Andres Perez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos de nuestra santa fee (Madrid, 1645)
The Jesuit provincial's history of the missions of Sinaloa and Sonora, printed at Madrid in 1645. Inside a triumphalist frame it carries field observations of a kind rarely met that early: that the languages of the region share their radical words with Mexican, that peoples came from the north across a narrow arm of sea, that unwritten languages keep uniform rules, and that by 1645 the Indians of Cinaloa were carrying their harvests on horses bought from the Spaniards.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of Perez de Ribas quote him for martyrdoms and for the phrase "gentes las mas barbaras", and the 1645 sheets themselves are rarely opened outside specialist literature on the northwest missions. This object opens them and gives page by page what the book actually contains: the method of asking the oldest men where they came from and being answered, every time, from the north; the observation that the many languages of Cinaloa share their radical words with Mexican and that their Artes differ while many precepts agree; the passage of firm land or the narrow arm of sea by which men and animals could have crossed; the name Yoris that the peoples of the province gave the Spaniards; the report that missionaries learned two and three languages with no Arte, Bocabulario or Calepino, and the judgement that these supposedly barbarous languages keep uniform and invariable rules and are very elegant; the chapter heading that asks whether these peoples had formal idolatry or none at all, and the answer that many had no notion of a deity or of providence; and the sentence recording that they now carried their harvests on horses bought from the Spaniards. It also prints the frame and the cost in the author's own words - Babel and the demon as the explanation of linguistic diversity, and a flood read as God teaching idle people to work, with Egypt as the precedent - because an object that quoted only the observations would be advocacy rather than evidence.
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 volume read here is the 1645 first edition and its title page states what the book is: "HISTORIA DE LOS TRIVMPHOS DE NVESTRA SANTA FEE ENTRE GENTES LAS MAS BARBARAS, y fieras del nueuo Orbe: conseguidos por los Soldados de la Milicia de la Compañia de IESVS en las Missiones de la Prouincia de Nueua-España", promising also to relate "las costvmbres, ritos, y supersticiones que usauan estas Gentes: sus puestos, y temples: las vitorias que de algunas dellas alcançaron con las armas los Catolicos Españoles, quando les obligaron a tomarlas". It is dedicated to Felipe IV, "escrita por el Padre Andres Perez de Ribas, Prouincial en la Nueua España, natural de Cordoua", and printed "En Madrid. Por Aloso de Paredes, junto a los Estudios de la Copañia", 1645, "con privilegio".
The book's method on origins is stated as inquiry rather than assertion. The author says that with particular care and not a few times he made inquiry among the oldest and most understanding of these Indians, asking where they had come out from and when they or their forebears had settled the places they now held; that all with one voice always answered they had come out from the part of the North, abandoning some places they had held on that side because other nations had dispossessed them; and that in the reports he made on this matter he always found traces that all the nations settling in peace in new reductions had come out of the North.
The most striking observation in the book is comparative and linguistic, and it is offered as evidence rather than as authority. Learning some of their languages, he says, he noted and observed that in almost all of them - which are many and various - words are found, principally those they call radicals, which either are of the Mexican language or derive from it and retain many of its syllables, of which he could make a very long catalogue here. From this he infers two things: that almost all these nations communicated in their places and languages with the Mexican, and that although their Artes and Grammars are different, in many of their precepts they agree.
The second inference from the same page is a peopling route. All these nations, with the Mexican, came out to settle this new world from the side of the North, and found on this part a passage of firm land and continent with America - although it has not been known until now - or else this land is divided from that of the ancient Orb only by some narrow arm of sea, by which men as well as beasts and animals found in this new world could easily have passed; and he adds that God may have reserved this passage to be made manifest at the time his providence knows. This object does not assess the statement against later scholarship on the peopling of the Americas or on language families, because no linguistic or archaeological source was opened for it here.
The same page records what the peoples of Cinaloa called the Spaniards, and what the word meant. In the most common languages of the province they called them Yoris, or Doris, a name and word which, although it means the same as valientes, they also give to fierce beasts such as the lion and the tiger and others seldom seen; the author reads it as given both for that reason and because these Spaniards had come from the East, from where they had never seen another nation come.
The frame around those observations is theological, and it belongs on the record next to them. On the same pages the variety and confusion of the region's languages is explained as punishment for the sins of those who tried to raise the tower of confusion against God, and the demon is called the head and prince of confusion and division who has not stopped making divisions of peoples and tongues on earth in order to make the preaching of the Gospel more difficult. The author's explanatory system is not the one his own field observations would later be used to support.
The book also records how the languages were learned and what the learner thought of them. Many of the religious, he says, had to learn two and three distinct barbarous languages "sin libros, sin papeles, sin Arte, Bocabularios, ni Calepinos"; the number of languages is almost infinite; many pueblos share one language, but it also happens that within one and the same pueblo the languages of its barrios are different. And then the judgement that undercuts his own adjective: although these languages are barbarous, it is a thing to admire that they observe their rules, their formation of tenses and cases, their derivations of nouns and the other rules of Artes, and are very elegant languages, and that it is not without difficulty to understand how each of these nations, when it separated a language distinct from the rest, could so uniformly agree in forming so great a number of words and so many uniform and invariable rules.
On religion the book reports a negative finding rather than the idolatry its readers expected. Chapter V of Libro I is headed "En que se trata si se hallaua Idolatria formal en estas gentes, o si eran Atheistas: tambien de sus hechizos, y supersticiones, y sermones celebres que usan". Having been very attentive for the years he spent among them to ascertain what happened in this matter, he says that although in some of these peoples it cannot be denied there were traces of formal idolatry, others had no knowledge of God nor of any deity even a false one, nor explicit adoration of a lord holding dominion in the world; they did not understand there was providence of a Creator and Governor from whom to expect rewards for good works or punishment for bad in another life, nor did they use communal divine cult. What was found in them reduced to superstitions or sorceries taught by the demons to particular persons, and those persons were ordinarily the curanderos, the people among them most vicious and feared of all.
A single sentence on the same page dates the arrival of the horse in the daily economy of these peoples. Describing the loads an Indian would carry three, four and more leagues, and the callus as thick as a walnut it raised on the shoulder, the author adds that they now use less of this kind of carriage, having many horses which they buy from the Spaniards, and that they serve them both for travelling on and for carrying the fruits they harvest or trade in distant parts. The purchase, not the gift or the raid, is what the sentence says.
The cost of the mission is in the book in the author's own voice, and it is not softened here. Narrating a flood that destroyed newly built churches at the Guaçaue pueblos and drove the Indians to shelter in the trees, he writes that God may have intended by this event that the Indians should be made to work and come out of idleness, since it is known in all the republics of the world that work is of great utility and profit to men and idleness the cause of infinite harms; and that God did the same with his ancient people, delivering them at times, for punishment and remedy of their licentious idleness, to nations that subjected them and made them work, as happened in Egypt. On the same page he records that Indians swam a drowning priest out of a sacristy, and that others fled to the hills - as he puts it, more to seek liberty of conscience than food.
What this object rests on and what it does not. It rests on ten pages of a full-view digitisation of the 1645 sheets, read as page images: the title page, four pages of Libro I, one of Libro II and four of Libro V; the volume runs to more than seven hundred and sixty numbered pages and the rest was not read. The author is the Jesuit provincial of New Spain writing the history of his own order's missions for the King, so every observation quoted here was set down to justify and celebrate an enterprise, and the ethnographic value of the book and its purpose are the same object. Nothing here rests on a modern edition or translation, none of which was opened.