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 years later, Cornelius de Pauw revived these theories of climatic determinism in his wildly popular Philosophical Researches About the Americans (1768). Pauw concurred with Buffon’s assertions about the unhealthy nature of the American climate, describing “air stagnated in immense forests,” massive swamps, and “noxious vapours from standing waters.” He reasoned that this detrimental environment weakened animal life, arguing, for instance, that the “lion” of America (the puma) was so timid that he never grew a mane. But Pauw broke new ground when he proposed that this same discourse of degeneracy also applied to human beings. People from colder climates in the Northern Hemisphere, he argued, had faced greater challenges to basic survival and therefore became more industrious. Individuals from tropical zones, in contrast, had to work very little in order to survive and therefore were naturally lazy and corrupt.23
This discourse further soured with Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal’s Philosophical and Political History of the … Indies, published in installments from 1770 through 1781. Raynal dismissed the majority of the native Peruvians as “a set of naked and wandering men.” He mocked their quipu (knotted cords of string used for accounting) as a laughably deficient data storage system. Even worse, he insisted that the Spanish chronicles detailing the enormous building and engineering projects of the Inca were nothing more than hyperbolic fantasy that the Spanish had projected onto sad little “heaps of ruins.” He maintained that the Spanish exaggerated their prowess by claiming to have conquered sophisticated societies with dazzlingly large urban centers, trade networks, and civic buildings. “We must, therefore consider,” he cautioned his reader, “fabulous the report of that prodigious multitude of towns built with so much labor and experience. If there were so many superb cities in Peru,” he reasoned, “why do none exist except Cuzco and Quito?”24 Taking a different approach, William Robertson’s History of America (1777) dismissed the Indians as effeminate and weak because of their lack of facial hair and their “feebleness of constitution,” which was “characteristic of the species.” While he proposed a variation on Buffon’s original argument by maintaining that men were less affected by climatic degradation than animals and plants were, he still posited that American natives were naturally lazy because the “spontaneous productions of nature” around them allowed them to flourish with almost no effort.25
Though aware of this vitriol, the Spanish Royal Academy of History was rife with internal discord and busywork that kept it from mounting a focused counterattack to defend the nature and natives of its American kingdoms. Instead, its members had determined that Mexico, Peru, the Philippines, and the Caribbean merited no fewer than three natural histories and four civil histories each—a task that left them far too busy to defend the people, nature, and history of Spanish America.26 Instead, Spaniards living in America came to their own defense with local histories that responded to European detractors by celebrating the environment, culture, and inhabitants of Spanish America. In his Ancient History of Mexico (1780–1781), Francisco Clavijero, a Jesuit expelled from New Spain, refuted Buffon’s claims that American animals were puny and weak. He proposed instead that the relative smallness and gentleness of New World mammals signified the “softness” of the American climate. He listed multitudes of plant and animal species that could be found in New Spain but not in Europe. But perhaps most important, he insisted, “the souls of Americans are not at all inferior to those of the Europeans.” Citing Indian codices and manuscripts, he insisted that Aztec pictographs were, in fact, a system of writing, “not just simply images of objects.”27 Similarly, Jesuit Juan Ignacio Molina dismissed the work of “Paw” and Europeans like him as “weird” and uninformed: not only had Pauw never been to America, he pointed out, but it also appeared that he read only those accounts that suited his purposes of degrading it. Molina insisted that America’s Indians were healthy and productive and that their own “documents”—quipu, manuscripts, and codices—served as a good basis for a history of Chile.28 Writing from exile about his native Ecuador, Juan de Velasco focused most of his History of the Kingdom of Quito (1789) on pre-Hispanic Indian history. He wrote about Inca rulers such as Huayna Capac as if they were heroes, praising their laws, government, and civic buildings. Velasco especially valued the “mechanical arts” practiced by Quito’s Indians and mestizos, individuals whom he found talented and naturally inclined to crafts and trades.29
Had Martínez Compañón been able to finish writing the “Historical, Scientific, Political, and Social Museum of the Bishopric of Trujillo del Perú,” which he had been working on for many years but which remained in the research stage at the time of his death, he may well have been recognized as one of the Spanish clerics who wrote in defense of America’s nature and people. But even without the text to narrate it, his utopian project in Trujillo was designed as a living, breathing declaration of the utility of its natural world and the capacity of its human inhabitants. His reform agenda and his natural history research were intricate variations on the classic eighteenth-century defenses of the New World and its peoples. When he collaborated with natives and plebeians to develop and implement political economy reform, local communities became engineers of their own improvement. When they requested his help to build new towns in more socially and commercially advantageous locations, and then worked with him to secure the necessary permissions, land, and financial backing, the people of Trujillo were not just passively receiving reform ideas born in European capitals. Instead, they were actively participating in creating their own future while displaying their ability to improve their own situation. Similarly, the agendas to found Indian colleges and local primary schools throughout Trujillo were driven by local requests, initiative, and manpower. Despite their physical and geographical distance from large European-style “lettered cities,” local communities understood the social capital that literacy provided and were willing to work hard to obtain it. Taken together, these initiatives were living evidence of Martínez Compañón’s conviction that if properly guided, the Indians of northern Peru could be transformed into ideal vassals. They would work with ecclesiastic
