as a city with wide, straight streets; fragrant peach trees and grapevines; and happy dogs “so fat they can hardly move” because, like most of the city’s inhabitants, they frequently dined on meat, chicken, and eggs. The next stop was typically Córdoba, which lay approximately 435 miles northwest of Buenos Aires. To reach it, Martínez Compañón and his party would have had to cross the river Tercero, known for its turbulent waters and bountiful fish. From there, they would have continued north on foot, stopping at the base of the Andes in the smaller city of Salta before heading up the mountains to 13,000 feet above sea level. This was the location of one of the world’s highest cities, the snowy and windy mining center of Potosí, which the Cerro Rico mine had made into the most densely populated city in the world by 1650—although by the time Martínez Compañón may have been there in 1768, silver deposits were diminishing and the city was in decline.12 Next was a short stop in the city of Chuquisaca before the long march along the Andes foothills. This route straddled the main Peruvian volcanic region to the east. To the west was the highest navigable lake in the world, the frigid and glassy Lake Titicaca, which sits at 12,500 feet. Then the party would probably have continued to Cuzco, the former Inca capital known for its beautiful cathedral that some insisted was every bit as striking as its counterparts in Europe. From Cuzco, they would have descended the Andes into the coastal desert of Lima, finding the city damp, cold, and shrouded in the typical garúa mist of the winter months.13
Though his books were likely still making their way up the Pacific Coast, they must have been on the future bishop’s mind as the sterile, hard earth of the altiplano crunched beneath his feet. As he passed through the ancestral lands of the Tiwanaku empire, with its stone megaliths, ceremonial puerta de la luna (door to the moon), and sunken temples, he might have heard that the areas surrounding these sites were sparsely inhabited, by just a few remaining Indians. He likely would have remembered what he had read about these people in popular chronicles by Pedro Cieza de León, Bernabé Cobo, and Garcilasco de la Vega. Almost universally, they depicted the surviving natives of the Tiwanaku region as a dispossessed, pathetic, and unfriendly people who had lost all vestiges of their former glory. Perhaps such ruminating on their fate compelled the young prelate to turn over in his mind the “many things he had read and heard about the calamities and misfortunes of the Indians of America”14 and how they had suffered since the arrival of the Spanish. No work on this subject was as vivid or horrifying as Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, which the Bishop owned. Las Casas infamously characterized the early Spanish settlers on Hispaniola as “most cruel tygers, wolves, and lions” who took bets as to who would be able to slice a hapless Indian in two with one swipe of a sword, dashed babies’ heads against rocks, and murdered Indians by roasting them to death like meat on a spit. Such lurid details made Las Casas a favorite of foreigners hoping to vilify the actions of the Spaniards in America. For idealists like Martínez Compañón, they were vivid examples of the abuses that their reforms sought to correct.15
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
