The 1684 expedition of P. Tomás Santos from the Pastaza to the Tigre
In this post I would like to summarize the account of a journey along the upper Tigre River, undertaken in June and July, 1684, by Tomás Santos, an Ecuadorean Jesuit who, beginning October 3, 1683, was parish priest at Santos Ángeles de Roamainas, a settlement of significant historical importance for the study of the Omurano. Santos' journey is enlightening because he was accompanied overland by a contingent of Roamainas who, in reaching the Tigre, passed through the territory they had originally occupied before being moved to the Pastaza by the Jesuits some thirty years prior. In narrating this expedition, Santos provides relevant geographic information on Roamaina territory, and that of other groups, notably the Pinche.
Santos' account comes down to us in a manuscript written by him, which is held at the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid and was published as Santos ([1684]1986). Up until the 1680s, the Tigre remained an area that had been little explored by the Jesuits that had begun evangelizing in the region in 1638, in part because of rumors of extremely fierce groups resident in its upper reaches. The Jesuits were particularly interested in establishing more permanent contact with the Pinche, possibly ancestors of the 20th-century Taushiro (see Alice Ortíz (1976)). This was the general motivation for the trip that Santos set out on in the first week of June, 1684, in the company of 27 Roamainas and 8 Pabas [sic]. They spent two and a half days crossing a varadero (the strip of land crossed to reach one river from another), hauling their canoes and everything else, to reach a small river (Sp. quebrada) known then, and now, as the Capirona. (Santos baptized the river Quebrada de las Víboras because of the incredible number of snakes that seem to have terrified him.) From here the group emptied out into a quebrada known (at least then) as the Roamaina, because this was the site from which the Jesuits extracted large numbers of Roamainas (possibly up to 600) in the 1650s. At this point, Santos admits to a certain degree of worry that his companions might abandon him entirely, in order to return to their original territory after suffering 30 years of massive death tolls on the Pastaza. However, after a Roamaina cacique (leader) assures Santos of his group's unwavering love for him (and Santos returns the sentiment), Santos is apparently content to keep going.
Numerous fallen trees and other riverine debris make the following period of travel difficult, but the group eventually empties out into the río de los Sapas, the Zapas apparently being an ethnic group closely related both culturally and linguistically to the Roamaina (an issue I will take up in a later post). This river was much wider and had a much faster current than the preceding, but in coming upon its lower reaches, the Roamaina begin to proceed with greater caution because of concerns that they are entering the territory of gentiles (uncontacted, un-Christianized groups). At this point Roamaina scouts come across an old abandoned path in the adjacent forest, and the cacique insists on following the trail, although it ultimately goes cold and the group continues downriver. After an unmentioned amount of time, the reach the Tigre proper.
They spend the next four days traveling upriver along the Tigre, continuing to suffer from the hunger that has plagued them for several weeks, apparently finding no indigenous groups along the way. On June 28 they enter the río de los Asarunatoas, and from there Santos orders that one canoe go ahead of the rest with the accompanying translator, while the main group lags behind, armed. After traveling only a few bends upriver, they come across a fallen tree crossing the river that appears to be a makeshift foot bridge. The Roamaina proceed to search the surrounding forest, and shortly thereafter come across a wide footpath and footprints. Santos sends ten armed Roamainas to scout out ahead, who, after three days, have not returned. Santos then sends another contingent of nine Roamainas to recover the trail of the first ten, and they come across the first group, which has followed the trail for two days only to find burnt houses and abandoned swiddens. A smaller group returns this news to Santos, at which point the Roamaina that remain with Santos on the river begin hauling all their belongings along the aforementioned footpath, which appears to have hugged the river. After and indeterminate number of days, Santos sends a small canoe ahead along the river to locate the remaining scouts who have not returned. They come back with the news that the scouts have captured to Asarunatoa women; this was apparently July 2. Santos' group hurries to meet up with them, befriends them, and instructs them to lead them back to their village, which ends up being some six leagues away.
The contingent spends four days in this settlement, ousting a family from a house for their temporary lodgings, and during this time a group of (relatively) nearby Cenicientos comes to visit. Everything seems to have gone quite peacefully. Santos later learns that the Pinche and the Havitoa [sic] reside on another tributary of the Tigre, and embarking near the Asarunatoa settlement on the same tributary they had come up, they arrive within a day and a half back on the Tigre. The rest of the narrative is quite rushed, with Santos simply indicating that they proceeded further upriver to another tributary, where they visited both the Pinche and Havitoa. Upon first encountering the Pinche, they apparently were eager to fight Santos' group, presumably the large numbers of Roamainas that accompanied him. A period of typical gift giving ensues, Santos encourages the Pinche to settle on the Pastaza (which they "promise" to do when he sends for them), and the whole entourage seems to follow their original course back to the Roamaina reducción on the Pastaza.
The geographic details of Santos' trip are interesting to tease apart. Today, the Capirona, the first river which the group reached following their initial overland trip, empties out into the Corrientes, a major tributary of the Tigre. I take Santos' río de los Sapas to be the Corrientes, given that in his account it empties out into the Tigre, and because of his mention of its much more rapid current (cf., Sp. corriente 'current'). However, Santos indicates that the group traveled on an intervening river between the Capirona and the Corrientes, which he calls the Roamaina, something that one could not do today. It is noteworthy, though, that today the Capirona joins with one other significant quebrada (the name of which I cannot locate) before entering into the Corrientes. I interpret Santos' Roamaina river as corresponding to the portion of the Capirona between this juncture and the entry of the latter into the Corrientes. Extrapalating from Santos' account, then, it seems that the group of Roamainas that were taken to the Pastaza by the Jesuits in the 1650s occupied the very lower reaches of the modern-day Capirona (i.e., between the mouth and this lower juncture), and that the Zapas (see above) occupied a portion of the Corrientes. However, the latter do not appear to have occupied the lower Corrientes, as it is in exactly this region that the group begins to be quite wary of unrelated groups. Note that Ribeiro & Wise (1978:151) mention twenty to forty surviving families of "Omuranos" (although they are likely extracting this number from a source that labels them 'Roamaina') on the Capirona in 1737, some fifty years after Santos' expedition.
The position of the río de los Asarunatoas and of the tributary that the Pinche lived on is much less clear. However, both were upriver of the mouth of the Corrientes, and appear to have emptied into the Tigre on the same bank as the Corrientes. Despite the fact that this portion of the narrative is rushed, Santos does not mention any extremely lengthy period of time before reaching the tributary that the Pinche lived on. This leaves open the possibility that Santos contacted the Pinche in 1684 exactly where missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics contacted a Taushiro family in 1971, on the Aucayacu, a tributary of the Aguaruna, which empties out into the Tigre on the same bank as the Corrientes does, and which runs parallel to it some 20km to the north. This would lend further credence to a well-established tradition in the ethnographic literature that the Pinche are the Taushiro. Who the Asarunatoa were is anyone's guess.
The mention that the Pinche wanted to fight the Roamaina (whereas no similar mention is made of the Asarunatoa) is also noteworthy. Tessmann (1930:449) notes that the Omurano of the Urituyacu River had previously fought with the Pinche. Although admittedly a very tenuous bit of evidence, this may suggest a further connection between the Roamaina and the Omurano of the Urituyacu.
Lastly, it is important to bear in mind that Santos' expedition is not the first to follow the overland path connecting the middle Pastaza to the Capirona. In 1656, Martín de la Riva Herrera, one of a last generation of Spanish conquistadors, made a similar journey (Santos Granero 2003), although the geographic details are somewhat less clear. However, I hope to review these details, in light of the present discussion, in a later post.
Alicea Ortíz, Neftalí. 1976. Apuntes sobre la cultura taushiro. Lima: Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL).
Ribeiro, Darcy and Mary Ruth Wise. 1978. Los grupos étnicos de la Amazonía peruana. Lima: Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL).
Santos, Thomas. 1986[1684]. Relacion que da el padre Thomas Santos de la conquista y entrada que por el rio del Tigre hizo á cuatro naciones que son los asouinatoas, los pinches, los cenicientos y habitoas. In Various, Informes de jesuitas en el Amazonas. Iquitos: Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (IIAP); Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía (CETA).
Santos Granero, Fernando, ed. 2003. La conquista de los motilones, tabalosos, maynas y jíbaros. Iquitos: Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía (CETA).
Tessmann, Günter. 1930. Die Indianer Nordost-Perus: Gründlegende Forschungen für eine systematische Kulturkunde. Berlin: Friederischen, de Gruyter and Co.
Santos' account comes down to us in a manuscript written by him, which is held at the Real Academia de la Historia in Madrid and was published as Santos ([1684]1986). Up until the 1680s, the Tigre remained an area that had been little explored by the Jesuits that had begun evangelizing in the region in 1638, in part because of rumors of extremely fierce groups resident in its upper reaches. The Jesuits were particularly interested in establishing more permanent contact with the Pinche, possibly ancestors of the 20th-century Taushiro (see Alice Ortíz (1976)). This was the general motivation for the trip that Santos set out on in the first week of June, 1684, in the company of 27 Roamainas and 8 Pabas [sic]. They spent two and a half days crossing a varadero (the strip of land crossed to reach one river from another), hauling their canoes and everything else, to reach a small river (Sp. quebrada) known then, and now, as the Capirona. (Santos baptized the river Quebrada de las Víboras because of the incredible number of snakes that seem to have terrified him.) From here the group emptied out into a quebrada known (at least then) as the Roamaina, because this was the site from which the Jesuits extracted large numbers of Roamainas (possibly up to 600) in the 1650s. At this point, Santos admits to a certain degree of worry that his companions might abandon him entirely, in order to return to their original territory after suffering 30 years of massive death tolls on the Pastaza. However, after a Roamaina cacique (leader) assures Santos of his group's unwavering love for him (and Santos returns the sentiment), Santos is apparently content to keep going.
Numerous fallen trees and other riverine debris make the following period of travel difficult, but the group eventually empties out into the río de los Sapas, the Zapas apparently being an ethnic group closely related both culturally and linguistically to the Roamaina (an issue I will take up in a later post). This river was much wider and had a much faster current than the preceding, but in coming upon its lower reaches, the Roamaina begin to proceed with greater caution because of concerns that they are entering the territory of gentiles (uncontacted, un-Christianized groups). At this point Roamaina scouts come across an old abandoned path in the adjacent forest, and the cacique insists on following the trail, although it ultimately goes cold and the group continues downriver. After an unmentioned amount of time, the reach the Tigre proper.
They spend the next four days traveling upriver along the Tigre, continuing to suffer from the hunger that has plagued them for several weeks, apparently finding no indigenous groups along the way. On June 28 they enter the río de los Asarunatoas, and from there Santos orders that one canoe go ahead of the rest with the accompanying translator, while the main group lags behind, armed. After traveling only a few bends upriver, they come across a fallen tree crossing the river that appears to be a makeshift foot bridge. The Roamaina proceed to search the surrounding forest, and shortly thereafter come across a wide footpath and footprints. Santos sends ten armed Roamainas to scout out ahead, who, after three days, have not returned. Santos then sends another contingent of nine Roamainas to recover the trail of the first ten, and they come across the first group, which has followed the trail for two days only to find burnt houses and abandoned swiddens. A smaller group returns this news to Santos, at which point the Roamaina that remain with Santos on the river begin hauling all their belongings along the aforementioned footpath, which appears to have hugged the river. After and indeterminate number of days, Santos sends a small canoe ahead along the river to locate the remaining scouts who have not returned. They come back with the news that the scouts have captured to Asarunatoa women; this was apparently July 2. Santos' group hurries to meet up with them, befriends them, and instructs them to lead them back to their village, which ends up being some six leagues away.
The contingent spends four days in this settlement, ousting a family from a house for their temporary lodgings, and during this time a group of (relatively) nearby Cenicientos comes to visit. Everything seems to have gone quite peacefully. Santos later learns that the Pinche and the Havitoa [sic] reside on another tributary of the Tigre, and embarking near the Asarunatoa settlement on the same tributary they had come up, they arrive within a day and a half back on the Tigre. The rest of the narrative is quite rushed, with Santos simply indicating that they proceeded further upriver to another tributary, where they visited both the Pinche and Havitoa. Upon first encountering the Pinche, they apparently were eager to fight Santos' group, presumably the large numbers of Roamainas that accompanied him. A period of typical gift giving ensues, Santos encourages the Pinche to settle on the Pastaza (which they "promise" to do when he sends for them), and the whole entourage seems to follow their original course back to the Roamaina reducción on the Pastaza.
The geographic details of Santos' trip are interesting to tease apart. Today, the Capirona, the first river which the group reached following their initial overland trip, empties out into the Corrientes, a major tributary of the Tigre. I take Santos' río de los Sapas to be the Corrientes, given that in his account it empties out into the Tigre, and because of his mention of its much more rapid current (cf., Sp. corriente 'current'). However, Santos indicates that the group traveled on an intervening river between the Capirona and the Corrientes, which he calls the Roamaina, something that one could not do today. It is noteworthy, though, that today the Capirona joins with one other significant quebrada (the name of which I cannot locate) before entering into the Corrientes. I interpret Santos' Roamaina river as corresponding to the portion of the Capirona between this juncture and the entry of the latter into the Corrientes. Extrapalating from Santos' account, then, it seems that the group of Roamainas that were taken to the Pastaza by the Jesuits in the 1650s occupied the very lower reaches of the modern-day Capirona (i.e., between the mouth and this lower juncture), and that the Zapas (see above) occupied a portion of the Corrientes. However, the latter do not appear to have occupied the lower Corrientes, as it is in exactly this region that the group begins to be quite wary of unrelated groups. Note that Ribeiro & Wise (1978:151) mention twenty to forty surviving families of "Omuranos" (although they are likely extracting this number from a source that labels them 'Roamaina') on the Capirona in 1737, some fifty years after Santos' expedition.
The position of the río de los Asarunatoas and of the tributary that the Pinche lived on is much less clear. However, both were upriver of the mouth of the Corrientes, and appear to have emptied into the Tigre on the same bank as the Corrientes. Despite the fact that this portion of the narrative is rushed, Santos does not mention any extremely lengthy period of time before reaching the tributary that the Pinche lived on. This leaves open the possibility that Santos contacted the Pinche in 1684 exactly where missionaries from the Summer Institute of Linguistics contacted a Taushiro family in 1971, on the Aucayacu, a tributary of the Aguaruna, which empties out into the Tigre on the same bank as the Corrientes does, and which runs parallel to it some 20km to the north. This would lend further credence to a well-established tradition in the ethnographic literature that the Pinche are the Taushiro. Who the Asarunatoa were is anyone's guess.
The mention that the Pinche wanted to fight the Roamaina (whereas no similar mention is made of the Asarunatoa) is also noteworthy. Tessmann (1930:449) notes that the Omurano of the Urituyacu River had previously fought with the Pinche. Although admittedly a very tenuous bit of evidence, this may suggest a further connection between the Roamaina and the Omurano of the Urituyacu.
Lastly, it is important to bear in mind that Santos' expedition is not the first to follow the overland path connecting the middle Pastaza to the Capirona. In 1656, Martín de la Riva Herrera, one of a last generation of Spanish conquistadors, made a similar journey (Santos Granero 2003), although the geographic details are somewhat less clear. However, I hope to review these details, in light of the present discussion, in a later post.
Alicea Ortíz, Neftalí. 1976. Apuntes sobre la cultura taushiro. Lima: Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL).
Ribeiro, Darcy and Mary Ruth Wise. 1978. Los grupos étnicos de la Amazonía peruana. Lima: Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL).
Santos, Thomas. 1986[1684]. Relacion que da el padre Thomas Santos de la conquista y entrada que por el rio del Tigre hizo á cuatro naciones que son los asouinatoas, los pinches, los cenicientos y habitoas. In Various, Informes de jesuitas en el Amazonas. Iquitos: Instituto de Investigaciones de la Amazonía Peruana (IIAP); Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía (CETA).
Santos Granero, Fernando, ed. 2003. La conquista de los motilones, tabalosos, maynas y jíbaros. Iquitos: Centro de Estudios Teológicos de la Amazonía (CETA).
Tessmann, Günter. 1930. Die Indianer Nordost-Perus: Gründlegende Forschungen für eine systematische Kulturkunde. Berlin: Friederischen, de Gruyter and Co.
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