The Bishop's Utopia. Emily Berquist Soule
Documentation
Central to the story told here is that which Martínez Compañón himself wished to tell—the one that he left behind in the nine volumes of watercolors, Trujillo del Perú. The 1,372 images that constituted this “paper museum” were organized into different books, each with its own narrative in pictures. The first held maps, city plans, architectural drawings, and portraits of leading local officials, secular and ecclesiastic. The Bishop had ingeniously designed it to preface his work in Trujillo and familiarize imperial bureaucrats with the people and places that had been key to his accomplishments. The second volume, depicting quotidian life in Trujillo, portrayed a universe in miniature with Spaniards, Indians, mestizos, and mixed-race castas engaged in their daily lives; sharing meals and music, plowing fields and harvesting wheat, tending sheep and spinning thread. Green was the predominant hue of the botanical illustrations of trees, herbs, plants, flowers, and shrubs that made up volumes 3, 4, and 5. A menagerie of animals, from the comical ant-eater, its tongue replete with shiny black ants (see Plate 3) to the fetchingly large-eyed guanaco camelid, filled the pages of volume 6. Birds and marine life each merited a separate volume, and the set closed with intricate archaeological illustrations of local ruins, burial sites, and ceramics. Had it ever been completed in the way that the Bishop had hoped, the “Historical, Scientific, Political, and Social Museum of the Bishopric of Trujillo del Perú” would have carefully situated each specimen within its proper scientific category, proudly naming it for posterity and for the benefit of the broader European scientific community. Unfortunately, Martínez Compañón was unable to begin writing the manuscript before his death in 1797.17
However, the great repository for colonial Spanish American documents, Seville’s General Archive of the Indies, holds a valuable document that allows the dedicated researcher to begin piecing together how the project may have developed. The Bishop and his staff completed the “File About the Remission of 24 Crates of Curiosities of Nature and of Art, Collected by the Bishop of Trujillo [today archbishop of Santa Fé], and Sent by the Viceroy of Lima, Arrived on the Frigate Rosa” in 1788. This was an inventory that accompanied the immense natural history collection sent to the king of Spain that same year. It painstakingly described the botanical specimens, taxidermied animals, pre-Hispanic artifacts, and local manufactures packed in the crates. The anteater shown in volume 5 of the watercolors was included, its tongue carefully preserved, wrapped in paper and nestled alongside its body. The inventory described the ingenious way the so-called oso hormiguero, or “anting bear,” used its tongue to eat: “arriving at an ant hole, it probes it with its tongue,” the description read, “and sticking it all the way out, holds it steady until it is quite full of ants. Once it is, it recoils it and swallows them.” Whoever had observed the anteater knew even more about the species: “it is calm if not chased and harassed,” the informant claimed. “But once threatened, it gives enough fight to kill the man or dog that pursues it.” Yet this was the last surviving information about the animal that the Bishop and his informants had found so intriguing. Like the vast majority of natural history items remitted from the overseas kingdoms in the early modern period, the anteater’s body, tongue, and the other elements of the collection were parsed up and dispersed to the appropriate metropolitan institutions, including the Royal Museum of Natural History, the Royal Pharmacy, and the Royal Botanical Garden. In the end, most were discarded, lost, or their provenance obscured by categorization and re-categorization, transfers and moves.18 So the watercolor illustrations and the written inventory were all that remained of the Bishop’s animals, birds, and fish, great and small, rare and mundane.
Despite these losses, the textual and visual record of the Bishop’s natural history research still stands as one of the most intricately detailed natural history sources of its day. Remarkably, Martínez Compañón at no time benefited from any official patronage or financial support for his work as a naturalist, yet he managed to produce one of the most thorough visual and material compendiums of the colonial period in Peru. In order to incorporate this extraordinary body of information into my historical analysis, I analyzed the visual documents like textual ones; drawing contrasts and comparisons, looking for what was there as well as what was absent, keeping in mind the creators and the context, and looking for the multiplicity of meanings that one image can hold. Often these clues were exceedingly subtle and took multiple viewings to catch, such as the tiny inkwells hidden in the student tables in the illustration of the school at San Juan de la Frontera de Chachapoyas (see analysis in Chapter 4 and Plate 4), which signified that the school’s plans were too elaborate for local reality and local pocketbooks; or the small leafy green plant held in the left hand of the “hill Indian” (see Plate 5), who was depicted in the very act of gathering plants for the Trujillo collection. In other cases, my work with the images became a sort of cross-reading with the documents, a methodology best exemplified by the analysis of the “mestizo scarred by uta” image that opens Chapter 6 (see Plate 6). By pairing the image with corresponding documentation and supplementing with detailed research into regional ethnobotany, I uncovered more about native epidemiological knowledge in the colonial period than I thought possible using “just” an image and a few sentences of a document.
The visual information that the Bishop commissioned left a source so rich and varied that my main challenge was in choosing which portions of it were the most relevant; yet sometimes, I faced the opposite problem: a decided lack of information. Writing a book that dwells on a central character that revealed so little about himself, his motivations, or his understanding of his place in the world was no simple task. Perhaps Martínez Compañón’s self-pitying quip that “before I was bishop, everyone wrote to me, but afterward, I don’t get letters from anyone”19 was not far from the truth because his archival trail contains frustratingly little personal correspondence. Unlike the New England Puritans who so conveniently bestowed upon researchers a wealth of diaries detailing their spiritual progress and their experiences in the material realm, the early modern Spanish had no tradition of diary writing or public commentary on their interior lives. Church and state archives contain caches of personal correspondence only in the rarest of cases: my work in no fewer than twenty archives and special collections in nine cities of four countries turned up only one set of personal documents from Martínez Compañón. The Hermenegildo family of Lima had saved the Bishop’s letters to Antonio Hermenegildo de Querejazu and Agustín Hermenegildo de Querejazu, a father and son who became his friends, confidants, and collaborators. The 250 letters that he wrote to them twice a month over a fourteen-year period reveal how he worried about his health, doubted the skills of physicians, and loved to dispense advice about family life. They show Martínez Compañón to be a curious student of the natural world, a dedicated follower of imperial politics, and a loyal friend.
While the letters shed light on one set of the Bishop’s friendships with other men of privilege, it was difficult to integrate these glimpses of his interior dialogue with his ceaseless activities in Trujillo, about which he once commented that “day or night I have hardly stopped running around like a crazy person.”20 I needed to show how he came to develop such an ambitious program of improvement for his bishopric, to understand what had prompted him to imagine how a mining camp of exploited Indian laborers could become a plebeian utopia, or how shoeless and illiterate Indian children might one day learn to read, write, and practice trades so successfully that they, too, might achieve the privileged title of don. What about his time in Peru inspired him to combine his contemporaries’ ideas of assisting the Indians, improving the plebeians, and mapping the natural world into one massive project to create a better future? Simply telling the story of his life and his influences as a way to explain his motivation would be insufficient. I wanted to give a sense of a mind, a time, and a world. So I followed the example of other historians who have experimented with integrating historical analysis with narrative techniques, including Rhys Isaac, John Demos, and Peter Mancall. The resulting scenes re-create conditions on the ground in real time at pivotal points in Martínez Compañón’s life: as a young man on the docks of Cádiz, eagerly waiting for his ship to depart for the New World; traveling on foot from Montevideo to Lima; a new bishop entering his cathedral city for the first time. Documents indicate that these events actually took place, although they do not elaborate on contextualizing details.