On April 28, 1688, a long procession moved out of Mexico City, along the causeways that crossed the nearby lakes, and through the small towns and farms of the plateau, on its way toward the pass between the two volcanoes Iztaccihuatl and Popocatépetl, both more than sixteen thousand feet high, and down to the tropical port of Vera Cruz. The farmers in their villages and fields were used to a good deal of such coming and going, but this time they stopped their work to look and to call out to each other in Nahuatl, the main indigenous language, for this was no ordinary procession. Cavalry outriders and a huge coach were followed by many baggage wagons and a long line of fine coaches. The marquis of Laguna had served as viceroy of New Spain from 1680 to 1686. With their wealth, powerful connections in Madrid, and a taste for elegance and the arts, he and his wife had given the viceregal court a few years of splendor and sophistication comparable, if not to Madrid, certainly to many of the lesser courts of Europe. Now their wealthy Spanish friends were riding in their coaches as far as the Villa de Guadalupe, seeing the marquis and marchioness off on their voyage home to Spain.
A child born of a slave shall be received,
according to our Law, as property
of the owner to whom fealty
is rendered by the mother who conceived.
The harvest from a grateful land retrieved,
the finest fruit, offered obediently,
is for the lord, for its fecundity
is owing to the care it has received.
So too, Lysis divine, these my poor lines:
as children of my soul, born of my heart,
they must in justice be to you returned;
Let not their defects cause them to be spurned,
for of your rightful due they are a part,
as concepts of a soul to yours consigned.
These lines were written sometime later in 1688 and sent off from Mexico to the marchioness of Laguna in Spain. They make use of metaphors and classical conceits to express and conceal the feelings of the author, who had lost, with the marchioness’s departure, the object of the nearest thing she had ever known to true love and, with the marquis’s departure, her ultimate protection from those who found her opinions and her way of life scandalous. The trouble was not that the author was lesbian—although her feelings toward men and women were unusually complicated and unconventional, anything approaching a physical relation or even passion is most unlikely—but that she was a cloistered Hieronymite nun, who read and studied a wide range of secular books, held long intellectual conversations with many friends, wrote constantly in a variety of religious and secular styles, and betrayed in her writings sympathy for Hermetic and Neoplatonic views that were on the edge of heresy if not beyond it. Her name in religion was Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz. She is recognized today as one of the great poets in the history of the Spanish language.
Mexico in the 1680s was a society of dramatic contradictions. The elegant viceregal court and the opulent ecclesiastical hierarchy looked toward Europe for style and ideas. The vast majority of the population sought to preserve as much as possible of the language, beliefs, and ways of life that had guided them before the coming of the Spaniards; the worship of the Virgin of Guadalupe, for example, owed much to the shrine of an Aztec goddess that had been the setting of the original appearance of the Virgin to a Mexican peasant. In between the “peninsular” elite and the “Indians,” the native-born “creoles” of Spanish language and culture managed huge cattle ranches and sought constantly new veins of profitable silver ore and new techniques to exploit old ones. Neither “Spanish” nor “Indian,” they experienced the full force of the contradictions of Mexican society and culture.
The literary world in which Sor Juana was such an anomalous eminence thrived on these contradictions of society and culture. This was a baroque culture. The word “baroque” originating as a Portuguese term for the peculiar beauty of a deformed, uneven pearl, suggests a range of artistic styles in which the balance and harmony of the Renaissance styles are abandoned for imbalance, free elaboration of form, playful gesture, and surprising allusion, through which the most intense of emotions and the darkest of realities may be glimpsed, their power enhanced by the glittering surface that partially conceals them. Contradiction and its partial, playful reconciliation are the stuff of the baroque style. So is the layering of illusion on illusion, meaning upon meaning. And what more baroque conceit could be imagined than the literary eminence of a cloistered nun in a rough frontier society, with a church and state of the strongest and narrowest male supremacist prejudices? Look again at the poem quoted earlier: The chaste nun refers to her poem as her child or the harvest from a grateful land. She declares her love once again to the departed marchioness.
Sor Juana was a product of Mexican creole society, born on a ranch on the shoulder of the great volcano Popocatépetl. Her mother was illiterate and very probably had not been married to her father. But some of the family branches lived in the city, with good books and advantageous connections. As soon as she discovered the books in her grandfather’s library, she was consumed with a thirst for solitude and reading. Her extraordinary talents for literature and learning were recognized. When she was fifteen, in 1664, she was taken into the household of a newly arrived viceroy, as his wife’s favorite and constant companion. She must have enjoyed the attention, the luxury, the admiration of her cleverness. She no doubt participated in the highly stylized exchange of “gallantries” between young men and young women. But she had no dowry. Solitude was her natural habitat. As a wife and mother, what chance would she have to read, to write, to be alone? In 1668 she took her vows in the Hieronymite convent of an order named after Saint Jerome, cloistered and meditative by rule.
This was a big decision, but less drastic than one might think. Certainly she was a believing Catholic. Her new status did not require total devotion to prayer and extinction of self. It did not imply that she was abandoning all the friendships and secular learning that meant so much to her. The nuns had a daily round of collective devotions; but many rules were not fully honored, and the regimen left her much free time for reading and writing. Each of the nuns had comfortable private quarters, with a kitchen, room for a bathtub, and sleeping space for a servant and a dependent or two; Sor Juana usually had one slave and one or two nieces or other junior dependents living in her quarters. The nuns visited back and forth in their quarters to the point that Sor Juana complained of the interruptions to her reading and writing, but outsiders spoke to the nuns only in the locutory especially provided for that purpose. From the beginning she turned the locutory into an elegant salon, as the viceroy and his lady and other fashionable people came to visit her and they passed hours in learned debate, literary improvisation, and gossip.
One of Sor Juana’s most constant friends and supporters was Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, professor of mathematics at the University of Mexico, an eminently learned creole scholar whose position was almost as anomalous as hers. He had been educated by the Jesuits and had longed to be one of them but had been expelled from their college. He had managed to obtain his position, without a university degree, by demonstrating his superior knowledge of his subject. He had added Góngora to his name to emphasize his distant kinship, through his mother’s family, with the most famous of Spain’s baroque poets. But he always felt insecure among the European-born professors, churchmen, and high officials. He wrote a great deal, much of it about the history of Mexico. He was in no way Sor Juana’s equal as a writer, but he probably was responsible for most of her smattering of knowledge of modern science and recent philosophy.
There was a rule of poverty among the Hieronymites, but it was generally ignored. Sor Juana received many gifts, some of them substantial enough to enable the former dowerless girl to invest money at interest. By gift and purchase she built up a library of about four thousand volumes and a small collection of scientific instruments, probably provided by Sigüenza. Her reading was broad but not very systematic, contributing to the stock of ideas and allusions she drew on constantly in her writings but giving her little sense of the intellectual tensions and transformations that were building up in Europe. She wrote constantly, in a wide variety of complex and exacting forms. Voluntarily or upon commission or request, she wrote occasional poems of all kinds for her friends and patrons. A celebration might call for a loa, a brief theatrical piece in praise of a dignitary. In one of hers, for example, a character “clad in sunrays” declares:
of that blazing sun
who, among shining rays
numbers brilliant sons:
when his illustrious rays
strike a speculum,
on it is portrayed
the likeness of his form.
Sor Juana’s standing in society reached a new height with the arrival in 1680 of the marquis and marchioness of Laguna. Even in the public festivities celebrating their arrival, she outdid herself in baroque elaborations of texts and conceits for a temporary triumphal arch erected at the cathedral. It was an allegory on Neptune, in which the deeds of the Greek god were compared to the real or imaginary deeds of the marquis. Much was made of the echoes among the marquis’s title of Laguna, meaning “lake,” Neptune’s reign over the oceans, and the origins of Mexico City as the Aztec city of Tenochtitlán in the middle of its great lake: an elaborate union of sycophancy to a ruler, somewhat strained classical allusion, and a creole quest for a Mexican identity. In parts of the text the author even drew in Isis as an ancestor of Neptune, and in others of her works from this time she showed a great interest in Egyptian antiquity as it was then understood, including the belief that the god Hermes Trismegistus had revealed the most ancient and purest wisdom and anticipated the Mosaic and Christian revelations. These ideas, the accompanying quasi-Platonic separation of soul and body, and her use of them to imply that a female or androgynous condition was closer to the divine wisdom than the male took her to the edge of heresy or beyond and was turned against her in later years.
Sor Juana soon established a close friendship with the marchioness of Laguna. Some of the poems she sent her are among her very finest, and they are unmistakably love poems. Some of them accompanied a portrait of the author. Several portraits in which a very handsome woman gazes boldly at us, her black-and-white habit simply setting off her own strength and elegance, have come down to us.
And if it is that you should rue
the absence of a soul in me [the portrait],
you can confer one, easily,
from the many rendered you:
and as my soul I [Sor Juana] tendered you,
and though my being yours obeyed,
and though you look on me amazed
in this insentient apathy,
you are the soul of this body,
and are the body of this shade.
The marquis of Laguna stepped down as viceroy in 1686 but remained in Mexico until 1688. In that year Sor Juana was very busy. The marchioness was taking texts of her poems back to Spain, where they soon would be published. She added to them a play, The Divine Narcissus, interweaving the legend of Narcissus and the life of Jesus, which probably was performed in Madrid in 1689 or 1690. Her niece took her vows in the convent in 1688. Late in the year, after her noble friends had left, she wrote the poem quoted earlier as well as a romantic comedy, Love Is the Greater Labyrinth, which was performed in Mexico City early in 1689.
A large collection of her poetry was published in Madrid in 1689. The next year in Mexico she published a letter taking abstruse issue with a sermon preached decades before by the famous Portuguese Jesuit Antonio Vieira. Her casual way with the rules of the religious life, her flirtings with heresy, her many writings in secular forms with intimations of understanding of love inappropriate to her profession had made her many enemies, but they could do nothing while the marquis of Laguna and his lady were on hand to protect her. Now they closed in. In 1694 she was forced formally to renounce all writing and humane studies and to relinquish her library and collection of scientific instruments. In 1695 she devotedly cared for her sisters in the convent during an epidemic, caught the disease, and died.
Mexico City was the seat of one of the Spanish viceroys in the Americas; the other was in Lima. The viceroys, always nobles sent from Spain, ruled in splendor, literally “in place of the king.” Reporting to them were the governors of various provinces. University-trained lawyers shaped the decision-making process at every stage; it was very thorough and very slow. It did a respectable job of keeping control of key lines of trade and taxation and of preventing the accumulation by any colonial official of too much independent power. The centralized structure of the Roman Catholic Church and its many orders added more layers of organizational strength. Centers of Spanish settlement and power gained continuity and cohesion by petitioning the king for the legal privileges of citizens and a local city council in the European manner.
The Spanish-speaking population of the Americas in 1688 included many modest people like Sor Juana’s rural relatives—people who farmed, traded, mined; people who, though not idle or necessarily rich, did all they could to hire or compel others, often indigenous people on the margins of the Spanish-speaking world, to do the heavy work. The Spanish monarchy often proclaimed that it maintained its American empire in order to save souls, and certainly it gave great support to missionary efforts; but it also worked diligently to tap the wealth of the Americas for its own purposes—most of all its silver.
In commerce and in politics, precious metals mattered enormously to Europeans of the 1600s, for the settling of accounts among merchants and rulers in different countries, for paying troops, including mercenaries, for bribing monarchs and officials—wherever mistrust or secrecy made bills of credit unusable. But their appeal was more than rational. Seventeenth-century Europeans could be driven mad by thoughts of gold and silver. As “noble metals,” subject to only very slow oxidation or other chemical change, they were symbols of resistance to decay, even of eternity. Many of the most advanced scientists of the world of 1688 still were interested in alchemy, although they often claimed that their interest was philosophical, not stemming from greed for gold.
So it is not surprising that Europe was fascinated by reports of the “mountain of silver” at Potosí (in modern Bolivia), the main source of the stream of treasure from the New World that made the king of Spain immensely rich and powerful. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Potosí usually produced more silver than the two great Mexican producing districts combined. Silver pesos from the American mints circulated all over Europe and in many ports and coastal districts of Asia. In the dock districts of Amsterdam, in between bouts of drinking, whoring, and telling lies about every port in the world, sailors would join in a chorus in celebration of the greatest of attacks on the Spanish silver fleet, one of the few real successes in the Dutch West India Company’s efforts to carry the war against the Spanish-Portuguese monarchy to the Americas, in 1628: “Piet Heyn! Piet Heyn! All praised is his name! . . . For he captured the silver fleet!”
In the early eighteenth century Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela, a native of Potosí, wrote a monumental history of his native city. It is an amalgam of empirical information about its government and society and wonderful stories of passion, violence, divine retribution, miracles, and witchcraft, assembled from other local authors and tales passed down generation to generation. Under the year 1688 he records the adventures of a young woman of good family whom he had known personally. Perhaps he had been in love with her:
Her face was like white marble, her hair the proper mean, for it was neither as dark as night nor as golden as the sun; green eyes, with lashes so long that they seemed to serve them as a canopy, and so luxuriant that they seemed like a fence protecting her eyes or like an ebony frame and embellishment to her face; her brows also luxuriant, broad, and so close together that there was no separation between them; her nose so perfect that it was not a whit too small or too large; her cheeks and brow adorned with charming ringlets, which, falling over her face, grudgingly allowed a little crimson to show in an expanse of snowy whiteness; her mouth small and adorned with small, white, and even teeth; her hands, bust, and waist all in graceful proportion; a winning charm in her manner and grace in her walk; her voice (which is often an added embellishment of beauty) soft, sweet, and resonant; and her intelligence clear, keen, and extremely prudent.
She was called Doña Teresa; she was only fifteen.
Who, asks our author, could have failed to fall in love with this wonderful creature? Two suitors managed to make their interest known to her, one a married, wealthy mercury refiner, the other an outsider using the apparently bogus title Count of Olmos. But Doña Teresa’s parents kept her even more strictly confined than was the norm for young ladies of her class; “On many Sundays and feast days they did not even take her to hear Mass.” Thus she was deprived even of that small measure of freedom that “would not have exceeded the bounds of her natural chastity and modesty. . . . Now, freedom is one of the most precious gifts conferred by Heaven on human beings; the treasures enclosed in the earth or hidden in the sea are not to be compared with it; men can and must risk life itself for freedom, as for honor, and, conversely, the greatest misfortune that can befall mankind is captivity.”
The mercury refiner persuaded Doña Teresa’s parents to let the girl accompany his wife to various festivities but never got the chance he was hoping for to be alone with her and seduce her. The “Count of Olmos” moved into a house across the street from hers and secretly watched her comings and goings; once she learned of his love, they agreed to talk at night, he at his balcony and she at her window, above the narrow street. It seems that once or twice they were able to converse in her room, but their growing love was never consummated. Finally she agreed to climb down knotted sheets and go with him to his house but fell. She somehow managed to get back in her bedroom before her parents found out.
The mercury refiner now realized he had a rival and told Doña Teresa’s mother, who beat an Indian maidservant until she told all. The mother then beat Teresa until the blood ran and locked her in a chicken coop in a deserted stable yard, keeping her there from May through July, the coldest months of the year. “If the mother had already ascertained,” our author comments, “that her daughter was still a virgin, yet punished her so cruelly because she learned that the girl had let a man into her bedroom, why should she now cast her into despair?” The beating was appropriate, it seems, for letting a man in her bedroom, and the confinement would have been proper if the girl had indeed been “dishonored.”
The father had been away on business, and the mother told Doña Teresa, “I wrote to your father to inform him of the evil you have done in discrediting our honor, and I have now received his reply, in which he says that he is coming home only to drink your blood. Take notice, therefore, that you will leave here only to be carried to your tomb.”
The “Count of Olmos” finally learned of Teresa’s plight by way of her younger brother, who was sent twice a week to clean her chicken coop. The boy carried secret messages back and forth and finally took Teresa a file to cut through the lock on her door. It was agreed that she would climb onto a low roof, where she would affix a strong rope attached at its other end to the count’s balcony. Just four days before her father arrived home, they made fast both ends of the rope. But Teresa panicked as she began to pull herself along it, and the count had a servant go across the rope to help her.
As they were moving along the rope two things happened that might have caused serious injury had Teresa fallen from the great height. The first was that as the two of them swung down from the roof, the edge of the balcony (which was of wood and somewhat worm-eaten) gave a great crack and would have split and let them fall had not the count held on to it with both hands. The other was that halfway across the street the girl’s arms became so tired that when the servant noticed it he had to hang from the ropes and seize Teresa by her hair and the front of her shift; and although the two hung there motionless for the space of a Credo, at last she recovered her strength and continued until she reached the balcony, where the count received her with the greatest affection. They then untied one end of the hempen rope and, pulling on the other, hastily drew it in, thereby removing the evidence that the beautiful Teresa had escaped by that route. She spent the rest of the night in the arms of her lover, who did not behave with as much restraint as he had on the first, second, and third occasions, especially because this time Teresa was quite willing.
Doña Teresa stayed in hiding in the home of the count for two months; nothing more is said about why she didn’t marry him. Then she and her little brother slipped away to an aunt’s house in another city and stayed away from Potosí for over two years, during which her mother died repentant and grieving for her lost children. Doña Teresa found “a noble youth who wished to wed her. . . . At last Doña Teresa returned to this city with her husband, where they lived for ten more years in great peace and tranquility, and at the end of that time Teresa departed this life, leaving four sons and a daughter who bore her name, a girl as beautiful as her dead mother had been. And she is alive today, her beauty increasing as she grows older.”
This little tale of the power of feminine beauty, of passionate whispers above narrow streets and hairbreadth escapes across them might come from old Seville, with guitars strumming, fountains splashing in the courtyards, Gypsies conjuring in the shadows. But the setting was about as different from Seville as it could be.
The streams of silver from the mines of Potosí and Mexico gave Spain its few decades as the first world power and sustained the growth of the whole net of world trade—in northern Europe, in the Mediterranean, on the Mecca pilgrimage routes, into India, and both ways around the world into China. These streams flow all through our stories of the world of 1688. That world knew no more improbable combination of planning and anarchy, passion and repentance, greed and compassion, church, law, and silver, Spaniard and Indian than Potosí itself. At an elevation of about thirteen thousand feet in a valley surrounded by barren mountains, bringing all its food, lumber, and other necessities up from lower elevations, the city simply would not have been there at all if this location had not been the site of the largest and richest deposits of silver then known in the world, discovered in 1545 and coming into production in the 1580s. In the early 1600s Potosí had well over a hundred thousand people, and its core was a fine Spanish city with well-planned plazas, churches, opulent mansions, a huge area devoted to fortified refining complexes, and streets deliberately made narrow and crooked to break the howling winds. Every luxury good in the world was for sale—Chinese silks, Italian paintings, Persian carpets, French beaver hats—but Spanish women had learned that they must go down to lower elevations to give birth, for many of their infants would not survive their efforts to get enough oxygen from their first breaths of the thin air. There were not many cities outside Japan whose streets were safe at night in 1688, but few were as wild as those of Potosí. Greed, passion, challenges to honor, long-lasting feuds among Basques, Castilians, American-born creoles, and foreigners led to the endless ambushes, duels, and pitched battles described with such relish by Arzáns. If occasionally one of the wild men repented and ended his life as a Franciscan friar, it gave the tale-tellers of Potosí a treasured chance to describe the most interestingly brutal crimes and provide edification all at once. Black slaves and Indian servants could be counted on to vary their monotonous lives by breaking the heads of their masters’ enemies. If greed for silver did not provide enough recruits for the devil, there also was a scattering of Spanish and Indian witches, some of them said to specialize in trances induced by coca, already very much a part of the lives of the people of the Andes.
Potosí and its stream of silver depended on an organized brutality, the mita system of forced Indian labor. From the 1570s on, the Spanish authorities required every Indian village in the viceroyalty of Peru to send one-seventh of its male population every year for a four-month term of paid labor in the mines of Potosí, the mercury mines of Huancavelica (in modern Peru), or other public projects. The wages were far below market levels, the work was hard and dangerous (the worst was amid the poisonous mercury ore at Huancavelica), and disease and bad diet contributed to the high death rates. The mita provided only about one-tenth of the labor supply at Potosí, but these laborers did the heaviest and most dangerous work, which no one would do without compulsion, carrying heavy baskets of ore up rickety ladders out of the mines. The mita also shaped the economy of the rest of the area, as Indians fled villages where they were registered in order to live where they had no mita obligations.
By 1650 the mita was producing only about 60 percent of the numbers of laborers for Potosí it had at the turn of the century, and silver production and royal revenues from it were falling. The mill- and mineowners were demanding restoration of the full labor supply, and the monarchy was supporting them in hopes of reviving production. In 1683, after prolonged discussion and several abortive reform projects, the viceroy, the duke of La Palata, ordered a new census as a basis for full enforcement of the mita. Many local officials repeatedly sought clarification or asked permission to use local variations in reporting categories, and otherwise delayed compliance, while masses of Indians moved away from administrative centers to avoid being registered. The result was a census showing a total population of Upper Peru only half that of a century before. In 1688 the results finally were being pulled together, and a new set of lower mita quotas was laid out. In the eighteenth century the Spanish managed to raise production at Potosí above its late-seventeenth-century level and continued their efforts to revive the mita, but to little effect, as quotas and actual supplies of forced labor continued to decline.
To the first-time viewer, the Sonora Desert is all that the word “desert” connotes: a wasteland, its hard soil broken only by occasional forbidding cacti and dead-looking bushes. Especially in the summer the heat is stunning, the sky cloudless, and as soon as the sun rises, the visitor flinches from its power and seeks what shade he can find. But the visitor who spends some time exploring the region finds surprising variety. Mountains rise to over sixty-five hundred feet above sea level, capped with pine forests. Here and there the saguaro, organ-pipe, ocotillo, and other large cacti grow in such numbers that they form singular gardens and almost groves.
In August rain clouds ride in on the east winds, all the way from the Gulf of Mexico. Thunder rumbles, lightning flashes, and dark clouds pour flash floods into dry watercourses. In the winter the temperatures are milder, and storms out of the North Pacific sometimes reach far enough inland to give the Sonora Desert its second set of life-giving rains. This is the singularity of the Sonora Desert; farther east or west the deserts only have one season per year of possible rains and have nothing like the variety of desert vegetation that the two rains support in the Sonora region.
The people who lived in the Sonora Desert in 1688 called themselves Hohokam, “the people.” The Spaniards who were beginning to move into the desert from the south called them Pima and their land the Pimería. They were largely hunter-gatherers, harvesting the variable roots and seeds and hunting the small animals of the desert. Some of them planted corn and beans where there was a reliable water supply. They dug ditches to channel water to their fields and in some places could see traces of the much larger irrigation works of earlier peoples who may have been their ancestors but with whom they felt little kinship.
In 1688 Father Eusebio Francisco Kino of the Society of Jesus was spending his second summer in the Sonora Desert. He never left it again, dying there in 1711 at the age of sixty-six; the site of his burial may be seen in modern Magdalena de Kino, Sonora, Mexico. It seems likely that he spent most of 1688 in one place not far from where he now is buried, the new mission establishment of Our Lady of the Sorrows (Nuestra Señora de las Dolores), on a rocky point overlooking promising alluvial fields and the San Miguel River, an excellent all-year source of irrigation water. Work on this site had begun in March 1687; by 1689 it boasted rich fields, a church, and a house. It may be that in 1688 Kino remained uncharacteristically immobile at Dolores, watching the farming and construction work and ministering to the Pima who came to settle nearby.
Eusebio Chini or Chino was born in 1645 at Segno in the Val di Non near Trent. Martino Martini, S.J., a famous cartographer, geographer, and historian of China in the seventeenth century, was a relative. Chino was educated at Jesuit colleges in his home area and in German-speaking lands, including Ingolstadt. Much later in his life he wrote that he was not sure if he should call himself an Italian or a German. During a serious illness he took a vow that if he recovered, he would seek to become a Jesuit and a missionary. From 1670 on he repeatedly petitioned his superiors for assignment to the missions in China. Despite his deep longing—he even preferred to have a room facing east, so that he could gaze off in that direction—he was of course an obedient Jesuit, ready to go where God and his superiors sent him. When his superiors dispatched him and a colleague to Seville for assignment to missions, one in Mexico and one in the Philippines, the two drew slips of paper to let God choose between them, and Eusebio drew Mexico.
While they waited at Seville, Chino and his colleagues spent many evenings watching an extraordinarily bright comet that appeared in November and December 1680. Comets, coming so mysteriously and unpredictably, were taken in many cultures as portents of heavenly wrath and disaster. They also were very hard to fit into the late scholastic cosmology of unchanging crystalline spheres that was increasingly rejected by up-to-date European scientists but was still the orthodox Christian view. The 1680 comet prompted apocalyptic fears in Puritan Massachusetts and among the hard-pressed French Calvinists, but among the latter it also evoked a memorable counterblast against portent-mongering and apocalyptic preaching from the French Protestant writer Pierre Bayle, whom we shall meet in a later chapter. It also attracted the interest of advanced scientific minds, one of whom, Edmond Halley of London, would be ready for observations of unprecedented accuracy and sophistication when another comet appeared just two years later.
Arriving in Mexico in 1681, Chino still hoped that a China assignment might turn up, but it was not to be. In his brief stay in Mexico City he met briefly Sor Juana de la Cruz and tangled memorably with Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora on the subject of comets, specifically the bright one that had just been observed with so much dread. Sigüenza had published a short work that cautiously deprecated the ominousness of comets and developed some of the more modern theories of their nature and their orbits; he already had been furiously attacked by several more conservative authors. Chino apparently wished to demonstrate his own astronomical learning by publishing a short book that asserted that everyone took seriously the ominousness of the comet, “unless there be some dull wits who cannot perceive it.” It is not likely Chino intended a direct reference to Sigüenza, but the latter, ever the prickly and insecure creole, wrote a furious reply, which was not published until 1690; by that time Father Chino was well settled in his mission field, and there is no evidence that he ever knew how he had inadvertently offended.
Father Chino’s first missionary assignment was an unsuccessful effort to plant a mission on the forbidding coast of Baja California. Then in 1686 and 1687 he set out for a new assignment on the far northwest frontier of the Spanish domains, in the Sonora Desert. The Italian spelling Chino, pronounced “kino” in Italian, was pronounced in Spanish as it would be in English and meant “Chinese,” sometimes an ethnic slur in Mexico and a too painful reminder of his lost dream of the China missions. He began to spell his name Kino.
In most of his many years in the Pimería, Kino made at least one long trip on horse-or muleback through the deserts, seeking new sites for missions and Indians to convert. He often rode thirty miles a day, almost never with any soldiers to escort him. Sometimes he found welcome when one chief or group saw advantage in gaining the support of the Spanish against another. But the more usual reasons for welcoming the black robe and his little train of livestock and Indian helpers were healing and hunger. In the desert year there were times when food was scarce and others when the mesquite beans ripened and people got sick gorging on them. Agriculture and the storing of grain at the missions produced a more stable food supply, some of which Kino carried with him in his expeditions into the desert. The Pima also seem to have accepted Kino as a healer, staying by him if someone he treated and prayed over got well, following the ceremonies he taught them as they might have one of their own healer-shamans. Now little by little they themselves traveled to Dolores to see the strange healer, accept his little gifts, rest in the cool interior of the church, and stay at least for a time to dig some ditches, plant some crops, and eat regularly. They came on their own; by no means were there enough Spanish soldiers on this far frontier to force them to come.
In later years Kino worked indefatigably to plant more mission stations, always with provision for cattle ranching and a bit of irrigated agriculture. In addition to the native corn and beans, he encouraged the planting of wheat, onions, garlic, and a variety of European fruits and vegetables, including wine grapes so that the fathers could make their own wine for communion and for a very occasional drop with a distinguished visitor. When one adds the pioneering of desert cattle ranching, it is clear that Kino had brought a large number of new food resources to the relatively well-watered upland valleys of Sonora. Despite Kino’s constant lobbying with his superiors in Mexico and Europe for more missionaries, there never were enough fathers to staff all the missions he started. Sometimes when the Pima heard of an influential visitor to Dolores, they would come many miles to plead for more fathers to bring the planting, medicine, and prayers to their areas once more.
Eusebio Kino made the mission at Dolores his base until his death in 1711. He pushed the frontier of his little mission empire north as far as San Xavier del Bac, about 130 miles north of Dolores, where a fine old church still stands on the outskirts of Tucson, Arizona. During his long journeys he gathered geographical knowledge as well as souls. It was generally believed that the long peninsula we call Baja California was an island and that the Gulf of California continued north to some kind of connection with the Pacific. A land route to Baja California would greatly facilitate efforts to establish missions and other settlements in those forbidding deserts, where the failed effort in which Kino had participated had been followed by others that were just barely hanging on. Several times Kino had crossed the daunting lava desert just south of the modern Arizona-Sonora border to the gulf. His observations suggested it was unlikely that the gulf continued to the north. In 1706, aged sixty-one, he led a party on a rugged muleback trip up Pinacate Mountain in the heart of the lava desert. The view of continuous coastline to the south and the curve into the Baja California coast to the southwest convinced all of them that California was not an island.
If Eusebio Kino had gotten his wish, he would have boarded another Spanish ship at Acapulco and crossed the Pacific to Manila. He might have joined a mission in the Philippines or perhaps, despite the jurisdictional claims of the Portuguese crown, made his way to his heart’s desire in the China missions. Either one would have been very different from Sonora.
In May 1688 the city of Manila was agitated by rumors that the Chinese bakers were putting ground glass in the bread, which had been circulating for many months. The independent crown judge in his reports seemed to believe these rumors, but the governor found many things to doubt and imposed some fines but no more severe punishments. The crown judge, apparently fearing a further escalation of the quarrel, took refuge with the Jesuits. It is likely that the bakers had been adulterating the bread, but not lethally, and the crown judge had been too ready to listen to rumors amplified by the fear and hatred of the Chinese, a constant feature of life in Manila.
Manila in 1688 was a little more than a hundred years old, a small, fortified Spanish city with a few crowded neighborhoods outside its walls, situated at sea level on the waterlogged plain separating the inland Laguna de Bay from the excellent harbor of Manila Bay. Its Spanish governor claimed jurisdiction over the rest of the Philippine Islands but commanded only a few small garrisons and very little settlement or commerce elsewhere. The most important Spanish presence outside Manila was that of the great missionary orders—Jesuit, Franciscan, Dominican, and Augustinian—already well embarked on their singular achievement of making the Filipinos the only predominantly Christian people in Asia. Politically the Spanish authorities were an improbable appendage of the viceroyalty of New Spain, with its capital in Mexico. Economically Manila was the passive meeting point for two great phenomena of the seventeenth century: the stream of silver from the mines of Spanish America and the sophisticated manufactures and energetic commercial enterprise of the Chinese. Every year a galleon or two crossed the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila, bringing a cargo of New World silver to be used in buying Chinese silks, Chinese and Indian cottons, and other fine consumer goods that were in great demand in the New World. In Lima, it was said, even the slaves of the great households were dressed in Chinese silk. The goods were brought to Manila by a few ships from India or Java, but mostly by Chinese junks, largely from Xiamen and other ports of Fujian Province in South China. Spanish customs records list seventeen junks from China in 1685, twenty-seven in 1686, fifteen in 1687, but only seven in 1688. There may have been some falling off from 1685, but as so often in the decayed empire of Carlos II, massive collusion in customs evasion probably also contributed to the low total.
Manila depended on the Chinese for more than the trade with China. A few Chinese had traded and perhaps settled there before the Spanish conquered it in 1571. The infant Spanish settlement had almost been extinguished by a Chinese pirate. But thereafter thousands of Chinese had settled in the Manila area, and they provided almost all the craft production of the city—blacksmithing, leatherwork, tailoring, and of course baking—a singular occupation for South Chinese rice eaters living in a rice-growing country. Resident Chinese became key middlemen in the trade with the Chinese junks. They also contracted with the Spanish authorities for the monopolies of various retail trades and the collection of commercial taxes from the Filipinos. Some of them became Roman Catholic converts of every degree of purity and syncretism, fervor and opportunism. Most of them were typically low-profile, cautious mediators, although there also was a pirate/gangster element among the seagoing Chinese. There were violent streaks among the Filipinos as well, and to the Usual Spanish hand-on-the-sword attitude was added the special flavor of a place where the American authorities could exile some of their worst problems; to Manila, said one eminent Dominican of the late 1600s, “are transported all the feces of New Spain.”
Manila had been born in conflict with Chinese pirates and had been threatened by a dissident Chinese regime on Taiwan in the 1660s. More-over, the Spanish had dreamed of a pure Christian commonwealth at this far end of the earth but had found themselves irremediably dependent on the heathen Chinese for its maintenance. Various blends of Spanish and Filipino fears and hatreds had been ignited in massacres of the Manila Chinese in 1603, 1639, and 1662. In 1683 there was some danger that the collapsing regime on Taiwan might try to save itself by attacking Manila. This may have contributed to fresh worries about the Chinese and new letters about them sent on their slow way around the world; all we know is that in September 1686 a royal order was issued in Madrid that all non-Christian Chinese were to be expelled from Manila. While that order was making its way back across the Atlantic and the Pacific, more trouble was brewing. The large numbers of Chinese ships arriving in 1686 brought quite a few immigrants, and the Spanish began to talk about new measures to keep them confined to the previously assigned Parian, or Chinatown. Rumors of these discussions may have set off a small outburst of violence, beginning when a band of Chinese assassinated the Spanish collector of the Chinese head tax in his own house in May 1686, and three other Spanish officials were seriously wounded in attacks on the same night. It was at this time that rumors of ground glass in the bread began to circulate. Several days of sporadic violence followed, while many Chinese fled their homes in fear of Spanish and Filipino retaliation. Seven suspects in the assassination were brought to trial, and order gradually was restored.
All this and the alleged plot of the bakers left the Spanish primed for action when the royal order of expulsion of non-Christian Chinese, sent from Madrid in September 1686, finally reached Manila in October 1688. The Chinese of course were at least the equals of the Spanish in delay and the manipulation of paper work. When the expulsion order was announced, some said they wanted to become Christians and requested prebaptismal instruction. Some asked to be allowed to stay until the Acapulco galleons came in because many Spaniards owed them money that they could not repay until they received the returns on their investments in the trade with Mexico. The Spanish authorities thought this reasonable and asked for a list of debtors and creditors but, when it came in, found that all the Chinese threatened with expulsion claimed to be creditors of the crown because of loans (probably fórced) to help pay the Spanish garrison. Despite all this, it seems that about a thousand non-Christian Chinese were deported on the junks that came in 1690; but many more were not sent for lack of shipping, and the Spanish dependence on the Chinese and unwilling toleration of the non-Christians among them remained unbroken. Even today there are important Chinese elements in the Manila business elite, although their relations with the Filipino elite and government sometimes are uneasy. The Chinese cemetery of Manila, whose central chapel displays both Christian and Buddhist images, is one of the world’s finer exhibits of a tolerant syncretism that now is more conspicuous than the bigotry of the seventeenth century.