Early evangelisation efforts

When the Spanish Crown issued its royal cédula of 27 November 1666, instructing the governors of Popayán, Antioquia and Cartagena, and the president of the audiencia of Panama, to take part in a new effort to colonise the Chocó, it stressed that missionaries – ministros evangélicos – were to lead the pacification campaign, and that the conversion of Indians to the Christian faith was to be achieved without recourse to force. There was, of course, nothing new or unusual in the type of pacification advocated in this royal instruction. The term ‘pacification’ replaced the word ‘conquest’ in official documents as early as 1573, when Philip II promulgated the Ordenanzas para Descubrimientos. It was also at this time that the mission, supported where necessary by a small military escort, became the favoured method for colonising frontier regions. From the late sixteenth century onwards, large parts of Spanish America from northern Mexico to southern Chile, inhabited by an as yet unknown number of distinct native societies, became mission territories administered by Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, Augustinians, Capuchins, Mercedarians and Calced Carmelites. Usually, however, missionaries were sent to frontier areas that were unappealing to other colonists, either because they contained little in the way of resources of immediate value to Europeans, or because they were occupied by non-sedentary or semi-sedentary Indian groups that were hostile and difficult to subdue. These were the regions that normally fell to the missionary orders. They were given responsibility for opening and holding new territory, and for pacifying Indian populations numbering millions, before disease and the other effects of contact with the Spanish took their toll.

The Chocó frontier was of a different nature. In spite of the difficult terrain, the long distances that separated the region from the centres of Spanish settlement in New Granada, and a long history of hostility on the part of indigenous groups, the Chocó's gold deposits repeatedly drew colonists from other parts of the New Kingdom to attempt pacification and settlement. Well into the seventeenth century, therefore, the Spanish Crown continued to rely on privately financed entradas to undertake the task that in other areas it was beginning to entrust to the regular orders.