HIS 315 History of Latin America

CAUGHT BETWEEN RIVALS: THE SPANISH-AFRICAN MAROON COMPETITION FOR CAPTIVE INDIAN LABOR IN THE REGION OF

ESMERALDAS DURING THE LATE SIXTEENTH AND EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES1

I n 1586, the royal audiencia of Quito received a letter from a fugitive African slave written with the aid of an itinerant Spanish missionary.2

The judges were dismayed by what they read. The African, Alonso de Illescas, head of one of the maroon communities that had been flourishing on the coast of Esmeraldas since 1553, petitioned the court with a proposi- tion and a veiled threat. The proposal implored the judges to honor an ear- lier promise giving Illescas political authority over Esmeraldas, the coastal province comprising the maroons’ homeland, and to desist in their plans to establish Spanish settlers in the region. In exchange, the maroons would gather and surrender hundreds of bellicose “Campaz” natives and deliver them “to the service of God and his majesty.”3 If the court rejected their terms, they would renege on their offer to “do everything possible so as to procure and pacify all of the natives of this province.”4 In addition, they would not assist the settlers nor aid them in capturing the Campazes. Impor- tantly, for the administrators to honor their previous promise would amount

The Americas 63:1 July 2006, 113-136 Copyright by the Academy of American Franciscan History

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1 I would like to thank friends, colleagues, and mentors who read this essay at various stages of com- pletion and generously provided commentary. Special appreciation goes out to Douglas Cope, Michele Reid, Leo Garofalo, Sherwin Bryant, Rachel O’Toole, Ben Vinson, Lindsey McCormack, Vincent Peloso, Bernard Bailyn and the participants of the 2004 International Seminar on the History of the Atlantic World, and to the anonymous reader of this essay.

2 Letter from Alonso de Illescas. Archivo General de Indias, Escribania, 922b, f. 192v-193v. All fol- lowing references from the Archivo General de Indias will use the abbreviation AGI followed by the sec- tion and folder and where applicable the folio or image number (in the case of digital images).

3 The name Campaz was used to reference native people residing between the Esmeraldas River and Bahia de Caraquez. It is difficult to tell what eventually became of the Campaz people. Many local denominations such as Campaz and Nigua fell out of usage during the colonial period. In some cases these were subdivisions of larger groups such as the Tsachila (Colorados) or Cayapas.

4 AGI, Escribania, 922b, f.192v-193v. “Haria todo quanto en mi fuese y procuraria traer de paz todos los naturales de questa provincia...”

to Spanish legitimation of the Africans’ presence and their dominance over native communities, a concession that Spanish imperial policy would not allow.5 Colonial authorities were aware that their original offer contradicted Spanish ordinance, but on their side of the Atlantic divide a more critical set of goals outstripped the crown’s. They were duty bound to obey the laws of the Indies that forbade the intermingling of natives and Africans but did not enforce the removal of Africans from native communities in Esmeraldas.6

This short vignette provides only a glimpse of the tensions and conflicts between fugitive African slave communities, Spanish colonial authorities, and the elite of Quito. However, it exemplifies the complexity of marronage in sixteenth century Spanish America. Here African slaves were empowered to subdue native people while declaring their desire to serve the crown. Spanish authority was limited, indeed stymied, by maroon independence. Missionaries gave aid to “the enemy,” turning their backs on the colonial administration and the specter of violent subjugation. Strikingly, similar terms of engagement materialized in other parts of the Spanish Empire. Recent works by Jane Landers, Patrick Caroll, Kathryn McKnight, Matthew Restall, and others demonstrate the multipositionality of Africans in resist- ance and the diversity of their relationships with colonial authorities, Span- ish settlers, and native communities.7 Indeed, long-term maroon survival

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5 Strict control over Africans was evinced by policies enacted early in the Viceroyalty of Peru. in 1538 the city cabildo of Quito prescribed the right to carry arms to blacks (either free or enslaved) and empowered Spaniards to kill any black who questioned or raised a hand to them: “qualquier negro que se tomare a palabras con español e alçare mano con armas o sin ellas…el dicho español le pueda matar. Libro primero de cabildos de Quito, ed. and transc. by José Rumazo Gonzales (Quito, 1934), pp. 390- 391. Royal ordinances recorded in 1580 reflected concern with the very type of intermingling (as per- ceived by Crown administrators) occurring between Africans and Indians in Esmeraldas. The ordi- nance explicitly forbade blacks from settling in or among native communities. The reasons noted by the Crown included, 1. reports of Africans abusing natives, taking and abusing their wives and daugh- ters, 2. Africans corrupting the process of evangelization, 3. denying the Indians their liberty. See Col- lección de cédulas reales dirigidas a la audiencia de Quito, Tomo I—1538-1600: Volumen IX, Publi- caciones del Archivo Municipal, vers. Jorge A. Garcés G.; introduction by J. Roberto Páez (Quito, 1935), p. 357.

6 The books of the Cabildos de Quito include a wide variety of ordinances prohibiting blacks from carrying arms and numerous prohibitions against their living among or intermingling with native people. See for example Collección de cédulas reales dirigidas a la Audiencia de Quito (Quito, 1935) p. 354. Another group of orders are contained in the Archivo Nacional Histórico (Quito), Cedulas, Caja 1.

7 Matthew Restall’s edited volume Beyond Black and Red: African-Native Relations in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005) contains numerous articles exam- ining African resistance within an African-native context. Also see Jane Landers’ Black Society in Span- ish Florida, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), Patrick J. Carroll, Blacks in Colonial Veracruz: Race, Ethnicity, and Regional Development (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991), Kathryn McK- night’s “Confronted Rituals: Spanish Colonial and Angolan ‘Maroon’ Executions in Cartagena de Indias (1634),” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5:3 (2004), and Paul Lokken’s “A Maroon Moment: Rebel Slaves in Early Seventeenth-Century Guatemala,” Slavery and Abolition 25:3 (Decem-

relied on skillful negotiation and exploiting divisions within colonial soci- ety. While military resistance remained central to maroon independence, continuity also depended on legitimation by colonial authorities.

Historians of colonial Ecuador have done much to trace the Esmer- aldeños’s story. Earlier works, including those of Frederico González Suárez, José Rumazo González, and John Leddy Phelan sidelined the African dimensions of the saga to focus instead on the question of regional development, while later studies including José Alcina Franch, Adam Sza- szdi, Frank Salomon, Kris Lane, and Rocio Rueda Novoa, have brought the African element into focus and provided a rich view of life along the Esmer- aldas coast.8 Where this article parts from earlier analyses is in examining marronage as a set of long-term strategies and activities reaching far beyond the act of escaping enslavement. Flight was only the first, if essential, step in a process with many possible outcomes. The maroons of Esmeraldas used numerous approaches: collaborative, competitive, and even predatory in their effort to thrive under adversarial and hostile conditions. Rather than imagining the arc of marronage as a predictable curve moving from initial conflict and aggression, to either destruction or eventual incorporation, Esmeraldas demonstrates that marronage involved a dynamic, often chang- ing set of relationships. Collaboration and conflict were frequently entwined

CHARLES BEATTY MEDINA 115

ber 2004). An earlier set of studies addressing similar issues includes James Lockhart’s Spanish Peru, 1532-1560; A Colonial Society (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), Frederick Bowser’s The African Slave in Colonial Peru, 1524-1650 (Stanford, 1974) and Stuart Schwarz’s Slaves, Peasants, and Rebels: Reconsidering Brazilian Slavery (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992).

8 The first professional modern history to include Esmeraldas was Federico González Suárez’s His- toria general de la República del Ecuador (Quito: Imprenta del Clero, 1893). A large cache of related primary documents were transcribed and published in the 1940s by José Rumazo González as Docu- mentos para la historia de la Audiencia de Quito (Madrid: Afro Aguado, 1948). John Leddy Phelan ded- icated a chapter to Esmeraldas in The Kingdom of Quito in the Seventeenth Century (Madison: Univer- sity of Wisconsin, 1967). In ethno-historical terms Alcina Franch concentrated on both the pre and post-contact societies of Esmeraldas. See José Alcina Franch, “Penetración española en Esmeraldas tipología del descubrimiento.” Revista de Indias XXXVI: 143-144 (January-June 1976), pp. 65-121; La arqueología de Esmeraldas (Ecuador): Introducción general (Madrid: Ministerio de Asunto Exteriores, 1979) and “El Problema de las Poblaciones Negroides de Esmeraldas, Ecuador.” Apertura: Boletín Ofi- cial del Vicariato Apostolico de Esmeraldas1 (1991) pp. 34-45. Adam Szazdi’s article “El transfondo de un cuadro: ‘Los mulatos de Esmeraldas’ de Andrés Sánchez Galque” published in Cuadernos Prehis- pánicos 12 (1986-1987), pp. 93-142 is perhaps the most extensively documented examination of the Esmeraldeños engagement with Quito authorities. Frank Salomon’s monograph Los Yumbos, Niguas y Tsatchila o “Colorados”: Durante la Colonia Española (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1997) examines the maroons in relation to interstitial native communities joining the littoral with the highland regions of Quito. Rocio Rueda Novoa’s thesis from the Universidad del Valle del Cali published as Zambaje y autonomia: histo- ria de la gente negra de la provincia de Esmeraldas, siglos XVI-XVIII (Quito: Abya-Yala, 2001) is notable for its emphasis on the intermingling of native and African elements in forming the Esmeraldas maroons’ ethnicity. Kris Lane’s Quito 1599 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002) has an excellent chapter describing the Esmeraldeños within an audiencia-wide context.

as maroons employed various methods to mediate their relationship with colonial authorities and native peoples.9

PRE- AND POST-CONQUEST ESMERALDAS

Before the Spanish arrived, a series of highly developed cultures inhabited the Esmeraldas littoral. The northern half of the province, beginning approxi- mately from the Esmeraldas River and ending at modern day San Lorenzo, saw the emergence of long-distance trading societies with a rich ceremonial and religious life. Archaeological evidence from La Tolita (located near the mouth of the Santiago river—see map) and its hinterland demonstrate the existence of lithic ceramic producing civilizations dating back to the first century A.D. Mounds at La Tolita, as well as ceramic phasing, evince a cultural and ritual complexity that suffered decline before the Spanish arrival.10 By the sixteenth century a notable pattern towards the establishment of smaller settlements (chiefdoms) and relatively isolated communities dominated the interior of northern Esmeraldas. The coast still contained a few large settlements, one near the Santiago River Basin and another at Atacames south of the Esmeraldas River.11 Significantly, as the Inca expanded north in the fifteenth century and took control of Quito, Esmeraldas remained on the fringe of the great empire.

The post-contact history of Esmeraldas is largely one of rapid demo- graphic decline and social reorganization, especially for the large coastal communities. Spaniards first saw large settlements at Tenumpuela and Ata- cames in 1526, while exploring the coastline that eventually led them to Peru and the Sapa Inca. By 1553, when a small group of African slaves en route from Panama to Peru fled their captivity, the large settlements vividly portrayed by conquistadors twenty years earlier no longer existed.12 Many

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9 The literature on maroon societies across the Americas provides points of departure and similar scenarios in the Atlantic diasporic context. Some useful examples are: Scott Paris, “Alliance and Com- petition: Four Case Studies of Maroon-European Relations,” Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, 55 (1981), pp. 174-224; and Paul Lokken, “Useful Enemies: Seventeenth-Century Piracy and the Rise of Pardo Militias in Spanish Central America,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, 5:2 (2004).

10 See Warren R. Deboer. Traces Behind the Esmeraldas Shore (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1996). A well-rounded collection of essays on the archaeology of the Esmeraldas shore is avail- able in the volume Primer encuentro de investigadores de la costa Ecuatoriana en Europa (Quito: Abya- Yala, 1995). For a sense of overall demographic declines see Linda Newson’s Life and Death in Early Colonial Ecuador (Norman and London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).

11 Deboer, Traces, pp. 170-172. Also see Juan and Judith Villamarín, “Chiefdoms: The Prevalence and Persistence of ‘Señores Naturales’ 1400 to European Conquest” The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, vol.3, South America (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 607-612.

12 See, for instance, Pedro de Cieza de Leon, The Discovery and Conquest of Peru: Chronicles of the New World Encounter, trans. Noble David Cook and Alexandra Parma Cook (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999).

of their inhabitants fell prey to European diseases; the remainder had retreated inland.

Although numerous entradas, or conquest raids, marched into Esmeral- das between 1526 and 1563, the region was of little importance to Spanish

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Quito Northern Highland Cities and Coastlands (with elevations). Map drawn by the author.

administrators or Quito’s elite. Change came after 1563, and the establish- ment of the royal audiencia. Following the urging of the first audiencia pres- ident, Hernando de Santillán, merchants and encomenderos stated their desire for a port closer to their highland capital.13 Citing the “excessive cost” of overland shipping from Guayaquil, colonial administrators and local leaders eagerly sought a closer alternative in Esmeraldas.14

It was a great idea on paper. However, by 1583, over 30 military expedi- tions had failed to establish a permanent Spanish settlement.15 Ironically enough, Spanish armies, adroit at confronting Incan forces in the thousands, seemed incapable of subjugating the much smaller semi-sedentary chief- doms of Esmeraldas.16 The same did not hold for the fugitive Africans. Struggling to survive as rebels, they carved out a space for themselves in the militarily ravaged landscaped and within the complex of small chieftaincies. While the Spanish seemed unwilling and unable to survive—much less thrive—in Esmeraldas’ dense rainforests, the Africans formed settlements, intermarried with and subjugated native communities, thereby establishing a degree of political authority and military might. With few Quiteños will- ing to settle there, authorities decided that if the maroons and natives could be persuaded to establish settlements on the coast the Quiteños could thus achieve a portion of their goals. The maroons would become their proxy set- tlers: authorized to assist in the reducción and the congregating of the local native population. They could assemble in one location the badly needed labor force to shuttle goods along trails and rivers from the coast to the high-

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13 At this early date, the audiencia argued that the inefficiency of the overland route from Guayaquil resulted in the extremely high cost of Spanish goods in Quito, a speedier route would therefore reduce the cost of imports making Quito a larger market for commerce from the peninsula: “Letter from Her- nando de Santillán” AGI-Quito 17, September 20, 1564.

14 Examining Quito’s desire for a closer port, an important consideration was the reduced cost of exporting high bulk, high volume goods like biscuits, hams, espadrilles, and gunpowder. Given its lim- ited sources of mineral wealth; textiles and hacienda production were the key industries in Quito. Karen Powers states, “It was the only way that a relatively unendowed, peripheral Spanish population could earn enough specie to participate as consumers in the trans-Atlantic trade.” Karen Vierra Powers, Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1995). Also see Kris Lane’s “Mining the Margins” in Quito 1599, pp. 115-149.

15 José Alcina-Franch, “Penetración,” pp. 65-121. 16 Cabello Balboa notes the numerous failed attempts to establish a permanent settlement, including

one by Sebastian Garcilaso de la Vega, father of one of colonial Peru’s first Mestizos and noted author. Miguel Cabello de Balboa “Verdadera descripción y relación larga de la Provincia y Tierra de las Esmer- ladas, contenida desde el cabo comunmente llamado Pasao, hasta la bahía de la Buena Ventura, que es en la costa del Mar del Sur Reino de Piru; dirigida al muy Illustre Señor Licenciado Jhoan López de Cepeda de el Consejo de su majestad y su Presidente en la provincia de los Charcas, Reinos de Piru; hecha por Miguel Cabello Balboa, clérigo; donde se contiene una breve suma del alzamiento y rebelión de los indios de la provincia de los Quixos y de la entrada del inglés en el Mar del Sur,” in Jacinto Jijón y Caamaño, ed., Obras vol.1 (Quito: Editorial Ecuatoriana, 1945), pp. 7-76.

lands. Once in place, Spanish colonizers would gradually take control of the fledgling settlements.

Dealing with the maroons, however, was no simple matter. The Africans’ arrival was neither intentional nor were its effects predictable. Their landing, nonetheless, would have a tremendous impact on the region during the 16th and 17th centuries. By 1577, colonial authorities had acquired more than a vague notion of the difficulties involved in colonizing Esmeraldas and the power attained by the maroons. For the next fifty years, they viewed the African renegades as the “key to the region.” Though few in number, the maroons were an essential consideration in nearly every colonizing project.

FROM CONFLICT TO COOPERATION AND BACK, SPANISH— MAROON RELATIONS IN ESMERALDAS

To the Quiteños’ great chagrin, the audiencia had little luck in convincing Lima or Madrid of the city’s need for a second port. Neither the viceroy nor the crown would approve numerous requests for a concession to conquer Esmeraldas. The court remained hamstrung until 1576, when an initial over- ture came from maroon leader Alonso de Illescas. After rescuing a group of shipwrecked passengers, he expressed his desire to make peace with the authorities in exchange for official recognition of his peoples’ free status. If the audiencia had simply granted Illescas’ request, an immediate peace would have resulted. Instead, in 1577 the judges set forth a grander scheme. They proposed to raise Alonso de Illescas, maroon leader, to the post of gobernador of the region.17 According to Miguel Cabello Balboa, an ex-soldier and priest who was sent to carry out the negotiations, the one-time fugitive was taken aback and further astounded to receive the honorific title of “don.” In exchange Illescas was to persuade the chieftaincies of the region, along with rival maroon bands, to settle at the mouth of the Esmeraldas River.

The plan was a miscalculation on the court’s part. By expecting that Illescas could effect the reducción of the local chieftaincies, they overesti- mated maroon strength and authority on the coast. Illescas’ attempt to con- solidate power locally led to internecine warfare between factions of the

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17 There is a question of whether the audiencia’s proposal was that Illescas should, like a gobernador de indios, have authority limited to natives and his followers. Cabello makes clear that Illescas was to be gobernador de estas provincias, thereby giving him authority over anyone residing or entering the region. The audiencia’s sincerity may be doubted here. Cabello stated his low opinion, referred dis- paragingly to the mulattos and natives as mal habidos (badly living) and as esta canalla (this riffraff or mob). He referred to Illescas as a regente (regent) and commonly denigrated him as the “nuevo y negro gobernador” (the new and black governor). Cabello, Verdadera descripción, pp. 39, 41-42.

renegade Africans and lowland native societies. While the issue of labor was never directly broached, it was understood that establishing a new settlement and bringing together the region’s natives and maroons meant making them more accessible. Cabello de Balboa never mentioned the labor demands that would come with the arrival of Spanish soldiers to the new settlement. Native inhabitants, however, were commoditized. Esmeraldas, he writes, was the best in “fertility, healthiness, riches of gold and silver and natu- rales,” the crown could hope for none better.18

Cabello remained silent on the envisioned labor regime of the port settle- ment, referring rather to saving the many errant souls in the region and bring- ing them into the “service of your majesty.”19 It should not surprise us that captive labor was rarely mentioned in the source documents of the period. Native exploitation and abuse in the early Caribbean colonies remained infa- mous and provided the basis for the black legend. Successive ordinances of the first half of the sixteenth century culminated with the “great debate” over the legitimacy of Spain’s conquest and its claim to the Americas. The period marked the formal end of native enslavement, thereby transforming the dis- course over labor acquisition. New coercive schemes for acquiring native labor such as the mita and repartimiento became the preferred methods. In Esmeraldas, Quiteño elites encoded discussions of harnessing native labor in the language of salvation and service. The Christian missions in peripheral areas like Esmeraldas created centralized settlements that attempted to fix populations and eliminate internecine warfare in what was termed allanamiento, or the “smoothing” of the land. “Civilizing” through “salva- tion” often became the first and crucial step toward bringing native people into servicio: a catchall term referring to tribute, mita, domestic service, or other labor obligations. Though the exact labor scheme imagined for the port at Bahía de San Mateo remained vague in the early years, a local model for the kind of exploitative system to be used already existed among the miser- ably treated balseros of the Guayas region and on the Island of Puná. 20 These raft transporters plied the caiman infested waters leading from Guayaquil to

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18 Miguel Cabello Balboa, “Report to the Crown,” in Rumazo, Documentos, vol. 4, p. 394. 19 Soon after Cabello’s expedition, a letter to the crown from two Quiteño conquistadores stated that

the very first benefit of conquering Esmeraldas was, “the bringing of many Indians into the service of God and into your royal service,” Letter from Diego de Arcos and Nuño Ruiz de Rojas to the Crown, AGI-Quito 07.

20 A first hand report of the balseros and their working conditions was recorded around 1570. It relates that the up-river journey to the highlands took a total of three days, during which the balseros are not allowed to sleep or rest along the way. The author points out that “some cruel Spaniards” don’t allow the rowers time to eat either, forcing them to take their meals while they row the raft upstream. The author, as if to mitigate the abuse, points out that a culture developed around the hard work of moving the balsas

the highlands. Similarly, Quito’s great hope was to conduct the business of inter-regional transportation via Esmeraldas’ native and maroon populations.

Cabello was not entirely unaware of the suspicions that the audiencia’s offer to Illescas brought into play. In one passage he projected the view that the other maroons may have had:

. . . How can you trust these Christians since you know their inclination to take everything for themselves? . . . Do you think, by chance, that those “dons” that they bring you, is nothing more than the fat on the hook to fish you? Forget about giving yourself to the enemy. . . . And, if not for yourself, do it for us. . . . Don’t pay us back by bringing our women and children to these bearded ones . . . you and your son-in-law would be punished as malefactors and your children as slaves and we never to be free. Don’t do this thing you mean to do, if you don’t want to end your life and ours in perpetual agony.21

When Illescas proved unable to create a settlement and obvious signs of warfare appeared on the coast, the Spaniards fled the area. Cabello’s mission failed; however, it spurred the Quiteños to continue to seek out ways to tap the human resources of the region and establish their port city.

After 1577, Spaniards and maroons went through four more periods of negotiation and interaction: 1583-1586, 1599-1602, 1604-1605, and 1615- 1617. These phases were not completely discontinuous; rather they repre- sented times of relatively intense interaction interspersed by years of limited contact. These four stages also provide exceptionally rich source materials in the form of letters, court records, and audiencia reports.

Between 1583 and 1587, the Spaniards attempted once more to pacify the Esmeraldas maroons militarily. Although Lima and Madrid still refused to grant the concession of conquest, the death of Viceroy Martín Enriquez pro- vided a window of opportunity for the sole sitting audiencia judge, Pedro Venegas de Cañaveral, to draw up a contract. It went to a local military man with knowledge of the coast, Diego López de Zúñiga. From Quito, he mounted a campaign with over one hundred Spanish soldiers and hundreds of native porters and guides.22 The outcome, like all previous military expe-

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upstream, “. . . with all this they always sing in their language and with much rejoicing.” Pilar Ponce Leiva, ed., Relaciones Historico-geograficas de la Audiencia de Quito (Quito: Abya-Yala, 1992) p. 62. On the Island of Puná, Don Diego Tomalá, a native cacique, provisioned ships utilizing the port of Guayaquil, greatly enriching himself in the process. See Adam Szaszdi, “D. Diego Tomalá, Cacique de la isla de la Puná” in Estudios sobre política indigenista Española en América (Valladolid, 1977).

21 Cabello de Balboa, Verdadera descripción, pp. 53-54. 22 The most extensive source on the López de Zúñiga expedition is contained in a single legajo: AGI-

Escribania 922b.

ditions, was disastrous. Of the Spanish soldiers, fourteen died of fever, over twenty mutinied, and López de Zúñiga himself returned with neither the gold he desired nor having established a fixed settlement. As with earlier encounters, the soldiers fruitlessly attempted to track the maroons. Master- fully, the fugitives repeatedly retreated from the Spanish advance and regrouped amidst the dense forests of Esmeraldas, which provided a formi- dable defense against Spanish swords and horses. The lesson of López de Zúñiga’s expedition stuck with the Quiteños: quick military subjugation was simply not possible. Moreover, the mission proved that common soldiers would only remain faithful to an expedition that generated immediate returns in labor or precious metals. Land itself had little value without sources of native labor to distribute among the captains and to perform the work of building towns.23

During the mission, Spanish soldiers also bore witness to the intense ethnic crossover that had been transpiring in Esmeraldas. Many observed the lack of physical differentiation between maroon offspring, called mulattos, and their native allies.24 The process of ethnogenesis was clearly felt among first generation Esmeraldeño mulattos. Their marriage into native matrilin- eal tribal structures hastened the adoption of native ritual, language, dress, and adornment.

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23 Venegas gave the reason for the expedition as: por el mucho bien/que se seguira de conquistrar y/ pacificar los yndios que ay en la/ dha provincia y allanar y traer/ de paz un negro que en la dha/ provin- cia a mucho tiempo que esta/ alçado: AGI-Escribania 922b.2.71r-72v. Pedro de San Martín, the ring- leader of the soldiers that mutinied had many witnesses that gave testimony like Manuel Vazquez who stated that: pedro de san martin persuadio/muchas vezes al governador y alos sol/dados que hiziesen sal- idas la tierra/adentro para que se procurasen/algunos naturales lo qual se hizo con/mucho cuydado myen- tras estuvieron/los soldados para ello y xamas pu/dieron a ver ningun natural: AGI-Escribania 922b.2.170r-173r.

24 The use of the term mulatto to describe people of African-native mixture is a matter of some con- tention is Latin American colonial studies. By the time that Quiteños began calling the people of Esmer- aldas “negros y mulatos” another term “zambo” or “zambaigos” was gaining use in Peru. For an excel- lent elaboration see Berta Ares Queija, “Mestizos, mulatos, zambaigos (Virreinato del Perú, siglo XVI)” in Negros, mulatos, zambaigos: derroteros africanos en los mundos ibéricos (Seville: Escuela de Estu- dios Hispano-Americanos, 2000). In Esmeraldas, however, “mulatos” remained in use, possibly as a reminder by authorities of the fugitive slave associations of the maroon communities. By the end of the 16th century, Quiteños reported that the descendants of the first fugitive Africans, intermarried with local native women could be considered “mulatos o zanbahigos.” However, subsequent documentation for the seventeenth century continued to use the term “mulato” to denote the maroon communities. I surmise that by the end of the sixteenth-century the term “los mulatos” and more specifically “ los mulatos de Esmeraldas” had become a term with incorporated features. They were not any mulatos, but rather a rec- ognized entity. Over the long-term the term, it seems, fell out of usage and by the nineteenth-century Stevenson would write: “The natives of Esmeraldas, Rio Verde, and Atacames, are all zambos, appar- ently a mixture of negroes and indians.” W. B. Stevenson Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (London: Hurst, Robinson and Co., 1825), vol. 2, p. 387.

Undoubtedly, the demographic shifts transpiring in Esmeraldas provided the maroons with a critical opportunity. Smaller chieftaincies could not police the territories controlled by the larger settlements and swaths of Indian land became available just decades after the Spanish arrival.25 The mulattos’ involvement in internecine wars and capture raids remained within the littoral region. According to Spanish observers, midland, or montaña native commu- nities were also well aware of the boundary lines of the mulatto territories.26

By the 1570s and 1580s the mulatto chiefdoms formed small, dispersed enclaves lining the Esmeraldas River. Evidence indicates that they kept hideaway camps and may have migrated seasonally, responding to the region’s extreme wet season.27 When López de Zúñiga came upon mulatto settlements facing the banks of the Guayllabamba River, he described small clusters of two or three houses lining the river strung lengthwise along its banks at short distances from one another. The maroons and their followers could easily access the dense interior forests here, thereby remaining inac- cessible to Spanish soldiers.28 While many of López’s soldiers had consid- erable experience in lowland conquests, during their initial landing they were unable to capture even one member of the mulatto clans.29

López’s difficulties with the maroons and his inability to locate a native workforce eliminated his chances of establishing a settlement on the coast, but his problems impacted the next attempt made by Rodrigo de Rivadeneyra, a Quiteño merchant, to establish a colony and locate sources of labor in Esmeraldas. Altering Spanish policy once more, Rivadeneyra engaged in a dialogue with the maroons through the intervention of a Trini- tarian missionary, Alonso de Espinosa. Although Espinosa initially appeared

CHARLES BEATTY MEDINA 123

25 Deboer notes this process was underway before the Spanish entered (Deboer, p. 193-194). Indeed, some lowland natives claimed provenance from the highlands either in the pre or post-conquest period. Cabello Balboa additionally mentioned reports of highland origins of lowland native communities (Cabello, Verdadera descripción, p.16).

26 Cabello, Verdadera descripción, p. 60. 27 Massive rainfall in Esmeraldas occurs during a longer wet-season (December through June) than

in the south of Ecuador (January through April). More importantly, each season dumps an average of 2000 millimeters (about 80 inches) compared to the Guayaquil area which receives only 200-500 mil- limeters (from 8 to 20 inches): Newson, Life and Death, p. 61.

28 A member of Cabello’s expedition, Juan de Caceres Patiño, described one of the mulatto interior settlements as lying near the hill country, possibly close to what is today called the Chindaul mountains. This region was within forty miles of the coast yet nearly impossible for Spanish soldiers to access: Cabello, Verdadera descripción, p. 46.

29 Numerous soldiers described the difficulties of the voyage downriver to the mulattos’ settlement. Pedro de Arévalo, one of the expedition captains, described being caught for six hours along a turbulent stretch of the Guayllabamba River. As the vanguard of the expedition, it’s probable that the mulattos detected Arévalo’s arrival well in advance. AGI-Escribania 922b, f. 95v-97v.

amenable to assisting colonial aims in Esmeraldas, he quickly became a staunch defender of the maroons. In 1585, he denounced the audiencia and Quiteño elite noting the multitude of failed conquests and the maroons’ desire for pacification.30 Rallying to their side, he brought about a critical turn of events as he proposed that the maroons possessed a legitimate right to reject Spanish conquest and were ideally suited to pacify the natives. Rather than viewing the mulattos and their African forebears as interlopers, Espinosa considered them the keys of the region, “la llave de la tierra.”31

Rivadeneyra’s strategy did not involve using the maroons as proxy con- querors in the same way as the audiencia project of 1577, but it did call for their assistance in helping locate native communities that could be brought under Spanish control, particularly the Campazes, a dispersed and resilient native population south of Bahía de San Mateo (see map). Although Rivadeneyra lavished the mulattos with gifts of clothing, knives, machetes, and other sundry goods, the response he received was uncooperative. Illescas declared for the first time that the maroons would challenge the Spanish col- onizers. Like some native chiefs, however, Illescas sought the crown’s help in stalling colonizer activities. Though the maroons first appeared willing to submit to Spanish rule under certain conditions, now they moved to resist subjugation. In 1586 Illescas wrote to the court stating, “I am fearful because your captains have always broken their word to me.”32 Illescas’ refusal to assist Rivadeneyra, and his insistence that the maroons were better qualified to pacify Esmeraldas’ native population than the Spaniards, spelled failure for the Quiteño merchant. At the same time it demonstrated that Spanish incur- sions would encounter stiff maroon resistance in the future.

Father Espinosa convinced the mulattos and native leaders to travel to Quito, speak directly to the audiencia members, and tell them of their desires for peace, while stipulating their refusal to render labor or tribute to the col- onizers. Angered by the mulattos’ brashness and Espinosa’s intervention, the audiencia refused the maroons’ request and brought charges against Father Espinosa, expelling him from the colony. In picaresque fashion, the rebel- lious friar escaped his captors while en route to Panama, plunging once more into the forests of Esmeraldas where he was never heard from again.33

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30 Letter from Fray Alonso de Espinosa to the Crown, in Rumazo, Documentos, vol. 4, p. 11. 31 Letter from Fray Alonso de Espinosa to the Crown, in Rumazo, Documentos, vol. 4, p. 10. 32 Letter from Alonso de Illescas, AGI-Escribania 922b, f. 192v-193v. 33 Ordinances, AGI-Quito 209L1, f73v-75v. This order specifically called for the audiencia to send

Espinosa to Spain with a note to warning them that the viceroy will be empowered to make further deci- sions on the matter of Esmeraldas’ colonization.

Ten years of inaction passed before the crown court would again commit its resources to pacifying Esmeraldas. It occurred near the end of the cen- tury, as if to provide Philip II (who had taken some interest in the matter) a gift on his deathbed. Between 1597 and 1599 Juan Barrio de Sepúlveda, an audiencia judge, succeeded in establishing a formal peace with the maroons. However, it came with significant costs to the Quiteños’ plan. Although the mulattos were going to pledge their loyalty, they were unwilling to give up control of the region and their alliances with its native population. From Barrio’s perspective, this was the only solution. In his report to the crown, he strongly condemned the formulation of any colonizing plan that might be seen as aggressive by the mulattos.34

The symbolic capstone of Barrio de Sepúlveda’s mission is the famous painting of the mulatto leaders that today hangs in Madrid’s Museo de América. It was produced in 1599 in Quito to celebrate the pacification of the mulattos. The audiencia finally learned that peace could be made only on maroon terms. They were freed from labor obligations, tribute, and provided with a Mercedarian friar at the crown’s expense. The arrangement seemed a favorable one until raids in 1605-1607 disrupted the relative peace of the pre- vious five years. Significantly, the raids responded not only to maroon desires to increase their numbers but demonstrated the intensity of their competition with Spanish encomenderos for control of native labor in the region.

THE RAIDS OF 1605-1607: ETHNOGENESIS, DEMOGRAPHIC SHIFT, AND LOWLAND COMPETITION

By 1600, when Spanish authorities succeeded in bringing the maroons to an amicable peace, they realized that the pacification of Esmeraldas involved many more individual communities besides the mulattos and their followers. Numerous groups of Campazes, Niguas, Cayapas, and Malabas were to be gradually pacified by Spanish authorities. As part of these efforts, inducements were made to settle lowland people in the montaña regions called Sigchos, as well as in the interstitial zone known as Yumbos, located somewhat closer to Quito (see map). The effects of these reducciones, or transplantings, of communities from the lowland regions and the competi- tion between different native groups played a role in the first recorded raids of mulattos on native settlements under Spanish control.

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34 “Order that it be committed to persons that know how to choose the settlements and port areas . . . and who love and are jealous of serving God and your majesty and the souls and universal good of these miserable Indians and mulattos. And that they know how to treat and care for them with love and Chris- tian charity and that they abhor all avarice and disordered greed and in everything procure their good and that of your majesty and his vassals. . .” AGI-Quito 9R3N21p004.

In 1605, two maroon incursions took place in the villages of Cotongo and Bolo, lying in the warm forest regions at the western rising slope of the Andes. The Spanish called this area las yungas calientes de los Sigchos. The term yungas referred to the region’s climate and location on the sloping edge of the Andes; Sigchos, on the other hand, denoted a specific territory south of Quito and west of Latacunga. These settlements were situated at a lower elevation (below 2000m) than the highland Sigchos de Angamarca (3300m). The 1605 raids occurred in close sequence to one another in the month pre- ceding November 7, 1605.35 The first written account by the Spanish gober- nador, Fernando de Castro, indicates the audiencia began its investigation by seeking to determine if they were in fact separate incidents or part of a single expedition.36 The court determined that they were in fact separate incidents. Don Alonso Garcia, the Indian governor of Cansacoto, a Yumbos province, was the first to denounce the occurrences. He described these settlements as outlying villages of his gobernación. They were also contiguous to Esmer- aldas and recently formed settlements of lowland natives.

Both raids involved traumatic encounters. Early accounts describe how a large contingent of mulattos Mangaches massacred twenty-six Indians in the village of Cotongo and took another fifty-six as captives. In a fit of unre- strained carnage, the mulatto warriors ran lances through their victims, a number were held down kicking and screaming as their feet were chopped off. One villager of Cotongo, Pedro Pinga, arrived at the scene returning from a hunting expedition for wild boar. He found the village devastated with the dead strewn about “difuntos, degollados, y asoladas,” (dead, decapitated, and destroyed).37 In another raid on the village of Bolo, Maria, the wife of cacique Don Francisco de Rojas, told how she concealed herself and then watched in horror as the mulattos forced her husband to dance for them before cutting off his feet and finally running him through with their lances “ ’til he died.”38

The next raid did not occur until nearly two years later in the village of Ninbo on April 25, 1607 and indicates that mulatto tactics were integrated

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35 The testimonies relating to the 1605-1607 raids are contained in the Jowdy-Duque de Infantado Microfilm Collection (Conde de Montesclaros Papers), Roll 2, libro 15, expedientes 6-7, Esmeraldas, 1605-1607, located at the DeGoyler Library, Southern Methodist University.

36 Salomon places this province within what would become the region of the Tsatchila (or Colorado) Indians. The groups residing in Cotongo and Bolo are somewhat of a mystery. Salomon proposes that Bolo may have been Bola Niguas. He also states that the name “Caravilas” is an enigma, but that it could denote a group of the “Colorado” Indians.

37 Testimony of Don Alonso Garcia, his version was told to him by an Amerindian named Pedro Pinga, Jowdy-Duque, f.1v.

38 Declaration of three Nigua Indians, Jowdy-Duque, f. 8v. For an examination of a similar case of violent execution see Kathryn McKnight, “Confronted Rituals.”

into coastal raiding practices. In this assault, over 200 Cayapas, northern neighbors of the mulattos, invaded a settlement of about eighty Indians that belonged to encomendero Pedro de Arévalo. As with the earlier mulatto raids, this attack was precise in its target and its methods. Ninbo, like Cotongo and Calavili, was located close to other frontier encomiendas, those of Francisco de Olmos, Doña Ana de Paz, and Francisco de Ulloa, yet it was the only village to be attacked. Secondly, Ninbo was a community of “res- cued” Amerindians from a lowland Esmeraldeño community called Mampi. Its inhabitants were counting on Spanish protection to fend off mulatto and Cayapa aggressions. Once again, the raids could be traced to Spanish attempts to migrate Indian labor, which altered the demographics of the province. In its brutality, the incursion copied the earlier one. Of the eighty villagers, twelve were decollated and a number were quartered. All the houses of the village were burned and the remaining villagers rounded up and taken to Don Felipe, the Cayapa chief.

Importantly, these terrifying scenes demonstrate the destructive capacities of the mulattos and other lowland raiders and highlight maroon strategies of warfare and ethnogenesis. These raids confirm Richard Price’s notion that maroons challenged white authority and demonstrated a “consciousness that refused to be limited by the whites’ conception or manipulation of it.”39

Notwithstanding Spanish efforts to appease the mulattos, namely through the ceremonies and concessions of 1599 that aimed to “reduce” the rebels and formalize their allegiance to the crown, the détente had only temporary effects.40 For the mulattos, Spanish encroachment, in the form of pacifying interstitial communities and “rescuing” groups from the lowlands, consti- tuted a breach of the arrangement. Both parties recognized that the raids occurred in what was the geographic and military contact zone. While the contestation of these borders had no legally recognized form, its de facto existence demonstrates that Spanish intrusions and the mulatto raids were acts of territorial demarcation. They differentiated the mulattos’ domain even though neither party explicitly acknowledged the territorial integrity of mulatto homelands. These interactions indicate that aggressions resulting from tensions between insular and expansive notions of the maroons’ com- munities had a great impact on the area. They also highlight the cross-pur- poses found in colonizer-maroon agreements. According to Warren Deboer, such boundary enforcements reached heightened proportions in Esmeraldas,

CHARLES BEATTY MEDINA 127

39 Richard Price, ed. Maroons Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 2.

40 Fray Hincapie, predicator to the mulattos, said as much, when he testified, “there is no need to spend any more on them” [for their loyalty], Jowdy-Duque, f 4r.

as small chieftaincies became the dominant social structure. Apparently chieftaincies had reason to monitor the activities of even barren borderlands:

In the chiefdom arena, borders are always potential centers, a perimeter of rivals. . . . Border maintenance, therefore, is always a concern of chiefly politics and includes a wide variety of stratagems: buffer zones that reinforce the mar- ginality of the frontier; nepotistic appointments and marriage alliances; sump- tuary goods, etiquettes, rituals, and ideologies that serve to strengthen pan-elite identity at the expense of local loyalties; and, as a resort, abject terrorism.41

Strategies of various types were adapted in maroon-native-Spanish rela- tions before 1605, in that year “abject terrorism” briefly became the pre- dominant form.

As noted, one reason for the attacks was Spanish encroachment into the Yumbo and Yungas regions up to and after 1600. Clerics, civil authorities, and an increasing number of mestizo and creole adventurers were pushing into areas around Esmeraldas.42 These interstitial zones, where steady Span- ish advance was making itself felt also comprised regions where lowland groups made competitive claims for dominance. This appeared clearly in the Cayapa raid made on Ninbo. Cayapa chiefs were careful to leave the sur- rounding villages untouched in recognition of their longer presence in the area. They also knew these villages were firmly under Spanish domain. The maroons also understood this, as revealed in a number of testimonies. Man- gaches and Illescas both claimed to be in search of Indians escaped from their parcialidades, the subdivisions of their chieftaincies.43

The method of raiding also merits analysis. Testifying that the mulattos had nearly 400 Indians under their control, Fray Hernando de Hincapie noted that increased subterfuge was used to keep these Indians concealed from the Mercedarians. Such covert maneuverings may have aided Indians eager to return to their communities. This had been the case with Pablillo, a Nigua Indian captured by mulattos in the 1570s.44 His escape highlights problems that occurred on a constant basis as the mulattos enlarged their workforce by capturing nearby Indians. These problems also point to the benefits of the dramatic destruction of Indian villages to deter future escapes. If captured Indians had no communities to return to, then the potential risk of their

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41 Deboer, Traces, p. 194. 42 Frank Salomon, Los Yumbos, Niguas y Tsatchila o “Colorados”: Durante la Colonia Española

(Quito: Abya-Yala, 1997), chapter 3. 43 Testimony of Maria Mangache (Jowdy-Duque, f.3r) Testimony of Father Hincapie (f. 5v). 44 Cabello, “Verdadera Descripción,” p. 64.

escape decreased. Similarly, killing their captured caciques in a brutal manner reinforced their separation from their settlements, given that caciques were a central node of village life and leadership. Eliminating them placed individuals who managed to flee in the difficult position of having to re- establish their villages and to recreate authority and cohesion. In sum, by denigrating and polluting the bodies of the caciques and the physical space of these communities, the mulattos hoped to sever their captives’ community affiliations. In turn, they formulated a structure to incorporate these prisoners into the mulatto chieftaincies that they were forming on the coast.

Fray Hincapie’s testimony provided the evidence for maroon social engi- neering when he revealed they followed a selective model of polygamous marriage that produced an ever-growing population of mulattos. He states that each mulatto had at least five or six Amerindian women, leaving few indigenous women for the native males of the community. In this way, according to Hincapie, “the indios join only with mulatas, and the mulatos join only with indias, and for this reason, all who are born here are mulatos.”45 If the physical annihilation of indigenous communities worked to ensure the severing of ties between captives and their past existence, the ethnogenetic process of producing an ever larger mixed-race progeny resulted in the survival and expansion of the ethnically “mulatto” cacicaz- gos on the Esmeraldas coast.

Frank Salomon proposes that at the core, the mulattos’ use of capture and raiding was a means towards economic gain, describing it as a combination of indigenous methods of warfare with European methods of labor exploita- tion.46 This explanation fills in part of the picture. Along with economic accumulation, the mulattos were creating a new ethnic state that combined numerous goals in their regionally based competition with neighboring rivals. The record indicates that maroon raids stemmed from these territorial contests and the expanding mulatto elite. From 1577, when the first contact was made with the Illescas and Arobes, to 1605, the chieftaincy family units of each group had grown substantially. Cabello noted that Alonso de Illescas ruled his community with the help of two sons, Sebastián and Antonio. The Arobe brothers Francisco and Juan Mangache led a smaller contingent at that time. By 1605 both of these ruling families had expanded. Although Alonso de Illescas died sometime after 1587, Alonso Sebastián de Illescas now ruled with a large group of siblings and sons, including Baltassar Anto- nio, Don Geronimo, Don Juan, and Don Juan Mangache (an Amerindian in-

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45 Hincapie, Jowdy-Duque, f. 4r. 46 Salomon, Yumbos, pp. 62, 72-73.

law, not the previously mentioned Arobe brother). In the Arobe clan were Francisco de Arobe, his sons Pedro and Domingo, along with Don Alonso, Don Manuel, Don Gonzalo and Amerindian “allies” like Don Francisco Pata, and his brother Juan Bautista. These caciques made up the chieftaincy core of mulatto clans. To gain status as well as political and economic power members of the core clan created their own parcialidades. According to Fray Tellez, the Arobes had a total of thirty-five, and the Illescas about thirteen or fourteen individuals who made up the ruling kin group.47

Tellez and Pedro de Arévalo were the first to describe the chieftaincies as parcialidades. Their report does not state how many Amerindians were in each parcialidad, but their organization was probably similar to their Cayapa neighbors, who were divided into groups of about 50 to 100. In each case the numbers given for the communities were noticeably larger than they had been in the reports of the 1580s. The Arobes were said to have 450 “Chris- tian Indians,” some of them native to the area, and others being forasteros. The Illescas were reported to have 700 “Christian Indians.” All of these were stated as Indios de padrón, meaning they had been baptized and placed on the baptismal roles by the friars. Perhaps most interesting, when considering the transference of old world Christian classifications, was the term Indios de moros, used to describe baptized, yet captive, Indians whom the maroons hid from the friars to prevent them from receiving religious sacraments.48

Given the Mercedarian’s desire to incite Spanish punishment and retribution in the aftermath of the raids, they probably over counted the mulattos’ num- bers to make a punitive expedition more appealing to Quiteños. Still, that the communities numbered in the hundreds considering the size of the leader- ship cohort indicates that raiding and alliances significantly augmented the mulattos’ effective numbers. Finally, the mulattos’ involvements in raids across geographic zones indicate that the competition over labor was responding to and creating significant demographic shifts between the low- land and midland regions.

In addition, these raids responded to the political and demographic prob- lem facing the third-generation maroons, namely their desire to expand the parcialidades for the growing mulatto elite. It was not a mistake, for exam- ple, that witnesses of the carnage used a variety of names to describe the attackers: mulattos Chinches, Quiximies, Mangaches, Illescas, and Arobes. While the newer appellations did not conform to the traditional lowland practice of naming groups after their leaders, it does indicate that the mulat-

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47 Testimony of Fray Tellez, Jowdy-Duque, f. 20v. 48 Report by Tellez and Arévalo, Jowdy-Duque, ff. 20v-22r.

tos were recognized under an increasing number of names, some of them referencing ethnicity or geographic locations. Salomon has noted that among lowland cultures, alliances tied mulatto communities to nearby indigenous groups for the common purpose of raiding and acquiring cap- tives. But an equally strong phenomenon was territorial competition among the lowland societies who were vying to dominate land and people. It was already apparent in Alonso de Illescas’ letter to the crown in 1586 when he offered to “pacify” his Campaz neighbors, and became even more important after 1590 as Spanish authorities increased their interventions among the native societies of Esmeraldas.

The documents produced in response to the raids of 1605 piece together earlier evidence that hinted at why the mulattos engaged in capturing natives. As noted by Salomon, there was undoubtedly a profit dimension to the mulatto chieftaincies. Indians described as de moros probably indicated the tensions between maroon leaders who chose to integrate these captured Indians into their communities while forcing them to perform agricultural labor in the lowlands, and Catholic missionaries, like Father Hincapie, who wished to Christianize the Indians, arrange them into cabezeras, and inte- grate them as tributaries to the interests of Spanish labor needs.49 In addition to economic incentives for capturing labor, integrating new members to the communities obviously benefited the mulattos’ effort to gain greater control over the region. As the process of ethnogenesis produced larger numbers of mulattos, the invigorated mulatto chieftaincies extended themselves geo- graphically and demographically, thus broadening their dominance.

At the same time, the maroons’ attempts to increase the number and size of their lowland chieftaincies encountered setbacks. Their communities were subject to the same forces that promoted dispersion among other low- land groups. In a telling letter from Fray Hincapie, he describes the death of Alonso Sebastián de Illescas only two years after the mulatto raids (1607),

CHARLES BEATTY MEDINA 131

49 According to the documents, the agricultural labor that was avidly desired involved producing sta- ples like corn, and probably included tubers as well as a variety of lowland fruits. That these goods could also be produced for a profit is well indicated by an entry found in a Hackke rudder of the late 17th cen- tury. The instructions regarding Bahía de San Mateo, the nearest inlet to the maroon communities makes clear both the dangers therein as well as the advantages that ships could gain in procuring needed supplies:

2 leagues up the river on the larboard shore is very good sweet water you will find Indian warriours here but they will not hurt a stranger, in this bay is good trees fit for ships masts & all sorts of pro- visions which is sold by the Mulato’s:[emphasis added] if com to this bay in necesity I do give you important advice viz’t not to jest with theire women nor debauch them, 2dly not to threaten them with armes nor otherwise but treat them with humility you may have what you please, you may rode where the anchor is set [sic]. (Haacke Rudder, (1685), John Carter Brown Library, Providence.)

and finding the maroon settlements around Bahía de San Mateo “despoblada y dividida” (depopulated and divided).50 “Policing borders,” a process nor- mally associated with keeping invaders out, apparently included keeping populations in specific locations as well.

COMPETITION AND CONVERGENCE: COLONIZER AND MULATTO AIMS IN ESMERALDAS

At the time of the montaña raids by the mulattos and Cayapas, Quiteños were exploring viable alternatives to a port at the mouth of the Esmeraldas River. The pacifications undertaken six years earlier by audiencia judge Juan Barrio de Sepúlveda proved critical to this effort. In completing the lowland pacifications, Barrio de Sepúlveda saw the importance of encouraging many of the coastal native groups to make peace with the colonial administration. While the mulattos remained the “key” to the coastland, Spanish subjuga- tion of other coastal chieftaincies, namely Cayapa, Malaba, and Barbacoas, would aid colonization by stabilizing the Esmeraldas coast politically. By 1607, Quiteños were more than ready to exploit the newfound peace in the region and moved to open a route along the Santiago River (see map). As in the 1580s, Quito’s merchant elite was once again at the center of efforts to establish the path and a new port settlement. The early concessions to open a route went to long established merchants of Quito, the Troya family. First the audiencia founded the new settlement, San Miguel de Ibarra (about 50 miles as the crow flies) north of Quito. This highland town would be at the head of a trail leading down through the midlands settlement of Lita and on to the mouth of the Santiago. The audiencia sweetened the deal by linking administrative positions in Ibarra with the concession to open the route to the coast. Thus Cristóbal de Troya, in 1607 gained the asiento, or contract, to open the Rio Santiago route through Lita and Cayapas along with the positions of corregidor, and justicia mayor of San Miguel de Ibarra.51

Before establishing his port town, Troya had to reconnoiter the new trail and establish a settlement on the coast. In a report sent in May of 1607, Troya recounted entering the region of Lita before proceeding on to Cayapa and Malaba territories. Importantly, Troya’s expedition required a company of twenty soldiers with the help of the mulattos. During Troya’s expedition, the mulattos appear in their first role as guides and auxiliaries of the Span-

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50 Letter from Padre Fray Hernando de Hincapié. Archivo Nacional Historico: Quito, Fondo Espe- cial, Caja 1.

51 “Report of the route and port to the South Sea by Cristóbal de Troya Pinque,” in Rumazo, Docu- mentos, vol. 4, pp. 40-53.

ish soldiers. Troya indicates that by his orders “Don Alonso” opened trails through areas where the pathways had become overgrown or impassable.52

In addition, a contingent of Illescas maroons took part in the expedition: “un negro de alonso ademe[as] con su tropa y otros criados. . . .”53

Troya’s expedition also furnishes us with the first glimpse of what was surely an ongoing Spanish practice of capturing labor from littoral villages. After reaching the Santiago river estuary, Troya began to coerce the local Cayapa populations into his newly intended settlement. The tactics used were far from the peaceable means implored by Barrio de Sepúlveda just a few years earlier. Skillfully utilizing his Spanish soldiers, Indian “ianoconas,” and the Illescas contingent, Troya captured over 340 Indians for his settlement. Troya graphically demonstrates the resistance of the Cayapas and coercive measure of his troops when they had to watch over the captured Indians at night—the time they were most likely to attempt an escape:

. . . that night we all stood guard, half of us in the canoes, half on land with torches lit until three in the morning. We made the Indians understand that we would kill any of them with our arquebus who attempted to escape. . . . At about three a.m. some began to break away. I saw them from the canoes that I had tied together and took off after them shooting my arquebus in the air, I gathered them up so that not even one escaped.54

This was the first Spanish expedition with documented mulatto participa- tion. The maroons’ role quickly took shape. Using their understanding of geography and local native societies, they served as valuable allies in selec- tively subjugating Indians of the region, without compromising their own independence and while maintaining their own unique set of privileges.

The project enjoyed only short-term success although Troya captured numerous Indians of the Malaba communities on successive expeditions to the region and managed to open a road to the new port town.55 This process reflects the transference of labor capture strategies that classified mainland South American Indians into categories that were similar to those crafted earlier by Spaniards in the Caribbean phase of domination. Neil Whitehead points to the prevalence of this process, mentioning that “caribes were ‘dis- covered’ on Tierra Firme as well as on the islands,” and that, “the colonial logic of directly enslaving those who could not be brought within the system

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52 Troya Pinque in Rumazo, Documentos, vol.4, p. 44. 53 Troya Pinque in Rumazo, Documentos, vol. 4, p. 47. 54 Troya Pinque in Rumazo, Documentos, vol. 4, p. 51. 55 Troya Pinque in Rumazo, Documentos, vol. 4, pp. 49-51.

of repartimiento—a forced distribution of native lands and peoples into encomiendas—was widely applied.”56

By 1611 the Malabas captured to work at the new port and surrounding native communities (expected to feed and maintain the Spaniards) revolted, killing settlers and destroying the Santiago settlement.57 The short-lived project marked yet another failed attempt by Quiteños to control lowland labor. Once more they turned to the mulattos for a solution.

In 1617, another partnership of Quiteños attempted to found a settlement over one hundred miles south of the Esmeraldas estuary at a location called the Bahía de Caraquez. This plan was conceived as a joint venture by Quiteño merchant Martín de Fuica and Mercedarian Fray Diego de Velasco. It marked a new strategy in Quiteño attempts to make the mulattos into an obedient “colonial tribe.”58 By formally tying religious and secular interests into a single project, Fuica and Velasco hoped to combine the establishment of a missionary settlement in the “best interest of the mulattos” with a work- ing port and overland trading route. The Caraquez project additionally looked to midland sources of labor to compliment the littoral native force. Increasing mention of “yndios cargueros” from “la provincia de sicho” [Sigcho], demonstrate the importance of the interstitial midland communi- ties in the establishment of tambos (rest stations) and portage.59

Between 1614 and 1617, Fray Velasco succeeded in moving various par- cialidades of the Illescas maroons to the Bahía de Caraquez. In the reports and instancias of Fuica and Velasco, the sub-contractual labor provided by the maroons was repeatedly referred to in clauses as the “mulattos and their Indian followers.” The establishment of wage provisions also appears fre- quently.60 This economic arrangement denoted a full transition for the maroons as they became workers as well as suppliers of labor.

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56 Neil Whitehead, “The Crisis and Transformations of Invaded Societies: The Caribbean (1492- 1580)” in The Cambridge History of the Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol. III, South America, Part 1, p. 868. See also Felix Bolaños Barbarie y canibalismo en la retórica colonial: los indios Pijaos de Fray Pedro Simón (Bogotá: CEREC, 1994).

57 Whitehead, “Crisis and Transformations,” p. 868. 58 The term colonial tribe is defined by Mary Helms as “societies that originated as recognizable

entities as a direct result of colonial policies.” Key aspects of such social entities involve their “middle- men” position often placing them in “pivotal” positions between Europeans and native societies and at times between European powers as well. See: Mary W. Helms, The Cultural Ecology of a Colonial Tribe, Ethnology VIII:1 (January 1969), pp. 76-84.

59 Petition from Martín de Fuica, Rumazo, Documentos, vol.4, p. 80. 60 See Report of Martín de Fuica to the Audiencia of Quito, January 26, 1615, Rumazo, Documen-

tos, Vol. 4, pp. 74-75. Auto dictado por el Pesidente de la Audiencia de Quito (12 April 1616) (Rumazo, Documentos, vol.4, pp. 99-101).

By this point, the methods used to acquire labor and the categories of laborers used among Esmeraldas’s lowlands natives began to resemble the pattern established for the Andean highlands. For instance, reports from 1600 to 1617 describe a new type of lowland native used as a principle labor force among the mulattos. These were called indios gandules. Like highland forasteros, indios gandules, did not appear as integrated members of a par- ticular parcialidad, nor were they earmarked as the people of a particular mulatto chief. This loose labor force, derived in all likelihood through cap- tive raids and other resettlement practices, gave the mulattos a method to accede to Spanish demands for labor without depleting their own mixed- ethnic chiefdoms.

Indios gandules were not the only type of labor projected for use on the Fuica-Velasco project, captive raiding under the guise of “pacifications” were also projected. Such raids received legitimation within the needs of the port project undertaken by Velasco. His “Memorial de los mulattos. . .” pro- posed to launch mulatto expeditions to congregate natives who had deserted areas near the Bahía de Caraquez in order to escape Spanish domination: “. . . towards the Daule river more than 250 Indians who once lived in Coaque and the Cape of Passao . . . should be reduced to the holy Catholic faith…the mulattos should go to where they are hidden and pull them out which will be a great service to God and your majesty.”61

With official sanctions the rebel community finally made a successful transition to what might be considered a colonial tribe. The critical shift occurred within the third-generation mulatto ruling cadre. No longer strongly tied to the issues and conditions of slave resistance, and properly “naturalized” within the defined and accepted categories of native lordship, the mulattos became something other than fugitive rebel Africans by the 1610s. They became independent agents to the process of colonization. Such transformations, far from demeaning the basis or practices of maroonage and ethnic intermingling, set the foundations for lasting social entities which in the case of Esmeraldas (and numerous others) outlasted the colonial period and survived well into the 19th century.62

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61 Petition of the mulattoes Juan, Baltasar, and Jerónimo de Illescas, Rumazo, Documentos, vol. 4, p. 112.

62 W. B. Stevenson, Historical and Descriptive Narrative, vol. 2, chap. XIII.

CONCLUSION: CAPTIVE LABOR, LEGITIMATION, AND AUTONOMY AMONG THE ESMERALDAS MAROONS

The Esmeraldas maroons’ history during the long half-century from 1563 to 1617 demonstrates their engagement in a far more complex process than resistance to enslavement might imply. One part of this history is the unique mestizaje that occurred between the fugitive African slaves, their descen- dants, and the indomitable native population of Esmeraldas. Colonial authority’s engagement with this emergent new ethnic group also shows the incipient creation of caste classifications that reached its full articulation in the mid 17th century.

In addition, these societies demonstrate that African resistance was often intertwined with the aggressive carving out of space that maroons had to create to ensure success and survival in the New World. Importantly, success for the Esmeraldas’ maroons depended on playing an interstitial role. On the one hand, their marginal position in the Spanish colonial power scheme brought about identification and alliance with lowland Amerindians. At the same time, their fight for survival galvanized them to dominate lowland natives and engage in raids against more distant native villages in direct competition with Spanish encomenderos. Finally, they had to simultane- ously compete and cooperate with Spanish authorities and colonizers. This multifaceted game of survival for the African fugitives reveals the complex- ity of resistance in sixteenth-century Quito and demonstrates the degree to which marronage on the local scale influenced the larger dynamics of change in the Atlantic World.

Maroons in other places: the Caribbean, Mexico, and Panama, established that fugitives could become a painful thorn in the side of the colonial regime. But they could also play pivotal roles in colonial development and intra-European rivalries. While the threat of alliances with foreign competi- tors certainly helped push authorities into negotiating with maroons, the principal reason behind Quito’s offers to the Esmeraldeños, however, had more immediate and progressive ends. It was not so much the threat of mulatto aggression or a particular desire to establish peace with the rebels that motivated their engagement with the fugitives. Rather, it was the per- ception of the benefits they might accrue from a maroon-Spanish alliance that loomed paramount.

University of Toledo CHARLES BEATTY MEDINA Toledo, Ohio

136 CAUGHT BETWEEN RIVALS