III.2.4 Trip 3 to Segovia and Avila (5–29 August 1838)

Borrow’s third expedition, in the provinces beyond the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain-range, and the villages around Segovia and Avila, was his greatest exploit ever. The whole expedition consisted of 5 salesmen: Borrow himself, Antonio Buchino, Juan Lopez and two local peasants whom Lopez hired on the spot [BiS ch 44]. Furthermore, it took place at a time, August 1838, when yet one more Carlist Expedition came marching down from the north into Old Castile and turned the province into a veritable battlefield. Yet in spite of that, Borrow managed to sell over a sixth of the whole edition of the Scio New Testament during this journey, which was no mean feat!

As he tells it himself [L 1.9.1838; BiS ch 4465], Borrow was so enthralled with the idea of selling in proud, venerable Castilla-Leon that he started preparations the very day – August 4 – he returned from his expedition to Aranjuez (III.2.2 above). He dispatched several big cargoes of books to places he intended to visit in the area, and then ‘sent forward Lopez with his donkey, well laden’ with the understanding they would meet later either at La Granja or exactly below the 107th arch of the Segovia aqueduct [BiS ch 44]66.

A few days after Lopez left, Borrow and Antonio followed, selling ‘some Testaments in the villages near the roadside’ in spite of his haste (as noted in III.2.3 above, these sales probably came to 123 copies). Reaching the old royal residence of La Granja by the unfrequented and dangerous Peña Cerrada pass, he expected to meet Lopez and another helper, but they were nowhere to be found. So after a day of rest for the horses, he pushed on to Segovia, without having done any selling, since he was ‘well aware that orders had been transmitted to the authorities of the place to seize all copies of the sacred writings which might be offered for sale’. At a friend’s house in Segovia he received one of the chests he had sent ahead, containing 200 copies; but Lopez still did not appear. Only after two days of idleness – during which he once again refrained from selling – Borrow heard by chance from a farmer that there were men selling books in the neighbourhood of Abades village. So he instantly loaded his books onto the backs of three donkeys and set out to cover the roughly 20 km to the village.

Arriving at nightfall, he finally found Lopez, together with two peasants whom he had engaged, in the house of the local surgeon. Lopez ‘had already disposed of a considerable number of Testaments in the neighbourhood, and had that day commenced selling at Abades itself’. No sooner had the good man exposed his wares, however, than he had been ‘interrupted’ by a couple of village curas, ‘who with horrid curses denounced the work, threatening eternal condemnation to Lopez for selling it and to any person who should purchase it’. And notwithstanding the fact that the third, liberal, priest of Abades did all in his power to recommend the book and denounced his colleagues for being ‘hypocrites and false guides’, Lopez thought the better of it, and postponed sales until Borrow should arrive. This, of course, was the sort of challenge Borrow loved, and he immediately swung into provocative action. ‘Upon receiving this information, I instantly sallied forth to the marketplace, and that same night succeeded in disposing of upwards of 30 Testaments’. It did have its effect. The next morning, the two hostile priests made their appearance in the surgeon’s house; but Borrow, as he tells it himself, faced them down, and they were not heard from again.

In the following week, Borrow and his collaborators succeeded in selling ‘from 5 to 600 Testaments amongst the villages from one to seven leagues distance from Abades.’ Then, at the very time that he received a new shipment from Madrid, some well-placed person in Segovia informed him that orders had been issued to the mayor of Abades to stop him and to confiscate his stock. With the two hostile curas surely still on the look-out and ready to surge down, it was clearly time to make himself scarce. So that very same evening, he left Abades ‘with all my people and upwards of 300 Testaments’, and after spending the night in the open, reached and settled in the village of Labajos. Grown wiser now, he did not sell in the town itself, but for the better part of a week used Labajos as a base from which to supply, again with great success, the surrounding villages and the travellers on the highway to Valladolid.

Then Armageddon swung around. ‘We had not been at Labajos a week,’ Borrow wrote on 1 September 1838, ‘when the Carlist chieftain Balmaseda at the head of his wild cavalry made his desperate inroad into the southern part of Old Castile, dashing down like an avalanche from the pine woods of Soria. I was present at all the horrors which ensued – the sack of Arrevalo – and the forcible entry into Martin Munoz and San Cyrian.’67 But how could such petty things as pillage and mass murder stop George Borrow from what truly mattered? ‘Amidst these terrible scenes,’ he writes ‘we continued our labours undaunted, with the exception of my servant [Antonio], who seized with uncontrollable fear ran away to Madrid.’ There are times that one does not rightly know what to think of George Borrow. He obviously did not lack in courage; but if a tough survivor like Antonio Buchino lost his nerve in this situation, one may, with some justice, wonder about the British Bible salesman’s mental health…

Next thing Borrow knew, Juan Lopez disappeared. Nothing was heard of him for three or four days, and Borrow already imagined him to have been caught and shot by the Carlists. Fortunately this was not the case. He had merely been arrested, on the instigation of the local priest, in a little village of the name Villallos (probably modern Velayos, just west of Labajos). On 22 August 1838, the day after this news reached him, Borrow hurried over to the hamlet, only to discover that Lopez was already to be set free by order from the Ávila authorities, although the books which he carried would be detained. The alcalde and cura were unwilling to let their catch go; but, Borrow wrote later to his friend Hervey at the British Embassy ‘I deemed it my duty, as a Christian and a gentleman, to rescue my unfortunate servant from such lawless bands, and in consequence defying opposition I bore him off, though perfectly unarmed, through a crowd of at least one hundred peasants’ [L 23.8.1838; BiS ch 44; both texts copy his complaint of 23 August from Labajos to Sir William Hervey].

How many books were confiscated at Villallos is unknown. But it is obvious that Borrow had grown more cautious and cunning since Abades. He had taken to the habit of putting up in a larger town, where the stock was kept but no selling was done, and then to make day-trips to surrounding villages with small batches of books (some 20 to 30) which he could afford to lose. Thus, the stock seized from Lopez was surely small; and for convenience sake we may put it at 20 in the calculations below.

With the Carlists in the region, the curas alerted and the alcaldes under orders to intercept him, even Borrow now admitted that things were getting too hot for Bible peddling. His stock, furthermore, was practically exhausted, and he himself was feeling the onset of a heavy fever, which would soon confine him to his bed for a fortnight. He therefore decided to call it a day and return to Madrid. More than enough had been accomplished in any case. He and his men had ‘in the course of little more than a fortnight disposed of nearly 900 Testaments – not in populous and wealthy towns but in highways and villages, not to the spurious Spaniards of Madrid and the coasts, but to the sun-blackened peasantry of Old Castile, the genuine descendants of those terrible men who subjugated Mexico and Peru’ [L 1.9.1838; L 29.8.1838; APP]. In a later instance, when all was properly counted up, the number turned out to be 884 copies exactly: 322 copies at 4 reales, 546 at 3, and 16 at only 2, to a total of 1,288 + 1,638 + 32 = 2,958 reales [Acc 10].