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CHAPTER 2

Parish Priests and Useful Information

On May 13, 1779, the new Bishop of Trujillo made his first official entrance into what was now his cathedral city. The journey from Lima would have taken him on the King’s Road, or Camino Real, the thoroughfare that hugged Peru’s Pacific Coast. Coming from the south, he would have entered the city from the New Huaman gate and preceded up what is today Francisco Pizarro Street, named for the conquistador who founded it in 1535. To honor this occasion, he might have chosen some of his most luxurious clothing—perhaps one of his fine Dutch silk shirts and gold lamé vestments bordered with gold thread, with the ensemble finished with British stockings and a bracelet with a large emerald surrounded by pink diamonds.¹ To the left side of the road lay Trujillo’s Jesuit College, empty of the Saint Ignatius order since its 1767 expulsion from the Spanish territories. Several blocks north, the modest seventeenth-century Santo Domingo Convent and Church came into view. Once the carriage crossed the street that is today named for Pizarro’s friend-turned-foe Diego de Almagro, Martínez Compañón’s gaze would have landed on Trujillo’s pristine, perfectly square plaza mayor. It was significantly smaller than that of Lima but nonetheless home to the necessary buildings of state and church administration, including the municipal cabildo, the jail, the cathedral, and the Bishop’s palace, which would be his official home for the next eleven years. The brightly painted casona mansions of Trujillo’s well-to-do merchants and agronomists overtook the remaining lots around the plaza. Behind the wooden screens shading their traditional Moorish balconies, appropriately demure young ladies could observe the goings-on of the city without exposing themselves to public view. The houses’ high walls concealed rear private gardens resplendent with vibrant fuchsia bougainvillea and purple morning glories.

Even in the midst of such beauty, many of central Trujillo’s buildings were crumbling or stood empty. Much of the city had yet to rebuild from the earthquakes that struck the north coast in 1729 and 1759. One such unlucky structure was the city’s cathedral, which had been badly damaged in the last tremor. Furthermore, the same gentle ocean breezes that wafted through the city carried with them sand from the Pacific beaches three miles away—so much sand that sometimes pedestrians waded through knee-deep drifts to cross city streets. Outside the city walls, the poor mestizos, mulattos, and other mixed-race castas occupied the former Indian ghettos called rancherías, which, by the 1780s, had become slumlike.²

Of his visit to Trujillo over twenty years later, Alexander Humboldt dismissively wrote that “it is necessary to be familiar with Peruvian cities to find any beauty in a city like Trujillo.”³ Yet sandy streets and unattractive buildings were the least of Martínez Compañón’s concerns. Even before he left Spain for America, he had dreamed of learning about and helping the Indians; when he arrived in Trujillo, he found himself responsible for 118,324 of them. In a 1783 circular letter to “My Beloved Children, the Indians of this Bishopric of Trujillo,” he promised that “since I have arrived in these kingdoms … I have not forgone any occasion … to be useful to you, and to help you to know with my words, and my deeds, all that I have been able to do for your true well-being.”⁴ Happily, some of the Indians living in Trujillo city already seemed to be the hardworking plebeians whom the Bishop and other reformers of the eighteenth century tried to cultivate; they spoke fluent Castilian, wore Spanish-style clothes, and worked as artisans or manual laborers. But in provincial areas of the bishopric, many lived in poor, rural communities. They made meager wages as porters, farmers, or fishermen, often living in simple reed choza huts. Others resided on the outskirts of local haciendas, where they ceaselessly worked small plots of land in vain attempts to repay their debts to wealthy landlords. The situation was even direr in the Amazonian jungle regions, where some natives existed entirely outside the Spanish sphere of influence, such as the “infidel” Indians of Hibitos and Cholones, in the extreme eastern territory of the bishopric (see Plates 10 and 18). These “infidels” might have been the very men and women who kept Martínez Compañón awake on certain nights; their total isolation from European society and Catholic morals was a harsh reminder of the collective inability of the Crown and the Church to penetrate the deepest reaches of northern Peru.

Trujillo’s Indians would soon become the almost singular focus of Martínez Compañón’s utopian reform agenda, but in actuality his bishopric was much more diverse. His own demographic calculations listed the ecclesiastical province of Trujillo as the home of 118,324 Indians; 79,043 mestizos; 21,980 Spanish (including Creoles born in America); 16,630 pardos (mixed-race of African descent); and 4,486 blacks. The pardos and blacks were the smallest groups; but when combined, their total population rivaled that of the Spanish and made the city home to the viceroyalty’s second-largest black population. Though many were slaves who had been brought to the coastal regions through Panama to work on area sugar plantations, the majority were free, lived in urban areas, and worked in skilled trades such as masonry and carpentry. Some, such as Master Architect Tomás Rodríguez, even collaborated with the Bishop on important projects, including rebuilding the towers of Trujillo’s cathedral and rehabilitating the damaged church at Ferreñafe, northeast of Chiclayo. Paradoxically, although people of African descent constituted such a significant part of Trujillo’s population, Martínez Compañón never imagined how they might be incorporated into his utopian vision. In this, he was similar to other reformers of the Spanish eighteenth century, who focused on generating a productive plebeian class of poor Spaniards, mestizos, and Indians while relegating people of African descent to the category of slaves, marking them as easily replaceable beings unworthy of improvement.⁵

In terms of market forces, the fate of slavery was tied to the broader fiscal well-being of Trujillo. Bourbon economic restructuring meant that while Trujillo’s hacendados had been previously able to purchase African slaves from Panama, they could now do so only by way of Buenos Aires and secondary markets in Chile and Lima. As a result, slaves were suddenly more expensive and scarcer, driving up labor costs. At the same time, cheaper Brazilian sugar was flooding the Peruvian market. By 1784, the situation was so bad that Crown-appointed visitador Jorge Escobedo, who spent six years in Peru acting on behalf of the powerful minister of the Indies José de Gálvez, met with local officials to discuss the matter. In response to their complaints, he proposed that Brazilian sugar be prohibited in Spanish territory and that slaves be made available for purchase in Panama. His suggestion fell on characteristically deaf royal ears.⁶

Slaves aside, the situation in Trujillo was so dismal that in 1763, Corregidor Don Miguel Feyjoo concluded that “it seems that the same appreciable advantages for human happiness have turned into ruin and desolation. Not only … the many Spanish who have come to Peru, but also … the … natural children of the country [the Indians] find themselves notably diminished.”⁷ There seemed to be an almost endless need for improvement in Trujillo. Martínez Compañón would dedicate himself to it with an intensity reflected—but not equaled—by his colleagues among the bishops and archbishops of America, marking himself as an iconoclast among reforming prelates. To accomplish such a far-reaching agenda for change, he relied on the clergy to become foot soldiers working to foster public happiness and improvement at the farthest corners of the bishopric. He tasked them with promoting the agricultural, economic, and educational development that was the foundation of his utopian vision. At the same time, they would act as collaborators in his natural history research, sharing invaluable data on local resources, traditions, and customs. Although Martínez Compañón employed the time-tested information-gathering techniques of questionnaires and a visita to learn about his bishopric, he still needed local clergy to function as his eyes on the ground. It was only with their dedicated assistance that Trujillo could move forward toward its idealized future.

A Bourbon Bishop in Trujillo

When Martínez Compañón was named bishop of Trujillo, he became a member of the so-called Bourbon prelates: high-level ecclesiastics of the eighteenth century who functioned as “a kind of religious civil service, closely identified with the task of national improvement.”⁸ These archbishops, bishops, and cathedral canons were secular clergy who were ideologically and politically tied to the Spanish Crown, often having been handpicked by Charles III himself. As the king’s representatives in America, they were responsible for implementing his vision of reform for the Catholic Church. They oversaw the campaign to “secularize” Indian parishes by replacing the friars who administered them with secular parish priests. To avoid past abuses, they monitored these priests closely, scrutinizing their physical residences in their parishes, cataloging the sacraments they performed, and limiting their involvement with local judicial matters. The Bourbon prelates also managed a broad campaign of parish finance reform, closely examining religious brotherhood dues and arancel income from the collection of fees charged for sacraments. They targeted convents where nuns enjoyed lavish dowries, personal servants, and opulent costumes that flouted the Bourbon calls for austerity in religious devotion. In worship, they championed a return to private piety by discouraging the baroque tradition of overwhelming the senses with lavish architecture, self-flagellation, and opulent church décor.⁹

Many Bourbon prelates were involved in political economy projects that meant to improve the social and economic lives of their constituents. In Ecuador, Bishop José Pérez Calama opened a road connecting the jungles of Esmeraldas with their rich production of fruit and cloth to the commercial center of Quito. In New Granada, Archbishop Antonio Caballero y Góngora collaborated with scientist José Mutis to improve public health by promoting the newly invented smallpox vaccine. Many prelates worked to improve education: Bishop Francisco Fabián y Fuero, for instance, supported a literature academy and endowed university professorships in Puebla. Some even gathered natural history data about the Americas, with Pérez Calama contributing articles to the Mercurio Peruano journal, Caballero y Góngora supporting the Royal Botanical Expedition in New Granada, and Archbishop Francisco Lorenzana publishing a new edition of Hernán Cortés’s letters from Mexico, elaborated with his own reports on local nature and society, as well as newly commissioned illustrations and maps.

Though Lorenzana’s Historia de Nueva España is well known, scholars are less familiar with his 1768 manuscript, “Instructions for Making Indians Content in Spiritual and Material Things.” In keeping with what Spanish reformer José Campillo had called for twenty-five years earlier, Lorenzana mandated renewed efforts toward the spiritual and “material” education of Indians. Properly educated, he believed, the Indians would become more closely integrated into Spanish society. Therefore, priests and ecclesiastics should help them to engage in commerce, learn new agricultural techniques, and practice Spanish-style social norms, such as maintaining separate bedrooms for parents and male and female children. Despite such good intentions, Lorenzana was careful not to threaten the strict social hierarchy of the colonies, never suggesting that the Indians deserved to enjoy the social, racial, and economic advantages carefully guarded by Spaniards and Creoles. Other reforming prelates constructed similarly paradoxical campaigns that purported to benefit the Indians while ensuring their social inferiority. For instance, Archbishop Manuel José Rubio y Salinas sought to help the natives of Mexico by creating 237 primary schools for them; but he planned to use the schools to extinguish indigenous languages by forcing students to speak only Castilian. He also spent twenty-five years actively blocking an attempt to create a seminary for Indian boys just north of Mexico City.¹⁰

In Trujillo, Martínez Compañón did not display such paternalistic disdain for America’s native population. Instead, he referred to the Indians as “my beloved children” and placed them at the center of the utopia he envisioned. In addition to promoting their welfare and improvement in spiritual and temporal matters, he thought to afford them ideological advantages that would enhance their positions in colonial society. As we shall see, he suggested to King Charles III that deserving Indians be allowed to dress in the silken finery that was officially reserved for Spaniards. He believed that those Indians who most excelled in school should be honored with burial plots within their churches, just like Spanish elites. He even ventured that they be allowed to use the noble titles don or doña in their public lives, and be addressed with the supplicatory second-person title of vos in municipal government and at church. Although he, too, promoted the use of Castilian in primary schools, his careful cataloging of Quechua names for plants and animals, as well as the 344-word “Chart of 43 Castilian Words Translated to the Eight Languages That the Indians of the Coast, Sierra, and Mountains of the Bishopric of Trujillo Speak,” demonstrates that he sought to value and preserve the native languages of the Andes, rather than simply erasing them from existence. Instead of blocking a seminary for Indian students, as Rubio y Salinas had, in Trujillo the Bishop created his own body of itinerant priests’ assistants drawn from native communities. Such daringly egalitarian rhetoric not only reinforced his position in the debate over the inferiority of the New World; it also made him radically different from many of his peers. He was fully ensconced in the highest echelons of the Church hierarchy in America, yet he was wholeheartedly involved in secular reform, deeply engaged in scientific research, and, to a much greater degree than his compatriots, completely dedicated to the cause that mattered most to him: improving the Indians.¹¹

Martínez Compañón’s plans to assist the Indians must have been swirling in his head ever since he had learned of his promotion; but before he could focus on these matters, he had to attend to his duties as an ecclesiastical administrator in the capital. Rebuilding the demolished tabernacle, sacristy, and towers of Trujillo’s cathedral was paramount. He imagined a new neoclassical façade for the building—the same one that still adorns it today. He ordered a crypt constructed on the south patio to alleviate the foul odors resulting from the old practice of burying the city’s dead within the church itself. His drafting plans feature a window that allowed breezes to circulate, individual tombs one yard wide and two and a quarter yards long, and brick overlay on the limestone walls. In the new cabildo room that he commissioned for the cathedral, the Bishop gathered portraits of his thirty predecessors, compiling along with them a historical document detailing the major deeds of each.¹²

In addition to these matters of fábrica—church structure, materials, and decoration—the Bishop made changes to ecclesiastical education in Trujillo. He knew that seminaries were of special importance to Charles III and his ministers, who wished to submit ecclesiastical education to empire-wide regulations. They were particularly interested in secular conciliar seminaries that would teach aspirants to the priesthood standardized courses of doctrine, grammar, rhetoric, geometry, and art. The Lima Provincial Church Council of 1772 also stressed the importance of seminaries, arguing that reforming the manners and behavior of priests was the best way to ensure proper behavior among the populace. Martínez Compañón must have had these decrees in mind when, upon his arrival in Trujillo, he found that the city’s San Carlos Conciliar Seminary was no longer operational. He set to work almost immediately, and, under his watch, the first repairs were complete as early as November 1781. He planned for the seminary to educate forty-eight students, half of whom would pay full price and half of whom would be Indian scholarship students.¹³

But the Bishop’s vision for seminaries in Trujillo involved more than the traditional elite aspirants to the priesthood studying in the provincial capital. As Vasco de Quiroga had done with his own utopia in New Spain centuries earlier, Martínez Compañón was already imagining how seminary students in rural areas of Trujillo would become foot soldiers for his agenda of reform. Following the precedent of groups such as the Operarios del Salvador del Mundo and the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda (Propaganda Fide), first created in seventeenth-century Rome to recapture the faithful from Protestants, he planned four such missionary schools in the cities of Trujillo, Lambayeque, Piura, and Cajamarca. Priests, community members, and day students would study there, as well as young Indians who would learn Spanish, Christian doctrine, and basic literacy. The students, known as operarios eclesiásticos, or ecclesiastical workers, would make annual excursions into the countryside, where they would busy themselves “confessing the parishioners, visiting and consoling the sick, fixing disagreements and private discord … and leaving … rules of healthy governance.”¹⁴ They were to become, in essence, a native clergy of Creoles, mestizos, and Indians that could better reach people in sparsely populated areas distant from Spanish centers of control. The operarios would help to ensure that the people of rural Trujillo would behave as obedient subjects and proper Catholics, even when there were no parish priests or municipal officials close by to monitor them. Because they came from provincial communities themselves, local Indians, mestizos, and people of African descent would more readily accept them. They could stand in for civil government in areas where this often seemed entirely absent. With the operarios constantly reinforcing and spreading their mission, the seminaries would become vital support systems for the improved future of the bishopric. Like the preceding institutions and clergy who inspired them, the operarios would become foot soldiers of a future utopia.

Martínez Compañón imagined that of the four schools, Trujillo’s Seminario de Operarios del Salvador would hold jurisdiction over the other three. It opened its doors in September 1785, with the accompanying fanfare of a ceremony he later described as lengthy and well attended.¹⁵ In June of the following year, the seminary was confirmed by a royal decree. But official approval was never secured for the remaining three seminaries. Later referring to the attempt to found one in Cajamarca, Martínez Compañón worried about “the distrust of the town to be able to form an institution that it does not know, and has no experience with.” There was also the ubiquitous problem of lack of funds. The Bishop hoped to raise money for the seminaries through redistributing cofradía religious brotherhood income and selecting parish priests to serve in vacant parishes in Trujillo, so that they might hold Mass regularly and generate more tithe income. He also hoped that, since Indian children were welcome to be educated at the seminaries, native communities would make small annual donations for their operation costs. But none of these measures worked. When he found himself still unable to raise adequate finances for the seminarios by 1788, the Bishop turned to the ecclesiastical cabildo of Trujillo—which also denied the support that he needed to sustain the schools. The Spanish, mestizo, and Indian operarios would not become the foot soldiers of reform he had imagined they could be.¹⁶

While it must have been disappointing, the community’s general lack of interest in the seminaries had ample historical precedent: early attempts to allow Indians into the priesthood in sixteenth-century Mexico were promptly squashed with a 1555 Provincial Council ban—a prohibition that was first iterated in Peru in 1551 and again in 1567. As the career of archbishop Rubio y Salinas demonstrates, even in mid-eighteenth-century Mexico, a plan to found a seminary for Indian students was rejected, largely because of prejudice toward allowing Indians into higher education as well as fears about taking positions away from Spanish and mestizo priests.¹⁷

Although the seminaries that Martínez Compañón envisioned were not successful, Trujillo did not generally lack for religious figures. The bishopric was home to twenty-one monasteries and three convents, with the majority of the regular clergy being Franciscans, Mercederians, and Bethlehemites who lived in monasteries in the main population areas. As regulars, they were bound to follow the rules of their own orders; but the remaining priests and assistants who made up the secular clergy of Trujillo were directly subject to Martínez Compañón’s rule. Many of these were curas administering to the Spaniards, mestizos, and people of African descent who belonged to their own parishes, known as curatos, often located in the most densely settled coastal regions of the province. The less educated priests (often mestizos) who administered to the doctrinas, or Indian parishes, were known as curas doctrineros. Most often, their work brought them to the sierra towns where the largest groups of natives lived. In even more rural areas, traveling priests staffed ancillary churches called añejos. Especially in the jungle and the sierra, añejos were often located far from the communities they were meant to serve, limiting access to sacraments and worship.¹⁸

This isolation was even more problematic because in rural areas, priests and their assistants were sometimes the only Spaniards or mestizos of authority closely involved in daily life. Recognizing this, Martínez Compañón reminded Trujillo’s parish priests that one of their most important duties was to “reduce the Indians to civil life in town” by ensuring that all their charges lived “within the sound of the bell,” meaning that they could literally as well as figuratively be reached by their priest and their church. They were also to ensure adherence to the sacraments of communion, marriage, confession, and extreme unction. They should carefully record all births, deaths, marriages, and baptisms in their parishes, and keep meticulous tallies of all church income. They were to oversee proper behavior in the home, ensuring that parents married and that male and female children were properly clothed and that they slept in bedrooms separated by sex. With adults, they were to discourage drunkenness and adultery and to forbid men and women from bathing together in the same place.

While typical, such spiritual and moral directives were far from the only responsibilities Martínez Compañón gave to his parish priests. He also intended for them to participate in his vision of economic development, relying on them to share technological innovation, moral support, and organizational skills with the people. He told them to “speak lovingly of the fields” where the Indians worked, to explain which crops were best cultivated there, to show how to weed the soil, and to discuss how to grow fruit trees. He mandated that priests support young Indian women in their parishes by reallocating cofradía funds to buy them spinning wheels or pairs of oxen that would help supplement their household income. He also sought their help in building primary schools in his territory, as we will explore in greater detail in Chapter 4. In the Bishop’s utopia, priests were essential collaborators who would use their daily interactions with the local population to gather the data that he needed to construct his vision of reform for Trujillo.¹⁹

While promoting agricultural improvement and primary education might have been some of their most enjoyable responsibilities, priests in Trujillo also oversaw policía, or general orderliness in their parishes—a task that occasionally proved quite trying. In 1786, Francisco Simeón de Polo reported on a striking episode of unruliness from Saña, north of Trujillo. It began one night when two mestizos and a mulatto (who happened to be mute) were rehearsing for a play celebrating the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe and decided to partake in some unsanctioned merrymaking. Breaking into the local church, they pulled the statue of Mary from its display and headed for the room where the Augustinian brothers stored their religious garb. One mestizo donned a white ecclesiastical garment and a choir member’s cape, while the other found a frock with an image of San Francisco. Their mute mulatto companion dressed in the traditional black, long-sleeved habit of the Augustinian monks. The three proceeded to “make a scene … yelling as if they were preaching” to lampoon the strict Augustinian brothers (the documents do not suggest how a mute could have joined in this parody). The townspeople who had gathered nearby to enjoy a bonfire joined in their mockery until the wee hours of the morning, leaving the priest to report that, had he been there, “he would have instituted a remedy to avoid such excess and irreverence.” Later, he got his wish, as only one month after the incident was first drawn to Martínez Compañón’s attention, the Bishop decreed Polo to be a priest of “discernment, virtue, and discretion” who could conduct an investigation into the matter on his own. Leaving the matter to the priest’s discretion demonstrates how much the Bishop relied on his priests to maintain order and decorum at the local level. It was impossible for Martínez Compañón to personally ensure that his orders were followed, so he had to trust his priests to enforce proper decorum in the church and its environs. But this responsibility was only one aspect of a much bigger, and more innovative, role that he had planned for them in helping to build a utopia in Trujillo.²⁰

Priests as Informants

Once the Bishop’s duties in the provincial capital were well under way, he turned to tasks elsewhere in his bishopric. To start, Martínez Compañón knew that he needed a thorough understanding of the 93,205 square miles of extreme geographic diversity that made up Trujillo, and he planned to obtain it by personally visiting as much of it as possible. His task of assessing such a large area was not simple—in fact, no prelate had traveled extensively in northern Peru since Archbishop Toribio Alfonso de Mogrovejo of Lima in the late 1500s. But eighteenth-century reform culture promoted the pastoral visita as the most efficient and thorough method of gathering data to promote reform at the provincial level. Charles III was so convinced of the visita’s utility that in 1776, he mandated that all American prelates make thorough visitations of their territories and remit the data to the Council of the Indies.²¹ Martínez Compañón readily accepted this duty. He hoped that his visita would help him gather the information he needed “to complete [a project] that His Majesty might review with his own eyes, or [to] be informed of … the different qualities of the lands, of the provinces of this bishopric, and its principal fruits and manufactures of its inhabitants.” Above all, he planned to gather information about the population of Trujillo, “so that this report might contribute to the prosperity of the towns of this bishopric and of the whole nation in general.”²² The parish priests would be key to this endeavor, as they had direct access to parishioners, who could assess the informants’ testimony and who would gather the material and visual reports that the Bishop requested. Once compiled, their data would serve as a foundation from which the Bishop and the people would begin to build their utopia.

Martínez Compañón’s words about prosperity are a reminder that even though he was first and foremost a man of the cloth, as a vassal of the king, a functionary of the state, and a citizen of the world, he was bound to improve the material and social situation of his diocesans. Accordingly, much of his work consisted of promoting one of the most important concepts of late eighteenth-century government: public happiness. The basis of this, according to Italian Catholic intellectual Ludovico Muratori (whose work Martínez Compañón owned) was charity—a principle made real only when it was executed in daily life.²³ The Bishop had likely begun imagining this charitable work while still in Spain, where he would have started reading about ecclesiastics who worked with the Indians of America. In fact, Spain is where Martínez Compañón acquired his copies of the collected works of Juan de Palafox, bishop of Puebla, New Spain (1640–1655). Palafox wrote that in order to truly grasp how the Indians’ “nakedness, poverty, and work” enriched the state and the church, viceroys and bishops had to gather information from the parish priests who had daily contact with them. Like Martínez Compañón a century and a half later, Palafox was certain that once the Indians were properly understood and managed, they could become useful subjects. “They have a great facility to learn trades,” he argued, “because in seeing painting, they very soon paint; in seeing work, they work; and with incredible quickness, they learn four or six trades.”²⁴

But before Martínez Compañón could seek the vital demographic, cultural, and socioeconomic data that would be the foundations of these improvements, he had to prepare for the long and difficult journey. In autumn 1782, his servants carefully folded his simple priest’s gown and singlet with an amice (a square piece of linen with a cross in the middle). They might have also prepared his gold-tipped cane, useful to maintain steady footing on precipitous rural roads. Outside the Bishop’s palace, stable hands might have been busy readying his sorrel horse and a small pack mule to carry other personal items.²⁵ As his assistants and servants bustled about, Martínez Compañón selected the team that would accompany him: his secretary Pedro de Echevarri, a missionary, a chaplain, a notary, a scribe, a Spaniard named Antonio de Narbona (who, strangely, does not reappear in the documentation), his nephew José Ignacio Lecuanda, and six slaves to service the group.²⁶ Perhaps one of these was Theodoro, a kitchen slave whom Martínez Compañón had purchased with the plan of granting him liberty in a few years (but as of the Bishop’s promotion to Bogotá, the unfortunate Theodoro was “inventoried” as property of the Trujillo episcopate).²⁷

Meanwhile, Martínez Compañón coordinated how local clergy would receive the group. In April, he had sent a pastoral letter that told parish priests to expect the visita party. But rather than demanding the lavish ceremony and ritual that would typically accompany a bishop’s visit, he requested restraint and sobriety in their preparations. He cautioned that they were not to arrange for more than three dishes to be served at the midday meal, two at dinner, and one for dessert. In areas with no houses for his party’s lodging, priests were forbidden to order the construction of any structures for their use. “I have decided,” the Bishop wrote, “to bring a tent in which we will stay in those places.”²⁸

While the priests and their assistants were not to furnish any special creature comforts, they were asked to prepare for the Bishop’s arrival by gathering answers to two questionnaires that they received along with the pastoral letter. The first of the questionnaires was directed to the priests themselves, but in the case of rural doctrinas or añejos that were irregularly staffed, it stipulated that provincial corregidores were to interview “the most learned landowners or city-dwellers,” meaning well-to-do Spaniards or mestizos, and occasionally Indians.²⁹ These questions were to inform Martínez Compañón of standard ecclesiastical matters, such as whether the priests worked alone or with the assistance of a subordinate priest (often known as a vicario). This questionnaire (see Appendix 1 for a transcription) also asked for information on church finances, including whether the priests supported only themselves with their benefice, or if other family members lived from the same income as well. If the parish was home to any cofradías, or religious brotherhoods, the Bishop wanted information about them—specifically, what type of funding they received. He inquired about any additional income generated by religious festivals or arancel fees for religious sacraments. He also asked for information about the distance from añejos to their mother churches and the city of Trujillo. He sought to learn about the devotional practices of parishioners, wanting to know whether local parishes had any “image” or statue that they venerated and “whether the town was sick or healthy, and where one would go for medicines in case of sickness, and how much they would cost.” Finally, he asked if the parish had any poor or infirm residents who could not work. Taken together, these data would help him assess how much local religious authorities would be able to contribute to his planned utopia in Trujillo. He could then employ the information to mobilize parish church resources, with priests at the helm.³⁰

A Questionnaire for Useful Information

Martínez Compañón’s request for information about local religious life and ecclesiastical administration was not atypical in an age of close scrutiny of church finances and management. Much more innovative was his plan to use his priests as informants who would help him to complete the research for his “Historical, Scientific, Political, and Social Museum of the Bishopric of Trujillo del Perú” and its accompanying watercolor images and natural history collection. Therefore, they also received a second questionnaire that focused on temporal matters, particularly natural history and local resources. As he told them, he sent it because he believed “that within this diocese we have much more than what we imagine and that a distinct and thorough knowledge of it could be of great utility.”³¹ Such information, he was convinced, would serve not simply for “vain curiosity” but to promote “industry and commerce.”³²

In employing this second questionnaire to compile information, Martínez Compañón utilized a time-tested technique of gathering data on distant and unknown parts of the Spanish Empire. In sixteenth-century Mexico, Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex and Gonzalo Oviedo’s History of the Indies were both derived from questionnaire responses. But the most widely distributed questionnaire in colonial Spanish America was developed by royal cosmographers Alonso de Santa Cruz and Juan López de Velasco in 1598 as part of Philip II’s massive Relacíones Geográficas project to map the lands of the Spanish Empire. By asking respondents to answer specific questions about local history, the natural world, area economies, and geography, Santa Cruz and Velasco sought to gather sufficient knowledge for the Spanish king to rule the overseas territories that were too distant and dangerous for him to visit himself. Their method of inquiry—asking discrete questions to provoke short answers that could be later compiled and analyzed—signaled a major epistemological shift in European attempts to learn about the world, one that led scholars away from the discursive techniques of the past and toward the methodological inquiry of the future. Two hundred years later in the Spanish Empire, bureaucrats, naturalists, and ecclesiastics employed these same techniques of information gathering through written query and response, now standard throughout the Atlantic basin.³³

The questionnaire that Martínez Compañón composed reveals that, like most administrators gathering systematic data about unfamiliar territories, he wanted to learn about the people of Trujillo as well as the natural world in which they lived. Without understanding local people, he could not adequately assess how they utilized the natural world around them and how this relationship could be improved. Useful information was the very foundation of reform culture—without it, officials had no way of knowing what needed to be done. For help in beginning such an important task, he turned again to his parish priests, asking for them to facilitate detailed answers from local informants on the following queries:

1. What is the character and natural inclination of the natives of this doctrina, and if they understand and speak Castilian. If they are applied to their work or not. If there is any noticeable difference between Indians, Spanish, and other castas, as much in this or in their customs. And if this is attributed to differences in their education, or to some other natural or accidental principle. And what is the education they usually give to their children.

2. If the weather and climate is beneficial, and if … the … [territories] … of your jurisdiction are reputed to be healthy or sick, and to what they attribute whichever of these two qualities … are prevalent. Which are the most common sicknesses, and their causes, and the common medicines used to cure them, and [what is] the age to which its inhabitants typically live.

3. If there might be news that any of the towns belonging to this doctrina have been abandoned, [have] disappeared, or moved to another place, and the cause of the one or the other.

4. At what age they usually marry … in this doctrina. By which hand they usually arrange marriages. If there are any celibates, and [where] this virtue is most frequently found, both in terms of the castas and in terms of the sexes.

5. If one finds increased or not the number of landowners and city residents, both in this capital and in its annexes, with respect to the information in the censuses and old books, or the traditions of the towns. And what is the total of this augmentation or diminution, and if it is of Indians or other castas, and to what cause they attribute it.

6. If either within this principal town or its annexes, or surrounding areas begin any sources [of water], if these are the waters that serve for the common use of the people, and if in these they might have noted any particular quality, and what it might be.

7. If a river runs through its land or its borders, what they call it, where it has its beginnings, if they make use of its waters, and if they are known to be healthy. If it is navigable and if it has a bridge, and if not having a bridge if it would be possible to build one, and how much, more or less, its construction would cost.

8. What crops they harvest, and their quality, how much the fields produce, and what is the method, form, and season of doing their planting, cultivating, and harvesting.

9. If they keep any commerce … and of what kind, with towns or provinces, and what utilities it produces, and whether there might be some method or means of advancing it.

10. If there are any sugar plantations or refineries, cattle ranches, workshops, or agricultural estates, what are their profits, if tribute is given to them, how much they are given and how many workers they maintain. And if among them there are any mitayos, what salaries they pay them, and how they are paid.

11. If there are any minerals, which they are, how they mine them, and what they yield.

12. If there are any medicinal herbs, branches, or fruits, which they are, what are their shape, and the virtue of each one of them, and the mode of applying and using them.

13. If there are any mineral waters, and … if they are hot or temperate, sulfurous, nitrous, ferrous, or of another quality, what use they made of them, and to what effect.

14. If there are any resins or fragrant balsams, which they are, and what virtue they attribute to them.

15. If there are any strange birds or carnivorous animals, or any poisonous animals or insects, and if there are any of these, what precautions those who live around them take.

16. If there are any woods, their abundance, and qualities, the use they make of them, or might be able to make of them.

17. If there are any structures from the times before the conquest that are notable for their material, form, grandness, or any vestiges of that. If at any time they have found any huge bones that seem to be human. And whether they have any tradition that in some time there might have been giants, and in the places where they might have had them, for what time, when did they become extinct and for what reason, and what support the people have for the said legend.

18. If in the Indians one sees anything that smells of superstition, about what points and which are the reasons to distrust, or believe it, and what methods would be the most effective to extirpate them with respect to [the Indians’] character, inclinations, ideas, and customs.³⁴

A careful reading of the questionnaire suggests that the Bishop was already imagining how to draw the broad outlines of his utopia in Trujillo. Perhaps thinking of the Túpac Amaru Indian rebellion that had so recently threatened Spanish hegemony in the southern portions of the viceroyalty, the first section of the document sought details about “the character and natural inclination of the natives of this doctrina.” This had several facets, most of which concerned how “Hispanicized” the Indians were. Martínez Compañón wanted to know whether they spoke Spanish, a central indicator of previous meaningful interaction they had with church and state authorities. He also inquired whether there was any “noticeable difference” between the local Indians’ places in society and that of the Spanish or other castas who lived nearby. This would reveal whether they had fared well under Spanish colonial authorities, or whether they had become a permanent underclass that would have little motivation and few resources with which to support his reform agenda. Another factor that would signify a group receptive to his plans was whether “they are applied to their work or not,” as he put it. In response to this query, he must have hoped that he would not hear stereotypically negative comments such as those that would appear in Carrio’s Lazarillo a few years later, which claimed that Peru’s Indians had “no objective other than that of drunkenness” and that they were so lazy that they “would let themselves be eaten by lice” rather than work.³⁵

Given his experience as rector of the Saint Toribio Seminary in Lima and his plans to extend primary education throughout the bishopric, Martínez Compañón inquired as to whether area children attended school, likely understanding that “differences … in education” for Indian and white children might explain why the Indians were not known for industriousness or facility with the Spanish language. If local people assumed that differences between Spaniards and Indians were based on inherent deficiencies in native bodies and minds, the Bishop needed to know about the “natural or accidental principle” to which they attributed this difference.

Assuming that the Indians in question did work, Martínez Compañón wanted to gather more specific details about how they did so. He wanted to know if the community in question had any established commercial networks, and where these were. He hoped that the priest might suggest, if he could, “whether there might be some method or means of advancing [such commercial activity].” The Bishop knew that the people might also work in agriculture or mills, or perhaps in small workshops known as obrajes, if they did so, he wondered whether it was in order to meet their tribute duties or to earn money for themselves. He inquired as to how large these commercial operations were, including how many employees they had and whether any were assigned mita laborers. Such information would help him imagine how to improve each—perhaps through facilitating transportation along trade routes, sharing innovative agricultural techniques, or seeking updated machinery that might increase production in mills or obrajes.

While work and productivity were key to the present and future potential of Trujillo’s Indian communities, Martínez Compañón—like most administrators in Spain’s overseas territories (as Chapter 3 will illustrate)—believed that communal living in cities or towns was also key to development. He knew that with the exception of larger population centers such as Trujillo, Piura, Cajamarca, and Chachapoyas, many miles of Trujillo were isolated and rural, with no towns to speak of. He therefore inquired if the area in question had been home to any previous urban settlements that had “been abandoned, [have] disappeared, or moved to another place.” A related question was about local population statistics: over time, had the population of Indians and castas increased or fallen in the area? This would provide valuable clues as to whether the land was rich enough to sustain a sizable population. The questionnaire asked if local census records, town traditions, and archival records (or “old books,” as he called them) showed how many city dwellers owned the land on which they lived.

Although the first questionnaire had thoroughly covered local religious practices, Martínez Compañón saw fit to ask about them in this second one as well. He inquired whether there was “anything that smells of superstition” in the local Indian population. If so, he wondered if the priests had any suggestions for how to most effectively eradicate these beliefs, specifically “with respect to [the Indians’] character, inclinations, ideas, and customs.” While this was written in the tone of a dedicated extirpator, the Bishop’s questionnaire in fact showed him to be slightly skeptical of the harsh charges of “idolatry” that Indians often faced. Before condemning any such behavior in the local population, he wanted to know “the reasons to distrust, or believe it.” This attitude of levelheadedness toward potentially inflammatory Indian behavior would resurface throughout his time in Trujillo, helping him to maintain an air of careful detachment when observing the customs and traditions of the Indians around him.

Almost as important as verifying that the Indians behaved like good Catholic subjects was learning whether they followed the European social norms that would signify their status as upstanding vassals of the Spanish Crown. In the questionnaire, this had to do mainly with the institution of marriage: at what age it typically happened and how it was arranged. In asking about marriage, the Bishop was quietly inquiring whether communities fostered upstanding marriages sanctified by the Church, or if they followed traditional Andean customs of trial marriage, or pantanacuy, in which young couples were encouraged to informally cohabitate before marriage. Martínez Compañón also wanted to know if his bishopric had many inhabitants who had specifically chosen celibacy, and what racial group was most likely to do so.³⁶

In addition to investigating the present state of social relations in Trujillo, the questionnaire inquired about the area’s past. Peru’s north coast was rich in ruins from the “gentile,” or pre-Hispanic Moche and Chimú, peoples. Martínez Compañón therefore asked the priests to report “if there are any structures from the times before the conquest that are notable for their material, form, grandness, or any vestiges of that.” Regarding the people of the past, he wondered whether the priests might have heard of local people finding “any huge bones that seem to be human.” As we saw in Chapter 1, these were the giant bones that would serve as evidence to help prove that the natives of Peru were not physically weak and inferior.

While a good deal of Martínez Compañón’s questionnaire focused on the social resources, or the people of Trujillo, he also inquired about the natural world in which they lived. Although these questions were focused on “geography, metallurgy, mineralogy, and botany,” as the Bishop put it, they were just as important in determining how to build his utopian vision of improvement. Recall that, like most early modern Europeans, Martínez Compañón believed in climatic determinism, or the idea that the Earth and the heavens that surrounded it inevitably influenced men. The second item on the questionnaire asked priests to inform him “if the weather and climate is beneficial” in their area of jurisdiction. Accordingly, he wanted to know if people there were more likely to be healthy, or to be ill much of the time. If they did suffer from repeated illnesses, he asked “which are the most common sicknesses, and their causes, and the common medicines used to cure them.”

This question directly led to another farther down the list: if “there are any medicinal herbs, branches, or fruits, which they are, what are their shape, and the virtue of each one of them, and the mode of applying and using them.” As Chapter 6 will show, these answers formed the basis of the impressive collection of botanical information that the Bishop gathered from local informants throughout his time in Trujillo: three volumes of watercolor images showing 488 individual portraits of plants, trees, and bushes (many of which were medicinal); and ten crates of his natural history collection, half of which held exclusively plant matter and half of which mixed it with other specimens. In a related matter, question fourteen asked “if there are any resins or fragrant balsams, which they are, and what virtue they attribute to them.” Balsams, derived from the aromatic resin of trees and shrubs, had been seen as valuable medicines even before Dioscorides, and since the 1520s, the Spanish had sought new balsams in American nature. Along with botanical medicines, they had vast potential as commercial trade items throughout the Atlantic world.³⁷

But Martínez Compañón also wanted to know what local natural resources might affect the health of his diocesans. He inquired as to whether “there are any mineral waters, and if there are if they are hot or temperate, sulfurous, nitrous, ferrous, or of another quality, what use they made of them, and to what effect.” It is possible that one response he received to this query is depicted in volume 2 of the watercolors, in an image that shows a “woman with leprosy bathing” (see Plate 11). In the late colonial period, Lima had its own hospital dedicated to lepers (named for their patron saint, Lazarus), and the viceroy endorsed projects to develop leprosy remedies based on balsams and ointments.³⁸ The image shown here suggests that the waters from this mountain stream in Trujillo might have served the same purpose. Along with potential cures for endemic disease, the Bishop inquired about “any poisonous animals or insects” and what might be done about these. He asked for notice of “any strange birds or carnivorous animals,” many of which must have been those depicted in volume 6 of the watercolors.

Plant and animal life was central to understanding the local environment; and in a bishopric that held vast expanses of arid desert and rocky mountains, water was an even more essential resource. So Martínez Compañón inquired if there were any water sources in each area. Perhaps having been warned that water disputes were rampant in Trujillo (as they were in much of the Andes and still are today), he wanted to know whether these were “for the common use of the people” or if they were held privately. At the same time, water was essential to transporting commercial goods and crops. So the Bishop inquired about any local rivers, their sources and tributaries, and their navigability. In addition, he wanted to know whether each river in question had a bridge and, if not, “if it would be possible to build one, and how much, more or less, its construction would cost.” Bridges would become a central part of the Bishop’s reform agenda, especially in the watery eastern portions of Trujillo, where he managed a campaign to build a bridge over the San Antonio River in the province of Luya and Chillaos.³⁹

Once water was secured both for irrigation and transport, the Bishop could turn to local agricultural production. He wanted to know what crops were farmed in each area, how productive the fields were, and “the method, form, and season of doing their planting, cultivating, and harvesting.” While agricultural crops provided both local comestibles and material for trade, Martínez Compañón realized that American woods were even more potentially profitable, largely because of their high demand in European markets. Of these, he wanted to know about not only “their abundance, and qualities” but also “the use they make of them, or might be able to make of them.”⁴⁰

Finally, like most anyone who had any knowledge of the Indies, Martínez Compañón knew that the Spanish were still looking for the very substance that had made their earliest ventures in America so fantastically successful. He asked simply, “if there are any minerals, what they are, how they mine them, and what they produce.” These would have complemented the great silver mine at Hualgayoc in Cajamarca, which was closely linked to the economic future of the entire province. As Chapter 5 will demonstrate, his reform work there would be some of the most thoughtful and innovative of his efforts in the bishopric.⁴¹

In the end, the questionnaire presaged what Martínez Compañón’s broader reform agenda would ultimately entail. His blueprint for reform was clear: he first needed to teach the people proper Spanish language skills, manners, and work habits. To do so, he would use local primary schools. He wanted to be sure that the bishopric was sufficiently populated and that people lived healthy lives; this was why he sought demographic information. Once the people were healthy, he would ensure that they had stable family structures based on strong Catholic marriages. With all this in place, the people needed to live together in orderly towns. They could then promote the infrastructural improvements—such as roads and irrigation ditches—that they needed to develop for agricultural and commercial growth. Mining was also an important economic factor, but the Bishop was concerned about indigenous laborers being harshly exploited—both underground in silver pits and aboveground on haciendas and in obrajes. In addition to wanting to improve the social and economic well-being of his diocesans, Martínez Compañón’s questionnaire demonstrates that he also sought to learn about “the arts, society, and culture of the Indians of Peru.”⁴² He inquired about their knowledge of materia medica, or botanical medicines, balsams, and any antidotes they might use against the bites of poisonous animals. He wanted to know about their antiquities and whether they had abandoned their idolatrous practices. Once it was received and compiled, this information would help him to construct his living utopia in Trujillo. He could also employ it as evidence in his ongoing campaign to demonstrate the Indians’ intellectual capacity.

Had the responses to these questionnaires survived in municipal or state archives, they would have formed an unbelievably fecund source for scholarship on local life in northern Peru in the late colonial period. Unfortunately, years of research in Peru, Colombia, and Spain produced almost no evidence of responses. But this does not mean that they were never written; Viceroy Croix’s report on his term in office clearly describes how Martínez Compañón gave him “an exact and prolific document with reports of priests, subdelegates, and Indian officials … everything with the corresponding documentation.” Convinced that the reform agenda that they meant to support was “of utmost importance,” Croix shared the reports with the Ministerio Fiscal in Lima. By June 1786, the viceroy had seen that the files were sent to Fernando Saavedra, the intendant of Trujillo. From there, they disappeared from the archival record.⁴³

The Visita

After such an effort preparing the questionnaire, organizing his team, and packing for what was sure to be a lengthy expedition, Martínez Compañón finally set out on the cool, clear Southern Hemisphere winter morning of June 21, 1782. That day, he began designing and implementing his utopian agenda for Trujillo. The visita would allow him a bird’s-eye view of his territory. He would meet local authority figures and personally assess the challenges faced by provinces and municipalities. He would learn about the region’s natural resources and come to understand its best chances for improvement. Perhaps most important, he could spread news of his utopian vision, gathering support for his plans and inspiring local communities to begin the challenging but rewarding process of reforming their own futures. First he traveled north from Trujillo along the Camino Real through the pale sands and crescent-shaped dunes of the Sechura Desert and into the sunny, verdant Chicama Valley. After a brief stop at the seaside town of Chicama, he headed up into the Cajamarca sierra, where he visited several small towns, including Contumazá, Trinidad, and Gusmango, which he reached on June 25. He continued northeast through the sierra to Celendín, a sparsely populated area where Indians lived scattered on distant haciendas. Here he conducted a thorough inspection of the local clergy, cautioning priests to carefully record names, dates, and the socioeconomic status of townspeople who presented themselves for baptism, marriage, and other sacraments.⁴⁴ He commissioned a map of the pre-Hispanic Moche irrigation canals that bifurcated the local landscape.⁴⁵ Here he also made his first attempt at founding a new town—something that the local hacienda workers requested he assist them with. As the next chapter shows, his efforts to establish Amalia de Celendín were successful—a 1794 letter from the local priest revealed that there were already two hundred houses built there, and in 1802, the Crown officially bestowed upon Celendín the title of villa, meaning that it was now an official Spanish settlement, with a population of two thousand to four thousand inhabitants.⁴⁶

From Celendín, the Bishop and his sorrel mare, along with Echevarri and the rest of the party, headed down the sierra toward the Marañón Valley and the Amazonian province of Moyobamba. Although it was the largest of the ecclesiastical provinces of Trujillo, it had only one significant town—also named Moyobamba. The Trujillo watercolors include a map that shows the province to be “in the mountains,” sparsely settled except for along the Moyobamba, Negro, and Tonchima Rivers. It stood surrounded by jungle forests and was an arduous eight-day mule journey from the nearest population center. This Amazonian lowland terrain was the most difficult to travel of the bishopric, with frighteningly precipitous roads and rivers that swelled past their banks during the rainy season, making the entire region impassable. The thick jungle vegetation teemed with dangerous animals, many of which are depicted in the Trujillo del Perú volumes, such as the ferocious mountain lion, red and black tapa machacuai rattlesnakes, and deadly scorpions. Here in the middle of the wilderness, the Bishop founded another new town, Santo Toribio de la Nueva Rioja, named after the great defender of the Indians he eventually had recognized as the patron saint of Trujillo.⁴⁷

By September, after almost three months on the road, the team headed back west toward Chachapoyas province. Strategically located between jungle and sierra, its main city (also Chachapoyas) was the vital commercial and transport link between these two regions. The Bishop planned to found a primary school there. In their free moments, he and his team spent several afternoons observing the embroidery and sewing work of local women, famed throughout the bishopric. Next, the party headed along the coast to Paita, and then to the city of Piura. They stayed there for several months, using it as a home base from which to make shorter trips, including one to San Miguel de Piura, one of the towns in which Martínez Compañón hoped (but was ultimately unable) to found a seminary of ecclesiastical workers. The people of Piura also requested their prelate’s help to found new towns, so that they could live more independently on lands owned by hacendados, enjoying regular access to priests, schools, and communal support. The story of what happened with two proposed towns in their province is retold in Chapter 3.

From there, the party traveled back down through the sierra, reaching the town of Sechura by late May of 1783. Here the Bishop ordered a new retablo, or decorative altar, built for the parish church. Quick stops in Monsefú and Reque were followed by a visit to the town of Saña, the burial place of Archbishop Santo Toribio. It might have been here that Martínez Compañón acquired what would be his parting gift to the Trujillo cathedral seven years later: a holy relic of Toribio that he placed in a gold reliquary encrusted with nineteen pearls and forty-four diamonds.⁴⁸ The party’s next stop was Lambayeque, the most important town in the region. The city map that they produced was extensive, illustrating the cathedral, four churches, and hospital within its city limits, as well as the extensive canal that rounded the city, separating it from the outlying agricultural fields. Here the Bishop tried to found another seminario de operarios and build an underground crypt like the one he had completed in Trujillo’s cathedral.⁴⁹ In his free moments, he instructed his assistants to gather samples of local cascarilla (also known as quina, the bark that was the basis of malaria-combating quinine), and bought or acquired a locally manufactured black hat made of vicuña wool, which he later added to the crates of his collection of the manufactured goods of Trujillo.⁵⁰

Finally, the visita brought the team back into the Andes, south of Lambayeque. On October 23, 1783, they arrived at the Hualgayoc silver mines, situated outside Cajamarca at over 13,000 feet above sea level. They went there with a purpose: the local miners’ guild had requested the Bishop’s help to improve their economic situation. After meeting with them, he developed a proposal to found a new town called Los Dos Carlos, which would provide volunteer workers with free land and the implements to work it. As Chapter 5 will demonstrate, this became an idealistic microcosm of his broader vision of improvement for his bishopric.

After quick stops at the doctrinas of San Pablo and Contumazá, the Bishop headed to the villa of Cajamarca, the site of the fateful first meeting between Pizarro and the Inca Atahualpa in 1532. Cajamarca was the second most important city in the bishopric, home to the miners and merchants who had made their fortunes at the Hualgayoc Mountain. One of these was Miguel Espinach, who owned mines and a hacienda and served as a colonel in the local militia. Espinach would later work with the Bishop on the Hualgayoc mining reforms, ingeniously portraying himself as a vital collaborator while simultaneously managing to privilege his own interest over that of the local community. It was also here that the Bishop forged a close relationship with Indian cacique Don Patricio Astopilco, who petitioned for assistance in founding local schools for natives and donated some of his ancestral land for the projects. In the surrounding areas of Cajamarca province, Martínez Compañón gave the sacrament of confirmation to 40,398 people—a significant portion of the total 162,600 souls he confirmed throughout the entire journey.

As his visita drew to a close, the Bishop began to realize that for much of it, he had been beset by seemingly constant illness: headaches, fevers, and failing eyes were among his most frequent complaints. He admitted that “every day I feel more and more the effects of my pilgrimage; sometimes my limbs hurt so much that I want to stop the suffering.”⁵¹ But before he could return to the Bishop’s palace in Trujillo, he made a final stop in the beachside town of Santiago de Cao, where compiled the results of his visita into one single document, the “Edicts of the Visitation to Santiago de Cao.” These 120 points constitute the agendas of the entire visita, summarizing the time when, as the Bishop put it, he “hardly stopped running around like a crazy man day and night.” He had spent two years, eight months, and seven days of his life at this endeavor, mobilizing local resources to gather the useful information that he needed to fashion a veritable utopia in his faraway corner of the great empire of Spain in the distant Kingdom of Peru.⁵²