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

Three: Communities of Experts: Artisans and Innovation in the New World

three Communities of Experts artisans and innovation in the new world In 1519 European ships arrived on Mexican shores. A man from Mictlancuauhtla who saw the ships went, of his own accord, to Motecuhzoma’s palace and told him the following: Our lord and king, forgive my boldness. I am from Mictlancuauhtla. When I went to the shores of the great sea, there was a mountain range or small mountain floating in the midst of the water, and moving here and there without touching the shore. My lord, we have never seen the like of this, although we guard the coast and are always on watch.1 This New World/Old World encounter would have been impossible without “floating mountains” and the technology necessary for their use. They brought not only people, animals, plants, and viruses but also artifacts and technology from the Old World. Ships, charts, and guns—and the systems of actions to which they belonged—became the instruments of European crowns in the process of centralization for the organization and domination of distant lands in the sixteenth century. Guns and cannons provided a decisive advantage over arrows and spears. Charts helped to establish links between central authorities in the Old World and their representatives (or presumptive ones) in the New World. In the sixteenth century instruments and tools allowed their users to engage in new systems of action such as trading, colonization, and navigations. Atlantic ships, for instance, were the products of merchant interests, shipbuilders, crown support, military needs, and Atlantic conditions.2 Communities of Experts 57 These ships opened new opportunities for European merchants and monarchs to extend their operations across the Atlantic Ocean. Portuguese merchants persuaded the Portuguese crown to support their Atlantic enterprise; the crown then appointed cosmographers, mathematicians , and other experts to devise methods to navigate the ocean safely. These officials incorporated new instruments such as the mariner’s astrolabes and tables of solar declination into their new methods of navigation . The making of charts required an exchange of information between pilots, who provided geographical details about the New World, and royal officials, who organized that information into charts at royal institutions. As they do today, instruments, tools, and technologies solidified interests and associations among certain groups of people; they fostered new visions of the world and generated new practices that in turn provided the context for even more new instruments, associations, and alliances of interests.3 By establishing alliances and new means of exchanging information and knowledge, the people developing new instruments helped to create a practical approach to understanding nature that had social and political consequences. On the one hand, their practical approaches fostered the material benefit of private agents and, through taxation, of the royal treasury. On the other hand, it offered an alternative view to traditional religious and magical views about nature. The instruments and technology that helped settlers in the New World were developed within a context of economic profits and political usefulness : the devices were good for the kingdom as long as they produced profits for entrepreneurs and the royal treasury. Yet these devices also emerged within the context of a legal framework of protection that made possible a system of investment in new technologies and competition among inventor-entrepreneurs. Making instruments to maximize the use of natural resources was certainly not a practice related exclusively to the American enterprise; but the American enterprise did foster it by creating the need to locate and to exploit distant resources for the empire (see Appendix 2). In contrast to humanists, whose knowledge was bound not only to texts but also to the past, inventors and developers of new technologies saw their activities in terms of future improvements.4 The Spanish American enterprise placed in a new political context the medieval tradition of linking practice and theory, transforming it into a set of practices that served the state, merchants, and entrepreneurs interested in innovation and profit.5 For instance, the amalgamation process (the use of mercury for the extraction of silver) developed by a tailor from 58 experiencing nature Seville later became the object of study of physicians and naturalists such as Juan de Cárdenas (1563–ca. 1592) and José de Acosta (1539–1600). Cosmographers and pilots designed marine instruments such as bilge pumps. Mathematicians developed mills. These instruments and technology either became part of theories or were the products of...