Secret Science: Spanish Cosmography and the New World (review)

Traditionally, historians of science have regarded Spain as being very backward in the field of scientific development, arguing that the scientific knowledge it derived from the discovery of the New World in the early fifteenth century was not totally absorbed and systematized, and consequently that Spain failed to incorporate the philosophical streams of knowledge coming from the rest of Europe, which for more than a century had been abandoning Renaissance cosmography in favour of the adoption of a more mathematical interpretation of the world. Professor Portuondo provides in this stimulating and innovative volume an excellent account of these facts, in support of her conclusion, which demonstrates that Spanish cosmographers, ignoring the modern orientation of European philosophers such as Bacon and Descartes, were not interested in developing a new philosophical explanation of natural phenomena. Instead, they found themselves under pressure to search for new ways of gathering and organizing information from the New World in a way that would be useful for the administration of the new territories and the localization and exploitation of its abundant natural resources for the benefit of the Spanish Crown. This utilitarian approach shaped the development of the relatively new science of cosmography in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain. As Portuondo herself puts it at the outset (p. 4): 'At every step royal cosmographers obeyed a utilitarian mandate that demanded a specific product, a time deliverable and a cost-effective implementation'.

The two institutions established for the administration and the regulation of Spain's relationships with the new territories were, of course, the Casa de la Contratación, the body in charge of trans-Atlantic commerce and navigation, and the Consejo de Indias. These two institutions needed charts, instruments and maps to enable them to accomplish their tasks and, at the same time, define the strategies required to avoid the incursions of the subjects of other European powers - primarily the French, English and Dutch - into the new territories.

The first of the major strategies employed was to obtain information, notwithstanding the enormous geographical and cultural distance between Spain and America, by requiring pilots crossing the Atlantic to complete questionnaires for the Council of the Indies, and trying to synthesize material that arrived in an absolutely disorganized, unsystematic manner. However, this method soon surpassed the capacity of the Council to process and systematize the information, the accuracy of which could not always be ascertained. Moreover, the royal cosmographers continued to employ a humanistic orientation towards cosmography, which relied heavily upon, for example, information on the history and religion of the places under scrutiny. A further complication was that from the outset there was a determination to keep information arriving from America absolutely secret, for fear that other countries might use it to challenge the power of Spain in the new dominions. However, this policy was continuously undermined by the Catholic Church, which claimed access to information in order to fulfil its task of evangelizing the 'naturals'; and by the unavoidable incursions of English pirates, who obtained navigational information as part of the plunder from the ships that they attacked.

Despite these difficulties, a small but quite strong community of cosmographers emerged from the Crown's demands for information and resources which would help satisfy its continuous need for cash. However, it slowly became evident that the old humanistic doctrine was not good enough for the pursuit of these objectives. The consequential measures taken included establishing two, rather than one, as hitherto, posts of cosmographer in the Consejo de Indias, one responsible for the scientific and mathematical aspects of the new territories and the other for more general matters relating to the administration and governance of the Indies, thereby preparing the way for the necessary divorce between the descriptive and mathematical aspects of the body's cosmographical practice. As is explained very clearly, this process provoked power struggles between the Consejo and the Casa de la Contratacion, particularly in relation to the updating of...