Born in Santiago in 1601, Alonso de Ovalle had the pleasure of seeing his Histórica relación del Reino de Chile published in Rome in 1646. At the time Ovalle, who had entered the Society of Jesus as a young man and had engaged in missionary work among the Negro population of Chile, was serving as his order’s procurator in Rome. Dismayed by the ignorance in Europe concerning the Indies, Ovalle resolved to write an account of his beloved Chile. Ovalle was too far removed from important sources to be able to produce a historical treatise in the narrow sense. He devoted many pages to describing the cities and the rural landscapes, the natural products, the customs, dress, games, and devotions of both the white and Negro population of Chile. He also described with care and some admiration the life of the Araucanians, among whom for years he vainly hoped to perform missionary work.
The present work is an anthology of the Histórica relación. Selections were judiciously made by Raúl Silva Castro, one of Chile’s most prolific men of letters, with the primary purpose of demonstrating the stylistic elegance of the seventeenth-century Jesuit author. Chilean students in the sixth year of humanities in the liceo customarily study the work of Alonso de Ovalle, and it was one of Silva Castro’s intentions to produce an anthology that would be useful for this purpose. The informative introduction provided by the compiler relates the discerning manner in which he corrected many of the errors that have crept into the Histórica relación, beginning with its first edition, and quite rightly points to the need for a corrected edition of the entire work.