Invading Colombia: Spanish Accounts of the Gonzalo Jiménez de Quesada Expedition of Conquest (review)

Ably introduced, annotated, and edited by J. Michael Francis, this relatively slim volume exemplifies a recent trend toward providing accessible primary material relating to early Spanish America in translation, geared mainly toward classroom use. While a number of such volumes include excerpts from primary sources available in other forms or are collections of documents relating to specific topics, developments, and trends in early Latin America, Francis’s contribution demonstrates a coherence and originality that many other such collections lack. It offers a particularly useful approach to integrating primary documentation with the little-known narrative of an important episode in early Spanish American history, the exploration and conquest of the interior of Colombia.

Francis prefaces the volume with a discussion of the larger imperial and geographical context of Jiménez de Quesada’s expedition, drawing interesting comparisons to Francisco Pizarro’s far better-known expedition to Peru and the events at Cajamarca, where the Inca emperor Atahualpa was taken hostage; that episode, generally taken to have signaled the conquest of the Inca empire, yielded a vast treasure to the Spaniards who were present. The interior of Colombia also yielded its treasures to Spaniards. Francis elaborates the narrative framework through individual introductions to the four phases of the expedition: its conception, authorization, and organization; the departure in 1536 from Santa Marta and journey up the Magdalena River; the move of the drastically reduced expeditionary force into the highlands and the territory of the Muiscas; and the conquest of the interior, sacking of Tunja, which yielded a bonanza of treasure in the form of gold and emeralds, encounter with two other Europeans intent on exploring and exploiting the interior (Sebastián de Belalcázar, who reached the area from Ecuador, and Nicolás Federman, who arrived from Venezuela), and finally the return to the coast. While in each section Francis’s comments frame and clarify the sources, his discussion does not duplicate the content of the documents themselves, allowing the reader to draw his or her own insights and conclusions. Francis’s selection and organization of the primary material, which he has translated into English for the first time, is excellent.

Not only does this volume present a fascinating story as told by participants and contemporaries, its impeccable scholarship, useful maps, tables, and index, and the lucidity of Francis’s writing will make it valuable not only to students but to others as well who are interested in the early period of Spanish expansion in the Americas and the varied peoples they encountered there. No one who reads the description of indigenous emerald mining in Colombia’s interior—to take just one example—could fail to be impressed by the technological sophistication of the Muiscas who, compared to the much better known Incas, Aztecs, and Mayas, are little known even to most scholars of the period. Invading Colombia is a welcome contribution to the literature on the conquest period of Spanish America and the societies and cultures that flourished in present-day Colombia.