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“EN ÉSTE NUESTRO REZENTAL APRISCO”: PIRACY, EPIC, AND IDENTITY IN CANTOS I-II OF DISCURSO DEL CAPITÁN FRANCISCO DRAQUE BY JUAN DE CASTELLANOS Emiro F. Martínez-Osorio York University T he Discurso del Capitán Francisco Draque is a five canto heroic poem written by Juan de Castellanos (Alanís 1522 - Tunja 1606) soon after an English fleet sacked the port of Cartagena de Indias in 1586.1 Francis Drake departed from Plymouth on September 14th the previous year as commander of a state-sponsored expedition that aimed to disrupt Spanish trade, and arrived at Cartagena after raiding the cities of São Tiago (Cape Verde) and Santo Domingo on the island of Hispaniola. Drake was able to stay in control of Cartagena for two months, during which he extracted a ransom of 110,000 ducats from the local authorities before sailing north across the Caribbean to capture St.Augustine, Florida.Although the financial rewards of the expedition were meager compared with the original expectations of the investors, Drake’s raid on the West Indies bestowed a significant military embarrassment to Spain and soured the already strained relations between Spain and England.2 Castellanos worked expeditiously in his poem in the months following Drake’s attack and produced a text that espouses the restoration of martial values and the bravery of the conquistadors as antidotes to the mounting threat of English maritime aggressions and the emasculating effects of commerce and bureaucracy. Although Castellanos used the religious discourse of demonology to portray Drake and his troops, the end result is a far less triumphalistic depiction of the English “other” than the one Lope de Vega offered by employing a similar discourse in La Dragontea (1598). Castellanos did not pick up the pen or embrace the epic genre to praise Habsburg navigational prowess, as has been suggested by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (39), but to challenge the policies of Habsburg CALÍOPE Vol. 17, No. 2, 2011: pages 5-34 Emiro F. Martínez-Osorio 6 monarchs concerning the administration of the recently established Viceroyalties in the New World, and above all to praise the deeds and defend the rights of the first wave of colonists.3 Although initially individuals like Castellanos contributed to Spain’s imperial project by exploring the New World and fighting in the campaigns to conquer it, they later felt affronted by the Crown’s implementation of laws aimed at limiting their political and economic power. Castellanos’s writings uphold the ideology of domination and share in the celebration of the Spanish enterprise of conquest but they do so from the perspective of a warrior class that was outmaneuvered in the administrative and legal battle for the political and economic control of the colonies. Hence, this study highlights the complexities of a text that bears evidence of an internal ideological fissure that significantly shaped Spain’s political and territorial expansion, and contributed to the emergence of a new type of literature. If epic poetry, as has been convincingly argued by Elizabeth Davis, “was invaluable to the ruling circles of the imperial monarchy, who used it to forge a sense of unity and to script cultural identities during the period of expansion and conquest” (10), then the heroic poems written by Castellanos on behalf of the conquistadors and encomenderos represent the boldest attempt to turn one of the most prestigious vehicles of Spanish imperial discourse into a tool for the expression of colonial political concerns; a project which included but was not limited to the deployment of aggressive practices of poetic imitation, the expression of a new sense of selfhood, and the demarcation of a new sense of patriotism. The New World as a new place of enunciation Castellanos included the Discurso in the third volume of the Elegías de varones ilustres de Indias but the official censor who examined it banned its publication and ordered its removal from the Elegías by instructing and signing on the margin: “Desdesta estancia se debe quitar – Sarmiento;” and “Hasta aquí es el discurso de Draque que se ha de quitar – Sarmiento.” However, Castellanos also sent an additional copy to Melchor Pérez de Arteaga, Abad of Burgo Hondo...

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