An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians, and: The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (review)

An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians. By Fray Ramón Pané. Edited by José Juan Arrom. Translated by Susan C. Griswold. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. xxix + 72 pp., introduction to the English edition, introductory study, maps, appendices, bibliographic note, index. $39.95 cloth, $12.95 paper.)

The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana. By Sir Walter Ralegh. Edited by Neil L. Whitehead. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997. viii + 252 pp., preface, introduction, maps, illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. $37.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.)

For some time now, historians and anthropologists have balked at using classic European chronicles of discovery as sources for the ethnohistory of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Scholarship in a variety of disciplines, especially literary criticism, has brought to light the perilous nature of such texts, exposing the imperial motives underpinning their production as well as the ethnocentric, fabricated, and even fictitious character of their reportage. The more that has been uncovered about the mentalité of early modern explorers, on the one hand, and about the precontact history and customs of Amerindians, on the other, the more we have realized that European chroniclers were writing largely about themselves and the act of colonial possession rather than about natives. The act of representing another culture, given the limitations of one’s own, especially within the context of conquest, turns out to be an exercise so fraught with hazards that texts emerging from initial encounters between Europeans and Indians can seem hopelessly skewed. The recent publication of critical editions of two such texts, however, underscores just how much still can be gained from their study.

Symptomatic of the current wariness, editor and Hispanist José Juan Arrom highlights, first and foremost, the literary as opposed to historical and ethnological contribution of Fray Ramón Pané’s An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians. A self-described “humble friar” of the Order of Saint Jerome, Pané lived for several years among the natives whom Columbus and his entourage encountered on the island of Hispaniola. As Arrom describes the textual result in his introduction to this English edition, Pané’s account constitutes “the first book written on American soil in a European language” and thus represents “an important document for those who study Latin American literature” (xi). Arrom, who edited the standard Spanish edition more than twenty-five years ago, is well aware of the fertile material that the text provides concerning the culture of those who came to be known as the Taínos. He has published extensively on Taíno mythology, cosmology, and art. Readers will find in Pané’s work the compelling details about Taíno myths, religion, language, daily life, and resistance to Spanish colonization that inspired Arrom’s scholarship. And so it is especially striking how little he has to say about the ethnohistorical value of the present edition. Instead he provides an incisive defense of Pané’s trustworthiness. Completed sometime between 1496 and 1498, Pané’s original Spanish manuscript remains lost, but in the biography of Columbus written by his son Fernando, a full version survived in transcription. Proscribed in Spain, the biography was not published until 1571 in an incomplete and error-ridden Italian translation containing the friar’s report. Given the manuscript’s tortuous trajectory, which over the centuries has produced confusion regarding the very name of its author, Arrom aims his exegesis at scholars suspicious of the friar’s “credibility as a reliable reporter” (xxiv).

With Pané, as with other chroniclers of his ilk, there is good reason to resort to such an approach. His zealous desire to convert the Taínos to Christianity, even when “force and punishment” (38) were required, inevitably colored his observations. Catalonian by birth, he possessed a native command of none of the three Indian languages spoken...