CABELLO VALBOA, MIGUELBorn in Archidona, Málaga, Spain, sometime between 1530 and 1535,
Cabello Valboa (also spelled Balboa or Cabello de Balboa), fought in France
and Flanders before making his way to the New World in 1566, settling first
in Bogota and later in Quito, where he was ordained a priest, in 1571. He
remained in Ecuador for several years before traveling south to Peru in 1580,
where he received a parish in Ica, on the south coast of Peru. He later
journeyed to Bolivia where, in 1594–1595, he took part in an expedition to
the land of the Chunchos, peoples who lived on the forested eastern slopes of
the Andes. Cabello Valboa wrote an account of that venture in 1602–1603.
Details of his later life are rather sketchy, and it is not known if he died in
Lima in 1606, or in Bolivia at a parish near La Paz about that same time.
Cabello Valboa began writing his chronicle, Miscélanea Antártica, in Quito
in 1576 and finished it in Ica in 1586. This work is essentially a history of the
Native peoples of the Andes from biblical times to the arrival of the
Spaniards, peppered with erudite references to classical authors. What set
Cabello Valboa apart from his contemporary chroniclers, however, is his
knowledge of Quito and the lives of the Incas in the northernmost reaches of
Tahuantinsuyu. He also used local informants to gather the myths and
traditions of the north coast of Peru, in particular an origin myth of the Chimú
people (see Chronology, Pre-Inca). His account of the Inca rulers and the
spans of their reigns, which he claimed were based on quipu accounts, begins
in AD 945 and assigns incredibly long reigns to rulers before the time of the
king Pachacuti. His suggested dates for the reigns of Pachacuti’s successors,
Topa Inca Yupanqui, Huayna Capac, and Atahualpa, however, are more
plausible, and these dates form the basis for one of the more widely accepted
chronologies of the Inca kings, that proposed by the noted Inca scholar, John
H. Rowe (see Chronology, Inca).
Further Reading
Cabello Valboa, Miguel. Miscelánea Antártica. Una historia del Perú antiguo. Lima: Universidad
Nacional Mayor de San Marcos, Facultad de Letras, Instituto de Etnología, 1951 [1586].
Ñúnez-Carvallo, Sandro Patrucco. “Cabello Valboa, Miguel (ca. 1530–1606).” In Guide to
Documentary Sources for Andean Studies, 1530–1900, edited by Joanne Pillsbury, vol. 1, 91–94.
Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008.
■ADRIANA VON HAGEN