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Utopias in the New World
From the moment the Spanish set foot in what would soon be known as the “New World,” they were seeking mineral wealth, neophyte Catholics, free labor, natural resources, and wondrous marvels. But above all, the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic ventured to the other side of the world in search of dreams. They envisioned shining cities of gold and palaces overflowing with jewels and silver. They dreamed of forests where rainbow-hued birds fluttered overhead. They imagined becoming little monarchs with their own kingdoms and vassals. They dreamed of their epic deeds being immortalized in history books. And some of them believed that with all this behind them, they would return to Europe and claim the international dominance that they were convinced was the destiny of Spain.
What happened to those dreams—the civil wars between brothers, the capture and execution of kings, and the decimation of an estimated 90–95 percent of America’s original peoples—has fascinated readers for centuries. These stories of darkness and depravity are an inseparable part of the history of the Spanish in America. Gripping as they are, they are not the only stories. Though the history of Spanish America is darkened by figures such as Bishop Diego de Landa of Yucatán, who in just three months arrested and tortured 4,500 Mayans on suspicion of idolatry, and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, a Spanish legal theorist who tried his best to prove that the Indians of America were natural slaves who benefited from captivity, these are not the only figures from the colonial period worth remembering. They lived alongside others less notorious—men who believed in harmony, prosperity, and exchange. Although these men also struggled with paternalism, orthodoxy, and even aggression, they held fast to their visions of a more perfect world in America.1
One such man is the subject of this book. Sent from Spain to the north of Peru in the final third of the eighteenth century, Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón dreamed of refashioning the rich natural environment and diverse peoples of Trujillo into a veritable utopia. He imagined a dreamlike world where Catholic morality and Spanish propriety would flourish in European-style towns. Indian children would attend primary schools to learn the basic reading and writing skills that would assist them in their future work as tradesmen or agriculturalists. Even the haphazard settlements outside Peru’s notoriously abusive silver mines were sites for his vision of industry, order, and peace. Under Martínez Compañón, Trujillo became a laboratory for improvement where local communities participated in engineering their own futures, deciding for themselves the meaning of utopia and their place in it.
But the Bishop’s utopia in colonial Peru was not only centered on the lives of natives; it also depended upon the natural world around them. Trujillo’s environment was an Edenic paradise replete with exquisite flowers, exotic fruits, strange marine species, and fantastical animals. The Indians’ ancestral knowledge was the key to observing, cataloging, and unlocking the vast potential of these riches. So the Bishop invited the natives of Trujillo to be his collaborators in a decade-long natural history project that cataloged the people, plants, animals, and past of the province. During almost three years of travels throughout his territory, he collected from locals in each district “a sample of all the specimens that are not found in other [towns].”2 Ultimately, this effort produced a natural history collection composed of thirty crates of local specimens, including carefully inventoried native antiquities, dried plants, soil samples, and local manufactures. The boxes were remitted to Spain in 1788 and 1790, where some of the archaeological artifacts still survive in Madrid’s Museum of America.3
As he traveled throughout the mountains, deserts, and jungles of Trujillo gathering his collection, Martínez Compañón kept careful notes of all that he saw, hoping one day to compile them into a “Historical, Scientific, Political, and Social Museum of the Bishopric of Trujillo del Perú.”4 He died before he was able to begin writing, so scholars can only fantasize about the treasures that such a book might have held. But as he worked on his collection and his notes, the Bishop also asked local illustrators to produce almost 1,400 exquisite hand-painted watercolor images depicting the world around them. After his promotion to the archbishopric of Bogotá, he compiled these into a “paper museum” in the style of the early modern visual compendiums by Athanasius Kircher, Cassiano dal Pazzo, and Federico Borromeo. The Bishop organized his “museum” into nine separate volumes depicting cities and towns, people, botanical specimens, animal, bird, and marine life, and native antiquities. They were edged in gold gilt, hand-bound in red Moroccan leather, and titled simply Trujillo del Perú.5
Received most enthusiastically by Crown and Church functionaries throughout the viceroyalty, the books offered a world in miniature. Volume 1 told the story of what Martínez Compañón had accomplished in Trujillo, beginning with a detailed topographical map of the diocese, as seen in Plate 1—particularly timely because just four years earlier, imperial officials had issued a frantic call for maps of the colonial provinces.6 The Bishop also used the book to display the vast array of reform projects that he had enacted or begun during his time in Trujillo. By his own calculations, these included fifty-four primary schools, thirty-nine churches built “from their foundations,” twenty towns, six new roads, and three irrigation channels. The volume also included a painted procession of Trujillo’s bishops, their lace chalices and thick black cassocks accented by ornate jewelry. Nestled among them were two portraits of Martínez Compañón himself. The first shows a younger man clasping a Bible to his chest in deep contemplation. The second portrait features a sterner man whose face wears the signs of his advancing age.
Volume 2, depicting quotidian life, opens with a series of “type” images of Indians, mestizos, Spaniards, and people of African descent, echoing the contemporary craze for ethnographic portraiture.7 More impressive than the Trujillans’ various intricate costumes, however, was the industriousness that marked their daily lives. The images showed them at work raising sheep, harvesting wheat, hunting animals, and manufacturing textiles. Even in their free time, they behaved like obedient, loyal subjects—like the two Indians playing cards in Plate 2. Not only was this couple supporting the profitable Crown monopoly on playing cards; they were also virtuously declining to gamble with actual money, choosing instead to use feathers.8 Like the majority of the native peoples shown in the volumes, these Indians have fair complexions and light hair, optimistically indicating that the Bishop’s efforts to Hispanicize them had been so successful that their very flesh had begun to lighten.
The watercolors in the remaining seven books depicted natural items and man-made objects. Volumes 3, 4, and 5 showed a dazzling array of medicinal herbs, trees, shrubs, and other plants that Indians used in their daily lives, many of which held useful cures for sickness and disease. Volume 6 contained images of monkeys, llamas, lizards, and even an anteater. This was followed by a book of birds, one of marine life, and an exquisite collection of archaeological drawings.
Such a comprehensive natural history was intended to bring Bishop Martínez Compañón praise in the metropolis. Even today, botanists, archaeologists, and ethnomusicologists recognize his research as one of the most complete sources of information on northern Peru in the colonial period. The Bishop hoped that the impact of his work would extend beyond museums and cabinets of curiosities. By surveying Trujillo’s natural resources and deciding how best to utilize them, he planned to transform his corner of the Spanish world into an orderly, profit-producing slice of empire. He trusted that studying such subjects as “geography, metallurgy, mineralogy and botany” would be useful for “industry and commerce” because the data could be employed for financial gain and because pursuing such knowledge would help to “distract my diocesans from laziness,” as he put it.9
Yet, as he looked back at his specimens and illustrations, Martínez Compañón worried that his natural history was “a bit vulgar and common”10 and perhaps “not all organized as well as it should be.”11 He may have guessed that his work would have one distinct problem in the eyes of the Madrid establishment: it did not conform to the contemporary parameters of natural history research, which privileged
