Reading the Book of Genesis in the New World: José de Acosta and Bernabé Cobo on the Origins of the American Population

Abstract

UPON his return to Spain from Peru, the Jesuit missionary Jose de Acosta published his acclaimed Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590). The book, a reworking and expansion of a previous Latin work he had written in Peru, De Natura Novis Orbis (1588), quickly became one of the most influential sources of information regarding the nature and cultures of the New World, being translated into all major European languages and, ironically, back into Latin (O’Gorman 245-47). In his book, Acosta took up one of the most vexing problems posed by the American continent, namely, the origins of its native inhabitants. Since the early sixteenth century, Spanish and European intellectuals alike had proposed a number of different theories for the presence of human beings on a continent unknown to the Ancients and, more disturbingly, not referred to in the Bible. Peoples as disparate as the lost tribes of Israel, the ancient inhabitants of Atlantis, or even pre-Roman Iberians had been proposed as the original settlers of the New World.1 Despite their variety, all these hypotheses shared a common concern to include the American peoples within the master narrative of European, and especially Biblical, chronology (Browne 10-12). Acosta’s solution to this conundrum was not based on interpretations of Ancient texts, or on far-fetched etymologies such as those linking the Biblical kingdom of Ophir to Peru. Instead, Acosta proposed a reasonable, if highly speculative, hypothesis: that the peopling of America must have been the result of a migration from Asia, through either a land bridge or