Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution

One: Searching the Land for Commodities

one Searching the Land for Commodities In 1530 a new kind of balsam made its way to Spain from the New World. The crown ordered the merchants interested in exploiting balsam to send samples of it to physicians and hospitals. They, in turn, would send reports to merchants and royal officials: Physicians and surgeons of any city, town, and place of our kingdoms and possessions, before they talk or publish inexactitudes about this balsam , should have unequivocal information [cierta noticia] about it; and when, by experience or by other method, they find out that it is harmful for wounds or any other illness, they should declare and reveal it to our magistrates.1 The balsam case and others like it provide a window into the way in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans understood and commercialized new natural products.2 In general, sixteenth-century Europeans understood nature as a repository of commodities, readily available for commercialization (as were so many other commodities in this era of discoveries).3 By no means was this solely a European phenomenon; China, India, the Ottoman Empire, and Africa were perhaps more important players in the configuration of the world’s trading framework.4 Still, the Portuguese and Spanish explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries placed Europe on a path that would shape it from that point on. 14 experiencing nature The newly emerging European states were constantly looking for resources outside Europe, and the New World offered many new economic and political possibilities. European crowns and merchants established ef- ficient mechanisms for economic and political control of the new lands. One consequence of these mechanisms was the emergence of empirical practices for understanding nature, expanding humanist and Aristotelian practices into new directions. Yet these humanist and Aristotelian practices constituted examples of empirical practices profoundly bound to textual authorities. The political and commercial expansion of this period created a context for the implementation of empirical practices free from textual authorities. In the case of Spain, both merchants and the crown encouraged the development of such practices, for both sensed that the empirical study of nature offered them material benefits.5 The crown institutionalized these empirical practices in two bodies, the Casa de la Contratación and the Council of Indies. In 1503 the crown established the Casa de la Contratación or House of Trade (perhaps based on plans by the royal official Francisco Pinelo) for the organization of trading relations with the New World, including the organization of the fleets and collection of royal tolls and taxes. A few years later, Ferdinand established a navigational and mapping center within the Casa for the organization of navigational activities, so that commerce could be conducted on a solid navigational basis. In 1524 the crown formally established the Council of Indies for the administrative and judicial organization of the New World. As happened with the Casa, the council would eventually establish offices for the collection of information about the New World (in particular natural history information) so that the administration of the New World could be conducted on the basis of solid information.6 Royal authorities needed specific information about the New World in order to control it: they needed to know about its geography and natural history, its peoples and types of governments. Entrepreneurs, by contrast, needed to know how to exploit the New World—so they sought information about the properties of the land and the uses of natural products . Both crown officials and entrepreneurs fostered the circulation of information and commodities, in which personal experience and testing became the criteria for validating information. During this period of exploration, European notions of nature and experience were displaced from their traditional classical definitions. Natural history notions from classical authorities such as Aristotle or Pliny did not account for the size of the earth, a new continent, life in the Searching the Land for Commodities 15 Torrid Zone, manatees and mechoacán (a Mexican medicinal herb). Experience , of course, had always played a role in validating knowledge; but the knowledge gained in exploration and in contact with other cultures in the New World made experience a much more important player than the authority of classical sources alone. a case study: the santo domingo balsam Balsam was a celebrated classical medicine. According to Dioscorides in De Materia Medica (the foremost classical source on medicinal simples ), Judea and...