Prevod
(To Dr. Ignacio La-Puente.) I One afternoon in June 1631, all the church bells of Lima were tolling mournful prayers, and the monks of the four religious orders then established there, assembled in full choir, were chanting psalms and supplications.
The inhabitants of the thrice-crowned city passed through the places where, sixty years later, the Viceroy Count of La Monclova would build the Escribanos and Botoneros arcades, and stopped before the side entrance to the palace.
Within, dignitaries of greater or lesser distinction were forever coming and going. One might have thought a galleon had just dropped anchor at Callao with momentous news from Spain, so great was the commotion among palace and populace! Or that, as in our own democratic times, one of those dramatic coups was under way to which the justice of rope and stake knows how to put a swift end.
Events, like water, should be drunk at the source; and so, with leave from the captain of arquebusiers standing guard at the aforesaid entrance, we shall enter a small private chamber of the palace, reader, if my company pleases you.
There sat His Excellency Don Luis Jerónimo Fernández de Cabrera Bobadilla y Mendoza, Count of Chinchón, viceroy of these kingdoms of Peru on behalf of His Majesty Don Felipe IV, and his intimate friend the Marquis of Corpa. Both were silent, gazing anxiously at a private door, which opened to admit a new figure.
He was an elderly man. He wore black wool breeches reaching to mid-calf, corduroy shoes with stone buckles, and a velvet coat and waistcoat, from the latter of which hung a heavy silver chain with exquisite seals. If we add that he wore chamois gloves, the reader will recognize the perfect specimen of an Aesculapius of that age.
Dr. Juan de Vega, a native of Catalonia who had recently arrived in Peru as physician to the viceroy’s household, was one of the luminaries of that science which teaches how to kill by means of a prescription.
“Well, Don Juan?” the viceroy asked him, more with his eyes than with his voice. “My lord, there is no hope. Only a miracle can save Doña Francisca.”
And Don Juan withdrew with a sorrowful air. This brief exchange is enough to tell even the least discerning reader what was afoot. The viceroy had arrived in Lima in January 1639, followed two months later by his beautiful young wife, Doña Francisca Henríquez de Ribera, whom he had put ashore at Paita to spare her the hazards of a likely sea battle with pirates. Some time afterward, the vicereine was stricken with that recurring fever known as tertian fever, which the Incas had recognized as endemic in the Rímac valley.
It is well known that when, in 1378, Pachacutec sent an army of thirty thousand men from Cuzco to conquer Pachacamac, he lost the flower of his troops to the ravages of tertian fever. In the early centuries of European rule, the Spaniards who settled in Lima also paid tribute to this terrible disease, from which many recovered without any known specific remedy, while no small number were carried off.
The Countess of Chinchón had been given up for lost. Science, speaking through its oracle Don Juan de Vega, had pronounced its verdict. “So young and so beautiful!” the desolate husband said to his friend. “Poor Francisca! Who could have told you that you would never again see your Castilian skies or the gardens of Granada? My God! A miracle, Lord, a miracle!…”
“The countess will be saved, Your Excellency,” answered a voice at the chamber door. The viceroy turned in surprise. It was a priest, a son of Ignatius of Loyola, who had spoken these comforting words.
The Count of Chinchón bowed before the Jesuit. The latter continued: “I wish to see the vicereine. Have faith, Your Excellency, and God will do the rest.” The viceroy led the priest to the dying woman’s bedside.
II Let us pause in our narrative to sketch, in the broadest strokes, the period of government of Don Luis Jerónimo Fernández de Cabrera, a native of Madrid, Commander of Criptana in the Order of Santiago, governor of the Alcázar of Segovia, treasurer of Aragon, and fourth Count of Chinchón, who held office from January 14, 1629, to January 18, 1639.
With the Pacific threatened by the Portuguese and by the flotilla of the Dutch pirate Peg Leg, much of the Count of Chinchón’s energy was devoted to placing Callao and the fleet in a state of defense. He also sent a thousand men to Chile against the Araucanians, and three expeditions against certain tribes of Puno, Tucumán, and Paraguay.
To sustain the extravagant whims of Felipe IV and his courtiers, America had to contribute at the expense of its own prosperity. Taxes and levies multiplied, and the merchants of Lima were forced to bear them.
The decline of the mines of Potosí and Huancavelica dates from that time, as does the discovery of the veins of Bombón and Caylloma. It was during this viceroy’s administration, in 1635, that the famous bankruptcy of the banker Juan de la Cueva occurred. In his bank, says Lorente, private individuals and the government alike had placed the utmost confidence. Until recently, that bankruptcy was commemorated in the farcical pageant called Juan de la Cova, coscoroba.
The Count of Chinchón was as fanatical as befitted an Old Christian. Many of his ordinances bear this out. No shipowner could take passengers aboard unless they first produced a certificate showing that they had confessed and received communion the day before. Soldiers, too, were obliged under severe penalties to fulfill this precept every year, and men and women were forbidden to gather in the same church during Lent.
As we have written in our Annals of the Inquisition of Lima, this was the period in which the implacable tribunal of the faith sacrificed the greatest number of victims. To be Portuguese and possess a fortune was enough to find oneself buried in the dungeons of the Holy Office. At just one of the three autos-da-fé attended by the Count of Chinchón, eleven Portuguese Jews, wealthy merchants of Lima, were burned.
We have read in the Duke of Frías’s little book that, on the first inspection of the prisons attended by the count, he was given an account of proceedings against a gentleman of Quito accused of having attempted to rebel against the monarch. From the court records, the viceroy concluded that the whole affair was slander, and ordered the prisoner released, authorizing him to return to Quito and allowing him six months in which to stir the territory to rebellion; with the understanding that, should he fail, his accusers would pay the costs of the proceedings and compensate the gentleman for the damages he had suffered.
What a clever way to punish the envious and their vile accusations! His Excellency must have had some quarrel with the women of Lima, for on two occasions he issued edicts against the tapadas, the women who veiled their faces; and they, it must be said, used the edicts to make curling papers and ringlets. Legislating against women has always been, and always will be, a wasted sermon.
Let us return to the vicereine, whom we left dying in her bed. III A month later, a grand celebration was held at the palace in honor of Doña Francisca’s recovery.
The fever-reducing virtue of cinchona bark had been discovered. Stricken with fever, an Indian from Loja named Pedro de Leyva drank, to quench his burning thirst, from a quiet pool along whose banks grew several cinchona trees. Having recovered in this way, he tried giving others afflicted with the same illness pitcherfuls of water in which he had placed cinchona roots. He came to Lima with his discovery and confided it to a Jesuit, who, by bringing about the vicereine’s happy recovery, rendered humanity a greater service than the friar who invented gunpowder.
The Jesuits kept the secret for some years, and everyone stricken with tertian fever went to them. For this reason, powdered cinchona bark was long known as Jesuits’ powder.
Dr. Scrivener says that an English physician, Mr. Talbot, cured the Prince of Condé, the dauphin, Colbert, and other distinguished figures with quinine, selling the secret to the French government for a considerable sum and a pension for life.
Linnaeus, paying homage to the vicereine, the Countess of Chinchón, gave the cinchona tree the name by which science knows it today: Chinchona. Mendiburu says that the use of cinchona at first met with fierce opposition in Europe, and that in Salamanca it was maintained that any physician who prescribed it fell into mortal sin, since its virtues were due to a pact two Peruvians had made with the devil.
As for the people of Lima, until a few years ago they knew the powdered bark of this marvelous tree as the countess’s powder.[1]
[Note 1: The Count of Chinchón’s first wife was named Doña Ana de Osorio, and many have believed that she was the woman saved by the virtues of cinchona. An interesting historical study published by Don Félix Cipriano Zegarra in the Revista Peruana in 1879 has convinced us that the vicereine who lived in Lima was named Doña Francisca Henríquez de Ribera. With this note, therefore, we correct the serious error into which we had fallen.]
