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

The important role that early modern Spain and her overseas imperial ambitions played in the historical transformations that were once called the scientific revolution has only recently begun to be appreciated in the anglophone world, thanks in large part to the work of a new generation of historians of Spanish science, including Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, Dagmar Bleichmar, Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Ruth Hill, Nicolás Wey Gómez, Neil Safier, and Margaret Ewalt. In this important new book, María M. Portuondo adds to our understanding of why the Spanish contributions to early modern science were long denied their due recognition. The production of Spanish cosmological knowledge operated for much of the sixteenth century under strict directives of secrecy that destined much of the knowledge produced solely for the vaults of the archive, rather than for the rapidly expanding world of print. Spanish officials strove to guard such knowledge for geopolitical reasons (to protect Spanish territorial claims founded on the treaties of Tordesillas [1494] and Zaragoza [1529]) and as a military strategy (to prevent rivals from gaining intelligence about ports, straits, resources, and routes). As the futility of these efforts became clearer by the end of the century, however, the Spanish monarchy under Philip III gradually came to promote dissemination of knowledge of the New World as propaganda intended to extol the magnificence and power of the Spanish monarchy and its vast overseas empire.

The main story that the book tells, however, is not that of Spanish imperial policies, but rather of the transformation of the science of cosmography during the sixteenth century, partly due to the epistemological challenges that the New World presented to classical text-bound traditions and partly due to the imperative of making science useful for economic exploitation and imperial administration. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the various classical traditions that coalesced in the late fifteenth century as the Renaissance humanist cosmography taught at the University of Salamanca and in the new genre of the navigation manual at the House of Trade in Seville. Chapter 2 focuses on the sixteenth-century efforts of cosmographers and crown advisers to bring science into closer correspondence with the necessities of empire. Chapter 3 highlights the reforms of Juan de Ovando, president of the Council of the Indies in the 1570s, and the impact of legal culture on the Council’s scientific practices, which resulted in the privileging of eye-witness testimony over textual authority. Not unlike in Baconian science in England half a century later, Ovando’s reforms aimed at a subversion of key aspects of Renaissance, text-bound cosmography, and at a centralization of knowledge production in which empirical information flowed “strictly one way” (p. 126) from the periphery to the center of empire, where it would be synthesized and evaluated by the cosmographer-chronicler major, a post newly created by Ovando. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 focus on the first occupant of this new post, Juan López de Velasco. After Velasco’s principal cosmographical work, the Geografía y descripción de las Indias (1574), and a shorter work, the Sumario, had received severe criticism by some fellow cosmographers commissioned by the Council for their lack of mathematical accuracy and orientation, Velasco initiated what would become two of the most significant projects in sixteenth-century Spanish knowledge production: the questionnaires sent to imperial administrators in the New World that would produce a vast treasure trove of first-hand geographic and ethnographic descriptions known as the relaciones geográficas de Indias, and a grand, global program to systematically observe lunar eclipses for the purpose of determining longitude mathematically. Strangely, Velasco, in neglect of his duties as cosmographer-chronicler major, never produced another major cosmographical work that synthesized the information collected in these projects. While previously historians interpreted Velasco’s failure to write another cosmography as evidence that he was disappointed with the results of his project, Portuondo instead argues that Velasco had become disillusioned...