type of funding they received. He inquired about any additional income generated by religious festivals or arancel fees for religious sacraments. He also asked for information about the distance from añejos to their mother churches and the city of Trujillo. He sought to learn about the devotional practices of parishioners, wanting to know whether local parishes had any “image” or statue that they venerated and “whether the town was sick or healthy, and where one would go for medicines in case of sickness, and how much they would cost.” Finally, he asked if the parish had any poor or infirm residents who could not work. Taken together, these data would help him assess how much local religious authorities would be able to contribute to his planned utopia in Trujillo. He could then employ the information to mobilize parish church resources, with priests at the helm.30
A Questionnaire for Useful Information
Martínez Compañón’s request for information about local religious life and ecclesiastical administration was not atypical in an age of close scrutiny of church finances and management. Much more innovative was his plan to use his priests as informants who would help him to complete the research for his “Historical, Scientific, Political, and Social Museum of the Bishopric of Trujillo del Perú” and its accompanying watercolor images and natural history collection. Therefore, they also received a second questionnaire that focused on temporal matters, particularly natural history and local resources. As he told them, he sent it because he believed “that within this diocese we have much more than what we imagine and that a distinct and thorough knowledge of it could be of great utility.”31 Such information, he was convinced, would serve not simply for “vain curiosity” but to promote “industry and commerce.”32
In employing this second questionnaire to compile information, Martínez Compañón utilized a time-tested technique of gathering data on distant and unknown parts of the Spanish Empire. In sixteenth-century Mexico, Bernardino de Sahagún’s Florentine Codex and Gonzalo Oviedo’s History of the Indies were both derived from questionnaire responses. But the most widely distributed questionnaire in colonial Spanish America was developed by royal cosmographers Alonso de Santa Cruz and Juan López de Velasco in 1598 as part of Philip II’s massive Relacíones Geográficas project to map the lands of the Spanish Empire. By asking respondents to answer specific questions about local history, the natural world, area economies, and geography, Santa Cruz and Velasco sought to gather sufficient knowledge for the Spanish king to rule the overseas territories that were too distant and dangerous for him to visit himself. Their method of inquiry—asking discrete questions to provoke short answers that could be later compiled and analyzed—signaled a major epistemological shift in European attempts to learn about the world, one that led scholars away from the discursive techniques of the past and toward the methodological inquiry of the future. Two hundred years later in the Spanish Empire, bureaucrats, naturalists, and ecclesiastics employed these same techniques of information gathering through written query and response, now standard throughout the Atlantic basin.33
The questionnaire that Martínez Compañón composed reveals that, like most administrators gathering systematic data about unfamiliar territories, he wanted to learn about the people of Trujillo as well as the natural world in which they lived. Without understanding local people, he could not adequately assess how they utilized the natural world around them and how this relationship could be improved. Useful information was the very foundation of reform culture—without it, officials had no way of knowing what needed to be done. For help in beginning such an important task, he turned again to his parish priests, asking for them to facilitate detailed answers from local informants on the following queries:
1. What is the character and natural inclination of the natives of this doctrina, and if they understand and speak Castilian. If they are applied to their work or not. If there is any noticeable difference between Indians, Spanish, and other castas, as much in this or in their customs. And if this is attributed to differences in their education, or to some other natural or accidental principle. And what is the education they usually give to their children.
2. If the weather and climate is beneficial, and if … the … [territories] … of your jurisdiction are reputed to be healthy or sick, and to what they attribute whichever of these two qualities … are prevalent. Which are the most common sicknesses, and their causes, and the common medicines used to cure them, and [what is] the age to which its inhabitants typically live.
3. If there might be news that any of the towns belonging to this doctrina have been abandoned, [have] disappeared, or moved to another place, and the cause of the one or the other.
4. At what age they usually marry … in this doctrina. By which hand they usually arrange marriages. If there are any celibates, and [where] this virtue is most frequently found, both in terms of the castas and in terms of the sexes.
5. If one finds increased or not the number of landowners and city residents, both in this capital and in its annexes, with respect to the information in the censuses and old books, or the traditions of the towns. And what is the total of this augmentation or diminution, and if it is of Indians or other castas, and to what cause they attribute it.
6. If either within this principal town or its annexes, or surrounding areas begin any sources [of water], if these are the waters that serve for the common use of the people, and if in these they might have noted any particular quality, and what it might be.
7. If a river runs through its land or its borders, what they call it, where it has its beginnings, if they make use of its waters, and if they are known to be healthy. If it is navigable and if it has a bridge, and if not having a bridge if it would be possible to build one, and how much, more or less, its construction would cost.
8. What crops they harvest, and their quality, how much the fields produce, and what is the method, form, and season of doing their planting, cultivating, and harvesting.
9. If they keep any commerce … and of what kind, with towns or provinces, and what utilities it produces, and whether there might be some method or means of advancing it.
10. If there are any sugar plantations or refineries, cattle ranches, workshops, or agricultural estates, what are their profits, if tribute is given to them, how much they are given and how many workers they maintain. And if among them there are any mitayos, what salaries they pay them, and how they are paid.
11. If there are any minerals, which they are, how they mine them, and what they yield.
12. If there are any medicinal herbs, branches, or fruits, which they are, what are their shape, and the virtue of each one of them, and the mode of applying and using them.
13. If there are any mineral waters, and … if they are hot or temperate, sulfurous, nitrous, ferrous, or of another quality, what use they made of them, and to what effect.
14. If there are any resins or fragrant balsams, which they are, and what virtue they attribute to them.
15. If there are any strange birds or carnivorous animals, or any poisonous animals or insects, and if there are any of these, what precautions those who live around them take.
16. If there are any woods, their abundance, and qualities, the use they make of them, or might be able to make of them.
17. If there are any structures from the times before the conquest that are notable for their material, form, grandness, or any vestiges of that. If at any time they have found any huge bones that seem to be human. And whether they have any 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.
18.
