Andres Perez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos de nuestra santa fee (Madrid, 1645)
The Jesuit provincial's folio on the missions of Sinaloa and Sonora, printed at Madrid in 1645, is the fullest seventeenth-century description of the peoples of the Mexican northwest. It admires languages it calls barbarous for keeping invariable rules, then says plainly that speaking them quiets, represses, wins and subjects. It prints an epidemic of smallpox and measles as providence, a peace sealed with Yaqui children held as hostages, and a defence of the silver mines.
Why this wins its question: English-language treatments of Perez de Ribas run through the 1999 Reff translation or cite the book as a bibliographic date behind a general account of the Sinaloa missions; the Spanish folio itself is usually summarised rather than quoted. This object goes to the sheets of the 1645 Madrid printing and gives what eight specific pages say, in the author's words: that his missionaries learned two and three languages with no book, grammar or dictionary and found it admirable that languages they called barbarous kept invariable rules of tense, case and derivation; that in the next column he states speaking those languages quiets, represses, wins and subjects; the mesquite pods that were to them what chocolate was to the Spaniards and the mescal roasted in a covered pit; the passage where he sets their absence of theft, perjury and bloodshed against the most political republics of the world; the smallpox and measles epidemic described down to the flies and the unburied, and read on the same page as God hastening the survivors to the Gospel; the Yaqui peace sealed by handing children to a mission school as hostages; and the mining argument with its "como se deue suponer" left standing. It also says which pages were opened and that the witness is the Society's own provincial, so a reader can weigh the source rather than inherit a verdict on it.
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 first edition, and its title page carries the book's own summary of what it contains: "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 Compania de IESVS en las Missiones de la Prouincia de Nueua-Espana", written by "EL PADRE ANDRES PEREZ DE RIBAS, Prouincial en la Nueua-Espana, natural de Cordoua", dedicated to Philip IV, "Ano 1645", "CON PRIVILEGIO. En Madrid. Por Alonso de Paredes, junto a los Estudios de la Compania". The same title page promises the customs, rites and superstitions of these peoples, their posts and climates, and - in the same sentence as the achievement - "las vitorias que de algunas dellas alcancaron con las armas los Catolicos Espanoles, quando les obligaron a tomarlas", together with the deaths of twenty religious of the Society killed by various nations.
The book's linguistic chapter is the reason philologists still open it. On page 21 the author records that his men must learn two and three distinct languages "sin libros, sin papeles, sin Arte, Bocabularios, ni Calepinos", and then makes an observation that cuts against his own vocabulary: although these languages are barbarous, "es cosa que admira el ver, que siendolo, obseruen sus reglas, su formacion de tiempos, y casos; sus deriuaciones de nombres, y las demas reglas de Artes, y lenguas muy elegantes." He adds the puzzle he cannot solve - how each nation, having separated off a distinct speech, could agree so uniformly in forming as many words as a language needs and as many uniform and invariable rules as concur in a grammar, without those who introduced them disagreeing.
The same chapter states the purpose of that language work without any softening, and the statement belongs next to the praise. On page 22 the author writes that there is no more powerful means for winning these nations "y sujetarlas, y tener con ellas la grande autoridad que ha menester el ministerio Euangelico" than to speak to them in their own tongue; that this is where the minister teaches tanquam potestatem habens; and that speaking to them in their language "los sosiega, y reprime, capta beneuolencia, gana, y sujeta." He closes the chapter by glossing the scriptural promise Serpentes tollent as "sujetaran Serpientes, quales eran estas gentes." A missionary linguistics that admires the grammar and names the subjection in the same three pages is a better witness than either half quoted alone.
Page 22 also records what the work produced. The author says his colleagues not only overcame the immense labour of learning so many languages but made them easier for those who came after, "reduciendolas a arte, y metodo, para que las puedan aprender", and that they already have written in them some treatises of mysteries and Christian customs. That sentence is the general form of the printed grammars and catechisms of the northwest, of which the Arte de la lengua cahita is the one that reached a press.
Book I is a working description of subsistence in an arid country, and it is specific enough to be used as evidence. On page 6 maize is "el maiz que en Espana llaman, trigo de las Indias", given with such increase that a fanega sown commonly yields a hundred and more; squashes are sown among the maize and cut into tasajos dried in the sun to last much of the year; the frijol is a seed like the Castilian bean and sweeter; the pods of the mesquite are ground and drunk in water and, being somewhat sweet, "son para ellos lo que el chocolate a los Espanoles"; the mescal plant is cut at its trunk, roasted between fire-heated stones in a pit covered with branches and earth, and eaten like preserve; the nopal bears tunas "que en Castilla llaman higos de las Indias", which the hills produce of themselves; and pitahayas follow. Houses are of poles interwoven with vejucos and daubed with clay, or of petates over hooped poles.
The description of crafts on page 12 is equally concrete and equally dismissive. The women span and wove cotton and wild fibres such as Castilian hemp or pita, "no en telares, que aun esse arte no alcancaron; sino con traca trabajosa, hincando vnas estacas en el suelo, de donde tirauan la tela"; deerskins were dressed for skirts and worked with red ochre; and of these nations the author writes that they "no supieron genero de letras, pintura, ni arte", their agriculture reaching only to the sown plots and their tools being broad wooden blades.
Having listed what he calls their barbarous customs and vices, the same page turns the comparison round, and the passage is the strongest counterweight the book supplies to its own title. He says he must also write of the vices these peoples lack, blind as they are, which are found often enough among "gentes, Reinos, y Republicas muy politicas y sabias del mundo", and among those that enjoy the Evangelical Law: what people, however political, escapes thefts and robberies; what republic or city is there where false oaths and even blasphemies, illicit and unjust dealings are not heard; where are brawls and quarrels not seen, to the shedding of blood and even to the taking of life among men of one republic and one blood and family. Of all this, he writes, little or nothing was found among these peoples, but concord and peace among those who held themselves of one nation, without deceits, frauds or thefts.
Book II prints an epidemic in clinical detail and then reads it as providence, on the same page. Page 46 describes "vna cruel enfermedad, que aunque de viruelas, y sarampion; pero tan contagiosa, y pestilencial, que a montones lleuaua a la muerte a los Indios", houses full of the sick with no one left in them to bring relief or food, bodies flayed with sores giving off a pestilential smell, flies settling on the fallen and leaving their seed so that worms bred in them and were thrown up through mouth and nostrils, and people saying that in the hills the living were leaving the dead unburied, too tired to bury them - the towns, he writes, were great hospitals of the sick. The same page opens by calling the disease one of two notable things by which "parece iva Dios auisando, y apresurando los animos de aquellas gentes, a que recibiessen la doctrina del Euangelio", the second being a terrifying earthquake; and it records more than three hundred souls baptised in extremis in the nation of Guacaue, most of whom died.
The Yaqui peace, the best-known episode in the book, is told with its price in the same paragraph. On page 299 two Yaqui caciques ask a term of twenty-six days to bring back their nation's final answer and the Spanish captain grants them ten more; the Yaqui women who had travelled for the peace were sent back dressed in the manner of the Mexican women, with huipiles and skirts of bright colours and featherwork, "cosa tan nueua, y nunca vista entre ellos"; and to show that they meant the peace and wished to receive the doctrine, the caciques "determinaron lleuar consigo vn buen numero de muchachos hijos suyos, para que siruiessen de rehenes de la paz, y se quedassen en poder de los Padres en el Seminario, y escuela, que ay en nuestro Colegio, de ninos de otras varias Naciones." The school and the hostage are the same institution in the sentence that describes it.
Book X states the economic case for the northern missions in the author's own defensive voice, and the hedge is visible in the prose. On page 636 he argues that no wrong is done to the Indians by the silver mines, "pues ellos no se aprouechauan destas minas; ni sabian, ni tenian Arte para labrarlas, ni las buscauan", and that before the Spaniards worked them the Indians, "siendo (como se deue suponer) bien tratados", gained clothing and "vida politica de hombres, y no fieras del campo" and found protection against enemy nations; that if these peoples remained in their gentility no constant loyalty could be expected of them; and that the principal silver camps of New Spain, and almost all of the kingdom's, lie to the north among barbarous nations, few and poor metals having been found to the south. He adds a figure: the marked bar silver of San Luis Potosi is worth fourteen pesos and more the mark because of the gold mixed in it, where the royal rate for other mines is eight pesos six reales.
What this object rests on, and what it does not. The 1645 Madrid folio was read directly as page scans of a full-view digitisation; the pages opened were the title page and pages 6, 12, 21, 22, 46, 299 and 636, and nothing here is drawn from a summary of the book. The witness is the provincial of the Society writing an apologia for its missions, dedicated to the king who paid for them; his casualty figures, conversion counts and readings of providence are a party's account and are not checked here against archival, archaeological or indigenous sources. The counterweights quoted above are the ones the book supplies against itself, not an external critique, and no claim in this object should be read as a demographic or ethnographic finding independent of him.