De Las Indias Research Articles

The poetry of history

The poetry of history

Colonial Writings and the New World, 1583-1671: Allegories of Desire (review)

Reviewed by: Colonial Writings and the New World, 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire E. Thomson Shields (bio) Colonial Writings and the New World, 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire. Thomas Scanlan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999. x + 242 pp., illus. As editor of The Roanoke Colonies Research Newsletter, I am excited to see new books that treat texts related to Roanoke colonization, such as Thomas Hariot's 1588 A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, especially when looked at in conjunction with the Theodore de Bry engravings that accompanied the publication of some of the editions of Hariot's work. My interest is piqued even further when such a text is juxtaposed to a discussion of the various editions of Bartolomé de las Casas's 1552 Brevissima relación de la destrucción de las Indias (A Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies) as translated into English between 1583 and 1656. Moreover, these are but two of the many items covered by Thomas Scanlan in Colonial Writings and the New World, 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire. Other texts discussed include Jean de Léry's 1578 History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil; Edmund Spenser's 1596 A View of the Present State of Ireland; sermons promoting English colonization in North America by Robert Gray, William Symonds, William Crashaw, and John Donne delivered and published between 1609 and 1623 (which Scanlan labels the Virginia sermons); Roger Williams's 1643 A Key into the Language of America; and John Eliot's 1671 Indian Dialogues. As this list indicates, Scanlan's book is broad in coverage, yet its topic is much more focused—the use of writing about native Americans in the discussion of colonial endeavors, especially those in North America, to create of a sense of English nationalism. While there are some problems with Scanlan's book, the issues he raises have enough interest and validity to make Colonial Writings and the New World a useful entry into the discussion of early American writing. [End Page 307] The value of Scanlan's work comes from two different strengths. First, it posits some interesting overarching arguments about writing in English concerning England's colonies.1 Scanlan argues that colonization "is never an end unto itself " in colonial writing (3). Instead, though telling about events in the colonies, colonial writing "must connect itself to some ultimate goal, which is inevitably removed from the colony" (3). In English colonial writing between the 1580s and 1670s, this ultimate goal, according to Scanlan, was English nationalism: "[T]he colonial project became one of the primary ways that the English used to articulate and define their own emerging sense of nationhood" (3). The most interesting element of Scanlan's argument develops a complex interrelationship between English national identity, Protestantism, and the representation of Native Americans. For Scanlan, English Protestants consistently described their relationship with native Americans in terms of fear and love—usually meaning that the Native Americans both feared and loved the English. Yet the English revealed a sense of fear and love about Native Americans themselves. What is particularly good about Scanlan's argument is his recognition that there is not just one static representation of Native Americans or of the English themselves in terms of fear and love. As objects of writing, Native Americans can sometimes stand for people to be colonized, sometimes as allegorical figures representing English Protestants, sometimes as people in need of the civilizing effects of Protestant conversion, and sometimes as being more Christian than professedly Christian, particularly Puritan, people. However, for Scanlan, these representations of Native Americans are not ends unto themselves in English colonial writing. Instead, they serve an "ultimate goal, which is inevitably removed from the colony." It is in arguments about nationhood as connected to religion that Scanlan's analysis of colonial English writing becomes its most engaging. The period that Scanlan chooses to write about is one of religious turmoil in England—from the time of Queen Elizabeth I's assertion of Protestant control over England in the late sixteenth century with its coinciding tension between more traditional Anglicans and the increasingly powerful Puritans; through to the...

THE DOUBLE-ENTRY BOOKKEEPING METHOD APPLIED IN SPAIN TO ACCOUNT FOR TRANSACTIONS RELATED TO THE MINTING PROCESS OF GOLD AND SILVER IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

This paper represents a summary of broad research undertaken in the Archivo General de Indias of Seville. Gold and silver were shipped from America, received in the Treasury Room, minted, and sold in public auctions to merchants. Because single-entry was the usual accounting method applied by the Casa de la Contratación de las Indias, it was surprising to find several books which provide evidence of the application of the double-entry accounting method to account for those transactions related to the minting process. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that the documents related to the accounting procedures of the Casa treasury represent the earliest evidence found of the utilization of the double-entry method by a public institution. The study concludes that the treasury utilized the double-entry bookkeeping procedure as early as 1555 to account for the transactions involved in the minting process of gold and silver. Although the focus of this research is on the period 1555–1600, this method was utilized until the middle of the 17th century. This paper examines the accounting procedures used to account for the sale of gold and silver during 1560.

Apocalypse Then and Now: Las Casas' "Brevísima relación" and Cortázar's "Apocalipsis de Solentiname"

The word apocalypse generally elicits horrific images of cataclysmic destruction signalling the end of time or of a civilization. Such is the notion to which writers refer when labelling apocalyptic Bartolom? de las Casas' eyewitness account in the Brev?sima relaci?n de la destrucci?n de las Indias.1 This sense of the term also characterizes the murderous devastation of the fragile Solentiname community that appears in the narrator's photographs in Julio Cort?zar's Apocalipsis de Solentiname. In fact, these texts are apocalyptic in a

Conquest and Discovery: Subversion of the Fall in El Carnero

1 The meaning of the popular title, El Carnero, has been a subject of discussion since Perez's preface to the first edition (Note 2). I have advanced the theory that the term refers to the judicial archives, to a morgue for old papers, and that it literally became affixed to the original manuscript when it was filed away by an anonymous royal bureaucrat after the author's death. Later copyists misread the term to be the title (Herman, Toward). For this and other reasons, to be elaborated below, I refer to the text as Conquista y descubrimiento. Achury Valenzuela (Prologue l-lvi) provides the most thorough summary of other theories concerning this issue. 2 The original manuscript was never published and is now lost. The text circulated in handwritten copies until 1859, when it was first published by Felipe Perez as Conquista i descubrimiento/del/Nuevo Reino de Granadal de las Indias Occidentales del Mar Oceano,/ ifundaci6n de la ciudad de/Santa Fe de Bogota,/primera de este Reino donde sefund6 la Real Audiencia i Chancilleria, siendo la cabeza. The title page, or titulo-programa (Benso 98), goes on to describe the work's contents, a topic which will be analyzed in more detail below. The Perez edition (P) is based on a lost copy that is generally believed to have been older than any existing ones and it has served as the basis for one line of editions, the most popular and numerous being those that derive from Miguel Aguilera's original 1963 edition. The other line of editions are more or less related to the oldest known version

The Invention of America Imaginary Signs of the Discovery and Construction of Utopia

“The ships that invented regions were directed toward the West”, announced Juan de Castellanos in 1587 in his Elegías dedicated to Christopher Columbus, and at the beginning of the 16th century Hernán Pérez de Oliva wrote a Historia de la invención de las Indias. The use of the word invention when speaking of the discovery of America may seem to be a semantic confusion or poetic license, viewed from the contemporary perspective of a discipline with well-defined limits, such as geography, since we usually understand invention as the transformation of things by man's intervention, while discovery is finding something that already existed so as to make it known to others.

The Aborted First Printing of the Second Part of Oviedo's "General and Natural History of the Indies"

Among its many treasures the Huntington Library is fortunate to possess fine examples of three out of four sixteenth-century printings of portions of the great Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y Tierra-Firme del mar Oceatno.. by the King-Emperor's official chronicler Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes (1478-1557), a work which I have termed elsewhere our First American Encyclopedia.1 This pioneering introduction to American geography, flora, and fauna also offers an intriguing collection of eyewitness accounts by individuals, most of them known personally to the author-compiler, who between 1492 and early 1549 effectuated the Spanish exploration and annexation of a New World. Boies Penrose has observed that . if published when written [this work] might have given the author the literary stature of a Barros.2 The Library also holds one of ten photostatic copies of the fourth sixteenth-century imprint of a part of the General History, a variant edition of Book 20. This copy was prepared under the auspices of the Massachusetts Historical Society from an original in the Collection of the Newberry Library in Chicago, for which reason we shall refer to it as the Ayer copy. In the present study we shall attempt to establish the relationship between the four sixteenth-century printings, that is the 1535 and 1547 editions of the nineteen books of part one, the 1557 edition of Book 20, and the undated copy (R90538).3 We shall also attempt to assign a date to the last-named and to comment on a reason for the failure to complete publication of the remaining eighteen books of part two, failure which has generally been deemed an abrupt interruption caused by Oviedo's death on 27 June 1557. The Huntington has exceptional resources for addressing these questions which have been the subject of scholarly debate for more than a century. The manuscript collection holds illustrated autograph manuscripts of Books 4, 7, 9, 11, 32, and 37 bound together in a single volume, and of Book 6 bound separately (HM177, 2 vols.). Books 4, 6, 7, 9 and 11 represent revisions of the sixteenth-century printings of part one. The Huntington manuscripts incorporate the changes and additions noted by Juan Bautista Mufioz near the end of the eighteenth century and included in the Jose

Columbus and the Recovery of Jerusalem

The beginning of Columbus' voyages to the New World coincides with the culmination of the Spanish Reconquista and carries over the latter's crusading zeal. Columbus' Diaries reveal that his empresa de las Indias had involved a master plan of contacting the Mongol and pro-Christian Grand Khan in the East, circumventing and encircling the Islamic lands of the Middle East, opening a new trade route to the East that did not have to pass through Mamluk territories and combining the forces of Western and Eastern Christendom in an enveloping movement for the recovery of Jerusalem and its casa santa. Columbus' plan followed a long tradition of Marco Polo (1295), Marino Sanudo's Liber Secretorum (1321), the life-work of Pope Pius II (1458-1465) and such writings as Campanus' Oratio (1471).

Archival Note: Archivo del Duque del Infantado

THE Gui'a de fuentes para la historia de Ibero-America is already proving an excellent tool for students of colonial Hispanic America.' This note calls attention to some additional colonial American materials found in one of the archives the guide describes so well: the Archivo del Duque del Infantado (ADI) in Madrid.2 The ADI contains over 30 folio-size, vellum-bound volumes of papers of Juan de Mendoza y Luna, Marques de Montesclaros. Over half of these relate to America; almost all the documents are manuscript, and mainly cover the period from 1590 to 1630. They are notable for the geographic variety of their subject matter and the quality of many individual pieces. Rather than Montesclaros' own correspondence, such as might be found in the Archivo General de las Indias (AGI), Lima 35-36, they are the sources the viceroy probably used in writing such letters. The documents relating to New Spain, where Montesclaros was viceroy from 1603 to 1607, have no particular focus. Among them are viceregal and audiencia ordinances and descriptions of Sinaloa and San Juan de Ulloa. There are quite a few documents from the Far East, some detailing early missionary activities. Peruvian materials constitute the greatest volume of American papers in the collection and are fullest for the years 1607 to 1615, when Montesclaros was viceroy there. Notable is an account of the inhabitants in Concepci6n and other central Chilean towns, recording for these places the names of all vecinos and moradores. Many,

Reply to Gibson's Review of the Aztecs

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Alcalde Rule: The Nature of Local Government in Spanish and Mexican California

Doubtless, the most important single officer in the administration of local government in California, both before and after the American conquest, was the alcalde. This magistrate, who was a part of the time honored governmental system of the Spanish colonies, was an adapta tion of the Arabian and Moorish Al-Cadi or village judge.1 The practice of selecting an alcalde remained in some towns in Spain after the Moors were expelled. Not universally adopted by Spanish towns, the office of alcalde was, nonetheless, sufficiently recognized as an efficient unit of government to be extended to the colonies of Spain, and included and described in the Recopilacion de Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias (Laws of the Indies), the governmental structure of all of the Spanish colonies.

The Encomienda in Latin-American History: A Reappraisal

The Teacher of Latin-American History in the United States finds himself seriously handicapped by the lack of impartial and fair textbooks on this increasingly important subject. Most of the authors, either through lack of contact with the sources of information and original documents, or just because the trends begun by the “New American School of History” mentioned by Charles F. Lummis some fifty years ago, have not yet reached them, still cling tenaciously to the errors of the “Black Legend.” Their pet source still is the now much discredited and entirely unreliable Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas. They still take their cues from his much translated Brevísima Historia de la Destrucción de las Indias. Seldom do they even mention any of the many saintly bishops and missionaries who opposed him in the great debate of the early colonial times.

SKIN DISEASES IN THE NEW WORLD

Of the earliest historians of America, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes, Fray Bartolome de las Casas and Fray Bernardino de Sahagun are among the most scholarly and the most accurate. Contemporaries of Columbus, they came to the New World early in the sixteenth century, and were participants in the few joys and many vicissitudes of the conquest and colonization. The marvels of the new lands and the courage and adventurous spirit of the conquistadores were theirs, as well as the gift to record their impressions and adventures in the most flourishing Spanish of the epoch. The Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra firma del Mar Oceano was divided by Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes into fifty books, of which the first nineteen were published in 1535 and the twentieth in 1547. But it was not until 1851 that the Spanish Academy of Letters, represented by