Carlos Meléndez begins his book with two elegant narrative chapters on the early history of Costa Rica drawn largely from documents and contemporary accounts. The subsequent chapters center on the 478 conquistadors who entered the central valley between 1561 and 1600; and within this group, special emphasis is placed on those who remained and became founders of the country. An appendix provides brief biographical information on 86 of these.
Meléndez is drawn to the present project not by the irresistible richness of archival material but by the fundamental importance of the subject. He wants to give a firm, documentary base to the history of original European settlement in Costa Rica and it appears that he has left no stone unturned in his efforts in Sevillian and American depositories. A problem, fully acknowledged, that surfaces early in the core chapters, however, is the scarcity of evidence so that in this case the author is not overwhelmed by his sources; instead, he chews rather more than he bites off. This is apparent, for example, in the attempt to analyze geographical origins. Meléndez is able to discover the birthplace of only 75 of the 478 entrants in the sixteenth century, which, as he understands, is in no way a representative sample. Nevertheless, several tables are produced to provide statistical proportions and comparisons, for example, with Peter Boyd-Bowman’s global data on sixteenth-century passages to America. Thus we are told that 14.64 percent of all entrants to Costa Rica were non-Spanish Europeans as compared with 3.10 percent in the Boyd-Bowman study, but Meléndez’s percentage rests on only six people (two Portuguese, three Italians, and a Frenchman).
At first glance, the book invites comparison with James Lockhart’s Men of Cajamarca (a work the author refers to), but Lockhart’s sources are much richer and he is able to extract more from them. Thus Meléndez does not, or is not able to, determine such things as proportion of literacy, occupations, residence patterns, and a host of other data that made Lockhart’s work so worthwhile. Meléndez concentrates quite a lot on social stratification but the gauge used to determine superior., medio, and inferior rank is an unpersuasive scheme that lumps together office, occupation, and income.
As the title indicates, the author is concerned with European settlers, not the indigenous inhabitants or Africans. There is mention of encomienda (not introduced in Costa Rica until 1569), but the full elaboration of this subject is promised in a forthcoming work. What we have in the present book is an exhaustive but nevertheless scant collective biography of the first conquerers and founders of Costa Rica preceded by an engaging sketch of their entry and settlement. Because all this began after the completion of the conquests of Mexico and Peru and the conflict over the New Laws, Costa Rica offers an interesting case study of late conquest policy and practice. Some of the fundamental elements in that story are treated here and in Meléndez’s previous work; research in progress should enhance his already distinguished career.
