From Columbus to Acosta: Science, Geography, and the New World

Abstract

What is called the Age of Discovery evokes images of voyages, nautical skills, and maps. Yet the European encounter with the Americas also led to an intellectual confrontation with the natural history and ethnography of a “new’ world. Contrary to the prevailing view of intellectual stasis, this confrontation provoked novel methods of empirical description, organization, analysis, and synthesis as Medieval deductivism and Classical ontogenies proved to be inadequate. This essay demonstrates how the agents of that encounter—sailors, soldiers, government officials, and missionaries—made sense of these new lands and peoples; it highlights seven methodological spheres, by examining the work of exemplary individuals who illustrate the diverse backgrounds, abilities, and interests characteristic of the period. These examples include the observational skills of Columbus in 1492, the landscape taxonomy of his son Fernando, the biotic taxonomy of Oviedo, the cultural recording of Sahagún, the regional geography of Cieza, the pervasive role of Velasco in both geographical synthesis and town planning at the government level, and finally, the overarching scientific framework for the natural history and peoples of the New World proposed by Acosta in 1590. The evidence rehabilitates the reputation of Columbus who, like so many others with little or no formal education, had a spontaneous capacity to observe and describe. The origins of Native American stereotypes are identified, but there also were remarkable “insider’ studies that, in the case of Sahagún, touched upon the semiotics of culture and landscape. Although Sahagún and Acosta had scholarly training, the confrontation with new environments and unfamiliar peoples probably put observers with rural backgrounds on an equal footing with those steeped in traditional academic curricula. Last but not least, the essay points up the enormity of the primary documentation, compiled by these Spanish contributors during the century after 1492, most of it awaiting geographical reappraisal.

Key Words:

• Acosta
• Columbus
• ethnography
• geographical planning
• gridiron towns
• history of science
• landforms
• López de Velasco
• natural history
• New World landscapes
• Oviedo
• relaciones geográficas
• Renaissance
• Sahagún
• Spanish geography