Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (review)

To leaf through the bibliography of this book is to be astonished by the profusion of studies concerning Spanish cosmography in the past thirty years. Before that time, there were pioneers in the English-speaking world like Howard Cline, Clinton Edwards, Peter Gerhard, Frederick Pohl, and Henry Wagner, and in Spain José Maria López Piñero was beginning his long career. But since then, the explosion of knowledge about this theme has been such that it is difficult to identify a new argument to put forward. Maria Portuondo resolves this problem by analyzing Spanish sixteenth-century cosmography in terms of figures whose work developed from the secret and descriptive to the publicized and mathematical. The leading figures in this process were Alonso de Santa Cruz, Juan de Herrera, Juan de Ovando, Juan López de Velasco, and Andrés García de Céspedes.

Alonso de Santa Cruz worked from 1536 on as cosmographer at the Casa de la Contratación, the House of Trade in Seville at which all information concerning the Indies was assembled and assessed. Santa Cruz followed the "cosmographical methodology" advocated by the Greek geographer Claudius Ptolemy, whose work had slowly penetrated European thought in the fifteenth century. By 1541 Santa Cruz had produced the Islario general, a remarkable assembly of texts and maps covering much of the known world. Portuondo points out, however, that this "humanistic cosmographical opus" lacked the mathematical aspects of the discipline on which Juan de Herrera, who succeeded Santa Cruz in 1567, would concentrate. Herrera was able to persuade the Council of Indies to arrange for the observations which ought to have led to a better understanding of longitudes at various sites in the world; he also took advantage of the experience of Portuguese cosmographers, absorbed after 1580 into the Spanish realm. His activity was not merely mathematical, for in 1570 he encouraged the departure for Mexico of Francisco Hernández, who would make an extraordinary survey of the medicinal plants of the New World. About that time, too, Juan de Ovando initiated a fresh description of the empire, relying not only on textual relaciones, but also on the pinturas, or maps, which were also requested.

Much of this information was acquired by Juan López de Velasco, who by 1574 had finished his Geografía y descripción universal. Curiously, he does not seem to have made systematic use of the general survey of 1571, perhaps because many of the maps would have been very foreign to European eyes. López de Velasco also tried to organize the observations which would lead to a better understanding of longitude, his last effort dating from 1588. Having begun as a descriptive cartographer, he had difficulty turning himself into a mathematical practitioner.

This would indeed be the leading quality of the new cartographers, of whom Andrés García de Céspedes was a leading figure. At the same time, the policy of secrecy which had marked the earlier work gave way to a period in which information about the empire was freely published, as in the case of the Décadas of Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas. Published in 1601, this very widely disseminated work was essentially a recast version of López de Velasco's Geografía of 1574. This formerly unthinkable publication was a recognition that it was no longer feasible to control information about the nature of the empire in the New World, and thus it marked a new stage in the nature of Spanish cosmography.

This book succeeds in imposing a convincing order on a very complex set of intellectual developments, even though its argument somewhat belies its title, since it traces the end of "secret science." It is elegantly produced and includes a set of ten color plates to show what kind of maps were being drawn by cosmographers like Santa Cruz and López de Velasco. It is a pity, though, that these plates...