The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
As each of us individually conducted research on a specific Atlantic traveler, collectively we read these books and used them as our navigational tools to sail the Atlantic's historiographical waters. The books' histories and stories guided us through our own process. Each of the following books features a unique, comprehensive approach to the early modern Atlantic world and the people who traversed it. Their authors provided us physical, conceptual, and narrative maps that we used to navigate our own understanding of the global Atlantic world. These books also offered us a set of concepts to understand and interpret the world our travelers inhabited and the challenges and opportunities they encountered in their journeys. Scott and Hébrard’s “micro-history set in motion,” Sparks's "Atlantic Creoles," Restall and Fernández-Armesto's "armed entrepreneurs," Sweet’s “Black Atlantic,” Jasanoff's "spirit of 1783," Pérez Morales's "masterless Caribbean," and Colley's "biography that crosses boundaries" offered us fruit for thought and nourished our weekly discussions.
The Books
The Books
Ramusio Map (1534). Courtesy of John Carter Brown Library
Catalina de Erauso (1585 - 1650)
By Hana Aram
The exceptional life of Catalina de Erauso, widely known as ‘La Monja Alférez’ or “The Lieutenant Nun”, illustrates an extraordinary tale of mobility and perseverance in the early Atlantic world.[1] Despite the multiple limitations imposed on women, Catalina de Erauso was able to adapt and manipulate circumstances to her advantage in order to find her way to the New World, specifically through the use of “disguises”. De Erauso’s trajectory, from her beginnings as a nun-in-training to her experiences as a merchant or transporter of goods and her exposure to warfare and violence all while under the guise of a man, make it possible to understand the difficulties faced by those who did not adhere to the social and cultural norms of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world.
As a nun, a merchant, a conquistador, and, late in life, a vagabond, Catalina de Erauso traveled through Spain, Italy and many parts of South America.
Catalina de Erauso was born in 1585 into a middle-class family in the “town of San Sebastian” in the Guipúzcoa province in northern Spain. After escaping the nunnery she was placed under the care of when she was fifteen years old, she cut her hair and donned the clothing of a man. From that moment onwards, Catalina filled out a variety of occupations. including working as a page to Juan de Idiaquez, Carlos I’s secretary, and as a ship’s boy aboard a galleon headed towards Punta de Araya in northern Venezuela in 1603.[2]
After working as a ship’s boy, Catalina abandoned her post and found work in Panama with a series of merchant masters. Working for merchants, Catalina learned to secure the safety and fulfillment of shipments, which often required her to travel, always disguised as a man, to receive merchandises. Although some of these tasks included bookkeeping, others exposed Catalina to menacing thugs, which caused scuffles and fights, which, on several occasions, resulted in Catalina’s imprisonment. Imprisonment was often followed by ingenious escapes planned by Catalina’s friends or her merchant masters.
After several years of service for a variety of merchants as well as several incidents with local sheriffs, Catalina de Erauso joined a company looking for soldiers to fight in Chile. Around 1605, with her fierce desire to “travel and see a bit of the world”, Catalina joined Captain Gonzalo Rodriguez’s conquest expedition in Concepción.[3] While keeping her identity a secret, Catalina de Erauso rose up the ranks of the company, eventually becoming a lieutenant for her bravery in recovering a “royal standard” captured by the “Araucano Indians” in Chile.[4] Although a turning point in her life, Catalina de Erauso soon left the company and her lieutenant title behind, entering her new life as a vagabond or a rebel.
For the next several years of her life, Catalina moved between Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru, confronting local authorities and enduring multiple trials and arrests. Despite the risk of being discovered, Catalina was unafraid and even daring against all the challenges against her. In many situations she faced colonial officers and highwaymen head on, even ruthlessly killing men who got in her way. In many of these encounters, she narrowly escaped execution and death.
Francisco Pacheco, "Doña Catalina de Erauso," lithograph, 1833. Image from The British Museum.
Word of the “lieutenant nun” spread throughout the New World attracting bishops and philanthropists, eventually allowing her conference with King Phillip IV and Pope Urban VIII, to whom she presented her petition, in the form of a memoir, to obtain a pension, “recognition of her labors in royal service,” and permission to “pursue her life in men’s clothing”.[5] Both the pension and the permission to “pursue her life in men’s clothing” were granted and Catalina was able to live as she desired when she returned to Genoa in May 1626.
Juan van der Hamen, "Catalina de Erauso," (1626). Image from Wikimedia Commons.
Catalina de Erauso’s autobiography stands as an important document to understand the ways in which some women were required to adapt to the rules and norms of an Atlantic world that nominally restricted women’s activities but often allowed exceptions to societal prescriptions. It was not uncommon during conquest expeditions for women to be required to act as “both women and men”. Women were tasked with not only “nursing the men” or providing them with food but also to “patrol fires, load crossbows when the Indians came to do battle, even firing the cannon”.[6] Beyond outlying situations of dire desperation, the roles and identities of women were limited and “dictated by sexual anatomy”.[7] Catalina’s story illustrates this fact; if it weren’t for her “disguise,” Catalina would never have risen up to her status as lieutenant or even gained the ability to request and receive a pension amounting to “four times” that of a Spanish lieutenant (eight hundred crowns a year).[8]
Catalina’s request for a pension, however, is not the most surprising element of her petition. Thousands of probanzas de mérito or proofs of merit, largely but not exclusively written by men, included a request for a pension. Petitioning “to continue living as a male” constitutes the most unique aspect of Catalina’s probanza. This request, in fact, has convinced many historians and scholars of ‘queer theory’ of Catalina’s identity as a transgender man.[9] Catalina de Erauso was in no way afraid of her true identity being discovered. One would think her to be cautious and weary of her true identity but unlike the women who supported conquest expeditions from the background until they were called to action in dire circumstances, Catalina de Erauso openly sought out war and battles and was even unafraid to challenge authorities and engage recklessly into brawls with thugs over arguments regarding gambling.
From her early life, Catalina de Erauso was a bold and brash individual with a skewed sense of justice and morality. Ready to slit enemies’ throats as well as eager to rescue a woman from her “murderous husband”, Catalina’s character was complex and adaptive to every scenario.[10] What draws Catalina apart is her embracement of her identity as a man. Acknowledging, perhaps, her past as a nun-in training, Catalina embraces the title of “Lieutenant Nun”, in no way afraid of her past coming to light as her journey had just begun in the New World as a new man.
[1] Aresti, “The Gendered Identities of the ‘Lieutenant Nun’,” 401.
[2] De Erauso, Stepto, and Stepto. Lieutenant Nun, 3-7.
[3] De Erauso, Stepto, and Stepto. Lieutenant Nun, 17.
[4] Aresti, “The Gendered Identities of the ‘Lieutenant Nun’,” 403.
[5] De Erauso, Stepto, and Stepto. Lieutenant Nun, 78.
[6] Restall, and Fernández-Armesto. The Conquistadors, 61-62.
[7] Aresti, “The Gendered Identities of the ‘Lieutenant Nun’,” 402.
[8] De Erauso, Stepto, and Stepto, Lieutenant Nun, 74, 76.
[9] Velasco, Lieutenant Nun.
[10] De Erauso, Stepto, and Stepto, Lieutenant Nun, 44-45.
References
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Aresti, Nerea. “The Gendered Identities of the ‘Lieutenant Nun’: Rethinking the Story of a Female Warrior in Early Modern Spain.” Gender & History, no. 3 (2007): 401.
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Erauso, Catalina de, Michele Stepto, and Gabriel Stepto. Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
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Restall, Matthew, and Felipe Fernández-Armesto. The Conquistadors: a Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.
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Velasco, Sherry M and Catalina De Erauso The Lieutenant Nun: Transgenderism, Lesbian Desire. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000.