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
CHAPTER 3
Imagining Towns in Trujillo
Three miles outside the city of Trujillo lies what Martínez Compañón called “the ruins of a town of the Chimú kings,” a UNESCO world heritage site today known as Chan Chan. The Chimú people who built it predominated on Peru’s north coast from the tenth century until the arrival of the Inca in the 1460s. At the height of their power, they controlled a vast territory stretching from Peru’s border with Ecuador to the Chillón Valley, north of Lima. Chan Chan was in its day the largest city in all the Andes, with a population thought to have reached 40,000 at its height. By the late eighteenth century, the ruins were most notable for their crumbling huacas, or burial mounds, looming in the distance. Their dusty walls were scarred with holes that were the handiwork of the infamous grave robbers known as huaqueros. Pilfering precious metals, ceremonial costumes, and other artifacts from native burial sites was big business in colonial Peru: in the sixteenth century, one individual reportedly unearthed almost 300,000 castellanos’ worth of gold and silver from just one huaca; in 1602, an enterprising group of men from Trujillo tried to divert the Moche River directly into the path of the pyramid at the Huaca del Sol so that water would cause it to cave in and expose the gold inside. But the most valuable find at Chan Chan was made in 1558–1559, when a down-on-his-luck townsman named Antonio Zarco unearthed treasures so brilliant that they set off a looting fever that eventually produced 700,000 castellanos worth of gold pieces and even more disagreement about who had rightful dominion over the wealth.1
Although these early missions were more focused on plunder than on archaeological investigation, more academically minded Europeans soon followed their avaricious predecessors to the pre-Hispanic ruins of the northern Andes. As early as 1631, Antonio de la Calancha investigated the nearby Moche sites of Huaca del Sol and Huaca de la Luna. By the eighteenth century, archaeological notations had become almost de rigueur in travelers’ reports from northern Peru. Frenchman Charles Marie de La Condamine and Spanish bureaucrats Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa wrote about and mapped the Inca ruins at Hatun Cañar near Cuenca, Ecuador. Spanish botanists Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón devoted portions of their Crown-sponsored botanical expedition to archaeological investigation. Their work was not anomalous: as the Spanish sought visual and material data that could
