Sign In

The following is excepted from Lawrence Wroth's Alonso de Ovalle's Large Map of Chile, 1646

Alonso de Ovalle, author of the Historica Relacion del Reyno de Chile. . . was born in Chile in 1601, the elder son of Don Francisco Rodriguez del Manzano y Ovalle and Dofia Maria Pastene de Astudillo y Lantadillo. The father is described by Jose Toribio Medina, the Chilean historian, as a Spanish captain, originally of Salamanca, who went to Chile early in the year 1600, sent thither in charge of a detachment of soldiers by the Governor of Buenos Aires. . . .

He was not pleased when his elder son and heir [Alonso] joined the Society of Jesus . . . . One day at the age of seventeen this lad, when returning with his younger brother from a local fiesta, chose . . . a road which led past the convent of the Jesuits in Santiago. At the doorway of the convent the boy Alonso dismounted, and saying farewell to his brother, directed him to proceed homeward with the horses. Without other ceremony than this he entered the cloister and began his novitiate. "For I am come to set a man at variance against his father"-thereafter no words or actions of Don Francisco availed to constrain either the boy or the Jesuits who had received him.

The young man's zeal and devotion to the Faith and the Society led him in time to a successful career as missionary to the Indians and as rector of the "colegio seminario". Prominent in the local affairs of the Society, he was sent abroad early in 1641 as "procurador" of the Chilean Jesuits, a mission which detained him in Spain and Italy until the year 1650. He was never again to see Santiago. He died in May, 1651, at Lima, in the course of his journey homewards.'  

*  *  *

. . .  [T]he Historica Relacion, a substantial work which he succeeded in publishing in Rome in 1646 in both Spanish and Italian versions. The book in both editions is extraordinary for its plenitude of illustrations, chiefly woodcuts of Jesuit establishments and plans of harbors, and for the presence  in it of a lively and interesting map of Chile. The Spanish version contains a rich addition of twenty-one  copperplate portraits of Chilean worthies, nine "Gubernatores Perillustres" and twelve "Invicti Duces". . .  .  The Ovalle work is the earliest history of Chile worthy of the name, a composition of excellent quality and of great interest to a reader who does not allow himself to be prejudiced by the author's partisan zeal for his Society or his naive and occasionally intrusive piety.

 But, whatever criticism may be made of the Historica Relacion, it presented to its contemporaries a full account of the natural features, the products, and the aboriginal races of the stern and beautiful land with  which it was concerned. Its narrative concludes with an account of the peace made with the Araucanian  Indians by the Marques de Baides in 1641. Though it proved to be a respite only, that treaty ended for  a few years a century of harsh, heroic, and inconclusive conflict. Out of that long war had come an unexpected flower, the notable Spanish epic, La Araucana, which Alonso de Ercilla y Zu'n-iga published in its
 first part in 1569.