Marcos Jiménez de la Espada (1831–1898): Tras la senda de un explorador

Abstract

Marcos Jiménez de la Espada was a nineteenth-century Spanish naturalist who travelled to Latin America in the 1860s as part of the Comisión Científica del Pacífico, a scientific expedition organized by the Museo de las Ciencias Naturales de Madrid. The expedition, which accompanied a far more controversial Spanish naval expedition, made the circuit of Central and South America. Jiménez de la Espada was a polymathic naturalist in the tradition of Alexander von Humboldt. Upon his return to Spain in 1868, he began to work on a series of historical studies on precolumbian and colonial Latin America. He was particularly concerned with recovering and editing critical texts from the early Spanish chroniclers of the Indies. This volume, which emerges out of a conference on Jiménez de la Espada held in 1998, explores many facets of this complex figure.The first section of the book includes a brief introduction to Jiménez de la Espada’s life and works, accompanied by a detailed chronology. The introduction focuses primarily on Jiménez de la Espada himself. This volume could have been much more useful for a general audience had the introduction set Jiménez de la Espada and his work in a broader historical context. Instead, key issues appear in fragments throughout the volume. For example, the chronology notes that there were some serious tensions between the Comisión Científica and the naval expedition, which ultimately resulted in the scientists’ breakaway from the naval expedition. Likewise, the book alludes to Jiménez de la Espada’s role in a nineteenth-century Spanish pan-Hispanic movement, but it does not explain this movement in any detail. Some of this context is available in the late-nineteenth-century obituaries of Jiménez de la Espada, which appear in the fifth section.The second section consists of brief conference papers that explore Jiménez de la Espada’s work as biological collector, herpetologist, historian, and Peruvianist. The latter two essays explain his important role in recovering and editing critical texts from the early Spanish colonial period, particularly his edition of the Relaciones geográficas, and Bernabé Cobo’s Historia del Nuevo Mundo, both primary sources now regularly used by historians of colonial Latin America. Several chapters in part two, and all of part three, discuss the organization of Jiménez de la Espada’s papers and museum collections, and in particular the pioneering efforts to digitize Jiménez de la Espada’s archives. Interested readers may see these efforts online at: http://www.csic.es/cbic/BGH/espada/pagina.htm, and the documents of the scientific expedition at http://www.pacifico.csic.es/pacifico.htm.One of the most valuable parts of this volume is its reproduction of 68 photographs, drawings, and engravings from the Comisión Exploradora. Most of the photographs—which are some of the earliest photographs of Latin America— were taken by the commission’s official photographer, Rafael Castro y Ordóez. The images are accompanied by a detailed essay discussing the techniques of early photography and the role of photography in the expedition. The photographs include cityscapes of Salvador de Bahia, Montevideo, Guayaquil, and San Francisco, photographs of Latin Americans of various ethnicities and social classes, and of economic production such as gold mines and guano extraction. The images also include illustrations made by other members of the commission, including two striking watercolors of volcanoes in Ecuador, and finely detailed engravings of animals and ethnographic artifacts collected on the expedition. While the quality of reproduction is excellent, the captions that accompany the photographs are too cursory, and the photographs seem to be ordered randomly.The fourth section is a brief anthology of Jiménez de la Espada’s writings, which gives a sense of his intellectual breadth. This section begins with a thematic classification of Jiménez de la Espada’s writings by Leoncio López-Ocón. López-Ocón divides these writings into three main categories: on natural history, on geography, and on history. This valuable bibliographic guide also conveniently lists more recent editions of Jiménez de la Espada’s publications. The introduction is followed by a sampling of Jiménez de la Espada’s articles and essays on such diverse themes as the fauna of the Amazon River, the women of Chile, and comments on a 1582 ascent of the Pichincha mountain.This rich collection will be valuable for scholars who specialize in the history of science and exploration in Spain and the New World, and in the development of Spanish pan-Hispanism in the nineteenth century. It is less useful as an introduction to these themes, since it lacks a comprehensive overview that would unite the volume’s disparate sections and place them in a broader historical context.