For many a long day in the past, in the multiple guises of seamen, merchants, explorers, overland travellers, settlers, geographers and scientists, the English were captivated by South America. By comparison with lands to the north of that continent and with Africa or Asia, where they were to carve out their own spheres of imperial dominance, their numbers were relatively small. But for over three hundred years during the age of sail, the most remote of Spain’s New World possessions, originally the Viceroyalty of Peru, nourished their imagination and whet their appetite for overseas enterprises, and above all profit, in...

As early as 1534, pamphlets had been produced in Italian, German and French which were translations of letters from Peru recording the early stages of the conquest – the departure of Francisco Pizarro from Panama, the progress of his march inland from Tumbes to Cajamarca, and the so-called ‘ransom’ of Atahualpa.¹ But the French document in particular added further details which would for centuries constitute the most irresistible of attractions for many who wrote of the region, since it extended its coverage of fabulous mineral wealth by listing that recently transported to Seville by Hernando Pizarro.

The lack of comment in...

The most valuable and the most numerous sources of information in English about Peru exist in the writings of those who travelled in the New World. Esteemed not only in their own right as first-hand records of visits to distant and exotic lands, they came to be prized by authors and compilers of works of history, geography and cartography, even of drama, and in the eighteenth century by the creators of the genre of fictional travel.

The earliest text in English to offer a complete view of America, north and south, was the translation of André Thevet’sLes Singularitez de...

There is only one place to commence a discussion of the translation, compilation and presentation of materials from history, geography, travellers’ tales, letters and other documentary sources, and that is with Richard Hakluyt. His unsurpassed reputation as a collector, translator and editor was laid, and has been maintained throughout history, by three works of increasing scope and size. The first,Divers Voyages(1582), was conceived with the general intention of promoting overseas expansion in fulfilment of the ultimate object of colonisation. It was probably intended specifically to gain support for a proposed voyage by Humphrey Gilbert to North America. Granted...

In this category we find the earliest description of the coasts of the New World by an English writer, Roger Barlow, presented in the form of a manuscript geography to Henry VIII. Naturally, as a consequence of its early composition in 1540 the references to Peru are few in number, but already indicative of the trend others would follow. The work is essentially a translation of Martín Fernández de Enciso’sSuma de geographia(Seville: 1519), to which Barlow has made additions with particular reference to the region of the rivers Plate and Paraná. This is an area he was one...

The earliest advocates of English overseas expansion in the age of Elizabeth I were to produce, during the 1570s, various types of propositions recommending voyages to the west, to the South Sea and beyond to the East Indies. One of the most widely known and influential was Humphrey Gilbert’sDiscourse of a Discoverie for a New Passage to Cataia, composed in 1566 and published a decade later. Although it contained a world map portraying the Straits of Magellan and Peru, its main objective was to prove the existence of a North-West Passage leading by a short voyage to the East...

By and large, the works we have been discussing were circulating in the English language by 1700. Obviously, neither these diverse types of material, nor the English fascination with South America and especially with Peru, ceased abruptly at that moment. In fact, it has been our purpose not simply to shed light on the elements of Peruvian reality which provoked such attention, but even more importantly to convey an idea of the depth to which concepts of the region, in an enduring amalgam of the ‘imaginary’ and the ‘real’, became profoundly ingrained in the minds of authors, compilers and editors....

The Spanish conquest implied the capture of the Andeanimaginarioby the new overlords, an open-ended and variegated process still in train today. This capture is not merely an appropriation, however, but rather a continuing dialectic which is sometimes uneven, sometimes reciprocal. Multiple processes of acculturation have generated various degrees of hybridity, sometimes resulting in a true synthesis.¹ This process reaches beyond mutual borrowings, appropriations and impositions; it is often creative, so much so that the resultant hybridities sometimes border on the fantastic, such that were they fiction, they would easily fit under the rubric of ‘magical realism’. And these...

The Cuzco region was the principal theatre of protest, rebellion and sundry subversive activities in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the last half-century of colonial rule (c. 1770–1824).¹ Royal authorities considered it to be the military and political key not only to Peru itself, but also to Spanish South America in general. This view took into account the obvious symbolism of the city of Cuzco for indigenous groups who yearned (according to Creole and peninsula pundits of the age) for a return to the supposed Golden Age of the Incario (Tahuantinsuyu), but it had also to do with the...

There was ample evidence to buttress Moscoso’s critique of Incaic symbolism in religious fiestas, though his assertion that Incaic dress wasde rigueurfor the indigenous nobility on ‘all’ civic and ecclesiastical occasions remains problematic. Certainly, there is little support for this in contemporary descriptions of civic ceremonies; it might be supposed that such splendour on mundane occasions would have elicited some comment on the part of the authorities. In 1787 the Cuzqueño savant, Ignacio de Castro, in his ponderous yet erudite encomium to the King on the occasion of the ceremonies marking the foundation of the Real Audiencia in...

On 22 August 1692 a remarkable ceremony took place in and from the Chapel of Our Lady of Loreto. It was the occasion of the customary annual fiesta and procession of the Virgin, whosecofradíawas located in the chapel, adjacent to La Compañía on Cuzco’s Plaza de Armas. There was nothing extraordinary about a religious procession wending its way through the old Inca capital. Apart from the great religious festivals such as Corpus Christi and Semana Santa, such processions were a regular feature of daily life in colonial times. A glance through Diego Esquivel y Navia’sNoticias cronológicas de...

Yet it might be argued that the paradoxes, ironies, exemptions and privileges which Inca nobles had to negotiate were innate to the colonial condition, wherein the identities and status of colonised indigenous elites were rendered at best contingent and at worst anachronistic, and which might even disappear overnight should a colonial official high-handedly decide not to accept documentary proof of noble status. A descendant of Inca emperors might, as a result of such a stroke of the quill, be consigned to the ranks of the tributaries, and neither he nor his descendants might ever be able to climb back to...