Núñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, Cautiverio feliz (Chile, 1673)
A Spanish captain taken by the Mapuche in 1629 and released alive later wrote the book arguing that his captors had treated him better than his countrymen treated them. It is an officer's brief against the war he served in: unjust because greed is its object, endless because slavery is its instrument. The assembly that deliberated over his life is described from inside, with its procedure and vocabulary. Written 1673, printed for the first time in 1863.
Why this wins its question: In English the book is usually a one-line curiosity — "a captivity narrative in which a Spaniard praises his Mapuche captors" — and where it is discussed the discussion is literary, about the pastoral or the picaresque. What almost never survives the summary is the argument the book was written to make, which is a legal and political one: that the Arauco war is unjust because greed is its object, that enslavement is the instrument that makes it endless, and that governors enslaved Indians who had submitted "debajo de la real palabra". This object gives that argument in the author's Spanish, with the page each passage was read on; adds the elder's catalogue of grievances and the indigenous account of the war's origin; keeps on the record that the same book describes caciques bidding to buy the author in order to kill him; and states exactly how far a reconstruction written forty-four years after the fact, printed two centuries later, can be trusted.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The book was written by a serving officer and printed two centuries after he wrote it. Its title page reads "COLECCION DE HISTORIADORES DE CHILE Y DOCUMENTOS RELATIVOS A LA HISTORIA NACIONAL. TOMO III. CAUTIVERIO FELIZ, Y RAZON DE LAS GUERRAS DILATADAS DE CHILE, POR DON FRANCISCO NUÑEZ DE PINEDA Y BASCUÑAN", issued at Santiago by the Imprenta del Ferrocarril in 1863. The text read here is therefore a nineteenth-century Chilean edition of a seventeenth-century Chilean manuscript, and the copy this object was read from is the Google scan of that printing. (Read at PP7.)
Its central argument is that the war is unjust, and it says so in the plainest terms an officer of that army could use. Reasoning that war can have no proper object but "la conservacion de la paz y de la justicia, para vivir sin molestia y sin congoja ni opresion tirana, como lo advirtió Ciceron", the author concludes: "si la guerra de Chille no se encamina a que vivan en paz, en razon y en justicia sus habitadores, sin duda será injusta la que se hace; porque el principal objeto y blanco a que van enderezados los superiores y ministros, es a la cudicia avara". He then applies Ezekiel's rapacious wolves to "algunos gobernadores de Chille". (Read at PA91.)
The specific charge is enslavement of Indians who had already submitted, and it is made against Spanish governors by name of office. Such governors, he writes, have not contented themselves with destroying the war frontiers and "ejecutando insolencias y maldades en los reducidos indios, haciéndolos esclavos debajo de la real palabra, habiéndolos admitido por amigos, sobre seguro haberlos maloqueado, cautivado y degollado várias veces" — enslaving under the royal word people they had received as friends, raiding, capturing and killing them "sobre seguro". The same passage charges them with stripping encomiendas from some to give to others, laying unaccustomed levies under pretext of the king's service, and taking men's estates to send procurators to Spain on private business. (Read at PA91.)
He draws the causal conclusion explicitly: slavery is what makes the war permanent. What peace, he asks, can these Indians give if every day they experience "las traiciones y engañosos tratos que tengo referidos"? The greedy princes and covetous ministers "no buscan la paz ni la quietud del reino", being instruments of the prince of discords, "tomando por instrumento la esclavitud de esta desdichada nacion" — from which he asks how the war can be anything but "perpétua y inacabable", and how Chile is not to be consumed and made an end of. The remedy he asks for is not more force but "legales ejecutores de las órdenes y mandatos de su Real Majestad, que con cristianos medios soliciten la paz". (Read at PA92.)
The book preserves an account of Spanish rule placed in the mouth of a named Mapuche elder. Questioned by the captive, an old cacique answers with a catalogue: the rigour with which tribute was collected and those who failed each month punished; men left to die on campaign "como bestias, sin hacer caso de ellos mas que de un perro, sin dejarles oir misa ni confesarse"; Spanish women who kept Mapuche wives and daughters working and watching all night "para sus tratos y granjerías", some so cruel that they mutilated their servants, "cortándoles las narices y las orejas"; and Spaniards "tan cudiciosos y tiranos, que ocultamente hurtaban los muchachos y chinas de las rancherías y los iban a vender al puerto de Valdivia por esclavos". The author names his informants — much of it, he says, "supe por los informes de aquellos ancianos caciques, y entre ellos el mas viejo llamado Aremcheu, que me pareció indio de mucha razon y ajustado a la verdad". (Read at PA252.)
It also preserves an indigenous causal account of the war's origin. In chapter XIX, "En que refiere el cacique la muerte del gobernador Valdivia", the elder attributes the rising to the first governor's exactions: Valdivia "tenia grande opinion de cudicioso y avariento", kept for himself five or six of the most opulent regües in the distributions he made, and therefore "cargó la mano en los tributos, que fueron intolerables"; the parcialidades of Arauco, Tucapel, Lebo and as far as Purén were kept continually taking out gold. The Spaniards then began "a no tratarnos como de ántes, trocando el nombre que a los principios nos dieron de vasallos del Rei, en el de miserables esclavos y aun peores", at which the Araucanians "dieron principio a sacudir el yugo de su servidumbre y a querer restaurar lo que de ántes era suyo, para gozar de su antigua libertad que es amable". (Read at PA253.)
The counterpoint is inside the book and is not softened: his captors deliberated about killing him. At an "extraordinario parlamento" convened on a deserted road, the caciques Antegueno, Lincopichun and Nailican offered his master Maulicán horses, ovejas de la tierra, collars of stones "que ellos tienen por preciosas, como nosotros los diamantes", a Spanish captive and a daughter in marriage, expressly "a venir mancomunados a comprarte este capitan que llevas" — the speaker adding that with such payments "se pueden comprar entre nosotros mas de diez españoles". Their stated purpose was to enlarge their names and fix their ancient insignia "con la sangre de opinados españoles", and to drive the Spaniards from their lands; they reckon that in two recent entradas more than 150 Spaniards were killed or captured and more than thirty estancias burned. His master refused every offer, which is why the author lived to write. (Read at PA41, PA92.)
The witness is an interested one and the reader should discount accordingly. Núñez de Pineda was a Spanish officer and the son of a Chilean field-master, writing in 1673 about a captivity of 1629 — some forty-four years later — in a book that argues a policy and also his own merit. The long speeches he gives to caciques are reconstructions, and he says himself that much of the material came second-hand from aged informants. The text was not printed until 1863, from a manuscript copy rather than his autograph, so its spelling and wording are the editor's transcription. What the book is good evidence for is what a Spanish frontier officer was willing to argue in writing; it is weaker evidence for the words any particular Mapuche actually spoke.