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CONCLUSIONS Whether Oviedo was writing about Native Americans, nature, or the conquest and colonization, his personal, political, and methodological concerns were never far from the surface of the narrative. The author’s attempts to maintain the favor of the Crown and establish the truth of his account serve as the underpinnings to his historiographic writing. In the closing chapter of the History, he recalls more than fifty years of service to the Crown—from the time of the Catholic Kings and Columbus’s first voyages (bk. 50, chap. 30). The historian records his travels, administrative duties, and writing as acts of service: information about the natural world and judgments about conquistadors, Spanish bureaucrats, and Indians provide knowledge with which to rule the new territories. Significantly, if Oviedo’s accounts were successful he stood to gain power and fame through lucrative administrative posts. Intimately linked to Oviedo’s posture as a loyal servant was the establishment of his credibility as an author. Even as he closes his lengthy History, Oviedo harangues his detractors who asserted that a true history should be written in Latin. He counters their charges with an appeal to truth: “May the truth prevail above all else . . . for without elegance nor circumlocutions, nor embellishments nor rhetorical ornamentation, but in a straightforward manner have I allowed this General and Natural History of the Indies to reach this state, in accordance with the truth” (bk. 50, chap. 30).1 He faced conflicting testimonies and representational quandaries as he wrote about an expanding new world in a period when the nature of truth and authority was being debated. As we have seen, Oviedo grappled with sixteenth-century epistemological, philosophical, historiographic , and canonical issues. Writing during an era in which representational practices were in flux, he unevenly (and at times uneasily) addresses these questions according to the material treated and the year written. In general, however, the author increasingly equated truth with experi- conclusions 137 ence and direct observation, and authoritative texts served as a point of departure to underscore the new. Unrecorded or partially recorded information and events required extensive detail and explanation. Oviedo frequently updates the natural world, detailing new species, information, and curiosities. And he provides courtroomlike multiple testimony about men’s actions, hoping to facilitate justice and truth. Yet Oviedo’s “truth” is often colored by his agenda. Both his service to the Crown and his rhetorical dedication to truth highlight Oviedo’s essential role as a player in Castile’s project in the Indies . Whether comparing testimony or recording his own new observations , the historian carves out a space for himself in the narrative. He is the central mediator of information from the ancients to contemporary reports from the field. All sources come under scrutiny as he contested some and accepted others. Indeed, Oviedo emphasizes his personal role in the construction of the text by signing every copy of the 1535 edition and closing this same edition with a reproduction of his family coat of arms (fig. 78), which now included the New World constellation, the Southern Cross, as proof of his time in the Indies. This is not to say that Oviedo’s representational practices were static. The historian’s first representations of the Indies, prior to about 1532, tended to be general and schematic when dealing with natural history and personal and political when dealing with general history. Early illustrations were depicted without much detail, and the first portraits of Native Americans were highly stereotyped and judgmental. In one case, he uses reports on indigenous women to support the Old World Amazonian myth. Oviedo’s administrative posts and ambitions deeply influenced the narrative during his early years. He fought hard in the courts and in writing to gain new wealth, repartimientos, and bureaucratic titles. Some of these earlier sections abound with a juridical, autobiographical style that reflects his legal battles and petitions (for example, his bid for a governorship and interactions with Pedrarias Dávila). Overall, the author’s stance in the early History is as an actor in the conquest and as a witness who experiences and records New World natural wonders without paying great attention to detail and perhaps veracity. Beginning in the 1530s, soon after his appointment as official chronicler , and solidifying in the early 1540s when he reconfigured a large part of the History, Oviedo moves away from his role as participant-observer in the text and adapts the persona and methods of an official historian. The more schematic generalizations and...

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