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‘Guided By God’ beyond the Chilean frontier: the travelling early modern European conscience

This essay describes the journey of conscience of a sixteen‐year‐old Spaniard on the seventeenth‐century Chilean frontier as, while captive, he travelled deep into enemy territory, learned to live amongst the Mapuche, to speak their language fluently, made close friends and, to a point, shared their lives and customs whilst still endeavouring to remain Spanish and Christian. The essay analyses how the youth's conscience developed as he travelled around the indigenous Chilean landscape but also as he progressed through life and witnessed injustice and bad government causing continued suffering to those who lived near to the frontier. The boy's experience confirmed to himself and the contemporary reader the validity of Catholic notions of conscience – especially that of the innate knowledge of goodness – across cultural frontiers and throughout humanity. At the same time, the moral struggles described in Happy Captivity show the many difficulties he encountered as he realised the Mapuche's humanity whilst still trying to preserve his own individual Spanish identity. In the end, what he perceived as the universality of the innate principles of the Christian conscience took him to the point where he was able to transcend his own culture, inviting the dissolution of seemingly insoluble boundaries.