Gaspar de Villagra, Historia de la Nueva Mexico (Alcala, 1610)
An epic poem, printed at Alcala in 1610 and dedicated to Philip III, written in Virgilian verse by a captain who marched with the 1598 expedition to New Mexico. It is the earliest printed book devoted to that country, it stages the defenders of Acoma as a deliberating council with named speakers, and in the middle of a canto it stops the verse to print, in prose, the friars' written opinion on what makes a war just. The same sheets carry the cost and the poet's own bid for payment.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of this book reaches readers as a label - "the first epic poem about the American Southwest" - usually attached either to a celebration of Onate or to the Acoma massacre, with whichever half suits the writer left out. Read from the 1610 sheets, both halves are in the same volume and sometimes on the same folio, and a third thing is there that neither telling mentions: a canto that suspends its own verse to print the friars' written opinion on the conditions of a just war, first requirement first, in prose, because the poet thought the documents mattered more than the metre. This object puts on the record, as separate sourced claims, the imprint and the colophon; the tassa of 27 April 1610 with its thirty-eight pliegos at three and a half maravedis; the Virgilian first line and the heading that derives the Mexica from the north on indigenous authority; the table of cantos indexing the war by folio, beheadings included; the canto whose announced subject is that soldiers' services are badly repaid; the prose reply of the Commissary and the religious; the named Acoma council of folio 218, where the defenders argue with each other and pull two of their own apart; the closing verses that call the Indian almost naked of reason; and the same verses asking Onate to pay the author what he owes him.
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 copy read here is the first edition, and its title page states the whole publishing arrangement: "HISTORIA DE LA NVEVA MEXICO, DEL CAPITAN GASPAR DE VILLAGRA. DIRIGIDA AL REY D. FELIPE nuestro senor Tercero deste nombre", with the royal arms, "Ano 1610", "CON PRIVILEGIO", "En Alcala, por Luys Martinez Grande", "A costa de Baptista Lopez mercader de libros". The last leaf repeats it as a colophon: "Impresso en Alcala de Henares, por Luys Martinez Grade. Ano. 1610."
The book prices itself, on the leaf that carries the tassa. Diego Gonzalez de Villarroel, escribano de camara of the royal Council, certifies at Madrid on 27 April 1610 that the Council valued each pliego of the book at three and a half maravedis, that it has thirty-eight pliegos, that they amount at that rate to a hundred and thirty-three maravedis, that it may be sold at that price and no more, and that this certificate is to be printed at the front of every copy so that the price is known.
The poem opens on folio 1 with a line taken straight from the Aeneid - "LAS armas y el varon heroico canto, / El ser, valor, prudencia, y alto esfuerco" - under a heading that announces something a European epic normally does not carry: that Canto I declares the argument of the history, the site of the new Mexico, and the notice had of it "en quanto la antigualla de los Indios, y de la salida y decendencia de los verdaderos Mexicanos". The book therefore begins by deriving the Mexica from the north, on the authority of an indigenous tradition.
The table of cantos indexes the Acoma war of 1598-1599 by folio, and does not soften it. Canto XVIII, folio 156, is how the governor went to the stronghold of Acoma and the disturbance Zutacapan caused; Canto XIX, folio 166, how the author returned from the punishment of those who were beheaded, and how the Indians of Acoma caught him in a trap; Canto XXII, folio 187, the rout of the maese de campo and the death of his companions; Canto XXIII, folio 196, his death and the carrying of the news to the governor; Canto XXV, folio 208, the process opened against the Indians of Acoma; Canto XXVI, folio 216, the council Gicombo called among them.
One heading is a complaint rather than a narrative. Canto XX, folio 173, is announced as being "de los excessivos trabajos que padecen los soldados, de nueuos descubrimientos, y de la mala correspondencia que sus seruicios tienen" - the excessive hardships suffered by soldiers on new discoveries and the poor return their services get. A serving captain put that sentence in a book dedicated to the king and printed with royal privilege.
At the point where the punitive expedition is authorised the poem stops being a poem. Canto XXV is headed "COMO SE HIZO CABEZA DE processo, contra los Indios de Acoma, y de los pareceres que dieron los Religiosos, y de la instrucion que se le dio al sargento mayor, para que saliesse al castigo de los dichos Indios." The verse then says that the governor wanted the Father Commissary and the religious each to give his vote on these doubts, and that their grave writings should be set down here without altering their style.
What follows on folio 209, in prose inside the epic, is headed "Repuesta del Comissario, y Religiosos" and answers the question of what is required for a war to be just. The first requirement given is the authority of a prince who recognises no superior, as the Roman Pontiff, the Emperor and the Kings of Castile are, the last enjoying the privilege of Empire in not recognising a superior in temporal matters; so the war may be made by such a prince in person or by whoever holds his power for the purpose, because a private person may not. This is the just-war doctrine of the Spanish theologians being applied, in writing, on a frontier in 1599 - and printed eleven years later by a man who was there.
The defenders are not a crowd in this book. On folio 218, in Canto XXVI, the Acoma leaders are in session as what the verse calls "esta illustre y noble junta"; a speaker argues that any of the five noble men present is protection enough to undo the whole universe from that stronghold, taunts Gicombo for his fear and tells him to shelter in the shadow of his mace, and objects to outsiders coming to defend them and to give their vote where strength and counsel are already in surplus. Two warriors then come to blows over a stone, and Popempol, Chumpo and Calpo step down between them before the roused anger can go further.
The contempt is on the same sheets and is not smuggled out of the record here. The closing verses on folio 287, written in praise of the author, tell a "Baruaro mancebo" not to flee the sword of Villagra but to offer his life to its rigour with new pleasure, since the hand that gives him that wound will be the author of his perpetual life, and they describe what the history would have said to the "indio rudo, De cuerpo, y casi de razon desnudo" - the rude Indian, naked of body and almost of reason.
The same closing verses state the book's other purpose without embarrassment. They urge the poet to see that his commander settles up - "Y a de pagarte trate, / Lo que te deue tu Caudillo Onate" - what your chief Onate owes you. The Historia is a petition for reward as well as a history, and it says so on its last leaf, which is a reason to weigh its account of the writer's own conduct with care rather than a reason to discard the book.
The extent read here is the printed foliation itself. The text runs to folio 287, the last canto reached in this reading being Canto XXXIII, which opens at folio 273; after the verse come the commendatory poems and the Alcala colophon. No count of cantos is asserted beyond the thirty-three actually seen, and no claim is made here about later editions of the poem, none having been opened.