Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution

Two: A Chamber of Knowledge: The Casa de la Contrataci

two A Chamber of Knowledge the casa de la contratación and its empirical methods In 1598 the Englishman Richard Hakluyt described the navigational activities of the Casa de la Contratación in Seville for his English readers: [The] late Emperour Charles the fift, considering the rawnesse of his Seamen , and the manifolde shipwracks which they susteyned in passing and repassing betweene Spaine and the West Indies, with an high reach and great foresight, established no onely a Pilote Major, for the examination of such as sought to take charge of ships in that voyage, but also founded a notable Lecture of the Art of Navigation, which is read to this day in the Contractation house at Sivil. The readers of which Lecture have not only carefully taught and instructed the Spanish Mariners by word of mouth, but also have published sundry exact and worthy treatises concerning Marine causes, for the direction and incouragement of posteritie. The learned works of three of which readers, namely of Alonso de Chavez, of Hieronymo de Chavez, and of Roderigo Zamorano came long ago very happily to my hands, together with the straight and severe examining of all such Masters as desire to take charge for the West Indies.1 Although the office of the chief pilot was established by Ferdinand the Catholic and not by Charles V, Hakluyt’s description captures the teaching and training activities of the “Contractation house at Sivil.” The office of the chief pilot, however, was established not only to train pilots but also to make charts. The cosmographers of the Casa were hired 30 experiencing nature to make instruments and lecture pilots. The institutionalization of these activities was the result of the Spanish crown’s political interests and desire for control in the New World. In the process of gaining control of longdistance lands, the crown established mechanisms at the Casa for making navigational instruments and charts, for teaching navigational techniques to pilots, and for examining the pilots. The establishment of these mechanisms (the focus of this chapter) was the result of administrative practices copied from the Portuguese, suggestions made by pilots and cosmographers , and administrative decisions for solving disputes among pilots and cosmographers working at the Casa. The overarching goal of the Casa was “to bring together practice and theory,” which was a way of bringing together the personal experience of pilots and the formal education of cosmographers.2 Personal experience was the key element in the collection of new knowledge but had to be organized within a theoretical framework to be useful. Thus, the cosmographers at the Casa used that knowledge to create charts and to train pilots in the use of instruments (so they could use those charts). During the entire sixteenth century, the tensions between these two groups were significant and constant, and they constitute a central theme in this chapter. The crown would intervene often to mediate between the two groups, acknowledging the need for bringing together practice and theory and the difficulties in accommodating those approaches in a coherent practice. In the early sixteenth century European kingdoms sought to establish areas of influence over routes to Africa, Asia, and the New World. Portugal and Spain claimed rights over different areas of the Atlantic Ocean, yet they first had to determine the size of the ocean, the exact locations of the recently encountered lands, navigational routes, and geographical aspects of the new lands. A set of offices within the Casa emerged to face the challenge of collecting and organizing knowledge of the new lands into maps, charts, instruments, treatises, and navigational practices. A veritable chamber of knowledge, a center of information, evolved as the offices and practices of the Casa were developed and institutionalized to collect and disseminate information about the New World, to train artisans (pilots) in the new navigational techniques, and to hire professionals (cosmographers and pilots) for research and teaching activities. The historian Clarence Haring calls it a “Hydrographic Bureau and School of Navigation, the earliest and most important in the history of modern Europe.”3 The Casa’s activities predated Francis Bacon’s (1561–1626) program of research and the information-gathering activities of scientific academies such as the A Chamber of Knowledge 31 Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge (1660). Not surprisingly , Bacon’s program and the activities of the Royal Society emerged at the time...