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spanish america  Ship  Frederick Luciani That great monument of Spanish baroque poetry, Luis de Góngora’s Soledades (1627), opens with a shipwreck: the “stranger” or “pilgrim” who is the poem’s protagonist, floating on wreckage , reaches an unknown shore.There heencounters an old man who, recognizing in the stranger’s clothing the ravages of the sea, delivers a somber harangue against ocean navigation and the greed of men, which, he says, is “at the helm today, not of stray trees, / but of whole shifting forests .”1 The old man’s bitterness is born of personal tragedy: his son and his fortune were lost in a wreck in the distant Spice Islands. This speech is adapted from poetic topoi of classical antiquity , crystallized in Greek and Roman verse in descriptionsof theAgesof Man.Navigationbelongstothepresent-­ day Age of Iron—age of the plow and the sword, of labor, strife, and the quest for wealth. Góngora recontextualizes these hoary poetic themes in terms of the Iberian voyages of discovery and conquest. Commentators of the Soledades since Góngora’s time have debated what this means. On the one hand, the allusions to Iberia’s maritime expansion have a certain triumphalist ring. On the other hand, the poem insists that the Iberian navigators were motivated by a desire for wealth that was immoderate and ruinous. Whether Góngora’s poem was celebratory, admonitory, or a baroque (un)balance of both, similar themes and semantic tensions can be found in seventeenth-­century representations of the baroque ship. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-­ century galleon enabled Spain to project its military power, defend the faith in the Old World, further its missionary enterprise in the New, and transport the mineral wealth of America to Spanish shores. It was not only a nautical workhorse but a work of art: the high, flat sterns of Spanish galleons were often decorated with the portraits of the saints who were their namesakes and with other artistic motifs, sometimes achieving splendid aestheticeffects reminiscent of baroque altarpieces. The talismanic intent of such decoration was clear: each successful crossing of a fleet was a victory over Spain’s enemies, including Christendom’s ultimate enemy, Satan, who was thought to conjure tempests and other disasters toward off further incursions of Christianity into the New World.2 The rhythm of shipboard lifeon the Spanish galleon was religiously inflected, and the most important ships on the carrera de Indias were sometimes the site of elaborate religious ceremony and celebration to mark the deliverance from storms or important days in the religious calendar.3 Religious pageantry of this kind is described in the narratives of the voyage of Diego López de Pacheco Cabrera y Bobadilla, marqués de Villena, to take up his post as viceroy of New Spain in 1640. The marquis organized Corpus Christi celebrations aboard his fleet at anchor off the coast of Puerto Rico: Masses, music, theater, and a poetry contest . A stanza of verses celebrating the Eucharist was unfurled atop the mainmast of the marquis’s flagship, to be glossed by all the poetic wits aboard the various ships. The result was such a fecundity, ingeniousness, and abundance of verses, that the salt waters could boast of being Castalian springs, the naiads of the Sea could be reborn as Muses, as if in the very masts of the ships were grafted the laurels which crown Mount Parnassus, and a moving forest of resplendent genius were reborn on the slopes of watery mountains.4 Góngora’s “shifting forest,” piloted by greed, here becomes a “moving forest of resplendent genius”—an apt baroque metaphor for a fleet of Spanish ships, floating theaters for human ingenuity. But the description of these shipboard Corpus Christi festivities is wedged between narratives of tribulation, death, and miraculous salvation: the marquis’s fleet was assailed by storms at the beginning and end of the journey . These narratives remind us that, for all its beauty and might, the Spanish baroque ship was prey to constant perils: pirates, Protestant enemies, fires, foundering on sandbars and reefs, and ferocious storms. It was vulnerable as well to perils from within: perfidy among crews, cowardice among officers, miscalculations by pilots, and the catastrophic overburdening by greedy officers and merchants .5 Representations of the Spanish baroque ship are haunted by the specter of the wreck. In seventeenth-­ century Iberia the loss of ships meant potential disaster for whole nations. The loss of treasure fleets from the New World had grave consequences for the...

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