Читать книгу The Bishop's Utopia - Emily Berquist Soule - Страница 11

CHAPTER 1

The Books of a Bishop

By December 1767, twenty-nine-year-old Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón had likely grown tired of waiting to begin the journey to distant Peru and his new life in Spanish America. Earlier that year King Charles III had called him to serve the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church as chantre, or musical director, of Lima’s metropolitan cathedral. In the meantime, he had completed his duties as a consultant to the Inquisition in Madrid and had prepared for departure. By June, his license to cross the Atlantic was in order. Yet almost half a year later, he still found himself waiting. At least some of the delay must have been meteorological: 1767 was one of the most active years for North Atlantic hurricanes, and October and November were prime storm season. At that time of year, ships making the crossing from Cádiz to the southern ports of Spanish America had to take particular care not to find themselves stranded in the windless equatorial region or battered by ferocious winds with nicknames like the “bellowing forty” that lurked below thirty degrees latitude.¹

Though waiting for the weather to improve was the most prudent course, such inaction must have been all the more difficult, considering that Cádiz was a city built around voyages. In 1717, it became the center of Spanish trade with the American colonies when the Crown pronounced it the monopoly port on the Peninsula because its wide harbor better accommodated the larger ships of the eighteenth century. Situated on a narrow isthmus a few miles off the mainland, the city stood on rocky, sandy terrain surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving vessels passed through the intimidating La Candelaria Fortress, with its breakwaters and cannons, before reaching the protected Santa María port. As the fourth-largest city in Spain, Cádiz in 1750 was home to 60,000 people, making it comparable in size with other large European cities such as Dresden and Stockholm. Many of its inhabitants were from merchant families whose affluent, cosmopolitan lifestyle marked it as a fashion and culture center second only to Madrid. The city was also famous for its merchant neighborhood, the so-called City of the Hundred Palaces, as well as its cathedral, which, when construction was complete, would feature grandiose towers as high as those of the famous Giralda of Seville.²

The ocean air and bustling streets of Cádiz were strikingly different from the cool, verdant valleys of Navarre that the Bishop’s family called home. Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón was born on January 6, 1737, in the town of Cabredo, Navarre. Located in the Pyrenees region of northeastern Spain, Navarre was its own kingdom and held special fueros, or local legal privileges, including an independent viceroy and ruling Cortes. Shared culture, language, and social systems linked Navarre and the rest of Spanish Basque country (Alava, Guipúzcoa, and Vizcaya) with the French Basque provinces of Basse Navarre, Labourd, and Soule. Martínez Compañón’s father, Mateo, worked as a customs officer to provide for his wife, María Martínez de Bujanda, and their family. Though there are no images of him as a child, Martínez Compañón as an adult was thin and of average stature, with pale skin and black hair. He had thick, dark eyebrows, prominent cheekbones, and a long Romanesque nose. His portrait (see Plate 8) highlights his curious eyes and penetrating, determined gaze.

Martínez Compañón began his education studying Latin in the nearby town of Quintana, continuing in La Merced Convent in Calatayud (Aragón), where he studied philosophy. He completed his first university training in canon law at the Universities of Huesca and Zaragoza, also in Aragón. He earned his degree in canon law in 1759 at the College of the Holy Spirit at the University of Oñate in Guipúzcoa. This course of study would have included grammar (or reading, writing, and Latin); rhetoric (dealing with classical works in Spanish and Latin, and learning persuasive speaking and writing techniques); and philosophy (which covered logic, physics, mathematics, and moral philosophy). It was designed to prepare the student to think on his feet and argue convincingly while referencing the most important classical scholarship—essential skills for a successful ecclesiastical career. After serving as a chancellor at the University of Oñate, Martínez Compañón was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1761 in the town of Vitoria. Two years later, still at Oñate, he earned his doctorate in theology and canon law. This advanced degree allowed him entry into the highest echelons of church bureaucracy. In 1766, he was called to serve as an adviser to the Inquisition, an appointment that brought him into the orbit of high-level Church and Crown officials and likely factored in his subsequent career successes. One year later, his hard work was rewarded when he was presented to King Charles III as a potential canon of Lima’s cathedral.³

During the few months’ delay before his departure, the young prelate would have had ample time to get to know the two men who would accompany him to America. Pedro de Echevarri, his personal servant, was twenty years old with dark hair and eyes. His face was dotted with smallpox scars. Also Basque, he came from Oñate.⁴ Echevarri served Martínez Compañón in Lima, and became his secretary once the young canon was promoted to bishop. He attended him on his grueling visita through the mountains, jungles, and deserts of Trujillo and later followed the newly promoted archbishop of Santa Fé north to Bogotá, New Granada. As Martínez Compañón’s personal secretary, Echevarri patiently penned the thousands of pages of official correspondence that his employer dictated. His handwriting is legible and pleasing to the eye—especially when compared with that of his superior, which is gnarled, small, and hurried. It appears to be Echevarri’s hand that transcribed the hundreds of names on the images of the watercolors of Trujillo del Perú, and it was he who wrote out the collection inventory. Without Echevarri’s careful cataloging of the Bishop’s papers and his insistence that Martínez Compañón’s natural history be sent to Spain after his death, much of the Bishop’s life’s work might have been lost. In many ways, Echevarri is one of the most important, yet least audible, characters in the story of the Bishop, the Indians, and Trujillo.⁵

Documents reveal almost nothing about the second servant who accompanied Martínez Compañón. Ceferino Manuel de Isla, a native of Santander, was eighteen years old in 1767, with a dark complexion and thick eyebrows that set off his brown eyes. He was to travel independently to Peru, overseeing the prelate’s luggage on a separate ship that would sail south around Cape Horn and up the Pacific coast to Lima. This route typically took about four months—at least one month longer than arriving directly at Montevideo or Buenos Aires. The longer journey was the only way to handle large amounts of heavy cargo that could not be moved across the Andes Mountains on foot. In this case, the cargo that Ceferino supervised was perhaps the most precious thing that Martínez Compañón brought to Peru: crates and crates of his beloved books. These constituted one of the largest private libraries in the entire viceroyalty, with more than two thousand volumes inventoried upon his arrival in Trujillo. The Bishop had tracts by scientists, ecclesiastics, and government reformers in Spanish, Latin, Italian, and French. His library inventory reveals that he was intimately familiar with the dictates of European political economy reform, the early modern methods of making natural histories, and the most influential scholarship on the native peoples of the New World. These books were both inspiration and reference for his campaign to create a utopia in Trujillo that would become a real-time contribution to one of the most contentious debates of his day: whether the people and the nature of the New World were inherently inferior to those of the Old. Martínez Compañón brought from Europe practical guidebooks that he and his priests could use to help local communities improve agricultural techniques and develop local trade networks. He carried several texts explaining how to create local histories, how to study native cultures, and how to teach painting and illustration to students. And he kept a thorough selection of works that explained who the Indians were and how they had been treated since the Spanish had arrived in the New World. The books that the Bishop brought to help him build his utopia vividly demonstrated his belief that the Indians, plants, and animals of Trujillo were not feeble, unhealthy, or weak, as so many of his European contemporaries insisted.⁶

Like any ecclesiastic, Martínez Compañón had a full complement of religious texts. Along with his assortment of Bibles, he owned copies of Saint Augustine’s City of God, the collected works of Sor Juana, and the popular Moral Philosophy, by the eighteenth-century Spanish Benedictine polymath Benito Feijoo. The bishop-to-be also owned works by Dom Jean Mabillon, a seventeenth-century French cleric who branched off from his Benedictine brothers to form a splinter sect known as the Maurists, who dedicated themselves to collecting, editing, and publishing historical documents. Mabillon also wrote about his frequent scientific journeys—Martínez Compañón referred to these as itinerarios (itineraries)—wherein he would visit local monasteries and look through their archives as well as investigate nearby catacombs, relics, and archaeological sites.⁷

Mabillon’s work explained how to collect historical materials; Sacred Painting (by sixteenth-century Italian Cardinal Federico Borromeo), a book that Martínez Compañón requested to borrow in 1788, described how students should be taught to paint images that might accompany such a collection. Borromeo’s central premise was that paintings could represent historical truth if their field of composition truly matched the subject that they depicted. He advocated the use of saturated colors, pointing out that “colors are like words: once the eyes see them they sink into the mind just as do words heard by the ears.” Artwork, he maintained, was most valuable for representing nature. The Bishop must have admired the group of Milanese institutions that Borromeo founded: a library in 1607, a drawing academy in 1613, and a museum in 1618.⁸

Martínez Compañón owned Alonso Montenegro’s Itinerary for Indian Parishes, one of the most widely used field manuals for priests and vicars in eighteenth-century Spanish America. This five-volume set, written by a sixteenth-century bishop of Quito, discussed the obligations of clerics toward their parishes. Its second volume, “Nature and Customs of the Indians,” stressed how easy it was for the devil to erect “his tyrannical empire” among these uneducated and gullible people who most commonly committed idolatry by accident because they could not grasp the ideological divide between Catholic devotion and heretical idolatry. Montenegro drew liberally from Heinrich Kramer’s ubiquitous Malleus Maleficarum to answer vexing quandaries such as “if he who has been cursed can legally ask the hechicero [who cursed him] if he can remove the curses.” (The appropriately puzzling answer to this question was yes, but only if the curse could be removed without casting another spell. Any spell—even one meant to undo a previous curse—was heretical, so if the hechicero had no other method, the victim of the curse would simply have to bear his sour destiny in this life rather than risk eternal damnation in the next.)⁹

The Bishop’s library revealed his interest in the natural world: among his many scientific tracts were Isaac Newton’s Natural Philosophy and various works by Robert Boyle and Francis Bacon. He had a copy of Athanasius Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus, a delightful seventeenth-century publication that discussed the German Jesuit’s expeditions to Mount Vesuvius under the midnight moon. Kircher’s exploits might have crossed Martínez Compañón’s mind during his journey from Lima to Trujillo as he passed near Peru’s Sabancaya volcanoes. Some of his guides might have told tall tales of the devastating Huaynaputina eruption in 1600, which shrouded the city of Arequipa in ashen rain while aftershocks continued for weeks, convincing many locals that the end of days had finally arrived. While there were no such catastrophic incidents in the eighteenth century, the Sabancaya volcanoes did erupt several times between 1750 and 1784.¹⁰

Though Kircher’s book on volcanoes was largely pleasure reading, Martínez Compañón’s library showed more than a passing interest in matters of science, as well as matters of state. He was well-read in contemporary theories of society, economy, and governance. This familiarity with eighteenth-century political economy reform would later help him conceive one of colonial Spanish America’s most expansive plans for improvement. The books that guided him included Jerónimo Ustariz’s Theory and Practice of Commerce and Maritime Affairs, which argued that the Spanish should focus on manufacture and commodity trade, not simply exchange silver for goods. He had several works by leading reformer Pedro Campomanes, including Discourse on Popular Industry, which proposed that Spain could save its economy through encouraging economic productivity in the home. He also brought various agricultural manuals, such as Alonso de Herrera’s Agricultura General. First published in 1513, this book was still in use over 200 years later, highly valued for its practical suggestions about how to cultivate everything from bees to cotton to onions. Carefully stored with the books were several collections of prints, including Otto van Veen’s Moral Theater of Human Life, which featured woodcut engravings of voluptuous men and women in allegorical situations. One depicted a disgruntled farmer leaning against a tree with his arms crossed, while an industrious compatriot led a team of oxen plowing a field in the background. The caption reads, “He who does not begin does not finish.” Such books would have helped him to imagine his own reform agendas and also served as references for communicating specific mandates to parish priests, who would be directly responsible for implementing these programs of improvement with the local population.¹¹

Though we have no exact notice of which day the Bishop last stepped on Spanish soil—in his old age in America, he finally sought (but was never given) a see at home in Spain—documents indicate that his vessel left Cádiz sometime before the New Year, and he assumed his post in the cathedral on July 17, 1768. Presuming that he traveled the typical route for ships sailing from Cádiz, he would have first touched American ground at the Atlantic shores of Montevideo, and then traveled overland to Lima. This trek was likely the same as the one immortalized in the popular picaresque travel narrative Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (Lazarus of the Walking Blind), published in Lima in 1775. It began with the short voyage across the River Plate to Buenos Aires, depicted in Lazarillo 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 implications for the history of America and its native peoples, especially in the Spanish Empire. Eighteenth-century Europeans’ 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 and secular officials to design and implement a program for their own improvement. These reform agendas drew their inspiration 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 nearby port of Callao, its flat terrain, and its climate, which, despite the humidity, was much milder than the highland population centers favored by the Inca. Visitors to colonial Lima tended to remark on the elaborate dress of its inhabitants and its multitude of churches, monasteries, and convents. It was recognized for the impressive baroque mansions that surrounded the city center, such as the Torre Tagle palace, built in the early eighteenth century for a Spanish marquis, celebrated for its typical carved stone portico and Moorish-style enclosed wooden balconies. Lima was also known for its lavish festivals: the Spanish technocrats Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa (who traveled throughout Spanish America from 1735 to 1746) were especially impressed with the pageantry surrounding Lima’s viceroy. They reported that Antonio de Mendoza had a personal militia of 210 men: 160 cavalry who wore blue and red uniforms with silver accents, and fifty Spanish troops dressed in blue suits and waistcoats made of crimson velvet with gold trim. On the day the viceroy made his official entrance into the city, the streets were hung with vibrant tapestries, and local artisans erected an impressive triumphal arch over the Rimac River. Next to it, municipal workers built a special grandstand so that the highest dignitaries could enjoy a parade featuring local militia troops, secondary school and university students, and civil servants. The parade route ended at Lima’s cathedral, where the new viceroy would meet the archbishop and cathedral canons and receive a ceremonial golden key to the city.³⁹

He was not greeted with such pomp, but when Martínez Compañón stepped into Lima’s plaza mayor for the first time, he found himself in the symbolic and cultural center of Spanish life in Peru. The plaza was home to the cathedral, the viceregal palace, and a famous fountain featuring eight lions with water trumpeting from their mouths. His eyes would have fixed on the cathedral’s elaborate façade, featuring delicate Corinthian columns made of stone imported from Panama. He would have entered the cathedral for the first time through the main of the three doors facing the plaza—the so-called portada del perdón, or door of pardon. Looking up, he would have seen the soaring Gothic arches that supported the weight of the roof. Plated in gold, these intersected in a crossed design that recalled the starry night sky.

When Martínez Compañón—or Limeños, for that matter—tired of liturgical celebrations, their city also offered many venues for proper European-style amusements. These included theaters, where comedic productions were reputedly “as good as what you see in Madrid or Naples”; a cockfighting coliseum, a circular amphitheater with nine grades of spectator seating; and lively cafés where city dwellers could enjoy coffee, tea, chocolate, traditional yerba maté, and even games of billiards. A cathedral canon was unlikely to attend comedies or cockfights or to play billiards; but like many Limeños, Martínez Compañón may have frequented the city’s cafés, especially to enjoy a cup of his favorite beverage: hot chocolate prepared in the typical style of the late eighteenth century, with chocolate shavings flavored with sugar and cinnamon.⁴⁰

While chocolate was one of the few earthly pleasures that the Bishop enjoyed, he likely would have been far more interested in Lima’s vibrant intellectual life. The city was home to the University of San Marcos—the oldest in South America—as well as more innovative institutions such as the Convictorio Carolino, where students learned experimental science, and the Colegio de San Carlos, where Newtonian physics found a place on the curriculum the same year that Martínez Compañón arrived in Peru. Lima also had a growing community of naturalists. Cosme Bueno published his yearly almanac, Conocimiento de los tiempos, there. The city was the home of Hipólito Unanue, a naturalist who proposed that cultivating commerce based on Peru’s rich natural resources could benefit the viceroyalty. Another local scientist, José Eusebio Llano Zapata, sent a manuscript detailing the natural resources of Peru, titled Memorias histórico, físicas, crítico, apologéticas de la América Meridional, to the king in 1761. In 1787, Lima’s first Spanish-style economic society was founded. This same group would later become the Sociedad de Amantes del País (Lovers of the Country) and publish the Mercurio Peruano (1791–1794), which frequently commented on scientific matters. In 1792, Padre Francisco González Laguna oversaw the founding of Lima’s own botanical garden.⁴¹

Although all this surrounded Martínez Compañón, his chances for engagement would have been limited by his duties inside the walls of the cathedral. As chantre, or musical director, he was one of the most important members of the cabildo or cathedral chapter of dignitaries. These men met directly with the archbishop on a regular basis, exercised power on his behalf in his absence, and oversaw religious services. Martínez Compañón was responsible for supervising the musical accompaniments to liturgy, including chanting, singing, and instrumental music. Much of his work would have taken place in or near the cathedral’s impressive choir stall, one of the oldest and best preserved in all Peru. Built in the early seventeenth century, this large wooden structure features ornate chairs for each choir member. Situated at ground level alongside the cathedral’s main altar, the severe wooden seats are dominated by the carved relief figures of saints that stand behind them.⁴²

Though records reveal nothing further about Martínez Compañón’s duties as chantre in Lima, we know that during his visita, the Bishop taught Gregorian chant to seminary students in Piura, Lambayeque, and Cajamarca. He also recorded musical notations and lyrics when visiting communities throughout Chachapoyas, Otusco, and Cajamarca. The songs he collected ranged from Christmas carols to music for a Chimú dance performed with violin accompaniment. As with the illustrations that made up the nine volumes of watercolors, he gathered these songs from vernacular sources; they were mostly “simple” folk songs dismissed as such. Today, ethnomusicologists praise the entire collection, especially the “Chimú tune,” which is the only known surviving musical notation in the Mochica language (extinct today and, even in 1644, spoken by only forty thousand people). The Bishop thought to preserve several musical instruments in his collection, including a “copper tambourine with seven jingle bells, a little hen, and four Indians dancing,” in which one of the human figures carried “in his hand an axe like those that … the Indians use to dance [with today].”⁴³ Likewise, many of the watercolor images include musical instruments or people playing them, especially during Carnival.

In addition to his musical duties in the cathedral, Martínez Compañón was tasked with compiling a master list of chaplaincies and charitable endowments. The two massive volumes that resulted were an early indication of his organizational abilities: indexed like a modern-day address book with tabs separating the letters, the capellanías books listed by surname the individuals who had made the bequests, and for what purpose. He recorded that Miss Maria Theodora, for instance, had in 1740 established a chaplaincy based on the value of her country home outside Lima. With these funds, she supported a licentiate named Lorenzo de Azogue.⁴⁴

In Lima, Martínez Compañón cultivated a close relationship with Archbishop Antonio de Parada, who soon thereafter rewarded him with additional responsibilities. By 1770, Parada had named him rector of Lima’s Saint Toribio Seminary, a position that he retained until his departure for Trujillo in 1779. Although the majority of the documents from his time there are lost, we do know that while at the seminary, Martínez Compañón worked tirelessly to organize and improve, soliciting permission and funding for several structural improvements to the building, including more student rooms and easier access to water in the cooking area. Years later, when he was founding his own seminary in Trujillo, he hoped for the boys there to wear purple sashes similar to those that the Lima students had worn.⁴⁵

In 1772 and 1773, the cathedral hosted the Sixth Provincial Church Council of Peru, in which canons, bishops, and the archbishop debated how they would implement Charles III’s modernizing ecclesiastical reforms and how they would handle the aftermath of the expulsion of the Jesuits from Peru five years earlier. Martínez Compañón was named consultant, canon, and secretary of the council. He would have observed and perhaps even participated in heated discussions about the preparation of primary school teachers (they had to be well trained in Catholic precepts), the importance of repetition in teaching doctrine to Indians (adults were to study every Monday and Friday; children were to study every day), and the necessity of teaching Indians to speak fluent Spanish, so that “they will be more easily and better taught in the subjects of religion and of the state.”⁴⁶ Many of these same ideas about Indian education were later incorporated into the reform agenda that the Bishop imagined for Trujillo.

In 1773, Martínez Compañón became a member of the Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País, or the Basque Friends of the Country Society, a social organization dedicated to improvement and reform that would likewise prove influential in his future imaginings of utopia in Trujillo. Founded in the Basque town of Vergara in 1765, this was the first of scores of economic societies established throughout Spain and America in the late eighteenth century. Although an ocean and a continent separated him from Vergara, Martínez Compañón’s membership in the Basque society was not an anomaly: the majority of the society’s nobles, government officials, academics, and clergy were men of Basque origin pursuing careers in other parts of the empire. Their original manifesto outlined their goal as “the socialization of progress [and] collective improvement … [of the] labor of groups and institutions.” Their many publications provided suggestions for improvement that Martínez Compañón later planned to implement in Trujillo: cultivating alfalfa and flax, promoting agriculture and industry, building town primary schools, and educating women. They suggested that students’ improvement be rewarded with prizes, and they thought contests useful for promoting technological advancement. In its 1780 ordinances, the Basque Society promoted the study of the arts, particularly drawing, which it decreed “useful to all types of people,” since it was “the basis of the liberal arts, the soul of many branches of commerce” and “a universal language that can benefit everyone.”⁴⁷

Martínez Compañón carried these ideas with him when, on February 25, 1778, he was promoted to become the next bishop of Trujillo, in the north of Peru, near Ecuador. Reforming the Indians, promoting primary education, and pairing religious and social goals would become the foundations of his utopian agenda there. When complete, his successes would make plain to the rest of Peru, the Spanish Empire, and the world beyond that the Indians were fully capable members of society. Yet even with such a vast array of improvement strategies at his disposal, there were inevitable reservations. Being assigned to a post that was comparatively poor and isolated may have been somewhat of a disappointment. He subtly revealed these feelings in a letter from 1790 in which he wrote about how much he had loved Trujillo, “even though it was not Lima.”⁴⁸ Regardless of any doubts he might have had, in 1778 he was scheduled to be confirmed as bishop the following June. When the necessary decrees finally arrived, he learned that, like all bishops in America, he was responsible for obeying the laws of the Indies and ensuring that all ecclesiastical income was to be shared with the Crown. From Lima that March, he confirmed: “I swear I will guard and comply with our king with all corresponding faith, observing all the laws of the patronato real [royal patronage of the Church], and that I will not contradict anything contained in them in any way.”⁴⁹ After filing the paperwork and journeying 500 miles up the coast to Trujillo, he was confirmed as bishop on May 13, 1779.⁵⁰ He was forty-two years old.