The Bishop also had a copy of Gregorio García’s Origin of the Indians of the New World, which considered the theological and scientific conundrum of how men came to inhabit America, a part of the world that was not known to classical scholars or mentioned in the Bible. García discussed the most popular contemporary solutions to this problem: that Noah’s ark was shipwrecked in America, leaving behind a group of early Christians; that Christians crossed from Europe to America via the Asian landmass; and that they traveled there by boat across the ocean.16 These questions may have seemed academic compared with the very real matters of Indian exploitation and poverty that Martínez Compañón would confront in Trujillo; but in the eighteenth century, the matter of Indian provenance was central to contentions over their place in the Spanish Empire. Scholarship showing that the Indians were descendants of Adam, Eve, and Noah was important because it insisted that Indians were men (however flawed)—and not half-wits who were natural slaves, as purported by Las Casas’s nemesis Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. It also linked them to ancient Christians, giving them a special protective status, meaning that they were to be treated as children, not animals.
As a treatise of intellectual inquiry, García’s work was a useful reference, but its philosophical bent offered no suggestion toward a methodology for Martínez Compañón’s self-designated task of studying “the arts, society, and culture of the Indians of Peru.”17 For that, he could have turned to his copy of the French Jesuit Joseph Lafitau’s Customs of the American Indians. This two-volume work was a comprehensive account of Iroquois life, detailing everything from methods of warfare to gender relationships, food preparation, and religious beliefs. Though it dealt with an entirely different group of native people, it appears to have been influential in how the Bishop approached learning about the Indians. Lafitau’s innovative comparative methodology used contemporary research to draw conclusions about the nature and past of the Indians. For instance, he described at length how Iroquois women heated grains of corn in ash and then ground it by hand to make a simple gruel called sagamite. He compared this with how the ancient Romans and Greeks prepared their own grains, also roasting first, grinding by hand, and simply adding water. To Lafitau, this similarity in the method of preparing and consuming grain was critical evidence that the Indians of America had common ancestors with Europeans. Most important, it implied that they were original Christians who had forgotten their true religious heritage but could be retaught correct behaviors and attitudes.18
Lafitau was convinced that he could help the Indians by learning about them and imparting knowledge of their culture. It is no mere coincidence that his work shares a number of similarities with that of Martínez Compañón; they stood on the same side of the great debate over the Indians that so divided early modern Europeans. Both asserted that contemporary Indians were not just the bedraggled remnants of their advanced ancestors (as many of their detractors argued). Accordingly, their work dealt simultaneously with contemporary and ancient Indian cultures: while Lafitau paired the data he collected living among the Iroquois with past accounts of their culture, Martínez Compañón worked with Indian communities throughout his bishopric and referenced and examined Peru’s pre-Hispanic past through collecting and studying artifacts, burial mounds, Indian ruins, and pottery. Both men believed that the Indians themselves could provide valuable scientific and ethnographic information that was useful to society. Their studies drew on information gathered from native informants. When Lafitau’s work with the Iroquois led him to “discover” ginseng in North America (it was native to the region and used regularly by Iroquois herbalists), he immediately imagined how to make it commercially viable in global markets by linking it to the Tartary ginseng plant that was sold as an aphrodisiac in China. Likewise, Martínez Compañón’s botanical research with native communities outlined scores of plants that were commonly used by Trujillo’s Indians and could become potential profit generators for the Spanish Empire.
Finally, the research of the French Jesuit and the Spanish bishop shared a similar fate. Lafitau’s work sold well and was popularly acclaimed, but he was dismissed by the major French thinkers of the period who disdained his comparative ethnographic approach. Expert naturalists in Spain rejected Martínez Compañón’s work when they parsed up his collection and relegated the nine volumes of watercolors to a dusty shelf in the Royal Palace Library. In the end, contemporaries of both men failed to recognize the value of their ethnographic, botanical, and historical investigations. To begin to understand why, we must look more carefully at the discourse surrounding Indians and nature in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world.19
Writing the History of Peoples Without History
The neglect that Lafitau and Martínez Compañón faced was, in many ways, related to a much bigger controversy about the history of America’s Indians and how it should be written. In proposing an innovative historical method that combined face-to-face experience with written histories, Lafitau forged a radical departure from the older Baconian method of factual compilation. He instead paired existing studies with his own research, using “reliable” (presumably elite, Europeanized) modern Indians as informants. As the work of Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has so elegantly demonstrated, the epistemological shift that his work exemplifies had broad implications for the history of America and its native peoples, especially in the Spanish Empire. Eighteenth-century Europeans’ mounting distrust of eyewitness accounts and first-person histories meant that the oft-used “chronicles” penned by the first generation of Spaniards in America no longer served as accurate sources of data on native cultures. Likewise, suspicion of non-alphabetic writing systems eliminated Indian codices and manuscripts from the list of potential sources for historical studies. The tested ways of making history were no longer deemed trustworthy.20
Responding to (or perhaps anticipating) such upheaval, the Spanish Crown founded its first official historical institution, the Royal Academy of History, in Madrid in 1755. Following the Bourbon agenda that stressed generating more profits from overseas, the academy then promptly declared its priority to be writing histories of the natural world of Spanish America. In keeping with current methodological fashion, these were to employ sources other than eyewitness accounts and existing historical studies. Scholars were to rely on data that were more readily verified, many of which were, in fact, material: paintings, buildings, hieroglyphs, and collections of natural history objects. By turning a critical eye upon their own history making, Spanish academicians actually anticipated the same critiques that European detractors would later use against them.21
While the Spanish could assert relative control over who wrote what history of America within the empire, the Crown had no say in what was published about Spanish America elsewhere in the Atlantic world. Foreign travelers decried continental Spain as backward, destitute, and “loaded with political evils”; but in Spanish America, their attack began with the environment itself. The theory that American nature was inherently weak, degenerate, and corrupt was most infamously articulated by Louis LeClerc Buffon, director of France’s Royal Botanical Garden, in his seminal 1747 Natural History. Despite never having visited America, Buffon claimed that the American landmass was newer than the continents in the Eastern Hemisphere and therefore retained too much water and humidity. In its deleterious climate, bugs and venomous creatures flourished, but quadrupeds, birds, and other species useful to man did not develop the diversity or physical strength of their counterparts in Europe. Furthermore, Buffon insisted that when European mammals were transferred to those American environments, they, too, would deteriorate in the unlucky climate.22
Twenty