The Scourge of God in the New World: Alonso de Ercilla’s Araucanians

After a sea voyage of almost three months, from the Peruvian port of Callao, Alonso de Ercilla arrived at the northern Chilean port of La Serena on April 23, 1557, setting sail again bound for southern Chile in June. At the end of that month, he disembarked near Concepción where he learned of the Araucanians’ hostility for the first time on August 25. He participated in almost every battle against the Araucanian resistance, and during this period he probably started to write La Araucana. One night in July, 1558, Ercilla had a violent argument with Juan de Pineda (the reasons are unclear), for which the governor García Hurtado de Mendoza condemned them both to be beheaded the following morning. An influential lady (whose identity is unknown to us) intervened in their favor and their sentences were commuted just before the order of execution was to be carried out. After some eighteen months in Araucanía, three of which he spent in prison, Ercilla embarked for exile in Peru either at the end of December of 1558 or at the beginning of January of 1559 (Medina 38-81).

This brief stint by the poet in Chile has sufficed for some critics to accept Ercilla’s testimonial authority on early Chilean history and to trust his capacity to portray literarily real Indians of the Arauco War (Manchester 47-49). However, the analysis of the literary models on which La Araucana relies has cogently called into question this “verista” tradition of criticism.¹ Additionally, after counting the verses within the poem corresponding to the aforementioned period, and discounting those concerning events of which Ercilla did not claim first-hand knowledge, including the European incidents of San Quintin, Lepanto, and Portugal, Marcos Morínigo demonstrated that less than one sixth of the total 21,160 verses are of testimonial value (“Introducción” 25). Considering the experiential record of Ercilla in war-torn Arauco and the restricted inclusion of this experience into the poem, I would like to re-examine one of the most basic and widespread views on La Araucana, to wit, the poet’s admiration for his Araucanian enemy.² This traditional interpretation is partly founded upon such salient characteristics of Ercilla’s epic as the extensive portion of the narrative action that takes place from the Araucanian side and the meticulous presentation of several Araucanian warriors in contrast to the absence of a singular and clearly defined Spanish hero.³ It is also founded on the famous author’s own meditation on this issue, in the prologue to the first part:

Y si alguno le pareciere que me muestro algo inclinado a la parte de los araucanos, tratando sus cosas y valentías más estendidamente de lo que para bárbaros se requiere, si queremos mirar su crianza, costumbres, modos de guerra y ejercicios della, veremos que muchos no les han hecho ventaja, y que son pocos los que con tan gran constancia y firmeza han defendido su tierra contra tan fieros enemigos como son los españoles … Todo esto he querido traer para prueba y en abono del valor destas gentes, digno del mayor loor del que yo le podré dar con mis versos.

(1: 121-22)

Although the controversial internal hesitations of La Araucana and the ideological preferences of its author have been tackled and successfully depicted by recent scholarship, the relationship between these preferences and Ercilla’s portrayal of the Indians’ role in his account of the war has not been sufficiently addressed.⁴ I argue that Ercilla’s interest in the Araucanians as presented in the epic itself is very limited and primarily determined by the politico-moral purpose of his work, and that the inclination towards the Indian enemy is nothing but the resulting illusory effect of Ercilla’s moral rejection of his corrupted fellow conquistadors.

A process of idealization of the Indians makes possible the aforesaid instrumentalization, but this idealized portrait is a deceiving feature of the poem. Many critics have seen in Ercilla’s poetic representation of the Amerindian...