“Orinoco out into the light”: A Modern Jesuit’s Efforts to Kick the Devil Out of the Borderlands

The blazing light of Francisco Xavier, the apostle of Asia, guided many an early modern Jesuit into voluntary exile and even martyrdom at the hands of utter cultural strangers. Like many of his brethren, José Gumilla was inspired by the Navarrese saint to leave Spain in 1705 for missionary work. He devoted some three decades of his life rounding up the Achagua, Abane, Aruaca, Aturi, Betoye, Caverre, Chiricoya, Guamo, Guajivo, Guayno, Guayquirie, Guarauno, Maypure, Mapuye, Otomoca, Pao, Quirruba, Quiriquiripa, Sáliva, and Yaruro Indians into missions located on the banks of the Casanare, Meta, Apure, Bichada, Guabare, and Orinoco Rivers. The Valencian Gumilla willingly exchanged home for the terrors of the tropics: man-eating crocodiles; clouds of bloodletting insects and skin-drilling parasites; treacherous anacondas whose breath could mysteriously numb their prey; raiders wielding arrows poisoned with curare, a substance of occult demonic powers that within seconds could paralyze the body; and relentlessly hostile cannibal Caribs, whose alliance with the Dutch in Surinam gave them access to firearms. In a book addressed to the youth of Europe to join the Jesuits in a crusade against the Devil in the tropics, Gumilla produced an ethnographic manual for would-be missionaries. Gumilla’s Orinoco ilustrado (“Orinoco brought out into the light,” as Gumilla would have liked the title translated) is poorly known among students of Spanish-American Enlightenment, for it is too quickly assumed that the book is a pre-modern, baroque catalogue of wonders rather than a rational, secular interpretation of natural phenomena. In a provocative analysis of Gumilla as a figure of the Catholic Enlightenment, Margaret Ewalt does away with these simplistic generalizations and, in the process, she greatly complicates our genealogies of scientific modernity in Peripheral Wonders: Nature, Knowledge, and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco (Bucknell, 2008).

At first glance, Ewalt’s interpretation seems to defy common sense. How could someone who adamantly believed in battling Satan in the tropics be considered a full-fledged figure of the Enlightenment? How could someone whose thoughts encouraged crocodile fangs as necklaces to counter poisons be included among the founding fathers (and mothers) of our scientific modernity? A plausible answer to these questions would have been simply to note that Isaac Newton dabbled in alchemy and engaged in natural philosophy so as to bring the occult out “into the light” and thus shrink the monopoly of the Devil over the preternatural; or to point out that Hans Sloan, Newton’s successor as president of the Royal Society and Gumilla’s contemporary, wrote a voluminous natural history of tropical Jamaica that eerily resembles Gumilla’s. Ewalt’s answers, however, are more roundabout: she seeks to locate Gumilla’s sensibilities within traditions of empiricism and eclecticism in the Catholic monarchy.

Ewalt rightly shows that Gumilla built on the insights of a previous generation of Spanish natural philosophers, the so-called novatores who were committed to empiricism and deep skepticism of all-encompassing philosophical systems. Gumilla hailed from Valencia, one of the strongholds of this tradition. Rhetorically disinclined to exaggerate any claims to novelty, Gumilla was nevertheless probing and critical of all systems of ancient natural philosophy, including Aristotle’s. In Catholic Iberia, this might appear as a daring move. Several historians, for example, have highlighted the importance that Aristotelian physics played in the defense of Counter-Reformation dogma, including that of transubstantiation, which explained the miracle of the Eucharist and justified Catholic priests as unique mediators between communities and God.¹ Attacking the foundations of Aristotelian natural philosophy, therefore, was in some circles tantamount to heresy. Ewalt, however, correctly points out that early modern Spanish intellectuals had long been ridiculing the ancients for the latter’s appalling errors in geography and cosmography. In Iberia there was nothing heretical about taking on the ancients. Spain and Portugal had since the fifteenth century witnessed the rise of the “moderns” who considered that they had superseded the ancients in both the sciences and letters. The historiography on early modern Spanish science, upon which Ewalt draws, has shown that unlike other...