from European precedent but were specifically designed to meet local needs. In this vision for Trujillo’s future, the peoples’ dedication to these efforts would demonstrate their ability to engineer their own improvement, providing incontrovertible evidence that they were useful vassals and fully contributing members of Spanish society. There was no better way to defend their usefulness than having the Indians serve as evidence of their own abilities.30
Improving the financial and social situation of Trujillo was not the only way to contribute to the debate over the New World. In addition to creating a living laboratory of reform in Trujillo, Martínez Compañón and his local collaborators amassed a staggering amount of natural history data that demonstrated the intellectual ability of native Peruvians and the richness of their physical environment. The hundreds of illustrations of plant and animal species that came to be the nine volumes of watercolors of Trujillo del Perú were direct evidence of the rich and diverse climate there. Trujillo’s animal kingdom included useful animals such as llamas, guanacos, and other camelids, which could transport goods long distances over difficult terrain and also provide valuable wool. Northern Peru was home to vibrantly colored exotic birds, various types of large cats, and a dazzling array of marine species. Their diversity was a far cry from the fragility and deformity that New World detractors were so convinced of. Trujillo’s botanical world offered an even more comprehensive set of data to prove that its environment was a fabulous resource awaiting discovery. Its many herbs, bushes, and trees offered cures for endemic disease and common illness. They included plants that had commercial value as dyestuffs, food items, and even valuable import substitutes for items such as cacao or silk.
While the data served to defend Trujillo’s natural world, the provenance of the information—which was all gathered from local and native informants—was an even more sophisticated mode of contributing to what one scholar recently called “the eighteenth-century great debate.”31 All of Martínez Compañón’s data were culled from area informants and depicted in watercolors by local artisans. Their participation in the botanical research not only provided valuable facts; it also demonstrated that they were fully able to cultivate and retain the sort of useful knowledge that royal scientific expeditions pursued throughout the Spanish Empire. Finally, the archaeological drawings of ruins, pottery, tombs, and other artifacts celebrated the accomplishments of northern Peru’s pre-Hispanic peoples. When it depicted how the Chimú and Mochica cultures of Peru’s northern coast constructed great urban settlements, managed large-scale projects of public engineering, and expertly elaborated pottery, jugs, and other artifacts, Martínez Compañón’s natural history vividly displayed the intelligence and civilization of Trujillo’s natives.
In addition to defending the Indians through his socioeconomic reforms and his natural history investigations, the Bishop wrote more directly about his views on the great epistemological debate of the eighteenth century. Referring to the way men like Pauw and Raynal characterized them as naturally degraded, he asserted that “the Indians are not [really] like those stupid men want to portray them.”32 His efforts to teach them reading and writing, to use them as natural history informants, to move their towns to more commercially advantageous locations, to teach them useful trades, and even to award them with titles of nobility were all predicated on his view that the Indians were “men given a rational soul just like ours, and that they live in the same environment as we do, and what proceeds from that is that they have the same natural dispositions of body and soul as we do.” This was the same argument that Clavijero, Molina, and Velasco promoted in their written studies.33
Paradoxically, despite its defense of Indian intellectual capacity, this statement demonstrates that, like most learned men of his time, Martínez Compañón accepted the mainstream theory of climatic determinism. However, he used it to prove the virility of the American environment, not its degeneracy. In a 1785 letter to the parish priest of Chachapoyas, he outlined his stance on how environment affected human beings. “Diverse influences correspond to diverse climates,” the Bishop argued, and these differences explained the “great natural diversity that is seen among men of different regions.” He did not venture that this external difference was indicative of intellectual or spiritual ability, but he did believe that it accounted for differences in skin color and other external characteristics such as facial hair. It also explained the great variance in size of human beings, including why “some men are giant like those of the Patagonian coast … and others pygmies, like the Japanese.”34
It was no coincidence that the Bishop chose to discuss Patagonian giants as an example of how men could grow inordinately large in certain climates. Martínez Compañón was, in fact, somewhat of a giant enthusiast. The questionnaire that he remitted to his dioceses prior to leaving on his visita in 1782 asked respondents “if at any time they have found any huge bones that seem to be human … whether they have any [local] tradition that in some time there might have been giants, and in the places where they might have had them, for what time, when did they become extinct and for what reason, and what support the people have for the said legend.”35 He received at least some material evidence of giants unearthed in a field outside Santiago de Chuco, in the Huamachuco province of Trujillo. These specimens were deemed important enough to be carefully wrapped, packaged in the crates of his collection, and sent back to Spain. They included a “top of a femur bone that seems to be of a giant, already half petrified,” a “molar, also half-petrified that seems to be of a giant, found in the same place,” and “part of a sacrum bone with the same circumstances and provenance.”36 Although the title does not confirm it, a giant may also appear in this image of “Indian boys playing jai alai” (see Plate 9). The figure in the orange jacket is almost three times as big as the boys who play around him, and his body is significantly too large to fit through the door of the building behind him. The individual is shown bending over and supporting his body weight on his knees, a position that highlights his severely humped back, likely a symptom of the osteoporosis that is a common side effect of gigantism.37
The Bishop’s obsession with giants was no mere caprice—in providing visual, material, and anecdotal evidence of their existence in Trujillo, he was actually participating in the debate over the natural world of America and the men who lived in it. Spanish American scholars regularly discussed giants—especially those of southern Spanish America—implying that they evidenced the natural abundance of the local environment. For instance, the Mercurio Peruano, Lima’s Enlightenment periodical, reported on a giant named Basilio Huaylas, who, at twenty-four years old, stood seven feet tall when he was brought to Lima from the coastal town of Ica. Pedro O’Crouley’s 1774 Description of the Kingdom of New Spain mentioned giant bones and teeth in its chapters on curiosities. Even Archbishop Francisco Lorenzana of Mexico stored in his library some of the giant human bones unearthed at Culhuacán. Giant bones even became a popular collectors’ item throughout America in the eighteenth century because any evidence of giants was striking disproof of the argument that American mammals were smaller and weaker than those of Old World origin. That is why men like Robertson and Pauw were so insistent that giants were fabrications of desperate Spaniards in America. Robertson’s History of America was blatantly skeptical about South America’s famed giants, maintaining that the existence of giants and fossil evidence of them was “seemingly inconsistent with what reason and experience have discovered.” Years later, historian Antonello Gerbi wrote of Pauw that “giants would have brought down his whole thesis on the weakness of the nature of America.”38 Martínez Compañón’s own interest in giants, therefore, was a small-scale manifestation of his broader agenda to defend the nature, plants, animals, and people of Trujillo through engineering and depicting a living utopia in the north of Peru.
Martínez Compañón in the City of Kings
After his journey through the Andes, Martínez Compañón finally arrived in the most important Spanish city in South America: Lima, the so-called City of Kings. Despite its notoriously damp climate and cloudy skies, Lima was a commercial, intellectual, and administrative capital that was densely populated for the time (52,627 inhabitants in 1793). Francisco Pizarro chose the city site for its easy access to the
