Contested Territory: Mapping Peru in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

2. Beyond Textuality: Landscape, Embodiment, and Native Agency

t w o Beyond Textuality Landscape, Embodiment, and Native Agency In May  a small group of Spaniards disembarked at the port of Túmbez, in the far northwestern reaches of the Inca empire, known to its native inhabitants as Tawantinsuyu. Of the men who came ashore, some had been newly recruited in Spain by their leader, Francisco Pizarro , but most had come from Central America, where they left behind recently established livelihoods to go in search of an empire that lay far to the south. Since Pizarro’s first visit to Peru’s northern coast in ‒, conflict had erupted between Atahualpa and Huascar, sons of the recently deceased Inca Huayna Capac, who now struggled for control of Tawantinsuyu. As a result of the so-called civil war, the once-splendid settlement of Túmbez, which Spanish eyewitnesses described with admiration , had been laid waste and abandoned.1 The Spaniards’ suspense turned to skepticism at the sight of such desolation and, above all else, the absence of the promised wealth. It would not be long, however, until their hopes were amply fulfilled. The story of the Spanish conquest of Peru is one that has been told many times. As Restall shows so eloquently, tales of Spanish conquest have overwhelmingly celebrated the actions and deeds of a handful of intrepid Europeans.2 In striking contrast to the dynamism of these  individuals, the non-Europeans who participated in the events of conquest , together with the physical environments of the New World, frequently appear as little more than an inert canvas on which the Spaniards went to work. Since the s, however, accounts of conquest have increasingly been told in new ways. Although initial endeavors to recover “the vision of the vanquished” were sympathetic to Amerindian peoples, they accorded them little more in the way of agency than did the celebratory tales of European prowess.3 More recent studies suggest that the arrival of the first Europeans, far from being perceived by indigenous groups as a momentous occasion or dramatic point of rupture , was often of scant significance for Amerindians and was experienced , to highly variable degrees of intensity, as an event woven into a network of processes and practices that were established well before the Spanish set foot in the Americas.4 The task of demystifying conquest, however, must involve more than conceptualizing it as a process or series of events that was imagined and represented in distinct ways by two “sides”—the Spaniards and the Amerindians. It requires, in addition, that the Europeans are understood as individuals, whose actions are closely intertwined with and affected by the agency of other, non-European actors, as well as by the physical environments with which they came into contact. Making important moves toward such an approach, Pastor Bodmer draws attention to the corporeality of early Spanish explorers, their contact with and exposure to frequently harsh New World environments, and the manner in which this embodied contact shaped their perceptions and writings.5 Other Latin Americanists, looking beyond the Spanish deeds portrayed in colonial accounts, have shed light on the highly significant role of non-Europeans in shaping the trajectories of conquest, either as opponents or as collaborators of the Spaniards.6 Geographers, although often focusing on other times and places, have increasingly drawn attention to the corporeality of European colonizers and travelers, to their presence in the landscapes that they sought to possess, and to the ways in which their textual and visual representations of landscape were shaped by the particular material context in which they found themselves, as well as by the agency of non-Europeans.7 Building on these foundations, this chapter endeavors to show how, in the early years of exploration and conquest in Peru, Spanish experi-  Contested territory ences of landscape were shaped not only by the aims, ambitions, and worldviews that tied them discursively to Spain, but equally by their embodied experiences of American environments and the agency of Amerindians and other non-Europeans. The discussion begins with a comparison of portrayals of conquest contained within petitions for royal reward, which were submitted both by conquistadors and by Andean leaders from Peru’s central highlands. It then briefly focuses on early Spanish histories and chronicles. In contrast to the royal petitions, or so-called accounts of services, the histories and chronicles provide detailed descriptions of the architectural and agricultural landscapes of the Inca...