XVIII
Don Quixote Invades the Spanish Indies

When the commanders of the annual fleets sailed from Spain to the Indies in the spring and early summer of 1605, one bound for Mexico and the other for Tierra Firme or South America, these gentlemen were probably unconscious of serving as instruments for the introduction into the New World of one of the greatest literary works of all time, Don Quijote de la Mancha, written by a certain Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra and just off the press. Stowed in the holds and tucked away in the passenger cabins of many vessels of the two flotas was quite possibly the entire first edition of this famous novel journeying to the lands of the Conquistadors' descendants. Just how many copies of this masterpiece went overseas on this occasion will probably never be known, owing to the extremely fragmentary state of the existing bills of lading of the galleons which sailed the Spanish Main. The surviving records at Seville indicate that quantities dispatched in 1605 varied from "three books of Don Quixote de la Mancha printed at Madrid. By Juan de la Cuesta" which a "Juan de Saragoza" sent on the Nuestra Señora del Rosario to Juan de Guevara at Cartagena,^[1] to the 262 copies consigned to San Juan de Ulúa on the Espíritu Santo for Clemente de Valdés, a resident of Mexico City.^[2] Another substantial shipment was Diego Correa's, who forwarded two cases of books, including 100 copies of Don Quijote, to Antonio de Toro, their owner, at Cartagena on the Espíritu Santo, probably another ship bearing the common pious name.^[3]

But the enjoyment of the great "book of the year" in the New World did not have to wait until the contents of the heavy boxes reached their destinations and were sold to a scattered clientele; it

began on the high seas. When the vessels anchored in the port of entry the customs officials came aboard as usual, and the few available visita reports of 1605 made at Vera Cruz show that copies of Don Quijote were found in the passenger cabins, where they had doubtless served their owners well in beguiling the tedium of the voyage. Thus, as the islands and shores of the Indies drew nearer, cramped and weary voyagers mingled the delights of Cervantes' immortal pages with the joy of anticipation of the crossing's end.

To whom properly belongs the distinction of first introducing the greatest masterpiece of Spanish literature into the Western Hemisphere is a matter which, perhaps, can never be precisely determined, but the names of individuals appearing on the few surviving visita reports of 1605 made at San Juan de Ulúa may be put forward as possible candidates. On September 28 of that historic year two Franciscan commissioners of the Holy Office, Fray Francisco Carranco and Fray Andrés Bravo, summoned a notary of one of the ships for the customary interrogation. This individual declared that his name was Alonso de Dassa, that he was a native of Monte Molina, and that he was thirty years old "more or less." He had come on board La Encarnación, commanded by Captain Gaspar de Maya, which had touched at Cádiz after leaving Seville. From July 12,when they set sail from the Atlantic port of Spain, they had made no other stop except at Guadalupe to take on fresh water, and en route no sails, friendly or hostile, were sighted, and they had had no dealings with people other than those within the fleet itself. On the sixth question concerning books, Alonso de Dassa reported that "for his own entertainment he was bringing the First Part of El pícaro, Don Quijote de la Mancha, Flores y Blancaflor; and for his prayers he had a devocionario de fr. Luis, a 'S. Joan Chrisotomo,' and a Book of hours of Our Lady ." He prudently disclaimed knowledge of anything of a forbidden nature on board. Captain Maya of the same ship gave his age as fifty, his home town as Seville, and stated that he, too, had a copy of Don Quijote and a Book of hours which, he understood, were not banned works.^[4]

On the Nuestra Señora de los Remedios Juan Ruiz Gallardo, twenty-six years of age and hailing from the "Villa de Ayamonte," announced that he had amused himself on shipboard by reading Don Quijote de la Mancha and Bernardo del Carpio . On the San

Cristóbal, another Sevillian, Alonso López de Arze, twenty-five years old, acknowledged bringing a copy of Cervantes' latest novel to read and some collections of ballads, which worldly literature was balanced by a devotional work of Fray Luis de Granada.^[5] These and other copies of Don Quijote included in the personal baggage of their owners were, in all likelihood, the first to reach the mainland of New Spain and begin its conquest by the Knight of the Sad Countenance.

If it is clear that these few loose copies of the great novel found in the ship cabins actually did reach the New World, it can not be stated with certainty how many of the indefinite number carried in the holds of the small vessels were equally fortunate, for the fleets of 1605 suffered fairly severe losses before dropping anchor in the terminal ports of the mainland on the American side of the Atlantic. The earlier squadron bound for Tierra Firme and Panama made a late departure from Seville, on May 15. It consisted of thirteen galleons for Cartagena and the Isthmus, two more for Santa Margarita, and one each for Santa Marta, Río de la Hacha, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo.^[6] One of the galleons heading for Panama was wrecked in crossing the treacherous bar at the mouth of the Guadalquivir, while four others were lost off the coast of Santa Margarita with all their cargo, which probably included part of the precious first edition of Don Quijote . Later La Trinidad sank in the vicinity of Havana with but few of its personnel escaping.^[7]

The later, Mexico-bound Flota also had a measure of bad luck, both at the start and when its voyage was well advanced. Its forty-three vessels got under way on July 12; twenty-five were bound for New Spain, three for Honduras, two for Campeche, and one each for Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and Havana.^[8] These thirty-three ships departing from Seville were subsequently joined by ten more at Cádiz. On a black and tempestuous night shortly after leaving San Lucar de Barrameda the large almiranta, with orders to touch at Honduras, was struck by lightning near the port of Trujillo and sank with all but eleven of its 101 passengers and crew.^[9] It was also reported that well out to sea the Flota was assailed by eight enemy sloops. Though it was successful in sinking two of its attackers and capturing two others in this engagement, one of its heavily laden merchantmen was lost with all but twenty

on board.^[10] Presumably still other copies of Don Quijote carried in the cabins and cargo of the unlucky craft disappeared with it, thus narrowing still further the total number of the first edition to reach the Spanish Indies that year.

With many of the shipping registers of 1605 now missing from the archives and with an unknown number of copies of Cervantes' novel lost at sea in the series of maritime disasters of that year, it is hardly possible to ascertain either the quantity originally shipped from Spain, or that eventually reaching the hands of readers in America. It might be hoped that colonial archives of the Hispanic nations of the New World would yield documentary evidence of the actual arrival of a specific book shipment recorded in the surviving registers of the House of Trade at Seville, and thus supply a complete documentation which would demonstrate beyond cavil the unhampered circulation of printed literature among the Conquistador's descendants. Such instances are rare indeed, but in at least one this link is established clearly and unmistakably. By a happy coincidence, it relates to a shipment including seventy-two or more copies of the first edition of Don Quijote, which safely made the crossing of the Atlantic in the year of its publication. The fortunate discovery some years ago in the National Archive of Peru of a recibo, or receipt, covering a consignment of books at Lima makes it possible to trace the course of a large part of one substantial book shipment from its deposit at the House of Trade in the Andalusian capital to its safe arrival over a year later at the seat of the viceroyalty of Peru.^[11] It is thus feasible to offer a fairly detailed account of the vicissitudes experienced by the gallant knight and his squire when they first invaded the continent of South America.

On or about March 26, 1605, an enterprising bookseller of Alcalá de Henares in Spain, Juan de Sarria by name, brought into Seville on donkeyback sixty-one cases of his wares which he wished to forward to his business associate in far-off Lima, an individual known as Miguel Méndez. There was an assorted stock of volumes in these boxes, but the precise number, unhappily, can not be stated because the manifest sheets covering the first twenty cases are missing from the register.^[12] This unfortunate lacuna in the record precludes a determination of the total copies of Don Quijote which

Sarria shipped that spring, but the remaining part reveals that the cases numbered from 21 to 40 contained forty copies of Cervantes' masterpiece, and that those from 41 to 61 raised the total to sixty-six. The Lima receipt of this Sarria consignment lists only forty-five cases, for not all those transhipped at Panama had yet arrived at their destination, but this large fraction of the whole included seventy-two copies of Don Quijote . Thus it is evident that the first twenty cases of the original sixty-one, whose record is missing from the register still preserved at Seville, contained at least six Don Quijotes and very likely many more.

After the procedures at the House of Trade, described in an earlier chapter, were completed, the entire consignment of the Alcalá de Henares bookdealer was, apparently, placed on board a merchantman bound for Puertobelo which bore the euphonious, if commonplace, name Nuestra Señora del Rosario . As already noted, the Tierra Firme fleet raised anchor in the middle of May and departed for the Spanish Indies, making its customary first stop at the Canary Islands. A leak in one of the vessels, the Espíritu Santo, which, according to its register, carried at least one hundred copies of Don Quijote among its cargo, caused considerable delay. It was, therefore, well after June 5 when this outlying archipelago disappeared over the stern as the fleet resumed its westward course.^[13] Fortunately, the Nuestra Señora del Rosario was not among those galleons which went to the bottom off the coast of northern South America near the island of Santa Margarita and, in due course, it put in at Cartagena and, finally at the terminal port of Puertobelo. There the long-awaited appearance of the fleet was most certainly the great annual event and a signal for a momentary awakening from the lethargy and tropical torpor in which this trading center drowsed during most of the year. Its streets and water front swarmed with the perspiring and colorful overflow of its greatly increased population.

Among the transients on hand at Puertobelo to welcome the incoming ships was the son of the bookseller of Alcalá de Henares, Juan de Sarria, hijo, whom the document describes as "younger than twenty-five and older than twenty-three." He had come to the Atlantic port of the Isthmus to take delivery of the book consignment whose transfer overland to Panama City, transshipment

to Callao, the port of entry of Lima and Peru, and final delivery into the hands of his father's partner in the viceregal capital were entrusted to his care.

Puertobelo, ordinarily a small cluster of houses with a drab governor's residence, a rude hospital staffed with two parish priests, and a recently completed fort, the Castillo de San Felipe, had functioned as the western terminus of the transatlantic freight and passenger service between Spain and its South American colonies for only a little over a decade when young Sarria appeared there, probably late in the summer of 1605, to receive the copies of Don Quijote and other volumes in the shipment from his father. Earlier the less salubrious locality of Nombre de Dios farther to the east had served as the anchorage place of the fleets, but considerations of defense from pirate attacks, particularly after Drake's successful forays, as well as of health, had contributed to a shift to the only real harbor on the Atlantic side of the Isthmus. The main expanse of water front at Puertobelo was a good two miles in length and half a mile wide, with a deep and sandy bottom coming almost to the shore's edge; ships could enter and leave readily regardless of the direction of the wind, and they were assured safe shelter from storms. The Spanish government had been spending 60,000 pesos a year to erect the necessary buildings, and at a cost of some 62,596 pesos annually it was maintaining a garrison of fifty soldiers, whose supplies and equipment came mostly from Peru, in the Castillo de San Felipe to guard against the surprise attacks by the highwaymen of the sea.^[14] Only a short while before, in 1602, an English rover, William Parker, had managed to sack Puertobelo, and constant vigilance was imperative. Timber, stone, and fresh water were abundant in the vicinity, but the terrain was marshy and the steep range behind the town, together with the lay of the port itself, prevented free ventilation by cooling breezes. These conditions helped to breed fevers of high mortality, especially when the scanty population was abruptly augmented by the throng of officials, merchants, artisans, and hundreds, even thousands, of soldiers and sailors from the anchored galleons at the time of the annual Puertobelo fair.

This latter institution was initiated at Nombre de Dios about 1575 to facilitate at this meeting place exchanges of goods from

Spain and Peru. After the removal to the new site the fair flourished during nearly a century and a half. More than a distributing center for merchants of the surrounding area, the famous Puertobelo's function was that of an entrepôt for the entire Spanish-South American trade which, in a certain sense, was international. All the commerce of the west coast of the southern continent and even that of the Río de la Plata region on the lower Atlantic seaboard, was required by Spanish law to pass through Panama. Thus the merchants of Peru, mainly Lima, enjoyed in a vast region a virtual monopoly which was almost as exclusive and as profitable as that of their counterparts in the Spanish Peninsula itself. By an agreement between these Spanish and Peruvian businessmen, duly sanctioned by the Crown, the Peninsular exporters could trade on their own account only as far as the Isthmus. Hence the representatives of the merchants of Spain—in reality, those of Seville and Cádiz—bringing manufactured articles from the mother country, such as fabrics, hardware, glassware, wine, books, and paper, met the corresponding agents of the Peruvian traders at Puertobelo in order to effect an exchange of these products for the precious metals from the mines and for other commodities such as sugar, tobacco, and vicuña wool of the viceroyalty brought up to Panama on coastal vessels. These two groups of merchants were organized as guilds with definite rules and regulations governing their relations. At the time that Don Quixote first passed through Puertobelo in 1605 the import and export duties were netting sums between 150,000 and 170,000 pesos whenever the fleets came in, which, of late, had not been regularly.^[15]

The Atlantic galleons customarily stopped at the more healthful and protected port of Cartagena until word reached them that the Peru fleet had arrived at Old Panama City. They then proceeded on to Puertobelo. Meanwhile, on the Pacific side of the Isthmus seamen and Negroes unloaded the treasure and goods from Peru and transported them across the intervening land on recuas or pack-trains of mules and on bongos or large dugouts down the Chagres river. In Puertobelo the few townspeople rented part or the whole of their houses at exorbitant rates, and temporary huts and barracks were erected on the compounds and nearby fields in an effort to meet the housing shortage as the heterogenous throng

gathered for the fair. The cost of lodging and food rose to incredible heights and all values and services suffered a heavy inflation during the two weeks that the occasion ordinarily lasted.

The first step in the procedure of the Puertobelo fair was the customary inspection of the registers and cargoes of the incoming ships by the royal officers who had come from Panama City for this purpose. When they were satisfied that the merchandise was properly registered and that no contraband was included, the order to unload was given. Thereupon, under the supervision of these same officials, the general of the fleet and the alcalde of Puertobelo, slaves and seamen began the arduous task of transferring the goods from the holds and decks of the anchored vessels to sledges, on which the heavy cases and bales were dragged to the shelter of tents made from the ships' canvas and set up along the water front and in the public squares. There the owners or their agents identified their consignments by the distinguishing marks on the cases, which were also drawn on the invoices. Meanwhile, a commission composed of representatives of both the Spanish and the Peruvian guilds met as a sort of office of price administration or stock exchange to establish the rates at which the various kinds of commodities would be traded, and these quotations were publicly posted. Faithful adherence to these exchange rates appears to have been the rule on these annual occasions.^[16]

Such were the necessary preliminaries of the Puertobelo fair and during the next fortnight, later extended to a longer period, the houses, shops, stalls, streets, and squares of the port town bulged with boxes and bales of commodities which changed hands and were gradually loaded onto mules and into small river boats. Lying scattered about were heaps of ingots of silver and other precious metals in full public view and, apparently, without fear of theft. Everyone had surrendered to an orgy of barter, including the sailors of the galleons who offered sweetmeats and other tidbits brought from Spain for sale in tiny booths or stands.

Into this animated scene, then, came the young man, Juan de Sarria, to claim the sixty-one cases of books, including the first copies of Don Quijote to arrive in this part of the world, and to pay for them in behalf of Miguel Méndez, the Lima merchant by whom he was employed. When he had found these boxes, which were

probably piled one upon the other under the shelter of a tent made of ship's sails, and had fulfilled the indispensable legal and commercial requirements, he set about the task of transporting this rather considerable consignment of printed volumes across the Isthmus whose terrain was much too rough and broken to permit the use of carts or wheeled vehicles.

Before the arrival of the fleet at Puertobelo, Sarria had doubtless dickered with one or more of the several owners of mules engaged in conveying freight, and he had probably already made preliminary arrangements for the transfer of his father's wares to Old Panama City. This form of service was, in fact, one of the most important industries of the district and some thirty-three citizens of the isthmian city were engaged in this occupation. It was an arduous one, calling for considerable strength and skill, both in lifting the heavy cases and in balancing them properly on the backs of the diminutive animals to which they were ingeniously strapped. The vigor of the few Indians of the locality was unequal to the demands of this heavy task and the arrieros, or muleteers, attending these recuas had long been burly Negro slaves who possessed the hardened physiques and the muscular dexterity required to load the merchandise and keep the cantankerous beasts moving forward along the narrow and, in places, precipitous trail. Approximately 300 of the Africans were thus engaged when Sarria arranged for the transportation of his books. Some of the goods were thus brought directly across the Isthmus, while others were piled into barges which proceeded slowly along the coast from Puertobelo and then ascended the Chagres River to the depot at Las Cruces, where they were loaded on the backs of waiting mules and carried to the Pacific side at the Old City of Panama. In the whole region at the time of the Sarria shipment the thirty-three individuals engaged in this freight-moving business had a total of 850 mules. The number of these beasts of burden operating in the various pack trains varied from 75, which was the largest, through 55, 40, 30, 25 and less; the smallest, apparently, used only five animals.^[17] As a result of the need for this means of transportation, mule breeding was one of the leading industries of the region, particularly in the small towns of Nata and Los Santos not far from the Pacific terminus, but the best stock was imported from Nicaragua.

The two routes across the Isthmus formed a sort of triangle, of which the one swinging southwest along the seacoast and then turning up the tortuous Chagres River constituted two sides.^[18] It was a difficult journey beset with perils of shallows, rapids, sudden floods, and sunken logs, and usually required about two weeks' time, depending on the condition of the stream. The latter was navigable to Las Cruces, which was about five leagues from the Pacific Ocean, and the remainder of the crossing was by muleback. A settlement had grown up at this junction where a large warehouse in charge of a public official was established to store goods in transit and this service netted the government as high as 10,000 pesos a year, though a decline in trade had recently brought this sum nearer to 4,000 pesos.

The second route, known as the Gorgona trail, struck overland in a southerly direction and the eighteen to twenty leagues separating Puertobelo and Old Panama could ordinarily be covered in four days with stops at inns, but parts of this way were exceedingly dangerous. On leaving the site of the fair on the Atlantic side the pack trains passed through the squalid quarters of the slaves called "Guinea;" then, skirting the Cascajal River, they began the abrupt ascent which carried them over the highest part of the continental divide. Long years after Sarria's time it was reported that the passage was

. . . steep and narrow, in many places almost perpendicular [so] that we were obliged to ascend climbing with our hands and feet . . . we sunk up to the knees in mud . . . at other times the whole party seemed to be lost in the windings of the road, cut deep into the side of the mountain.

Concerning another range nearly a thousand feet high a later traveler declared:

It was impossible to keep on the mules without breaking [one's neck].... Some part of this road is not above two feet broad, having precipices on each side four or five hundred feet deep, so that by the least slip of a mule's foot, both itself and the rider must be dashed in pieces.^[19]

Even in the less hazardous stretches, constant vigilance was required in crossing the rain-drenched jungles and numerous swift

streams where a stumble or slip might irreparably ruin books and other perishable wares by wetting. It was over this route, apparently, that young Sarria had chosen to bring the first copies of Don Quijote to reach South America, and it appears that something in the nature of the mishap just mentioned befell a part of his consignment of sixty-one cases. In the recibo dated at Lima on June 5, 1606 which bears his signature, Sarria reported that several boxes got wet between Puertobelo and Old Panama and he was obliged to take out the damaged volumes on his arrival at the Pacific side and repack them separately. He was inclined, however, to lay the blame for this misfortune at the door of the packers in Spain who, he asserted, had not done their work well, rather than upon the difficulties of the Gorgona trail. These water-soaked books numbered ninety-one in all and the list of titles, which is duly inserted into the record, reveals that only one of the precious copies of Don Quijote suffered from immersion. The majority of the works included were a wide diversity of religious writings together with copies of La hermosura de Angélica, a half-chivalric novel by Barahona de Soto, of the diverting Viaje entretenido of Rojas Villandrando, of some epistles of Cicero, and some Romanceros or ballad collections, the latter the most numerous item contained in the case.

When Don Quixote and Sancho Panza passed through Old Panama for the first time in their adventurous careers encased in the packing boxes of the Sarria shipment, the city on the Pacific side of the Isthmus, founded some eighty-six years before, was experiencing a decline in its fortunes.^[20] Primarily a transfer point for the trade between Spain and its vast holdings in South America, the prosperity of this center depended largely on the annual fleets from the Peninsula which, in recent years, had arrived in smaller numbers and at intervals of two, and sometimes, three years. Moreover, some of the normal traffic was by-passing the Isthmus altogether by going from the mother country to Peru by way of New Spain. And it was also alleged that the China trade, funneled through Manila in the Philippines, was drawing off some of the silver of both Mexico and Peru to purchase the textiles and chinaware of the Far East. As a result unemployment was rising in the shrinking population of the isthmian city, and the pack trains and the barges

on the Chagres River could hardly be kept busy seven or eight months of the year.

The site of Old Panama was anything but attractive. Lolling on the edge of the Pacific, whose shifting sands were fast filling up the exposed harbor, it was immediately backed by low, swampy country which soon terminated in a mountain range on the north and craggy, forbidding hills to the east. On the west side a small stream separated the city from the little town of Nata. Occupying a frontier position between two oceans, its inhabitants lived in continual dread of attacks by enemies both external and internal. Piratic aggressions were common, and lurking in the surrounding highlands were cimarrones, or fugitive Negro slaves, who made travel in the interior and life on the outlying ranches a source of uneasiness; though frequently hunted down, these runaways were rarely captured. And the climate left much to be desired; it was hot, humid, and dank, with almost continuous rainfall throughout the winter. The moisture quickly rusted tools, weapons, muskets, and lances, and there was nearly always a shortage of these articles which had to be imported from Spain. Usually in December fresher breezes swept in, tempering the heat somewhat, and produced a more comfortable temperature until about the end of April. Despite the excessive precipitation and the soaked condition of the district generally there was no water within the confines of the city suitable for drinking, cooking, or even for washing clothes. Negro water carriers hauled a supply from ravines a half league away and they sold it in the streets at a half real a jugful. To the east and west of the city were brief stretches of fertile soil, but much of the surrounding country, especially toward the north, was hilly and sterile.

In 1607 a remarkably detailed report was prepared concerning Old Panama and its vicinity which offers a fairly complete description of the locality about the time that Sarria, Jr., passed through with his copies of the first edition of Don Quijote . The anonymous compiler is very precise in some of his facts and figures and a few of these will be utilized. The city itself, lying like a recumbent L along the water front, extended exactly 1,412 paces east and west, ending at the Convento de la Merced, and 487 paces from the sea inland; two unnamed rivers, one of which dried up part of the year,

formed its boundaries. The chief avenue along the shore, called the Calle de la Carrera, was paralleled by three others, all of which were crossed by seven muddy streets starting at the beach and pointing inward toward the hinterland. Besides the blocks of miscellaneous wooden, story-and-a-half, tile-roofed houses of Europeans thus formed, there were three public squares, the main one, on which the principal church and some of the public buildings faced, lying in the corner of the L, and two smaller ones. These dwellings numbered 322, only eight being built of stone; the five convents had gardens or orchards and were the only habitations that gave a touch of charm to the untidy community with its quagmires and pools of greenish, stagnant water. Surrounding this drab core of the city was a ragged periphery of squalid, grass-roofed shacks which sheltered the much larger Negro population and a few poor whites.

The decline in commercial activity had reduced the inhabitants to one-third the number of earlier days. The 1607 census reveals that the male Europeans totaled 548, of whom 495 were Spaniards and the remainder a sprinkling of Portuguese, Italians, Flemish and Frenchmen; 215 were married, 277 bachelors, and 56 were widowers. The corresponding female element was smaller, being only 303, and there were 156 children under the age of ten. The only educational activities were, apparently, in the hands of a few Jesuits who taught Latin for 300 pesos a year, and a schoolmaster teaching reading and writing who had his house rent free. Only twenty of the citizens owned horses, the true symbol of social and economic eminence.

These whites were greatly outnumbered by the 3,721 Negro slaves who, dwelling in the thick cluster of huts and lean-tos fringing the city and still speaking their African dialects, had long replaced the Indian aborigines; the latter survived only in three tiny and scattered villages inland, and hence the encomienda system characterizing the Spanish social organization in so many parts of America was nonexistent in the Isthmus.

The chief occupations of this community at the crossroads of the Spanish world were bartering, freight hauling, and shipbuilding. Agriculture was not sufficiently developed to maintain the settlement and much foodstuff was imported from Peru. It was essen-

tially a community of middlemen who dealt not only in manufactured articles from Spain but also in the merchandise and foodstuffs which came up the west coast of South America more frequently from the rich Peruvian viceroyalty. These imports included flour, sugar, molasses, chick-peas, starch, olives, soap, foot-ware, canvas, and shipping tackle as well as the silver and other products of the mines. The slow-moving coastal shipping took back lumber, building stone, tanned hides, and newly arrived Negro slaves as well as the manufactures of Europe. This business was in the hands of some twenty brokers who conducted their negotiations mainly in their own homes. There were, besides, about twenty-one shopkeepers in the retail trade of the city.

Next in order of importance economically were the pack train and freight service on the Chagres River, which together employed nearly a third of the population, black and white. The abundance of timber made shipbuilding one of the minor industrial activities, but this was hampered by the necessity of importing so much of the rigging and caulking materials from Spain. As a result only two or three vessels, of from 60 to 175 tons, were turned out each year. Fishing did not seem to pay enough to warrant the effort, but the coastwise shipping down the coast to Buenaventura, Guayaquil and Callao, and north as far as Nicaragua was fairly profitable. There was virtually no maritime service as far north as New Spain, however.

When at last Sarria's pack train trooped into the miry streets and steamy atmosphere of Old Panama with his sixty-one cases intact if slightly damaged by the wetting received on the trail, his troubles were by no means over. To defray the heavy handling charges of his large shipment across the Isthmus he was obliged to sell eight of his boxes and their contents, thus reducing his total to fifty-three. Though it appears that he gave a strict accounting of this transaction, the record has not been found and it is impossible to state whether copies of Don Quijote were included in the sale. And now the problem of transportation down the coast to Callao and Lima must be faced. The open harbor had silted up to such an extent that vessels of fifty or sixty tons could no longer enter, even at high tide; occasionally, they anchored a league off shore, and goods were lightered back and forth, but more often

they put into the deep-water, if somewhat exposed, harbor of Perico located in the little group of islands about two leagues south of the city. It was, therefore, both inconvenient and expensive to load cargo on the coastal ships at Old Panama.

The busy season coincided, of course, with the arrival of the Spanish fleet at Puertobelo, and Sarria had reached the Pacific terminus when freight space was scarce and rates had doubled. At other times of the year, in contrast, it was often difficult to fill the holds and there was a corresponding drop in the cost of shipping. Generally, goods in packing cases such as books were charged twelve or thirteen tomines per twenty-five pounds from Panama to Lima. Possibly the young man entrusted with the care of the consignment of copies of Don Quijote and other works was unable to obtain shipping space for his remaining fifty-three cases, or possibly he decided to wait on the Isthmus until cheaper freight rates were in force. Whatever the circumstances, he apparently did not deliver the books in Lima until the middle of the following year. Presumably he had met the Spanish galleons at Puertobelo in the early fall of 1605 and, although the voyage down the west coast of South America took many weeks and even months, the interval between that date and June 5, 1606, when the receipt was drawn up at the viceregal capital, suggests a lengthy stopover at Old Panama or somewhere en route. Perhaps Sarria, Jr., sought to reduce the inconvenience of this delay to his father's partner in Lima by turning over eight of his fifty-three cases to a cousin in Panama, Gregorio de la Puerta by name, who had acquired some space on the Nuestra Señora del Rosario . When he received this advance shipment, Miguel Méndez, the merchant in Peru, could begin unloading his new stock on the market while the remaining forty-five cases were in transit. If this was, in fact, young Sarria's idea, he was probably surprised and chagrined to learn, when he later arrived with the bulk of the consignment, on the Ave María and the Nuestra Señora del Carmen, that his plan had miscarried, for neither his relative nor the eight cases had yet put in an appearance at Lima. Hence, of the original sixty-one cases, he could take receipt for only forty-five, and no record has since come to light of the missing sixteen, which undoubtedly contained a certain number of copies of Cervantes' masterpiece. But it is clear from the lengthy

document signed by Juan de Sarria and Miguel Méndez before a public notary that June day in Lima that at least seventy-two priceless copies of Don Quijote de la Mancha had come to delight readers for the first time in the remote realm of Peru almost a year and a quarter after a bookseller of Alcalá de Henares had deposited them at the House of Trade in Seville.

Legend has it or, perhaps, tradición, to use the term that the gifted Peruvian writer, Ricardo Palma, gave to his historical anecdotes, that the first copy of Don Quijote to reach Lima was one brought down in a galleon from Acapulco in New Spain to the Count of Monterrey, Viceroy of Peru. Sent by one of his friends in Mexico, it allegedly arrived late in December of 1605 and found that vice-sovereign gravely ill. One of the visitors at his bedside was a Dominican friar, Diego de Hojeda, subsequently famed for his Milton-like religious epic poem La Cristiada, and upon him the dying ruler of the viceroyalty, too ill to read the novel which came so highly recommended, bestowed his gift. Thus this precious volume passed into the library of the Dominican convent and there presumably it remained until 1855 when it disappeared without a trace. In March 1606, the account continues, six other copies came to Lima directly from Spain and passed into the possession of aristocratic personages of the capital.^[21] Conceivably, there is a basis for this tale which Ricardo Palma recounts, and possibly in this manner Don Quixote did first invade this part of the world. Sarria's apparent delay in bringing his book consignment may well have caused him to lose priority in introducing Cervantes' famous work to Peru, but Palma's story rests on nothing firmer than the hearsay report of that genial raconteur, who rarely let strict historical fact interfere with the telling of a good yarn. Until more solid evidence of a documentary character is forthcoming, the six dozen copies which the Sarrias, father and son, introduced in mid-1606 represent the first authenticated delivery in the Peruvian viceroyalty of the immortal narrative of Don Quixote's adventures. Into whose hands these precious copies subsequently fell, the record does not say. All that can be stated with assurance is that not all the seventy-two copies were disposed of among the limeño public. At least nine of them were repacked in boxes and carried once again on donkey-

back, this time to Cuzco and its vicinity in the high Sierras of the Andes. Thus it appears that not more than sixty-three of these copies remained in Lima itself.

The recibo lists case by case the entire forty-five of the shipment and indicates a grand total of 2,895 volumes with varying quantities of each title, each of which is written in extremely abbreviated form, together with the price per copy in reales.^[22] Like most such colonial inventories, this lengthy document invites analysis and commentary. While its singular value lies in the unmistakable evidence it offers of the arrival at the viceregal center in mid-1606 of a substantial number of copies of Don Quijote, it would be manifestly unfair to omit consideration of the vastly larger quantity of other representative works included. Handiest are the three general categories previously adopted: belles-lettres, ecclesiastical literature, and miscellaneous secular writings. As usual, there are uncertainties in the identification of the shortened titles, and the statistics emerging are inevitably rough approximations.

The 2,895 books represent some 163 different works; about 12 per cent of the total of both volumes and titles are readily classified as creative literature of entertainment. In quantity Don Quijote easily tops this class, though the comparatively inexpensive ballad collections are a close second in number. The one copy each of El caballero del febo by Esteban de Corbera and Don Florisel de Niquea by Feliciano de Silva offer a contrast to the relatively large number of Cervantes' great novel, and again the student of literary history is tempted to perceive a confirmation of the oft-reiterated assertion that the Knight of the Sad Countenance did indeed give the coup de grâce to the declining vogue of the romances of chivalry which had so long claimed devoted readers in Spain and its Indies. Certain it is, in any event, that after 1605 book shipments to the colonies included almost none of them. As pointed out elsewhere, the presence of Don Florisel de Niquea may be due as much to its pastoral as to its chivalric elements. Of passing interest is the fact that the author of this fiction is linked to the history of Peru through his son, Diego de Silva, one of the conquerors of the Inca empire, who once resided for some time in Cuzco. There he had the distinction of serving as godfather at the confirmation of the

first genuinely American writer, the half-caste Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, famous for his Royal commentaries of the Incas .

Only slightly behind Cervantes numerically in the Sarria consignment was that other great contemporary, Lope de Vega, who is represented by five different titles in a total of sixty-three books. The most significant of these was the lone copy of Comedias de Lope de Vega, probably the first edition of the collection of a dozen plays which was also a literary event of the historic year of 1605, for it portended a fundamental change in the reading habits of the colonists during the next two centuries. The bulky novel and undialogued verse were still the preferred reading matter of the Conquistadors' descendants in 1606, but comedies printed in sueltas, or loose copies, as well as in groups were soon to become the chief fictional fare of colonial readers and theatergoers.

The predominance of ecclesiastical literature in the shipment causes no surprise, of course, and its character reflects only too clearly the two basic types of literary production of the Counter Reformation, namely, theological studies in Latin which served to expound and define Catholic dogma to the clergy, both secular and regular, and the works of religious instruction or devotion in the vernacular designed to reach the lay membership. The demand for writings of this sort often resulted in such large orders for a single work that, while some 57 per cent of all titles were ecclesiastical in nature, fully 75 per cent of the total number of books in the Sarria assortment fell into this class. These included sermons, catechisms, religious manuals, lives of saints, books of devotion, works of exegesis, and the poetry of the mystics such as Luis de Leon and Luis de Granada. It might be mentioned in passing that the twenty-eight copies of the Conceptos espirituales of Alonso de Ledesma suggest the early introduction into the Indies of the conceptismo which was to plague the poetry of the colonies as well as of the mother country during the rest of the seventeenth century and later.

These pietistic and theological writings, then, were the stock in trade on which booksellers leaned heavily in conducting their business and from which their largest returns were derived. Among the titles on the Sarria receipt were works printed under contract to the Alcalá de Henares dealer, and there were others which he

had purchased outright from the authors. The ten copies of the Flos Sanctorum by Francisco Ortiz Lucio appearing on the recibo were probably a part of the edition that the elder Sarria had obtained through an agreement made in Madrid in 1603,^[23] while notarial records indicate that the Devocionario y horas by the same writer, of which thirty copies came in the shipment to Lima, was bought with rights of publication by this merchant in Madrid on November 26, 1605 for the sum of 2,000 reales.^[24] On January 1 of the same year and hence in time for the shipment to Peru made that spring Sarria, Sr., signed a promissory note for 1,085 reales in favor of an Augustine friar, Pedro de Vega, for sixty-two of the latter's Tabla de los Salmos, Part III, twenty-nine of which were among the contents of the forty-five cases delivered in Lima.^[25] And doubtless other titles listed represent similar investments of the Peninsular merchant.

The group of miscellaneous secular works is of greater general interest. Numerically, it is a trifle larger than that of belles-lettres and constitutes about 15 per cent of the entire shipment. But if the proportion of volumes is small compared to those of ecclesiastical literature, the variety of titles offers a less sharp contrast. Of the 163 or so titles in the consignment, about 49 works or 30 per cent can be credited to this classification. These figures again suggest that theology was not the sole interest or intellectual activity of the more serious readers in the viceroyalty of Peru; though religious literature tended to predominate, it did not exercise such an exclusive monopoly of the colonial mind as has been commonly believed. These secular writings included works on medicine, veterinary science, books on precious stones, volumes on law and its practice, history, biography, geography, philosophy, grammar, almanacs, etc., much as other early book lists had shown.

As in other instances, it is likely that writings of the first and last classes, that is, belles-lettres and miscellaneous secular works, though fewer in number than the second group, enjoyed a wider reading and appreciation as they passed from hand to hand than did the theological treatises, whose appeal was to a more professional public. What should be stressed in connection with all categories in Sarria's shipment, as in others observed, is that many of the titles had recently appeared in Spain for the first time. This clearly indi-

cates that the colonists not merely received works whose vogue in the Peninsula was well established or even dying out, but could obtain from their local dealers the most recent publications being read in the homeland and could thus keep abreast of contemporary thought and literary fashions. Furthermore, the inclusion of a part or the whole of Cervantes' latest book that spring of 1605 offers convincing proof that such works were commonly sent to the overseas possessions of the Spanish Crown even before they were generally available to the public in Spain. So profitable was the book trade in the colonies that it was, apparently, the ordinary practice to hustle the first printing of a volume off the press and on to Seville in time for the departure of the annual fleets to those outlying parts of the empire.

Among other things, the study of these related documents in Seville and in Lima concerning the particular consignment of sixty-one cases of books shipped by Juan de Sarria, padre, points to the conclusion that the distinction of being among the first, and perhaps the very first, to introduce into Peru the princeps of the best of all novels, Don Quijote de la Mancha, belongs to the enterprising dealer of Alcalá de Henares who dispatched them from Spain; to his son, Juan de Sarria, hijo, who conveyed them from Puerto-belo to Lima; and to Miguel Méndez, bookseller and merchant of the viceregal capital, who sold them to his trade.