The Bishop's Utopia. Emily Berquist Soule
urban settlements, managed large-scale projects of public engineering, and expertly elaborated pottery, jugs, and other artifacts, Martínez Compañón’s natural history vividly displayed the intelligence and civilization of Trujillo’s natives.
In addition to defending the Indians through his socioeconomic reforms and his natural history investigations, the Bishop wrote more directly about his views on the great epistemological debate of the eighteenth century. Referring to the way men like Pauw and Raynal characterized them as naturally degraded, he asserted that “the Indians are not [really] like those stupid men want to portray them.”32 His efforts to teach them reading and writing, to use them as natural history informants, to move their towns to more commercially advantageous locations, to teach them useful trades, and even to award them with titles of nobility were all predicated on his view that the Indians were “men given a rational soul just like ours, and that they live in the same environment as we do, and what proceeds from that is that they have the same natural dispositions of body and soul as we do.” This was the same argument that Clavijero, Molina, and Velasco promoted in their written studies.33
Paradoxically, despite its defense of Indian intellectual capacity, this statement demonstrates that, like most learned men of his time, Martínez Compañón accepted the mainstream theory of climatic determinism. However, he used it to prove the virility of the American environment, not its degeneracy. In a 1785 letter to the parish priest of Chachapoyas, he outlined his stance on how environment affected human beings. “Diverse influences correspond to diverse climates,” the Bishop argued, and these differences explained the “great natural diversity that is seen among men of different regions.” He did not venture that this external difference was indicative of intellectual or spiritual ability, but he did believe that it accounted for differences in skin color and other external characteristics such as facial hair. It also explained the great variance in size of human beings, including why “some men are giant like those of the Patagonian coast … and others pygmies, like the Japanese.”34
It was no coincidence that the Bishop chose to discuss Patagonian giants as an example of how men could grow inordinately large in certain climates. Martínez Compañón was, in fact, somewhat of a giant enthusiast. The questionnaire that he remitted to his dioceses prior to leaving on his visita in 1782 asked respondents “if at any time they have found any huge bones that seem to be human … whether they have any [local] tradition that in some time there might have been giants, and in the places where they might have had them, for what time, when did they become extinct and for what reason, and what support the people have for the said legend.”35 He received at least some material evidence of giants unearthed in a field outside Santiago de Chuco, in the Huamachuco province of Trujillo. These specimens were deemed important enough to be carefully wrapped, packaged in the crates of his collection, and sent back to Spain. They included a “top of a femur bone that seems to be of a giant, already half petrified,” a “molar, also half-petrified that seems to be of a giant, found in the same place,” and “part of a sacrum bone with the same circumstances and provenance.”36 Although the title does not confirm it, a giant may also appear in this image of “Indian boys playing jai alai” (see Plate 9). The figure in the orange jacket is almost three times as big as the boys who play around him, and his body is significantly too large to fit through the door of the building behind him. The individual is shown bending over and supporting his body weight on his knees, a position that highlights his severely humped back, likely a symptom of the osteoporosis that is a common side effect of gigantism.37
The Bishop’s obsession with giants was no mere caprice—in providing visual, material, and anecdotal evidence of their existence in Trujillo, he was actually participating in the debate over the natural world of America and the men who lived in it. Spanish American scholars regularly discussed giants—especially those of southern Spanish America—implying that they evidenced the natural abundance of the local environment. For instance, the Mercurio Peruano, Lima’s Enlightenment periodical, reported on a giant named Basilio Huaylas, who, at twenty-four years old, stood seven feet tall when he was brought to Lima from the coastal town of Ica. Pedro O’Crouley’s 1774 Description of the Kingdom of New Spain mentioned giant bones and teeth in its chapters on curiosities. Even Archbishop Francisco Lorenzana of Mexico stored in his library some of the giant human bones unearthed at Culhuacán. Giant bones even became a popular collectors’ item throughout America in the eighteenth century because any evidence of giants was striking disproof of the argument that American mammals were smaller and weaker than those of Old World origin. That is why men like Robertson and Pauw were so insistent that giants were fabrications of desperate Spaniards in America. Robertson’s History of America was blatantly skeptical about South America’s famed giants, maintaining that the existence of giants and fossil evidence of them was “seemingly inconsistent with what reason and experience have discovered.” Years later, historian Antonello Gerbi wrote of Pauw that “giants would have brought down his whole thesis on the weakness of the nature of America.”38 Martínez Compañón’s own interest in giants, therefore, was a small-scale manifestation of his broader agenda to defend the nature, plants, animals, and people of Trujillo through engineering and depicting a living utopia in the north of Peru.
Martínez Compañón in the City of Kings
After his journey through the Andes, Martínez Compañón finally arrived in the most important Spanish city in South America: Lima, the so-called City of Kings. Despite its notoriously damp climate and cloudy skies, Lima was a commercial, intellectual, and administrative capital that was densely populated for the time (52,627 inhabitants in 1793). Francisco Pizarro chose the city site for its easy access to the nearby port of Callao, its flat terrain, and its climate, which, despite the humidity, was much milder than the highland population centers favored by the Inca. Visitors to colonial Lima tended to remark on the elaborate dress of its inhabitants and its multitude of churches, monasteries, and convents. It was recognized for the impressive baroque mansions that surrounded the city center, such as the Torre Tagle palace, built in the early eighteenth century for a Spanish marquis, celebrated for its typical carved stone portico and Moorish-style enclosed wooden balconies. Lima was also known for its lavish festivals: the Spanish technocrats Jorge Juan and Antonio Ulloa (who traveled throughout Spanish America from 1735 to 1746) were especially impressed with the pageantry surrounding Lima’s viceroy. They reported that Antonio de Mendoza had a personal militia of 210 men: 160 cavalry who wore blue and red uniforms with silver accents, and fifty Spanish troops dressed in blue suits and waistcoats made of crimson velvet with gold trim. On the day the viceroy made his official entrance into the city, the streets were hung with vibrant tapestries, and local artisans erected an impressive triumphal arch over the Rimac River. Next to it, municipal workers built a special grandstand so that the highest dignitaries could enjoy a parade featuring local militia troops, secondary school and university students, and civil servants. The parade route ended at Lima’s cathedral, where the new viceroy would meet the archbishop and cathedral canons and receive a ceremonial golden key to the city.39
He was not greeted with such pomp, but when Martínez Compañón stepped into Lima’s plaza mayor for the first time, he found himself in the symbolic and cultural center of Spanish life in Peru. The plaza was home to the cathedral, the viceregal palace, and a famous fountain featuring eight lions with water trumpeting from their mouths. His eyes would have fixed on the cathedral’s elaborate façade, featuring delicate Corinthian columns made of stone imported from Panama. He would have entered the cathedral for the first time through the main of the three doors facing the plaza—the so-called portada del perdón, or door of pardon. Looking up, he would have seen the soaring Gothic arches that supported the weight of the roof. Plated in gold, these intersected in a crossed design that recalled the starry night sky.
When Martínez Compañón—or Limeños, for that matter—tired of liturgical celebrations, their city also offered many venues for proper European-style amusements. These included theaters, where comedic productions were reputedly “as good as what you see in Madrid or Naples”; a cockfighting coliseum, a circular amphitheater with nine grades of spectator seating; and lively cafés where city dwellers could enjoy coffee, tea, chocolate, traditional yerba maté, and even games of billiards. A cathedral canon was unlikely to attend