, ‘Alteridad y mímesis del pirata en la épica colonial’, Hipogrifo, 4.1 (2016), 43–63. While the mastery of cosmography that underpins the navigations of this era is presented as a heroic pursuit, it is not an unproblematic one,3 Jason McCloskey, ‘Cosmographical Warfare: Secrecy and Heroism in Juan de Miramontes’s Armas antárticas’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 21.2 (2020), 171–85. and the focus of the action on the spaces joined by a chaotic sea has been posited as an explanation for its ‘poetics of errancy’.4 Lise Segas, ‘La navigation dans l’épopée Armas antárticas de Juan de Miramontes (1607–1610): L’odyssée d’un monde colonial à la dérive’, in Valérie Joubert-Anghel and Lise Segas, eds, Contre courants, vents et marées: La navigation maritime et fluviale en Amérique latine (XVIIe–XIXe siècles) (Pessac, 2013), pp. 153–78 (p. 156); see also Giuseppe Mazzocchi, ‘“Las armas antárticas” di Juan de Miramontes’, in Paolo Laskaris and Paolo Pintacuda, eds, Intorno all’epica ispanica (Pavia, 2016), pp. 121–42.

Miramontes’s fixation on this theme has been convincingly related to his own career.5 The most up-to-date biographical information for Miramontes is given in Firbas’s edition, pp. 17–20. Elio Vélez Marquina argues that the poem was a bid to garner support for the Armada del Mar del Sur and win the favour of the viceroy as a military adviser on such matters, in ‘Poemas para un Monte Claro: Discursividad política de la épica americana del siglo XVII’, in Firbas, ed., Épica y colonia, pp. 287–308. Born in Spain in 1567, on his arrival in the Indies at the age of nineteen in 1586 he already had military experience in Europe, and his steadiest employment thenceforth was in the defence of the Peruvian coastline. He served for many years as an alférez [ensign] conducting the annual convoy of silver from Callao to Panama in the ‘Armada del Mar del Sur’; spent a brief spell as sergeant major of the coastal fort of Arica, which was also en route from the mines of Potosí, and joined the defence efforts against Drake in 1586, Cavendish in 1587 and the Dutch pirate Olivier van Noort in 1600, without sighting any of them. From 1604, he enjoyed a more comfortable honorary position in the viceroy’s guard, which allowed him to settle permanently in Lima in his final years, apparently unmarried but with two black female slaves, one creole and one Angolan. Unlike Oña and Ercilla, however, Miramontes does not make much of his personal experience of his subject matter: the poem’s narrative of the struggle against piracy concludes at precisely the moment in which Miramontes himself entered the arena. Likewise, the intrusive first-person narrator of his predecessors, with their frequent metapoetic interventions, moral exordia and reference to first-hand testimony and knowledge, almost entirely disappears in favour of a much more self-effacing presence. The texture of the epic is as a result somewhat more classicising, with structuring imitation of Virgil, Lucan and Valerius Flaccus’s Argonautica as well as the more contemporary models of Tasso and Camões, among others.

While Miramontes relied on viceregal patronage, it was not in quite the same way that Oña did. Many of his appointments were in the power of the viceroy: he describes himself in a letter sent from Arica in 1590, which was intercepted and survives only in Richard Hakluyt’s English translation, as a ‘dere friend’ of García Hurtado de Mendoza, and his later employment in the viceroy’s guard was a direct result of Luis de Velasco’s favour.6 The documents are quoted in Firbas’s edition, pp. 117–21. All the indications, though, are that these promotions were primarily in recognition of his military service, no doubt aided by his hidalgo status (although little is known of his origins, he titles himself ‘Don’), rather than his poetic talent. He is never mentioned as a member of the Academia Antártica, the elusive literary grouping of this period discussed in Chapter 1, and any further connections he may have had with the literary community of Lima are not known to date. Similarly, nothing is known of whether parts of his poem circulated in manuscript before the autograph copy was given to Viceroy Juan de Mendoza y Luna, Marquis of Montesclaros, not long before the author’s death in 1610.7 The now accepted dating of the poem (1608–09) is Firbas’s, which is based on references within the poem to Montesclaros and the inclusion or exclusion of important contemporary events. As such, although the figure of the viceroy looms large, the poem is not especially wedded to the reign or deeds of any particular one, which perhaps explains why it never found its way into print. Like Ercilla, then, and unlike Oña, this gave Miramontes the luxury of time to mould his epic. Firbas suggests that the poem’s fragmentation might be largely due to its gradual process of composition, which may have begun soon after he arrived in the Indies, making Armas antárticas a poem nearly two decades in the making.

Notwithstanding the notoriously disjointed, episodic nature of the poem, this chapter sets out a case that it is most profitably considered as an interlocking whole. The various episodes of the wars against piracy, the cimarrones, and the interpolated tale of Chalcuchima and Curicoyllor are constructed in such a way as to shed light on each other. As in the case of La Araucana and Arauco domado, mirroring and repetition mark the poem’s process of internal evolution and particularly its development of political ideas. As we saw with Oña in the previous chapter, the poem’s digressions and moves away from epic often constitute its most explicit engagement with colonial realities beyond the battlefield. The theme of piracy is thus bound up with (displaced) concerns relating to the indigenous world, to the ongoing dilemma of the Chilean and other frontiers, and, in a more obvious way, to the presence of mixed racial and ethnic communities of unstable social and juridical status within and beyond the cities of the viceroyalty. When the intellectual context of the poem is mapped out more fully, it becomes clear that, at the turn of the century in Lima, these questions were not in fact independent at all.

They are given some coherence by the poem’s spatial and geographical positioning. While the reader’s eye is on occasion conducted inland – to the Elizabethan parliament, to the early conquests and civil wars, to the ancient marvels of the Inca heartland and the verdant cornucopia of the palenque – these episodes share an element of the distant and fabulous. Weaving them together, in precise relief, is the American coastline and the seas which permit the poem’s fluid trajectory around the Hispanic world. If cartographic analogies seem inevitable after Francis Drake recounts to his queen the exploits he wishes to emulate with a map in hand, one must surely imagine a portolan, or a nautical world map, with its densely delineated coastline and sparse, fabulous interiors, rather than a terrestrial chart. Latasa Vassallo points out that the documentary history of the Viceroyalty in this period presents us with ‘a misshapen America’ (p. xxiii), in which the Pacific coast and neighbouring highlands occupy a disproportionate prominence in comparison to the neglected territories of the Atlantic and the interior, and the same might be said of the poem.

The wandering paths around this maritime world, however, also converge on a natural centre: the city of Lima. The scene of the dispatch of troops from the viceregal capital, with all its embellishments and gallantries, is introduced already in La Araucana (XIII. 15–35) and becomes a standard motif in subsequent poems of the materia de Arauco. It reappears not only in Oña, in typically colourful style, but even in Diego Arias de Saavedra’s Purén indómito (c. 1601), a poem which is otherwise claustrophobically fixated on the spiral of catastrophes in Chile. In all these, however, the abiding impression is of a welcome, ephemeral diversion from the grim ongoing conflict elsewhere. Here, by contrast, the narrative is largely one of the city’s transition from a disarmed mercantile polis (I. 193) to the very epitome of a warrior community, in which

From this complex positioning, then, this chapter assesses how Miramontes departs from the preoccupation with the indigenous political community in Oña and Ercilla. Noting the silencing of the pre-conquest Amerindian oracles in the very first stanza of the poem, Firbas affirms that the work begins from a conclusive ‘silencing of the indigenous world’.8 Introduction to Armas antárticas, p. 165. While there is some truth in this, I suggest that contemporary concerns with the position of the Amerindian community within colonial society subsist in what might be better described as a definitive separation between the assimilated (and largely silenced) Andean communities and those of the frontiers. The effective marginalisation of both indigenous groups allows the emphasis to be concentrated on the simultaneous struggle against both piracy and heresy in the coastal waters and ports of the viceroyalty. While this is clearly framed as a just and defensive war, some perennial questions about clemency and the ethical conduct of conflict also emerge. All these themes are united by the serious doubts they raise about the possibility of future conquest and settlement, whatever its motivations, a preoccupation which I relate to debates over the so-called guerra defensiva and potential future expansions being conducted with intensity in Lima at the time of composition. The pivot towards a defensive war essentially eliminates the concerns about the latent restiveness of both frontier armies and Spanish urban communities never entirely dispelled in Oña and Ercilla. As a result, the governance of these criollo polities is considered at greater length, with an effectively mixed model of governance emerging. The viceroy plays a crucial role as head of these communities, and is a final incarnation of the essentially pragmatic and empirical approach to rulership we have seen formulated in diverse contexts throughout the poetic discourse explored in this book. Finally, however, concerns with unrest and rebellion are arguably displaced rather than disappearing entirely. The cimarrones, whose intervention in the narrative sees a complex and often disconcerting interplay of discursive traditions, represent a political community at once slave, free and outlawed, of uncertain status and troubling implications.