Plants of Castile in Peru: what Garcilaso dated, priced and counted the cost of
Libro nono of the Comentarios Reales is a dated inventory of the Old World crops that entered Peru, written by a man who was in Cuzco while it happened: wheat carried by Maria de Escobar and shared out thirty grains at a time, a crown prize of two silver bars for the first wine or oil raised in any Spanish town, the three olive cuttings of 1560 guarded by a hundred enslaved men and thirty dogs, and the weeds that erased a valley's name.
Why this wins its question: Ask who brought wheat, the vine or the olive to South America and the usual answer is a sentence with no date, no price and no cost - or a list of crops with arrows on a map. This object gives the chapters where the claims actually come from, with their folio numbers, and it keeps four things the popular accounts drop. It names Maria de Escobar and prints the rationing that followed her half almud of seed, twenty to thirty grains a household for three years. It prints the crown bounty - two silver bars of three hundred ducats, half a cahiz of wheat, four arrobas of wine or oil - which shows the transfer as a policy with an incentive attached rather than as drift. It sets the hundred enslaved guards and thirty dogs of Ribera's olive grove in the same paragraph as the three surviving cuttings, because that is where the source puts them. And it ends on the author's own account of turnips and mint defeating every effort to root them out and erasing the name of a valley, which is the ecological cost stated by the man making the case for the benefit. Emphasis by accumulation: the achievement, the incentive, the labour and the damage, each with its folio.
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 chapters have a stated purpose and it is not a boast. Opening cap. XVI of libro nono, on folio 323, Garcilaso writes that because it will please those now living and those to come to know the things that were not in Peru before the Spaniards won it, he thought to make a chapter of them apart, "para que se vea, y considere con quantas cosas menos y (al parecer) quan necesarias a la Vida Humana, se pasavan aquellas Gentes, y vivian mui contentos sin ellos" - so the inventory is introduced with the concession that the people who lacked all of it lived very contented without it. The same page lists the absences: no horses or mares, no cows or oxen to break the ground, no camels, asses or mules for carriage, no sheep of Spain, no goats or pigs, no hunting dogs; and no wheat, barley, wine, oil, fruits or garden vegetables of Spain.
Wheat has a name attached to it, and it is a woman's. Cap. XXIV, folio 332, says the first who took wheat to "mi Patria" was a noble lady called Maria de Escobar, married to a gentleman named Diego de Chaves, both natives of Trujillo, and that she took it to the city of Rimac - Lima. Garcilaso says he knew her, and complains in the same breath that she went uncommemorated: "Por otro tanto adoraron los Gentiles, a Ceres, por Diosa, y desta Matrona no hicieron cuenta los de mi Tierra". He does not know the year, and says so - "que Ano fuese, no lo se".
The distribution is the part worth having, because it is a rationing scheme rather than a sowing. The seed she brought did not reach half an almud, so it was kept and multiplied for three years without any wheat bread being made, and in those first three years the seed was shared out "a veinte, y a treinta granos por vecino" - twenty or thirty grains a household - and even then to the closest friends, "para que gocasen todos de la nueva Mies". Four years after the conquest of Peru the whole wheat stock of a Spanish city was being handed round by the grain.
What she was paid for it says what the reward system was made of. For this benefit, and for her husband's services as one of the first conquistadors, the same page records that she was given at Lima "un buen repartimiento de Indios, que perescio con la muerte de ellos" - a grant of people, which lapsed when the people in it died. The sentence is the object's plainest piece of evidence about the demographic collapse, and it is dropped in as an incidental clause by a writer defending the grant.
Barley has no name attached to it, and Garcilaso says why rather than inventing one: "la Cevada no se sabe quien la llevo, creese, que algun grano della fue entre el Trigo, por que por mucho que aparten estas dos Semillas, nunca se apartan del todo". A staple crop arrived in the Andes as an impurity in another crop's seed.
The vine is dated and its variety explained. Cap. XXV, folio 333, gives the honour of the plant to Francisco de Caravantes, an early conquistador of Peru, a native of Toledo; he sent to Spain for the stock, and the man who carried it, to keep it fresher, took it from the Canary Islands and took black grape, "de Uba prieta", so that almost all the grape came out tinta and the wine "todo Haloque, no del todo tinto" - and although many other plants had since been carried, up to the muscatel, "aun no ai Vino blanco". The claim that Peru had no white wine is Garcilaso's report as of writing, not a verified fact.
The first grapes into Cuzco travelled on thirty men's backs, and the source says so without noticing that it is saying it. Captain Bartolome de Terrazas planted a vineyard in his repartimiento of Indians called Achanquillo, in the province of Cuntisuyu, and in 1555 sent thirty Indians loaded with grapes to the author's father, Garcilaso de la Vega, with orders to give a share to each of the gentlemen of the city "para que todos gocasen del fruto de su trabajo". Had the grapes been sold, the same page reckons, they would have made more than four or five thousand ducats. The boy Garcilaso was chosen ambassador for the delivery and carried two dishes of them to each principal house. The vineyard stands in a grant of people and the fruit moves on their backs: the achievement and the labour regime are one sentence.
There was a crown bounty for introducing European crops, and folios 333 and 334 print its terms. The Catholic Monarchs and the emperor Charles V had ordered that a "Joya" be given from the royal treasury to the first man who in any town of Spaniards raised new fruit of Spain - wheat, barley, wine or oil - in a stated quantity. The prize was two silver bars of three hundred ducats each; the qualifying quantity was half a cahiz of wheat or barley, or four arrobas of wine or oil. The motive is given without varnish: the princes ordered it "porque los Espanoles se diesen a cultivar aquella tierra, y llevasen a ella las cosas de Espana, que en ella no avia".
The first wine at Cuzco was made for the prize and not for the money. Passing through the estate of Pedro Lopez de Cacalla, a native of Llerena, vecino of Cuzco and secretary to President Gasca, on 21 January 1560, the young Garcilaso was refused a single grape by the Portuguese foreman because his master meant to make wine of them; and the reason, folio 334 says, was not greed for the prize money, since he could have got much more by selling the grapes, "sino por la Honra, y Fama de aver sido el primero que en el Cozco huviese hecho Vino de sus Vinas". The same page adds that other cities, Huamanga and Arequipa, had had wine much earlier.
The wine prices on folio 334 are the best surviving measure of how far Peru was from Europe. At its cheapest an arroba was worth thirty ducats; in Gonzalo Pizarro's time and before it had often been worth three hundred, four hundred and five hundred ducats the arroba. In 1554 and 1555 there was a general shortage; at Lima it went so far that no wine could be found with which to say Mass, and the archbishop Jeronimo de Loaysa searched and found half a botija, which was kept for the Masses. A ship then came in with two thousand botijas and sold the first at three hundred and sixty ducats and the last at not less than two hundred. Garcilaso adds the social rule that went with the scarcity: wine was not put on the table for ordinary guests, and drinking it then "mas parescia vicio, que necesidad".
The new agriculture ran on irrigation and on staggered planting, and the source notes both. "Las Vinas se riegan en todo el Peru", folio 334 says, and it describes a vineyard on the river Mira in the district of Quito, below the equinoctial line, divided into twelve apartados of which the owner pruned one each month, so as to have fresh grapes all year; the author says he had seen the same staggering done with maize, one plot sown, another sprouted to knee height, another in ear. He attributes the practice not to curiosity but to necessity, and to the Indians having the ground and the means to work their lands. Read carefully this is a European crop being fitted to an Andean water regime rather than replacing it.
The olive is dated to a single shipment and three surviving cuttings. Cap. XXVII, folio 335: in the same year 1560 Don Antonio de Ribera, a vecino of Lima who had come to Spain years before as Procurador General del Peru, carried back olive plants from Seville, and for all the care he took over them in two tinajones holding more than a hundred posturas, no more than three living stakes reached the city - "no llegaron a la Ciudad de los Reies mas de tres estacas vivas".
What guarded them is in the same paragraph as the achievement, and this corpus does not separate the two. So that nobody should get so much as a leaf, Ribera "puso un gran egercito, que tenia de mas de cien Negros, y treinta Perros, que de dia, y de noche velasen en guarda de sus nuevas, y preciadas posturas". One night a plant was taken anyway, either by men who watched better than the dogs or with the consent of a bribed guard, and within a few days it appeared in Chile, six hundred leagues from Lima, where it spent three years raising offspring so prosperously that no cutting failed to take. After three years, and after the letters of excommunication Ribera had had read against the thieves, the same plant was returned and put back where it had stood, so neatly that its owner never learned who had done it. The hundred men in that guard were enslaved Africans, and the sentence that records the introduction of the olive to South America records their labour in the same clause.
The money in it was very large and is reported as belief rather than as account. Ribera's walled heredad in the Lima valley bore grapes, figs, pomegranates, melons, oranges, limes and other fruits and vegetables of Spain, sold in the plaza of the city as new fruit, and it "hico gran suma de dinero, que se cree por cosa cierta, que paso de docientos mil pesos". Garcilaso gives no accounts and marks the figure as what was believed for certain, which is why this claim sits lower than the ones around it.
Within one lifetime scarcity turned into glut, and the source measures the turn. Cap. XXVIII lists what Peru had not had - figs, pomegranates, citrons, oranges, sweet and sour limes, apples, pears, camuesas, quinces, peaches, apricots, any kind of Spanish plum, melons, cucumbers - and then says that all of them are now there in such abundance "que ya son despreciables, como los Ganados", and larger than in Spain: a pomegranate carried on the andas of the Blessed Sacrament in the Corpus procession at Lima big enough to astonish those who saw it, bunches of grapes of eight and ten pounds, quinces the size of a man's head. Garcilaso says he does not dare give the size of the pomegranate, for fear of scandalising those who will not believe there are greater things in the world than in their own village.
Sugar reached Peru late, and folio 336 explains how its industry was founded on a commercial trick rather than on an edict. There had been no sugar cane in Peru; the first ingenio was made in the lands of Huanuco, and a servant of its owner, seeing that much sugar was being shipped to Peru from New Spain and that his master's price would not rise, advised him to load a ship with sugar and send it to New Spain, so that Mexico should think Peru had a surplus and stop sending. "Asi se hico, y el concierto salio cierto, y provechoso; de cuia causa se han hecho despues aca los Ingenios que ai, que son muchos."
The transfer went both ways in the same orchard. Folio 336 reports Spaniards so curious in agriculture that they grafted the fruit trees of Spain onto the fruit trees of Peru and drew marvellous fruits from them, "con grandisima admiracion de los Indios, de ver, que a un Arbol hagan llevar al Ano dos, tres, quatro Frutas diferentes", and the author suggests that growers might also graft olives onto the tree the Indians call quishuar, whose wood and leaf he says resemble the olive. Cap. XXIX then lists what the Peruvian kitchen garden had lacked - lettuce, escarole, radishes, cabbage, turnips, garlic, onions, aubergines, spinach, chard, mint, coriander, parsley, asparagus - and among the seeds chickpeas, broad beans, lentils, anise, mustard, sesame, rice and cumin, and among the flowers roses, carnations, jasmine and lilies.
The counterpoint is not supplied by a modern critic; it is the last paragraph the author wrote on the subject. Of the same flowers and herbs he has just praised, folio 336 says that many of them are now "mui danosas": turnips, mustard, mint and camomile have spread so far in some valleys "que han vencido las fuercas, y la diligencia humana, toda quanta se ha hecho para arrancallas", and have prevailed so completely that they have blotted out the old name of the valleys and forced them to be called by the weed's name - the valley on the sea coast now called El Valle de la Yerbabuena, "que solia llamarse Rucma". That is a naturalist's record of an uncontrollable biological invasion, and of an indigenous place-name erased by it, printed by a Peruvian author in 1609.
Two transfers that did not take are recorded beside the ones that did. Mulberries were planted and silkworm seed carried to Peru, where there had been none, "mas no se puede labrar la Seda, por un inconviniente mui grande que tiene" - and the chapter never says what the impediment was. Cherry stock taken in 1580 by Gaspar de Alcocer, a wealthy merchant of Lima, was afterwards lost "por demasiadas diligencias que con ellos hicieron para que prevalescieran". Flax was tried and failed, though Peru had very fine cotton and the richest wool, which the women spun to a marvel, carding both with their fingers for want of cards and having no spinning wheel.
One anecdote prices the whole subject better than the ducats do. In 1555 or 1556 Garcia de Melo, a native of Trujillo and then treasurer of the royal exchequer at Cuzco, sent the author's father three asparagus, the first anyone had seen there; the father had them cooked at the brazier in his own chamber before seven or eight gentlemen at supper, dressed with oil and vinegar, and shared them out with his own hand, giving each man a mouthful and keeping the third for himself with the excuse that, being a thing of Spain, he wished to be favoured that once. "Desta manera se comieron los Esparragos, con mas regocijo, y fiesta, que si fuera el Ave Fenix" - and the boy who served at that table got none.
What this object cannot do should travel with it. Everything here rests on one witness, printed at Madrid in 1723 from a book first published at Lisbon in 1609 and described on its own title page as a "Segunda impresion, enmendada", so the wording read here is an eighteenth-century editor's. Garcilaso left Peru in 1560 and wrote in Spain: the dates before that year are his own memory, and the ones after it are correspondence - the cattle prices of 1590 arrive as "me escriven del Peru". His father's household is at the centre of a striking number of the first-ever anecdotes, which is exactly what one would expect of an author defending a family's standing. Nothing here was checked against a second source, and no notarial or fiscal record was opened to confirm a single price.