Pedro de Valdivia, by R. B. Cunninghame Graham
This book will have to go on the history shelf; it has no chance among the memoirs or the lives. There is precious little about Valdivia himself. There is, however, a rather scrappy chronicle of the early days of Chile, a meagre account of its conquest and settlement under Pedro de Valdivia.
Having read Mr. Graham’s preface, we suddenly come upon another title-page, and another title — ’“Pedro de Valdivia, Conqueror of Chile. Being a Short Account of his Life, Together with his Five Letters to Charles V.” So? We are to get Valdivia’s own letters! Interminable epistles of a Conquistador, we know more or less what to expect. But let us look where they are.
It is a serious-looking book, with 220 large pages, and costing fifteen shillings net. The Short Account we find occupies the first 123 pages, the remaining 94 are occupied by the translation of the five letters. So! Nearly half the book is Valdivia’s; Mr. Graham only translates him. And we shall have a lot of Your-Sacred-Majestys to listen to, that we may be sure of.
When we have read both the Short Account and the Letters, we are left in a state of irritation and disgust. Mr. Cunninghame Graham steals all his hero’s gunpowder. He deliberately — or else with the absent-mindedness of mere egoism — picks all the plums out of Valdivia’s cake, puts them in his own badly-kneaded dough, and then has the face to serve us up Valdivia whole, with the plums which we have already eaten sitting as large as life in their original position. Of course, all Valdivia’s good bits in his own letters read like the shamelessest plagiarism. Haven’t we just read them in Mr. Graham’s Short Account? Why should we have to read them again? Why does that uninspired old Conquistador try to fob them off on us?
Poor Valdivia! That’s what it is to be a Conquistador and a hero to Mr. Graham. He puts himself first, and you are so much wadding to fill out the pages.
The Spanish Conquistadores, famous for courage and endurance, are by now notorious for insentience and lack of imagination. Even Bernal Diaz, after a few hundred pages, makes one feel one could yell, he is so doggedly, courageously unimaginative, visionless, really sightless: sightless, that is, with the living eye of living discernment. Cortes, strong man as he is, is just as tough and visionless in his letters to His-Most-Sacred-Majesty. And Don Cunninghame, alas, struts feebly in the conquistadorial footsteps. Not only does he write without imagination, without imaginative insight or sympathy, without colour, and without real feeling, but he seems to pride himself on the fact. He is being conquistadorial.
We, however, refuse entirely to play the part of poor Indians. We are not frightened of old Dons in caracoling armchairs. We are not even amused by their pretence of being on horse-back. A horse is a four-legged sensitive animal. What a pity the Indians felt so frightened of it! Anyhow, it is too late now for cavalierly conduct.
Mr. Graham’s Preface sets the note in the very first words. It is a note of twaddling impertinence, and it runs through all the work. “Commentators tell us [do they, though?] that most men are savages at heart, and give more admiration to the qualities of courage, patience in hardships, and contempt of death than they accord to the talents of the artist, man of science, or the statesman. [Funny sort of commentators Mr. Graham reads.]
“If this is true of men, they say it is doubly true of women, who would rather be roughly loved by a tall fellow of his hands [hands, forsooth!] even though their physical and moral cuticle [sic] suffer some slight abrasion, than inefficiently wooed by a philanthropist. [Ah, ladies, you who are inefficiently wooed by philanthropists, is there never a tall fellow of his hands about?]
“This may be so [continues Mr. Graham], and, if it is, certainly Pedro de Valdivia was an archetype [! ! — ] of all the elemental qualities nature implants in a man. [He usually had some common Spanish wench for his kept woman, though we are not told concerning her cuticle.]
“Brave to a fault [chants Mr. Graham], patient and enduring to an incredible degree, of hardships under which the bravest might have quailed [what’s a quail got to do with it?], loyal to king and country [Flemish Charles V] and a stout man-at-arms, he had yet no inconsiderable talents of administration, talents not so conspicuous today among the Latin race. [Dear-dear!]
“Thus — and I take all the above for granted — etc.” Mr. Graham has shown us, not Valdivia, but himself. He lifts a swash-buckling fountain pen, and off he goes. The result is a shoddy, scrappy, and not very sincere piece of work. The Conquistadores were damned by their insensitiveness to life, which we call lack of imagination. And they let a new damnation into the America they conquered. But they couldn’t help it. It was the educational result of Spanish struggle for existence against the infidel Moors. Tfie Conquistadores were good enough instruments, but they were not good enough men for the miserable and melancholy work of conquering a continent. Yet, at least, they never felt themselves too good for their job, as some of the inky conquerors did even then, and do still.
Mr. Graham does not take Valdivia very seriously. He tells us almost nothing about him: save that he was born in Estremadura (who cares!) and had served in the Italian and German wars, had distinguished himself in the conquest of Venezuela, and, in 1532, accompanied Pizarro to Peru. Having thrown these few facts at us, off goes Mr. Graham to the much more alluring, because much better known, story of the Pizarros, and we wonder where Valdivia comes in. We proceed with Pizarro to Peru, and so, apparently, did Valdivia, and we read a little piece of the story even Prescott has already told us. Then we get a glimpse of Almagro crossing the Andes to Chile, and very impressive little quotations from Spanish writers. After which Valdivia begins to figure, in some unsubstantial remote regions with Indian names, as a mere shadow of a colonizer. We never see the country, we never meet the man, we get no feeling of the Indians. There is nothing dramatic, no Incas, no temples and treasures and tortures, only remote colonization going on in a sort of nowhere. Valdivia becomes a trifle more real when he comes again into Peru, to fight on the loyal side against Gonzalo Pizarro and old Carvajal, but this is Peruvian history, with nothing new to it. Valdivia returns to Chile and vague colonizing; there are vague mentions of the Magellan Straits; there is a Biobio River, but to one who has never been to Chile, it might just as well be Labrador. There is a bit of a breath of life in the extracts of Valdivia’s own letters. And there are strings of names of men who are nothing but names, and continual mention of Indians who also remain merely nominal. Till the very last pages, when we do find out, after he is killed, that Valdivia was a big man, fat now he is elderly, of a hearty disposition, good-natured as far as he has enough imagination, and rather commonplace save for his energy as a colonizing instrument.
It is all thrown down, in bits and scraps, as Mr. Graham comes across it in Garcilaso’s book, or in Gomara. And it is interlarded with Mr. Graham’s own comments, of this nature: “Christians seemed to have deserved their name in those days, for faith and faith alone could have enabled them to endure such misery, and yet be always ready at the sentinel’s alarm to buckle on their swords.” Oh, what cliches! Faith in the proximity of gold, usually. “Cavalry in thoSe days played the part now played by aeroplanes,” says Mr. Graham suavely. He himself seems to have got into an aeroplane, by mistake, instead of onto a conquistadorial horse, for his misty bird’s-eye views are just such confusion.
The method followed, for the most part, seems to be that of sequence of time. All the events of each year are blown together by Mr. Graham’s gustiness, and you can sort them out. At the same time, great patches of Peruvian history suddenly float up out of nowhere, and at the end, when Valdivia is going to get killed by the Indians, suddenly we are swept away on a biographical carpet, and forced to follow the life of the poet Ercilla, who wrote his Araucana poem about Valdivia’s Indians, but who never came to Chile till Valdivia was dead. After which, we are given a feeble account of a very striking incident, the death of Valdivia. And there the Short Account dies also, abruptly, and Chile is left to its fate.
Then follow the five letters. They are moderately interesting, the best, of course, belonging to Peruvian story, when Valdivia helped the mean La Gasca against Gonzalo Pizarro. For the rest, the “loyalty” seems a little overdone, and we are a little tired of the bluff, manly style of soldiers who have not imagination enough to see the things that really matter. Men of action are usually deadly failures in the long run. Their precious energy makes them uproot the tree of life, and leave it to wither, and their stupidity makes them proud of it. Even in Valdivia, and he seems to have been as human as any Conquistador, the stone blindness to any mystery or meaning in the Indians themselves, the utter unawareness of the fact that they might have a point of view, the abject insensitiveness to the strange, eerie atmosphere of that America he was proceeding to exploit and to ruin, puts him at a certain dull level of intelligence which we find rather nauseous. The world has suffered so cruelly from these automatic men of action. Valdivia was not usually cruel, it appears. But he cut off the hands and noses of two hundred “rebels,” Indians who were fighting for their own freedom, and he feels very pleased about it. It served to cow the others. But imagine deliberately chopping off one slender brown Indian hand after another! Imagine taking a dark-eyed Indian by the hair, and cutting off his nose! Imagine seeing man after man, in the prime of life, with his mutilated face streaming blood, and his wrist-stump a fountain of blood, and tell me if the men of action don’t need absolutely to be held in leash by the intelligent being who can see these things as monstrous, root cause of endless monstrosity! We, who suffer from the bright deeds of the men of action of the past, may well keep an eye on the “tall fellows of their hands” of our own day.
Prescott never went to Mexico nor to Peru, otherwise he would have sung a more scared tune. But Mr. Graham is supposed to know his South America. One would never believe it. The one thing he could have done, re-created the landscape of Chile for us, and made us feel those Araucanians as men of flesh and blood, he never does, not for a single second. He might as well never have left Scotland; better, for perhaps he would not have been so glib about unseen lands. All he can say of the Araucanians today is that they are “as hard-featured a race as any upon earth.”
Mr. Graham is trivial and complacent. There is, in reality, a peculiar dread horror about the conquest of America, the story is always dreadful, more or less. Columbus, Pizarro, Cortes, Quesada, De Soto, the Conquistadores seem all like men of doom. Read a man like Adolf Bandelier, who knows the inside of his America, read his Golden Man — El Dorado — and feel the reverberation within reverberation of horror the Conquistadores left behind them.
Then we have Mr. Graham as a translator. In the innumerable and sometimes quite fatuous and irritating footnotes — they are sometimes interesting — our author often gives the original Spanish for the phrase he has translated. And even here he is peculiarly glib and unsatisfactory; “ ‘God knows the trouble it cost,’ he says pathetically.” Valdivia is supposed to say this “pathetically.” The footnote gives Valdivia’s words: “Un bergantin y el trabajo que costo, Dios lo sabe.” — ”\ brigantine, and the work it cost, God knows.” Why trouble for trabajo? And why pathetically? Again, the proverb: “A Dios rogando, y con la maza dando,” is translated: “Praying to God, and battering with the mace.” But why battering for dando, which means merely donnant, and might be rendered smiting, or laying on, but surely not battering! Again, Philip II is supposed to say to Ercilla, who stammered so much as to be unintelligible: “Habladme por escrito, Don Alonso!” Which is: “Say it to me in writing, Don Alonso!” Mr. Graham, however, translates it: “Write to me, Don Alonso!” . . . These things are trifles, but they show the peculiar laziness or insensitiveness to language which is so great a vice in a translator.
The motto of the book is:
El mas seguro don de la fortuna
Es no lo haber tenido vez alguna.
Mr. Graham puts it: “The best of fortune’s gifts is never to have had good luck at all.” Well, Ercilla may have meant this. The literal sense of the Spanish, anybody can make out: “The most sure gift of fortune, is not to have had it not once.” Whether one would be justified in changing the “don de la fortuna” of the first line into “good luck” in the second is a point we must leave to Mr. Graham. Anyhow, he seems to have blest his own book in this equivocal fashion.