1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [82]
Potosí was as conflict prone as pirate-ridden Yuegang, but the battles were regarded differently, at least by their chroniclers. The main Chinese accounts of the wokou—county gazetteers and official reports—are terse and matter-of-fact, whereas Potosí’s most important chronicler, Bartolomé Arzáns de Orsúa y Vela (1676–1736), spent three decades writing a massive, 1,300-page history of the city that is, among other things, a breathless paean to romantic honor of the sort mocked in Don Quixote. Arzáns never published his book, partly because he was afraid to go public—local families might not have liked his descriptions of their forefathers’ mayhem, no matter how glorified.
Despite the golden haze Arzáns cast over events, one can see from his account how the city’s violence evolved from cinematic face-offs between alpha males into full-fledged battles between ethnic groups. In 1552, seven years after Gualpa or Hualpa discovered silver, the bellicose adventurer Pedro de Montejo arrived in Potosí. In Arzáns’s telling, Montejo put up placards challenging one and all to combat, “spear against spear.” Such fights “were an admirable thing in Potosí,” Arzáns explained. In a city with a permanent European population that almost exclusively consisted of young men on the make, “killing and hurting each other was the sole entertainment.”
By general consensus, Montejo had one obvious opponent: the equally bellicose Vasco Gudínez, who had already established a reputation as the city’s go-to man for threats and mayhem. Early on Easter morning both men, accompanied by their seconds, rode to the battleground, followed by a crowd of layabouts. After an exchange of insults, Arzáns recounted, the two men “charged at each other and collided so hard that it was like bringing together two rocks.” Gudínez, badly wounded,
withdrew some distance and threw his spear at Montejo with such violence that he did not have time to dodge, and it struck his buckler, passing entirely through it and wounding him in the arm, breaking through the chain mail and the steel plate, and much of the tip went into his body.… Montejo, fatally injured and without the defense of his buckler, attacked his opponent with diabolical force with the tip of his sword; he responded to Gudínez’s parry with his shield, and raising his arm brave Montejo unleashed a fierce blow to the head that dazed Gudínez and, worse, wounded and knocked his horse to the ground, spilling much blood. Now Montejo had him down and was about to cut off his head, but at the first step he [Montejo] fell dead, pierced through the chest. Gudínez got up with alacrity, and stumbled to the corpse and put his sword to its neck, thinking that he wasn’t yet dead.
Arzáns evidently embellished the details of this encounter—he claimed that the two men’s seconds thereupon engaged in a three-hour battle to the death, which the wounded Gudínez tarried to watch en route to his sickbed. Arzáns may even have gotten some basic facts wrong (no record exists of any Potosino named Pedro de Montejo, for instance). But the underlying scenario seems indisputable: the city was chock-full of brutal thugs. To reestablish control, the provincial government in Lima sent in troops. After a round of skirmishes, Arzáns wrote, Gudínez’s second, a specially vicious hoodlum, was drawn and quartered; Vasco Gudínez himself was jailed.
Vasco means “Basque,” and the name was no accident—a disproportionate number of Potosinos were from the Basque country in Spain’s Atlantic coast. Culturally, linguistically, and geographically isolated from the rest of Spain, mountainous and agriculturally unpromising, the Basque region was, so to speak, the Fujian of Spain—a center for