Vicuñas, pacos and guanacos — the Andean camelids in the Spanish printed record
Two Spanish books describe the only large herd animals the Americas domesticated. Acosta's Seville sheets of 1590 give the llama as the greatest wealth of Peru — sheep and pack-beast in one, feeding itself on the hillside — and beside it the wild vicuña and its silk-fine undyed fleece. Garcilaso prints the Inca rule for the hunt: one district every fourth year, three years' rest, the animals sheared and released. Both also record that the herds fell after 1532.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of Andean camelids is a zoology page plus one line about the Incas using llamas as pack animals, and it never quotes a sixteenth-century sheet. This object opens the 1590 Seville pages and prints what they actually say: the llama as the greatest wealth of Peru because it is sheep and pack-beast in one and eats for nothing; droves of a thousand carrying two thousand silver bars seventy leagues from Potosí to Arica behind a few Indian drovers with nothing ever lost; cumbi woven figured on both faces with no thread end visible; a fleece whose colour is permanent because it was never dyed; weighted cords thrown at the legs; and a cure for snow-blindness that an Andean woman gave to the author and that worked. It then sets Garcilaso's chaco rule beside it — one district every fourth year, three years of rest, the animals sheared and released, the tally kept on quipus, with the stated reason — which is a documented sustained-yield rule that conservation writing about the vicuña almost never cites from the source. And because the editorial line here is accumulation rather than omission, the object also prints both authors saying that the herds were being destroyed after the conquest, prints the arquebus used on bolting pack animals to save the silver, prints the death penalty attached to wearing vicuña under the Incas, and states in its last claim exactly which questions these two books cannot answer.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Acosta devotes two consecutive chapters of book four to the animals, read here in the Seville sheets of 1590. Chapter 40, "De las Vicuñas, y Tarugas del Piru", opens on page 290: among the notable things of the Indies of Peru are "las Vicuñas, y Carneros que llaman de la tierra, que son animales mansos, y de mucho prouecho. Las Vicuñas son siluestres: y los Carneros son ganado domestico." The wild and the domesticated are separated in the first two lines.
Page 291 places the animal and reasons about it. Acosta rejects the identification with Aristotle's and Pliny's capreae because vicuñas have no horns, and rejects the goats of the East Indies that yield the bezoar; "Assi que no se que en otra parte del mundo aya este genero de animales sino en el Piru, y Chile, que se continua con el." They are larger than goats and smaller than calves, tawny and a little lighter, hornless, pasture in the highest and coldest unpeopled ground "que alla llaman Punas", are not harmed by snow and ice but seem refreshed by them, run in herds and, in flight, drive their young ahead of them.
The same page carries the conservation rule and its breach, printed together. "No se entiende, que multipliquen mucho, por donde los Reyes Ingas tenian prohibida la caça de Vicuñas, sino era para fiestas con orden suyo. Algunos se quexan, que despues que entraron Españoles, se ha concedido demasiada licencia a los chacos o caças de Vicuñas, y q se han disminuydo." A Jesuit writing for a Spanish press in 1590 records the complaint that Spanish rule loosened an indigenous game law and that the herds fell as a result. The chaco itself he describes as a drive of sometimes a thousand or three thousand people who ring a great space of hill country and close it until three or four hundred animals are taken.
The fleece, on page 292. The animals are sheared and of their wool are made coverings and blankets of much esteem, "porque la lana es como vna seda blanda, y duran mucho, y como el color es natural, y no de tinte, es perpetuo" — a fibre whose colour cannot fade because it was never dyed. Acosta reports the medical uses at the level of hearsay and marks where his evidence stops: the wool is held very healthy for inflammations of the kidneys and to temper excessive heat, and some use it in mattresses for their health; for gout it is also said to be good, "no se en esto experiencia cierta."
Two things on page 292 that no summary of the vicuña carries. The Indians take the animal, outside the general chaco drives, by throwing "vnos cordelejos có ciertos plomos, que se les trauan, y embueluen entre los pies, y embaraçan, para que no puedan correr" — weighted cords thrown at the legs. And Acosta reports a cure worked on himself: arriving at a tambo in the sierra with so terrible a pain in the eyes from crossing snow that he thought they would burst, an Indian woman told him "Ponte padre esto enlos ojos, y estaras bueno", the remedy being a little flesh of a freshly killed vicuña still running blood; the pain eased at once and shortly went altogether. The book also notes that the Indians make chusharqui, or cured meat, of the flesh, and that the bezoar stones found in vicuñas — and larger and stronger ones in tarugas — are the chief reason the animal is prized.
Chapter 41, "De los Pacos, y Guanacos, y Carneros del Piru", begins on page 293 with a judgement about the whole viceroyalty: "NINGVNA cosa tiene el Piru de mayor riqueza y ventaja, que es el ganado de la tierra, que los nuestros llamá Carneros de las Indias: y los Indios en lengua general los llaman Llama". Food and clothing come from it as from sheep in Europe, and carriage besides, and it needs no shoeing, no saddles or pack-frames, no barley, "sino que debalde sirue a sus amos, contentandose con la yerua que halla en el campo": God provided sheep and beasts of burden in one animal, and for a poor people willed that they should cost nothing. There are two kinds, "vnos son Pacos, o Carneros lanudos: otros son rasos, y de poca lana, y son mejores para carga", with a long neck like a camel's, and of several colours, white, black and parti-coloured.
Page 294 describes the cloth economy built on the fleece. The Indians work the wool into two fabrics, "vna grossera, y comun que llaman Hauasca: otra delicada, y fina que llaman Cumbi", the cumbi worked into table covers, hangings and other cloths of choice workmanship, lasting, with a lustre as of half silk, and woven "a dos hazes todas las labores q quieren, sin que se vea hilo, ni cabo del en toda vna pieça" — figured on both faces with no thread end showing anywhere in the piece. The Inca kept great masters of cumbi whose chief men lived in the repartimiento of Capachica beside Lake Titicaca, and the colours were given with various herbs. Coarse or fine, "todos los Indios, y Indias son oficiales en la sierra, teniendo sus telares en su casa": the loom is domestic and universal, not a guild monopoly.
The same page and the next turn the animal into transport infrastructure. Droves are led "como recua: y van en vna recua destas trezientos, o quinientos, y aun mil carneros, que traginan vino, coca, mayz, chuño, y azogue, y otra qualquier mercaderia, y lo mejor della que es la plata, porque las barras de plata las lleuan el camino de Potosi a Arica setenta leguas, y a Arequipa otro tiempo solian ciento y cincuenta." Acosta says he often marvelled to see droves carrying one and two thousand bars, more than three hundred thousand ducats, "sin otra guarda, ni reparo, mas que vnos pocos de Indios, para solo guiar los carneros, y cargallos, y quando mucho algun Español", sleeping every night in open country, and that on so long a road nothing was ever missing from so much silver. The ordinary load is four to six arrobas at two or three leagues a day; for a single stage a beast will carry eight arrobas and more over eight or ten leagues.
Page 295 also prints the costs, in the same even voice. The animal is "amigo de temple frio, y por esso se da enla sierra, y muere en los llanos con el calor" — the Andean pack train could not descend into the hot country. And when the beasts take fright and run with their load to the highest crags, Acosta reports the practice without comment: since they cannot be overtaken, "porque no se pierdan las barras que lleuan", they are shot with an arquebus and killed. He closes with a word the Spanish of Peru had taken from the animal's sulking under a load: to say of a man that "se ha empacado" is to say he has turned obstinate.
Garcilaso de la Vega prints the rule that governed the wild herds, read here in the Madrid reissue of 1829. The royal hunt was a cordon: two wings of people driving everything before them into a clean space free of hills and crags, then closing "con tres y cuatro paredes de indios hasta llegar á tomar el ganado á manos". The count taken, of deer and of the guanaco "que es de lana basta" and the vicuña "que es menor de cuerpo, y de lana finísima", was very large, and according to the district "pasaban de veinte, treinta y cuarenta mil cabezas". Confidence sits below the Acosta claims because the copy read is an 1829 reissue and not the Lisbon sheets of 1609.
The management rule is the part that is almost never quoted. The guanacos and vicuñas were released as soon as they had been shorn; the numbers of all this wild stock were kept "como si fuera manso, y en los Quipus, que eran los libros anales, lo asentaban por sus especies, dividiendo los machos de las hembras", together with the numbers killed, so that the next hunt could be measured against what had multiplied. And the hunts "se hacian en cada distrito de cuatro en cuatro años, dejando pasar tres años de la una á la otra", because the Indians said that in that time the vicuña's wool grows all it has to grow and because the wild stock needed the interval to breed and to stop being driven — a stated sustained-yield rotation with a stated reason, printed in Spanish in the early seventeenth century.
The same passage records who was allowed to wear the fibre, and it was not everyone. Guanaco wool, being coarse, "se repartia á la gente comun"; vicuña wool, "por ser tan estimada por su fineza, era toda para el Inca", who ordered it shared among those of his royal blood, and others could not wear that wool "so pena de la vida", though it was given to curacas by particular privilege and favour. The meat of the animals killed was distributed to the common people and to the curacas, not from need but as the festivity of the hunt, so that all should have a share. The conservation regime and a sumptuary monopoly are the same regime.
Garcilaso then says what happened to the herds, and he says it bitterly. Having given the figures for the Inca hunts he adds: "Esto habia entónces; ahora digan los presentes el número de las que se han escapado del estrago y desperdicio de los arcabuces, pues apenas se hallan ya huanacus y vicuñas, sino donde ellos no han podido llegar." Two witnesses of different loyalties — a Jesuit provincial writing in Spain and a mestizo son of an Inca princess writing in Andalusia — independently report the same collapse and name the same cause, unrestricted hunting after the conquest. Confidence is held at 0.75 because neither gives a count, neither is a census, and Garcilaso is writing decades later and at a distance from Peru.
What these two printings cannot support, stated so that nobody borrows more from them than they hold. Neither gives a herd number before or after 1532, so the size of the decline they both assert is not measurable from them. Neither describes the eighteenth-century royal orders on vicuña hunting, the nineteenth-century fibre trade, or the modern chaccu under which the animal was brought back from near extinction; none of that was read here and none of it is claimed here. What the sheets do carry is the earliest sustained printed description of the animals, of the fibre, and of a stated indigenous rule for keeping the wild herds in being.