This is a study of frontier colonisation in Spanish America. It focuses on a remote and inhospitable region of dense rainforest and heavy rainfall situated on the Pacific flank of the colonial territory of the Nuevo Reino de Granada, the New Kingdom of Granada. The region extended across the entire lowland area stretching from the isthmus of Panama in the north to Buenaventura in the south, was separated from the interior by the Cordillera Occidental, and, by the 1560s, had come to be known to the Spaniards as El Chocó.¹ The area was inhabited at first contact by a multiplicity...

Native groups of the territory that was to become known as ‘El Chocó’ were among the first indigenous peoples of the South American mainland to make contact with Spanish explorers searching for gold and booty in the early sixteenth century. Santa María la Antigua de Darién, founded in 1510 on the western side of the Gulf of Urabá, became Spain’s first permanent settlement in this part of South America and an important base for further exploration. From Darién, expeditions fanned out in several directions: towards the isthmian region that lay to the north of Santa María; towards the Pacific Ocean...

From the earliest years after the discovery of the New World, the exploration, conquest and settlement of the vast territories that were to fall under the dominion of the Spanish Crown were left largely to private initiative. Rather than investing directly in the incorporation of new territories, the Spanish Crown limited its role, with few exceptions, to that of sanctioning privately financed expeditions and setting down the conditions within which the conquest and settlement of unexplored regions were to take place. These conditions were laid down in a contract, or licence, called thecapitulación– a document that stipulated the duties...

The failure of the expeditions of 1638–40 to bring about the pacification and settlement of the Chocó frontier led to a reassessment, in Antioquia and Santa Fe, of the methods employed to colonise this frontier region. There was, however, no agreement on the lessons to be learned from the disasters of those years. Theaudienciaof Santa Fe, always deeply suspicious of the methods and motives of theadelantadoVélez,¹ argued that the real reason for the failure to advance colonisation lay in a system that gave wealthy individuals the freedom to act in a manner that furthered their...

When the Spanish Crown issued its royalcédulaof 27 November 1666, instructing the governors of Popayán, Antioquia and Cartagena, and the president of theaudienciaof Panama, to take part in a new effort to colonise the Chocó, it stressed that missionaries –ministros evangélicos– were to lead the pacification campaign, and that the conversion of Indians to the Christian faith was to be achieved without recourse to force. There was, of course, nothing new or unusual in the type of pacification advocated in this royal instruction. The term ‘pacification’ replaced the word ‘conquest’ in official documents as early as...

On 15 January 1684 a mass Indian rebellion broke out in Citará province, marking the end of a prolonged period of tense but essentially peaceful Spanish–Indian interaction in this part of the Chocó. The uprising was timed to break out concurrently in the main settlements of Negua, Lloró and San Francisco de Atrato, from where it rapidly spread to the many small mining camps scattered across the province. Over the course of that day, Indians massacred all but a few of the Spanish residents of Citará territory, as well as black slaves, Indian servants and carriers from the interior,...

The pacification of the Citará rebellion of 1684–87 did not immediately lead to a mass influx of miners intent on exploiting the new conditions on the frontier. The years of rebellion had been immensely destructive of both life and property, and the job of reconstruction was slow. Writing in 1688, Don Antonio de Veroiz y Alfaro, newly appointedsargento mayorandcorregidorby Popayán’s governor Gerónimo de Berrio, described how the years of warfare had not only brought agricultural activity to a standstill in Citará province, but had also brought in their wake famine and disease: ‘there has been...

So far, our discussion of conditions in the Chocó in the eighteenth century has concentrated mainly on the shape and conduct of secular and religious administration, and on the abuse and exploitation inflicted upon Indians by frontier officials and other settlers, both lay and religious. This is largely because, in their concern to expose the worst features of Spanish administration in this isolated corner of the empire, senior officials and ecclesiastics in the colony focused almost exclusively on the effects of corruption and misgovernment on native populations, rather than on the ways in which Indians adapted to the changed conditions...

My principal aim in writing this study has been to throw further light on the evolution of inter-ethnic relations on a contested colonial frontier. These chapters, therefore, have focused on both the diversity of Spanish approaches towards, and strategies for, subduing, subordinating and governing the native inhabitants of this extremely important gold-producing territory, and the varied ways in which indigenous peoples, principally but not exclusively the Citará, sought to control and direct the nature and extent of contact with the world that lay beyond the boundaries of the Chocó itself. No rigid classification of action and reaction has been possible,...