Juan de Velasco's Historia del Reino de Quito (written 1789, printed Quito 1841): the exile's book that carried lost manuscripts into print, and the corrections its readers had to make
A Jesuit born in Riobamba, expelled to Italy in 1767, wrote there a history of his own country and dated it 1789. Quito's government press printed the ancient part in 1841, its editor admitting he had rewritten the language. Velasco opens by disclaiming warranty for the ancient chronology. Ecuador's first modern historian later corrected his conquest dates and still called the book uniquely valuable, because manuscripts it cites are lost.
Why this wins its question: Velasco is normally met in English in one of two useless shapes: as the patriotic inventor of a kingdom that never existed, or as the founding father of Ecuadorian history, with nothing in either account that a reader can check. This object puts the two printed volumes that settle the question side by side and quotes both. It shows the 1841 Quito edition confessing on its own preliminary leaves that it rewrote the author's language, which disposes of every argument that has ever been built on Velasco's exact words. It shows Velasco himself, on his first page, refusing to guarantee the truth of the ancient chronology his critics attack him for. It sets out the dynastic narrative in the detail that makes the criticism intelligible, including the dates and the succession law. And it lets the strongest critic speak for both sides: Federico Gonzalez Suarez, who moved the Inca conquest of Quito back to about 1450 against Velasco's 1487, who told his readers to distinguish Inca work from Scyri work in the same monuments, and who nevertheless recorded that the manuscripts of Bravo de Saravia, Marcos de Niza, Palomino and Montenegro are lost, that the history of the war between Huascar and Atahualpa written by the cacique Collahuaso perished, and that whatever survives of them survives only because Velasco cited them. The value of a compromised source is thereby stated as a mechanism rather than as a verdict, and the exiled Jesuit's real contribution turns out to be custodial rather than dynastic.
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 is an exile's work printed two generations late by the country it describes. The title page reads "Historia del Reino de Quito en la America Meridional, escrita por el Presbitero Dn. Juan de Velasco, nativo del mismo Reino. Tomo II, y Parte II, que contiene la Historia Antigua", dates the work "Ano de 1789", and gives the imprint "Quito. Imprenta de Gobierno, por Juan Campuzano. 1841". The author was a Jesuit of the province of Quito carried to Italy by the expulsion of 1767 and wrote there; the press that finally printed him was the government press of the republic that had inherited his subject.
The edition tells its reader that it is not a faithful printing, which governs everything else that can be said about its wording. The Advertencia del Editor sobre el tomo 2 records that the edition began with the second tome while certain additions were being made to the first, and then explains the method: "aunque a los principios parecio al Editor lo mas seguro y natural copiar el texto servilmente; examinandolo con mas detencion observo que el Autor, ya sea por haber escrito la obra en Italia, donde se versara poco en su nativo idioma", the language needed correction. The editor further admits that faults of grammar and phrases the Castilian tongue will not bear have survived into the edition, blaming his own limited lights, the provincial idioms of Quito that the author certainly used, and the wish to satisfy antiquarians who would resent any change to the text. The Advertencia is dated Quito, 10 November 1841.
The author disclaims warranty for the ancient part in his own opening sentences, and the disclaimer is stronger than any modern critic's. "La historia antigua del Reino de Quito, es tanto mas incierta y confusa, cuanto mas se retira a su primer origen." Lacking writings, the American histories must remain "envueltas en las tinieblas del antiguo caos"; the only faint light is tradition, and traditions "recogidas sin critica, ni discrecion, mezcladas con mil fabulas en los hechos, y apoyadas en la cronologia sobre puros computos y conjeturas, apenas pueden suministrar materia que no quede en la esfera de incierta o de dudosa." He will therefore set down only what seems most consistent or least ill-founded, "sin empenarme en ser garante de su verdad". A history whose ancient chronology is later disputed had already declined to guarantee it.
The scheme the book imposes on that material is a four-epoch chronology with dates attached. The first epoch runs from the first population, some centuries after the general deluge, until the kingdom was conquered by Caran Scyri about the year one thousand of the Christian era; the second lasts about five hundred years until conquest by the Inca Huayna Capac in 1487; the third forty-six years until conquest by the Spaniards in 1533; the fourth eighteen years until the civil wars of the Spaniards themselves ended in 1550. The author grades his own material as he goes: the first epoch is the shortest for history because almost nothing about it is known; the second would give abundant matter if fables and very doubtful facts were to be written; the third begins to give matter that can deserve the name of history; the fourth gives so much that it must be reduced to a very brief compendium.
The dynastic narrative that the book is famous and criticised for is circumstantial, dated, and rests on nothing the reader can check. Caran the eleventh Scyri, old and ambitious, is said to have obtained a new law by which a daughter might succeed and freely choose her consort, and to have used it to annex Puruha by treaty rather than by war: the marriage of Toa with Duchicela, first-born of Condorazo, regulo of Puruha, whose line ran through four Scyris until the Incas of Peru conquered the kingdom. Condorazo, unwilling to be his son's vassal, withdrew to the cordillera of the Collanes and was never heard of again, which the author gives as the origin of a surviving fable that he buried himself alive to become immortal in the mountain that has borne his name since. Duchicela is said to have brought the regulo of Canar and the lords south to Paita into the same confederation, extending the dominions of Quito more than a hundred and twenty-five leagues, and the extinction of the male line of Caran is computed at about the year 1300, Autachi Duchicela succeeding about 1370. No document, no informant and no monument is cited for any of it on these pages.
The strongest evidence that the book was worth printing comes from the historian who spent the most effort correcting it. Federico Gonzalez Suarez, writing at Quito in 1890, opens his own treatment of the pre-Inca period by conceding that "pocos son y muy deficientes los documentos en que podemos apoyarnos" and that Velasco "ha recogido y nos ha trasmitido las tradiciones que se conservaban" about the Scyris. He records that Velasco had the good fortune to study the manuscripts of Bravo de Saravia, of Fray Marcos de Niza, of Palomino and of Montenegro, whom he cites repeatedly and on whose authority he often leans, "por desgracia, esas obras no han llegado hasta nosotros"; of Niza's writings in particular he says they are so rare and so unknown "que aun de la existencia misma de ellas dudariamos, si el P. Velasco no las citara con tanta frecuencia". He adds that Velasco had the advantage of travelling all the provinces of the kingdom at leisure and knew and spoke the native language of the Indians well.
One of those lost manuscripts was written by an indigenous lord, and its loss is the sharpest thing in the case. Gonzalez Suarez states that the two Cartas de Palomino, extensive relations of the conquest and antiquities of Quito, were preserved unpublished in that city until the expulsion of the Jesuits, that Velasco had them and studied them to write his work, and that of that manuscript and others equally precious for the country's history nobody now knows the whereabouts and they may have perished for ever. Among the manuscripts Velasco studied, he continues, must be counted that of the "Historia de las guerras civiles entre Huascar y Atallhualpa, escrita por el cacique COLLAHUASO. Esta obra perecio para las letras, y lo unico que de ella se habra acaso salvado, sera lo que el P. Velasco tomaria para componer su Historia antigua del Reino de Quito." Of some works, he concludes, even the memory would have been lost entirely, "y no habriamos sabido ni la existencia de ellas, si el P. Velasco no las hubiera citado en su libro y dadolas a conocer. Por esto, la Historia del P. Velasco ha llegado a tener un merito unico y casi excepcional en su clase."
The same historian then corrects him, by name and on the record, which is why the two sources belong together. On the Inca conquest of Quito Gonzalez Suarez writes that the authority of Cabello Balboa, Montesinos, Fernandez the Palentino, Garcilaso and above all the diligent Cieza de Leon, together with Herrera who he says has done no more than copy Cieza literally without naming him, has moved him to tell the events as he has: "La conquista la llevo a cabo Tupac-Yupanqui, y la dominacion de los Quichuas en estas provincias principio, a no dudarlo, a mediados del siglo quince, acaso por los anos de 1450, casi un siglo completo antes de la llegada de los espanoles al Ecuador." Where Velasco has Tupac-Yupanqui reach only as far as Mocha, Cieza, Cabello Balboa and Montesinos have him reach Quito, and the authority of three Spanish chroniclers who visited these places seems to him "de mayor peso que la de nuestro compatriota". The correction moves the beginning of Inca rule some thirty-seven years earlier than Velasco's 1487.
A second correction is methodological and applies to the whole class of claim. Discussing the temples of the Sun and the Moon at Quito as Velasco describes them, Gonzalez Suarez points out that the temples the Spanish conquistadors found were Inca temples, since the Incas had ruled in those parts for at least seventy years, and that several of the circumstances Velasco describes "revelan la accion de los soberanos del Peru, mas bien que la de los Scyris de Quito en esos monumentos religiosos". He turns that into a rule for the reader: never lose sight of the observation made in the text, "para que procuremos distinguir obras de obras y civilizaciones de civilizaciones". The attribution of a monument to a pre-Inca kingdom is thus contested at the level of method and not only of date.
The nineteenth-century edition also declines to make the conquest comfortable, and does it in the editor's own voice rather than the author's. The Advertencia praises the moral that can be drawn from the history, in which "aparece evidentemente el brazo de la Providencia que jamas descuida el castigo de los perversos", and then names who is meant: Rumiñahui, who was either beheaded or came to a wretched end in the forests; those who condemned Atahualpa in spite of his innocence; those who mocked the bloodied head of Blasco Nunez; "y los demas espanoles que demostraron crueldad inaudita en sus guerras civiles o contra los infelices indigenas", all of whom received a punishment more or less delayed but always certain. A Quito editor of 1841 introducing a Jesuit's history of his own country puts Spanish cruelty against the indigenous people in the same sentence as the Spanish civil wars, and calls the lesson useful.
The limits of what was read here are wide and matter to every claim above. Only the second tome, the Historia antigua, was opened: the natural history that Velasco says carries most of what is probable, and the modern history, were not read at all, so nothing here describes his natural history, his account of the Spanish period, or his sources for either. No manuscript was collated: the wording quoted from the 1841 printing is the wording of an editor who states that he corrected the author's language, and no reading is attributed to Velasco verbatim on that account. This corpus asserts nothing about whether the Scyri dynasty existed, whether Caran conquered Quito about the year one thousand, or whether any of the regnal dates are historical; what it records is that the printed book asserts them, that the author declined to warrant them, and that the first modern historian of Ecuador, using the book as a principal authority, corrected its chronology and warned against reading Inca work as Scyri work. Twentieth-century scholarship on the question was not consulted here.