‘Un pueblo de Ethiopia’ (III. 275): Fugitive Utopias and Divided Slaves, between Africa and Lima

Initially, the episode follows a trajectory common to such scenes in epic. The first, unsuspecting inhabitants are rudely awakened and react with a mixture of desperate fury and cowering terror, rewarded with ‘a todos igual la triste muerte’ [grim death equally for all] (IX. 796); there follows a brief but bloody series of individual combats with those capable of presenting greater resistance. Soon, a fire takes hold of the houses, and civilians scatter in panic:

On one level, the depiction of the soldiers’ self-control here complements that of the civic political community discussed above. While the soldiery of Ercilla restrain their first instinct towards cruelty and greed only as a result of the king’s presence, and those of Oña, more inclined towards clemency, are nevertheless prone to lapses of discipline, here the troops are largely self-directed. Their ‘piedad’ and ‘clemencia’ are seemingly innate qualities, as befits their uniform characterisation as ‘hidalgos’ rather than common seekers of booty. This shift in representation is replicated in other scenes in the poem, as when the defenders of the coastline spare the English who surrender after routing them at Quintero (XIX. 1637). As a result, the emphasis moves away from the portrait of the general, who here simply observes the actions of his virtuous troops with satisfaction, and onto the militia itself, which becomes a cohesive self-governing community. Such a force does not need the exercise of absolute authority from its commanders, nor even the ‘middle way’ between rigour and lenience depicted by Oña, but requires only gentle strategic direction. It is clear in the poem that, while professional in their exercise of arms, these forces are in effect citizen militias, raised on the incursion of the enemy and accountable to the community that sends them. As a result, the emphasis on their conduct has a particular resonance in light of the social anxieties of the period already discussed. Far from being liable to mutiny, corruption or revolt, the ‘ordinary’ soldiers show complete self-mastery with regard both to their own and to the enemy.

Their clemency is, however, rather limited in its effects. Whereas the soldiers of Saint-Quentin extinguish the blaze and spare the honour and liberty of the town’s inhabitants, the compassion of those at Ronconcholo extends only so far as to spare innocent lives and bury the dead. The survivors are all imprisoned and enslaved, though their captivity is said to be ‘tolerable’ (IX. 814), the settlement is destroyed completely, and its wealth led in triumphal procession by the captives back to the Spanish camp. As in Miramontes’s predecessors, the nature of the people and political community against whom conflict is waged appears to condition the conduct of hostilities. Although English soldiers also perish at Ronconcholo, the emphasis is on the African inhabitants, ‘cautivos y cautivas de ethïopia’ [male and female captives of Ethiopia] (IX. 817). The underlying implication is that a war conducted against the cimarrones, rather than against fellow Christians or Amerindians or pirates, requires different standards of conduct. Where does the emphasis fall, however? Does the poem suggest that a conflict with de iure, if not de facto, slaves need observe only a more limited form of clemency? Or that some clemency should be observed, even against runaway slaves? The answer, of course, depends on the reader’s perspective, but also points towards a certain ambivalence in Miramontes’s representation of the maroon community which is consistent with their appearance throughout the first half of the poem.

Whereas Lope de Vega, ensconced in Madrid, could complacently look upon maroon townships such as Santiago del Príncipe (founded in 1579) as a curious but dependable feature of the Americas in La Dragontea, it is little wonder that Miramontes, a frequent traveller between Lima and Panama who had also spent time in the Caribbean, should view the phenomenon in a more complex light. Even the legally constituted free black townships scattered across southern and central America continued to excite mixed feelings among local observers. As Jane G. Landers observes, while the Crown and viceregal authorities tended to support such foundations, neighbouring residents were often much more hostile.2 Jane G. Landers, ‘Cimarrón and Citizen: African Ethnicity, Corporate Identity, and the Evolution of Free Black Towns in the Spanish Circum-Caribbean’, in Jane Landers and Barry Robinson, eds, Slaves, Subjects, and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, NM, 2006), pp. 111–45 (pp. 128–30). Caro de Torres shows a grudging admiration for the citizens of Santiago del Príncipe who helped to resist Drake:

It is arguable that Miramontes’s palenque acts also as a displaced mechanism for considering the large urban black population, both slave and free, of the viceroyalty. As Chapter 1 explains, those of African descent constituted around half the population of Lima in this period. Miramontes himself owned slaves in his household. As we have seen, the reality of racial admixture in the city is completely silenced in Armas antárticas. Anxieties about the susceptibility of the black population to subversion by the pirates – in Barco Centenera, for instance, they surreptitiously sabotage the defence efforts against Drake – are thereby suppressed. Nevertheless, the reader immersed in this reality could hardly fail to be sensitive to the poem’s projecting of issues of slavery and the religious, cultural and political status of the African community onto the turbulent past of Ballano. In his classic study, Frederick Bowser asserts that, as the slave trade expanded, ‘the African was transformed in the sixteenth-century European mind into the “Negro”, a man who was not merely the only available slave but was in fact born to bondage’, but this coexisted with earlier legends and traditions such as the ‘bon nègre’ of the Bible, the Christian Ethiopia of Prester John, the descendants of Ham’s curse, the pagans of the classical world, or the African Muslim kingdoms.4 Frederick Bowser, The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524–1650 (Stanford, CA, 1974), pp. 26–27. Francesc Relaño has complicated the picture further, demonstrating that the notion of a geographically unified Africa only emerged gradually during this period.5 Francesc Relaño, La emergencia de África como continente: Un nuevo mundo a partir del viejo (Lleida, 2000). Other recent studies demonstrate both the historical agency of black Iberians and the complexity of their literary representation. Chloe Ireton, for example, notes that free black migrants to the Americas stressed their status as ‘old Christians’ (i.e. not Moriscos), while Nicholas Jones demonstrates that the appropriation of black speech, habla de negros, by white authors, traditionally dismissed as derogatory, can ‘render legible the voices and experiences of black Africans in fundamental ways that demand our attention’.6 Chloe Ireton, ‘“They Are Blacks of the Caste of Black Christians”: Old Christian Black Blood in the Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Iberian Atlantic’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 97.4 (2017), 579–612; Nicholas R. Jones, Staging ‘Habla de Negros’: Radical Performances of the African Diaspora in Early Modern Spain (University Park, PA, 2019), p. 5; see also Jones, ‘Sor Juana’s Black Atlantic: Colonial Blackness and the Poetic Subversions of Habla de negros’, Hispanic Review, 86.3 (2018), 265–85, for a similar theoretical application in a specifically colonial context.

La Dragontea provides an important precedent for negotiating some of these competing associations within an epic framework and a colonial American setting. At the outset of Lope’s poem, Codicia reminds Drake of his first encounter with the cimarrones, ‘atrevidos […] huidos, rebelados y escondidos, | fiado en su ignorancia y libertades […] bárbaros en las obras y razones’ [daring (…) fugitives, hidden rebels, trusting in their ignorance and liberties (…) barbarian in actions and reason] (LD I. 49). When the English eventually meet them again in the sixth canto, however, now settled in a township, their representation has changed substantially. The free black community, described with a mixture of comic caricature, dramatic irony and grudging respect, has a clear political order, with its ‘oficios repúblicos’ [political offices] described in some detail (VI. 18), although Lope’s grandiose comparisons to the Roman republic and the great lawmakers of old is clearly for humorous effect.7 Lise Segas suggests links between Lope’s representation of the cimarrones in the epic and of negros on stage, in ‘Cimarrones y corsarios: De la realidad colonial a la épica histórica’, Hipogrifo, 5.2 (2017), 241–60. This is especially so when paired with a grotesque description of the African king, Don Luis de Mozambique, ‘doblado en cuerpo, en ánimo sencillo, | de barba hasta los pechos prolongada’ [with hunchbacked body, and simple mind, a beard growing down to his chest] (VI. 17), and the seizing of every opportunity for a colour-centred joke. When the English ambassador to the township attempts to flatter his audience by alluding to the illustrious past of Ethiopia (VI. 32) and dwelling on the injustice of slavery, a violation to ‘vuestra libre e igual naturaleza’ [your free and equal nature] (VI. 30), he is contradicted by none other than Don Luis himself. The African king mounts a strident defence of slavery and of his people’s willing subjection to the Crown. According to him, the Africans of the present bear no resemblance to the Ethiopia of myth. Living like animals, naked and even speechless, their enslavement is not only ‘en buena guerra’ [in a just war] but also brings the incalculable benefits of civility and salvation, ‘mejorarnos de tierra y darnos Cielo’ [giving us a better land and the gift of heaven] (VI. 37–38). There is a further irony when the English prove no match for the loyalty and valour of the Africans in battle, and in the end see their own number perish like beasts and be buried in the field (VI. 62).

Miramontes likewise combines a number of the conflicting ideas regarding Africa which coexisted at the turn of the century, although his development of this strand of the narrative is much more extensive than Lope’s and the effect of its juxtapositions more jarring. Apparently contradictory concepts are held together without clearly favouring one or the other, in such a way as to continually force readers to re-assess their expectations. At the outset, the contrast between the maroons and their new English ‘friends’ seems designed to highlight the primitivity of the former. At his first glimpse of the English military formations, arms and tents, and first taste of refined English food(!), the African king is left ‘admirado | del orden, aparato y policía’ [in admiration of their order, pomp and civility] (V. 400). The feast they proffer in return is an unseasoned assortment of ‘rústicos manjares’ [rustic delicacies] hunted or gathered from the wood.8 As Landers explains in ‘Cimarrón and Citizen’, maroon communities did in fact practise agriculture and rear livestock to the extent that their itinerant nature permitted, but this is not always acknowledged in contemporary Spanish sources. Moreover, clad in animal skins with an eclectic mix of weapons, Don Luis’s men prove as lacking in the military art as they are unversed in refined cuisine. Combats between Africans and Europeans are rarely represented in Armas antárticas, except in instances in which a single Spanish soldier takes on an unindividuated horde.

At the same, the comparison between the Africans and the privateers is not always to the Europeans’ advantage. The outdoor banquet, uncultivated as it is, is a veritable ‘cornucopia’ (V. 427–29) situated within a locus amoenus. Living in natural contentment here, the life of the maroons, from foraging to lovemaking, is simple and spontaneous, and they are signally lacking in those most characteristic of English vices, greed, fraud and ambition. In this light, the palenque exists not so much in a state of anarchic savagery as of golden-age innocence, and the portrait is not without its attractions. Nor does it negate the question of the status of the African commune as a political community. The theme is broached in the first encounter between the English and their potential allies, in which the subdued African hunter Jalonga is led back to the English camp and asked by Oxenham ‘si el jactancioso castellano […] os hace cruda guerra | y en qué disposición está la tierra’ [whether the boastful Castilian (…) wages cruel war on you, and what kind of state the land is in] (IV. 329). Jalonga does not answer the question directly, but instead embarks on a lengthy excursus on the ‘historias y antiguallas’ [histories and antiquities] of his people (IV. 330), from the mythical origins of his Ethiopian forebears, to the slaving wars, to the establishment and vicissitudes of the palenque.

According to this account, the first leader of the fledgling maroon settlement which inherited his name, Ballano, possessed very little in the way of properly political virtue as he embarked on a campaign of robbery and guerrilla violence:

When Don Luis eventually enters the scene, he is quite unlike Lope’s caricatured figura. Grave and dignified in bearing (V. 381–82, 388), he professes to be perpetually turning over ‘el medio conveniente | a la conservación de un libre estado’ [the most fitting way to conserve a free state] in a manner befitting his kingship (V. 389). Nor is the community as a whole completely lacking in the trappings of civility. In contrast to the toneless music and lascivious dance of Oña’s Araucanians, their banquet is accompanied by the ‘bien organizados instrumentos’ [well-arranged instruments] of ‘diestros músicos gentiles’ [skilled gentile musicians] (V. 403). Their song, like that of Orpheus or the Iopas of Virgil’s Carthage, expounds the secrets of seasons, weather and celestial bodies, transfixing its listeners. In a further twist, it is the English who convert the courteous celebration into a borrachera, ‘desenfrenados’ [unrestrained] (V. 431) in their gluttony, drunkenness, boasting and lust. One imagines the reader’s surprise over the course of these cantos as being something akin to the unexpected transformation of Ercilla’s band of fighting savages into a proto-Venetian senado.

To this already complex mix of discursive and literary traditions, Jalonga’s speech adds a further element by his definition of the maroons as ‘etïopes’, Ethiopians. Admittedly, the term is often used simply as a synonym for negro, whether to achieve a more culto lexis by epic poets such as Lope, Camões and Silvestre de Balboa in his Espejo de paciencia (1608), in a kind of self-fashioning by the former slave and neo-Latin poet Juan Latino in the prologue to his Austrias carmen, or, one suspects, with more political intent in the Jesuit Alonso de Sandoval’s plea for a humane treatment of the enslaved in his De instauranda Aethiopum salute [On Restoring the Salvation of the Ethiopians] (1627). Here, though, the denomination becomes a significant part of the Africans’ characterization. Jalonga traces the origins of his people back to the union of Apollo and Andromeda (apparently the poet’s invention) as the founders of the Ethiopian Empire. Needless to say, this legend whitens and ‘de-Africanizes’ the true history of the community.9 Jason McCloskey, ‘Noble Heirs to Apollo: Tracing African Genealogy through Ovidian Myth in Juan de Miramontes’s Armas antárticas’, in Frederick de Armas, ed., Ovid in the Age of Cervantes (Toronto, 2008), pp. 262–80 (p. 264). Nevertheless, it also has the effect of conferring dignity on a continent which had, in much Renaissance epic, come to be scorned. In addition to Lope’s fleeting portrait of the bestial existence of the Africans prior to the Portuguese arrival, the reader might think of the cartographic catalogue in the Gerusalemme liberata. Here, sub-Saharan Africa is dismissed in less than a stanza: ‘Africa […] su ’l mar culta e ferace, a dentro solo | fertil di mostri e d’infeconde arene’ [Africa (…) cultivated and fertile on the coast, inland only rich in monsters and barren deserts] (XV. 17). Similarly, for Camões, Ethiopia is a ‘nome antigo’ [ancient name] (I. 43) but little more; when the Portuguese pass its coast, they find the inhabitants ‘mais humana’ [more humane] than the savages of the south, but nevertheless a simple, pastoral people (V. 63), while those of Mozambique are alleged by the Moorish newcomers to be ‘aqueles que criou | a Natura, sem Lei e sem Razão’ [those whom Nature reared, without Law and without Reason] (V. 53). With the exception of North Africa and the Moorish colony of Melinde, it seems, most of the continent suffers ‘de tudo extrema inópia’ [extreme poverty in everything] (V. 6).

In place of this dismissive attitude, arguably the product of the early modern experience of colonisation and slave trafficking in maritime Africa, Miramontes looks back to the legendary precedents of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica and especially to the fantastic Ethiopia of Ariosto. In both Armas antárticas and the Orlando furioso, the kingdom, which at the source of the river Nile evokes the earthly paradise, boasts fantastic riches, extensive realms and a sophisticated culture, and in both, the Ethiopians are graced with an English visitor. In Ariosto, the knight errant Astolfo descends from his airborne hippogriff to right the emperor’s wrongs and lead the Ethiopian army to vanquish the Moors. Admittedly, the comparison is not entirely favourable either to the cimarrones or the English. While Don Luis’s swift duping by the false promises of the English and sudden aspirations to conquest recall the hubris of Ariosto’s Ethiopian emperor Senapo, punished with blindness for attempting to scale the earthly paradise, he does not resemble the latter in Christian devotion. In contrast to many contemporary accounts of the palenque and the legendary Ethiopia of Prester John, the maroons appear at best superficially Christianised, still resorting to superstitious practice and appealing to a pagan past; the only Arabisms used in the poem refer to their march to battle. Conversely, if Ariosto’s Astolfo is sent to restore Senapo’s sight and expel the monsters that prey on his table, the English newcomers of Miramontes are more like the harpies who spoil the feast. Perverting the natural rhythm of the polity, they, like the false Apollo of Atlantic Africa, sow darkness and confusion in place of light.

The most unprecedented step of the poem, though, is in putting this Africa – the Ethiopia of legend – into direct contact with the contemporary slaving wars. Jalonga dwells on the stark difference between his own people and the ‘gente | bestial, salvaje, rústica, arriscada, | bruta, caribe, bárbara, insolente, | fiera, sanguinolenta, cruel, airada’ [bestial, wild, rustic, daring, brutish, savage, barbarous, insolent, fierce, bloodthirsty, cruel, angry people] of the Atlantic seaboard (IV. 348). In the constant war between the two peoples, both end up as passengers on the Portuguese slave ships. Both types appear to be present in the cimarrón community, too. At times, as we have seen, these manifest the dignity and independence of the ancient Ethiopians. At other moments, they become again ‘zapes, angolas, biáfaras y branes’ (X. 910), the West African peoples most familiar from the slave markets of the Indies, and conduct themselves as if slavish behaviour had become a part of their nature, rowing the English ship as if they were criminals on the galleys (VI. 486), or willingly offering themselves as beasts of burden to carry the English food and equipment (VI. 416). Miramontes thereby denies the homogeneity often ascribed to the enslaved African collective. Moreover, Jalonga’s discourse on slavery strikes a distinctly critical note:

In sum, then, the complexities surrounding the restive Araucanian and Spanish American political communities in La Araucana and Arauco domado are, in Armas antárticas, partly displaced onto that of the cimarrones. An amalgam of divergent modes of representation and unresolved contradictions, Miramontes employs disconcerting juxtapositions to question the expectations and assumptions the work engenders in relation to the black community in the Americas and their African antecedents. His palenque undergoes various stages of development. In the initial phase of Ballano’s brutal raids on the Spanish, it fails to develop as a polity; as it retreats, immured from further European influence, it emerges as a people self-governing, in possession of its own history and lore, and spontaneously cognizant of natural law; finally, it undergoes a second decline when, infected with the English desire for conquest, it turns again from defensive to offensive war. To this extent, the episode correlates with the overall treatment of conflict and expansion within the work.

At the same time, however, the African commune is clearly an object of intrinsic interest in a way that, arguably, the contemporary Amerindian peoples of the work are not. Rather like the apparent contradictions of Oña’s Araucanians, the mixed characteristics of the maroons seem designed to reflect both the threat and the potential of this community. If their primary failing as a collective is their apostasy from the Christian faith, this in itself reflects upon the insufficient urgency accorded to the evangelisation of both slave and free populations. This constitutes the great difference, in this account, between the completed conquest of the Inca Empire and the inconclusive subjugation of the Africans. In his implicit criticism of the dehumanising treatment of slaves and the failure of evangelisation, Miramontes echoes the misgivings of many contemporary scholastics concerning the justification of slavery and the alienation of liberty (note the language of ‘free will’ and ‘dominion’ above).10 See Brett, Changes of State, pp. 93–95. He also coincides with advocates for moderate reform to alleviate the spiritual and physical abandonment of the etïopes, such as Alonso de Sandoval, who began his missionary work among the slaves of Cartagena during the final years of the poem’s composition. If the good disposition of the cimarrones and their progressive disillusionment with their monstrous ‘wedding’ to the English looks forward to Lope’s Dragontea and the promise of their eventual incorporation into the Spanish body politic, the poem nonetheless leaves their future provocatively open. Failing the evangelical and humane impetus clearly needed to reconcile this community, the spectre of independent resistance or covert subversion continues to linger.