Science in the Vanished Arcadia

Scientific and Learned

Cultures and
Their Institutions

Editor

M. Feingold
(California Institute of Technology)

VOLUME 11

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/slci

Science in the Vanished Arcadia
Knowledge of Nature in the Jesuit Missions of
Paraguay and Río de la Plata

By

Miguel de Asúa

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, “Carte du Paraguay et des Pays voisins: sur les mémoires des
espagnols et des portugais et en particulier ceux des RR.PP. de la Compagnie de Jésus” (1756), Museo Mitre
(Buenos Aires), reproduced with permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Asúa, Miguel de.

 Science in the vanished Arcadia : knowledge of nature in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay and Rio de la
Plata / by Miguel de Asúa.
  pages cm. — (Scientific and learned cultures and their institutions, ISSN 2352-1325 ; VOLUME 11)
 Includes bibliographical references and index.
 ISBN 978-90-04-25676-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-90-04-25677-4 (e-book) 1. Jesuits—
Missions—Paraguay. 2. Jesuits—Missions—Rio de la Plata (Argentina and Uruguay) 3. Religion and
science. 4. Jesuits—History—17th century. 5. Jesuits—History—18th century. I. Title.

 BV2290.A88 2014
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2014012955

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To María Natividad

∵
Contents

Acknowledgements  xi
List of Maps and Figures  xv
Abbreviations  xvii

Introduction  1
1 Some Historiographical Remarks  4
2 The Jesuits in Paraguay and the River Plate  8
3 A Brief Survey of Events  13
4 Life in the Reductions  19

1 Natural Histories  25
1 The Jesuit Natural Histories of Paraquaria  29
2 Textual Organization  36
2.1 Organizing  36
2.2 Listing  40
2.3 Naming  46
3 The Natural Histories  55
3.1 Lozano and the Wondrous Nature of Paraguay  55
3.2 Paucke: “I Tell What I Have Seen”  61
3.3 Sánchez Labrador’s Catalogue of the Natural World of
Paraquaria  68
4 Writing on Nature in Paraquaria  80
4.1 A Jesuit Genre of Writing  81
4.2 Theatrum naturae  86
4.3 The Jesuit Works and Eighteenth-Century Natural History  88
4.4 Native Lore on Nature  92

2 Herbals  96
1  Jesuits Medicine and Pharmacy in Eighteenth-Century Paraguay and
Río de la Plata  99
2 The Major Works  113
2.1 Montenegro  113
2.2 Aperger  115
2.3 A Jungle of Herbals  117
2.3.1 Manuscripts Containing Montenegro’s Materia medica
misionera  119
viii contents

2.3.2 Manuscripts Containing Versions of Montenegro’s Materia

medica misionera attributed to Aperger  123
2.3.3 Manuscript History  125
2.4 Montenegro’s Herbal. European Pharmacopoeia and Guaraní
Plant Lore  126
2.4.1 Identification of Plants  130
2.4.2 Pictures  131
2.4.3 Montenegro’s Materia medica misionera, the Guaraní and
the “Galenization” of Native Herbal Lore  134
2.5 Jesuits and Guaraní Healers  138
2.6 A Medical Handbook for the Missions  141
3 The Lost and Minor Works  147
3.1 A Guaraní receptarium  148
3.2 Medicinal Botany in the Paraguay Natural  150
3.3 The English Surgeon  151
3.4 A Book of surgery  157
4 The Herbal Tradition in Paraquaria  159

3 Maps  164
1 Quiroga  174
2 Astronomical Instruments  177
3 Charting Patagonia  179
3.1 Quiroga’s Maps and Observations  181
4 An Expedition to the Mato Grosso  185
5 The Chair of Mathematics  187
6 The Sources of the Paraguay River  189
7 Maps and Politics  194
8 Maps and Mission  199
9 Maps of the Productive Structure of the Missions  202
10 Jesuits, Natives, and Maps  204

4 The Heavens  211
1 The Stars Lead to Kircher  212
1.1 Comets and Eclipses  213
1.2 The Mission by the Lake Nahuel Huapi  219
2 Buenaventura Suárez S.J.  222
2.1 Suárez’s Telescopes  226
2.2 Observations from the Mission of San Cosme  228
2.3 A Lunar Calendar  232
contents ix

2.4 Suárez and the Royal Society  235

2.5 Longitude  242
2.6 Teaching of Astronomy in Córdoba  247
2.7 Theory  251
2.8 The Guaraní as Instrument Makers  253
3 Missionary Astronomy  257

5 Science in the Italian Exile  259

1 Juárez’s Vatican Garden of the Indies  261
1.1 The Osservazioni  269
1.2 Juárez’s Botanical Outlook  275
2 Spiders and Electric Fish  279
2.1 Jesuits and Electric Fish  283
2.2 The Immediate Background of Termeyer’s Experiments  285
2.3 A Fishy Anatomy  288
2.4 Experiments among the Mocoví  290
2.5 A Fluid Discussion  292
2.6 An American Postscript  295
3 Looking at the Heavens through Someone Else’s Eyes  296
3.1 The Cádiz Quadrant  300
4 The Cultural Transplant  307

6 A Last Word  310
1 Empirical Reference  310
2 Science and Religion  314
3 Science and Native Lore on Nature  315

Appendix  319
Bibliography  321
Index  365
Acknowledgements

This book began as a natural continuation of a previous research project, whose last
stage was carried out in the Lent term of 2002 at Clare Hall (Cambridge) with financial
support from the now extinct Fundación Antorchas. Two fellowships contributed deci-
sively to its development. The first was the Latin American fellowship of the John
Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, which allowed me to spend the Spring
Term of 2007 at the Section of the History of Medicine and the Program in the History
of Science and Medicine at Yale. I remain much obliged to John Harley Warner for his
generous hospitality and to the Secretary of the Section, Ramona Moore, for her help
in many matters of survival. The staff of the Sterling and the Beinecke Libraries were
always very helpful. In the second place, I was granted a Visiting Fellowship at The
Jesuit Institute, Boston College, where I stayed during the Spring Semester of 2008
writing the first draft of the book. I wish to thank Father T. Frank Kennedy S.J. for his
generous help, to my friend Tomeu Estelrich, to Jeffrey Kleiber S.J. (another Fellow at
the Institute at that time, who kindly sent me his book), to the manager Patti Donnellan,
and to the people of Interlibrary Loan at Boston College libraries. A two-week Mellon
Fellowship allowed me to do some research at the Jesuitica microfilm collection of the
Vatican Film Library in Saint Louis University, where I enjoyed the hospitality of Don
Critchlow, whom I knew from my years as graduate student at Notre Dame. In the
course of 2005–2006 I received a small grant from Universidad Nacional de San Martín
(Argentina) to work on this project. Throughout these years I was financially sup-
ported by the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Conicet,
Argentina). Dr. Alberto Pochettino, former dean of the Graduate School of Universidad
de San Martín and Jorge Fernández Niello, currently dean of the Institute of
Environmental Research of the same institution, allowed me frequent leaves of
absence in order to pursue my research project.
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to Father José Luis Narvaja S.J., a colleague at
Colegio Máximo (San Miguel) and socius in the Instituto Falkner project, who helped
me enormously with the localization and reproduction of manuscript material. My
friend and colleague Pablo Ubierna (Conicet, Universidad de Buenos Aires) also col-
laborated greatly on this account and also with some secondary literature. Gabriela
Siracusano, an Art historian and colleague at Universidad de San Martín, called my
attention to an herbal manuscript, which Ms. Kimberly Nusco, Reference and
Manuscript Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library, contributed to identify. Esther
González Ibarra, librarian at the Real Academia de la Historia (Madrid), helped me
with the identification of a manuscript held in that institution. Carmen Martín Martín,
Professor of History of Pharmacy at Facultad de Farmacia, Universidad de Granada,
generously sent me a photocopy of his book, which was out of print and which proved
xii acknowledgements

very valuable for this research. Luis Millones Figueroa (Colby College) kindly sent me
a copy of the book he published as an editor in collaboration with Domingo Ledezma.
Lic. María Amparo de los Santos, librarian at the School of Medicine of Universidad de
la República (Montevideo), graciously sent me digital images of a manuscript held
there. Francisco O’Reilly (Universidad de Montevideo), helped me to obtain images of
the whole manuscript with the efficient collaboration of Manuel Vivo, for which I
thank them. Monsieur Pierre Maurin, chargé de mission at the Ambassade de France
au Paraguay, contacted through the kind intermediacy of Mme. María Inés Rosas,
adjointe pour la coopération scientifique, Ambassade de France en Argentine, gener-
ously sent me excellent digital images of a manuscript held at the National Library of
Paraguay (Asunción), localized by the director of the institution, Lic. Zayda Caballero.
I remain indebted to all of them. In this regard, I should mention my friend Pablo
Penchaszadeh, from Conicet, who kindly helped in this as in other occasions. Johanna
Hopkins, Picture Curator of the Centre for History of Science, Royal Society, London,
helped me with the localization and reproduction of manuscript material. The same
can be said of the staff of the British Library, from where I ordered several manuscripts.
Anna Smith, Picture researcher at the Wellcome Institute, localized and sent me two
manuscripts held at the Wellcome Library. I wish to express my particular recognition
to my colleague Prof. Eliane Deckmann Fleck (Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos,
São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul), now working on a project on Jesuit medicine in the
missions of Paraguay, who graciously sent me the digital copies of two manuscripts
held in Brazilian libraries. Ms. Agnese Mandrino, archivist of the Archivio Storico of
the Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera sent me digital copies of a letter of Alonso Frías.
Dr. Pastor Arenas (Cefybo, Conicet), generously agreed to help me with an assess-
ment and partial translation of a Guaraní manuscript. Dr. Marcelo Wagner, Professor
of Pharmaceutical Botany at Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica (Universidad de
Buenos Aires) and Dr. Gustavo Giberti, curator of the Museo de Farmacobotánica
(Universidad de Buenos Aires), were always helpful and supportive. Dr. Tyson Roberts
(Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panamá), Dr. Hugo López (Museo de La
Plata) and Drs. Leandro Tamini, Ricardo Ferriz and Francisco Firpo (Museo Argentino
de Ciencias Naturales) helped me with the identification of Termeyer’s fish.
Some fragments of published articles are reproduced in this text. Firstly, “The
Publication of the Astronomical Observations of Buenaventura Suárez SJ (1679–1750)
in European Scientific Journals,” published in Journal of Astronomical History and
Heritage 7 no. 2 (2004): 81–84 (Wayne Orchiston, James Cook University, improved the
original version with his editing). In the second place, “Names which he loved, and
things well worthy to be known’: Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Natural Histories of
Paraquaria and Rio de la Plata,” Science in Context 21, no. 1 (2008): 39–72—I wish to
thank Leo Corry (Tel-Aviv University) for his editorial help. Lastly, “The Experiments of
Ramón M. Termeyer SJ on the Electric Eel in the River Plate Region (c. 1760) and other
acknowledgements xiii

Early Accounts of Electrophorus electricus,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences

17 (2008): 160–174. Stanley Finger (Washington University), an expert on the history of
electric eels, was very helpful with his editorial remarks. Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, a
colleague at Universidad de San Martín, collaborated with me in the early stages of the
research on Buenaventura Suárez.
Gerardo Losada, Sergio Boada, and Fernando Santamaría, librarians at Colegio
Máximo, helped me throughout these years in more accounts than can be named.
Daniel Miño S.J. and Rodrigo Zarazaga S.J., colleagues at Colegio Máximo, kindly gave
me a hand in more than one occasion. Susana Brandariz, director of the Preservation
Laboratory of the Fondo Antiguo de la Compañía de Jesús in Argentina and Martha
Velázquez, former librarian at Colegio del Salvador (Buenos Aires) kindly facilitated
the localization and reproduction of manuscript materials. Jorge Flores, librarian at
the Instituto de Geografía, Universidad de Buenos Aires, helped with the reproduction
of one of the maps. The staff of the Map section of Biblioteca Nacional (Buenos Aires)
and the librarians of the Rare Book section of the same institution were also very help-
ful. My friend Roberto Cassaza, research librarian at the Biblioteca Nacional, also
helped me on several occasions. Fabián Alonso, Belén, and all the staff of the reading
rooms on floors 4 and 7 of Archivo General de la Nación (Buenos Aires) helped me to
localize maps and manuscripts. José Carlos Chiaramonte, former director of the
Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Emilio Ravignani (Universidad de Buenos
Aires), and the efficient staff of its library were very collaborative with the localization
of some items of secondary literature. Olatz Berazategui Olazábal promptly sent me
upon request a reproduction of a document from the Library of the Santuario de
Loiola (Azpeitia, Basque country). The staff at the Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu
generously allowed the reproduction of two images from a document held in the
Archive. The librarians of Museo Mitre (Buenos Aires) helped me with the localization
of the map in the cover of this book, which is reproduced here with permission of that
institution. Designer Fabio Massolo, generously collaborated on an honorary basis
with the drawings of the two original maps in the book. Many people helped me to
obtain bibliographical items at one point or another (I hope I do not forget anyone):
Esteban Bontempi (at that time at Karolinska University), José Funes S.J. (La Specola),
José Meirinhos (Universidade do Porto), Juan Pedro Garrahan (University of
Nottingham), Alejandro Palomo (Universidad Torcuato Di Tella), and Analía Busala
(Universidad de Buenos Aires).
I wish to thank Pablo Brescia, who invited me to give the key address on Jesuit natu-
ral history at the Meeting “Science in the Humanities-Humanities in Science,” held at
the University of South Florida on 2 March 2007 (also for his sending of some biblio-
graphical items). I am also grateful to Ignacio Silva (Oxford) for his invitation to give a
conference on “Jesuit Science in the Missions of Paraguay and Río de la Plata” at the
xiv acknowledgements

Seventh Latin American Conference on Science and Religion, held at Pontifícia

Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro, 2–4 October 2012.
Mordechai Feingold (CalTech), the director of Brill’s collection Scientific and
Learned Cultures and their Institutions, encouraged from the start the publication of
this book and understandingly helped me in many matters, for which I remain much
obliged to him. I also wish to express my sincere thanks to the Brill editors Sabine
Steenbeek, Michiel Thijssen, and Pelle Matla for their comprehensive help and assis-
tance all along the editorial process.
My friend Juan Garralda, a witness to the last years of this project, kindly heard
what I had to say in times of trouble. My wife María Natividad and our sons Ignacio
and Javier deserve a special mention, for they patiently tolerated the many strains and
stresses imposed upon our family life by a long-term project like this. For their uncon-
ditional support, I wish to express them my deepest gratitude.
List of Maps and Figures

map caption

1 Paraquaria and adjacent lands  11

2 The thirty Guaraní missions  12

figure caption

1.1 Sánchez Labrador, caraguatá, Paraguay natural, pt. 2, bk. 4, Paraquaria 17:
178v, ARSI. Reproduced with permission of the Society of Jesus  75
1.2 Sánchez Labrador, tero or teru-teru, Paraguay natural, pt. 3, bk.2,
Paraquaria 18: 185r, ARSI. Reproduced with permission of the Society of
Jesus  77
2.1 Énula campana, ink drawing in the manuscript of Pedro Montenegro’s
herbal held in the Archivo General de la Nación. Reproduced from the
edition of the codex published as idem, Materia médica misionera
(Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional, 1945)  133
3.1 “Carta del Gran Chaco e paesi confinanti . . .,” drawn by Joaquín Camaño,
S.J. This map is included in José Jolís, Saggio sulla storia naturale della
Provincia del Gran Chaco (Faenza, 1789). Map Collection, Biblioteca
Nacional (Buenos Aires)  168
3.2 “Paraquaria cum adjacentibus.” Original in Colegio del Salvador
(Buenos Aires). Reproduced from Carlos Leonhardt S.J., ed., Cartas
anuas de la Provincia del Paraguay, Chile y Tucumán de la Compañía de
Jesús (1609–1614). Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Instituto de
Investigaciones Históricas, Documentos para la Historia Argentina,
1927  170
3.3 Map in Pedro Lozano’s Descripción Chorographica del terreno, ríos, árboles
y animales de las dilatadísimas Provincias del Gran Chaco (Córdoba
[Spain]: Colegio de la Asunción, 1733). Its author was Antonio Machoni
S.J., procurator of Paraquaria in Rome and editor of the book. Map
Collection, Biblioteca Nacional (Buenos Aires)  172
3.4 Jean Baptiste Bourguinon d’Anville, “IHS / Le Paraguay, où les RR. PP. de la
Compagnie de Jésus ont répandu leurs Missions” (1733). In Lettres
édifiantes et curieuses (Paris, 1781), 9:254  173
3.5 Jean Baptiste Bourguinon d’Anville, “Carte du Chili Méridional, du Rio de
la Plata, des Patagons, et du Détroit de Magellan” (Venice, P. Santini, 1779).
Library of the Instituto de Geografía Romualdo Ardissone, Facultad de
Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires  182
xvi list of maps and figures

3.6 “Mappa Paraquariae, in multis a me correcta . . .,” drawn by Martin

Dobrizhoffer and published in vol. 2 of his Historia de Abiponibus
(Vienna: Kurzbeck, 1784). Library of the Instituto de Geografía Romualdo
Ardissone, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos
Aires  193
3.7 José Cardiel, “[Chart of the Patagonian coasts] according to the most
recent observations of the years 1745 and 1746” ([Carta de las costas
magallánicas] según las más recientes observaciones [del añ]o 1745 y
1746). Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires  195
3.8 José Cardiel, “IHS/Parte de la América Meridional en que trabaja el zelo
de los Religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús de la Provincia dicha del
Paraguai [sic],” in P. Calatayud, Tratado sobre la Provincia de la Compañía
de Jesús en el Paraguay, manuscript volume held in Archivo de Loyola,
Azpeitía  200
3.9 Copy made by the French naturalist Aimé Bonpland of an 1806 copy of a
1766 original map of the yerba plantations of the reduction of Jesús. The
map was drawn in order to settle a dispute with the town of Yuti. Archivo
Bonpland, Museo de Farmacobotánica, Facultad de Farmacia y
Bioquímica, Universidad de Buenos Aires  203
4.1 Buenaventura Suárez, Lunario de un siglo (Lisbon 1748). Page for the
first semester of 1750. Rare Book Section, Biblioteca Nacional
(Buenos Aires)  234
4.2 Sundial from the Missions, Museum of San Ignacio Miní (formerly in
Museo Histórico Nacional, Buenos Aires). The zoomorphic gnomon is a
plastic expression of Guaraní interpretation of a classic astronomical
instrument  256
5.1 Psoralea americana (culén). Drawing by Father Cesare Majoli in Filippo L.
Gilii and Gaspar Juárez S.J., Osservazioni Fitologiche sopra alcune piante
esotiche introdotte in Roma fate nell’anno 1788 (Roma: Arcangelo Casaletti,
1789)  272
5.2 Drawing by Termeyer in idem, Opuscoli scientifici d’entomologia, di fisica e
d’agricoltura. Vol 1. Milan: Stamperia del giornale italico di Carlo Dova,
1807  282
Abbreviations

AGN Archivo General de la Nación [Argentina], Buenos Aires.

APUG Archivio Storico, Pontificia Università Gregoriana, Rome.
ARSI Archivum Romanum Societatis Iesu, Rome.
BL British Library.
BNCR Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma.
DBI Dizionario biografico degli italiani. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia
italiana, 1960–.
DHCJ Charles O’Neill S.J. and Joaquín M. Domínguez S.J., eds. Diccionario
Histórico de la Compañía de Jesús. Histórico-Biográfico, 4 vols. Roma:
Institutum Historicum S.I., 2001; Madrid: Universidad Pontificia de
Comillas, 2001.
DSB Charles C. Gillispie, ed. Dictionary of Scientific Biography, 16 vols. in
8. New York: Scribner’s, 1981.
FACJA Fondo Antiguo de la Compañía de Jesús en Argentina. Colegio del
Salvador, Buenos Aires.
HIA Cayetano Bruno S.D.B. Historia de la Iglesia en la Argentina, 13 vols.
Buenos Aires: Editorial Don Bosco, 1966–1981.
HRNB Georg Markgraf. Historia rerum naturalium Brasiliae. In Willem
Piso and Georg Markgraf, Historia naturalis Brasiliae. Leiden:
Franciscus Hack, 1648; Amsterdam: Ludovicus Elzevier, 1648.
RS Royal Society.
Sommervogel Carlos Sommervogel S.J., ed. Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus.
Nouvelle édition, 10 vols. Bruxelles: Oscar Schepens, 1890–1900; Paris:
Alphonse Picard, 1890–1909.
Introduction

This book is an inquiry into the scientific activities of the Jesuits in the mission
towns (reductions) of historical Paraguay and the River Plate during the sev-
enteenth and eighteenth centuries.1 Jesuit science in Paraquaria was far from
episodic. As the following pages will hopefully make evident, it can be best
understood as a distinct tradition, in the sense that its practitioners were con-
scious of belonging to a religious polity which had its own learned referents
and networks of communication, a keen memory of its achievements, and a
project of future accomplishments that was torn to pieces in a matter of days.
The tradition of Jesuit investigation of nature in the southernmost reaches
of the Spanish empire began with Jesuit missionaries sending to Rome data
about comets and eclipses, was carried on with the development of a par-
ticular genre of natural history, and eventually diversified itself into several
branches of leaning: cartography, observational astronomy, herbal pharmacy,
experimental electricity, and botany.
The programmatic source of the Jesuits’ approach to the natural world of
Iberian America might be found in José de Acosta’s book, Natural and Moral
History of the New World. It is significant that this Renaissance scientific work
was originally conceived as an introduction to a missionary treatise that set
the standard for the Jesuit style of mission in Spanish America.2 European
missionaries threw themselves into the forests, grasslands, and deserts of the
New World and much of their science was related to exploration, surveying,
cataloguing, and describing the plants and animals of the land, all of which
they needed for reasons of survival and the propagation of their religious mes-
sage. But the natural histories that resulted from this enterprise, with one pos-
sible exception, never entirely fit the template of enlightened histoire naturelle.
I will argue that with their love of wonders and religious miracles, their hospi-
tality to native tongues, and their hesitatingly critical criteria of evidence, they

1 Paraguay and Río de la Plata are historical designations for the vast region encompassing the
southern cone of South America, with the exclusion of Chile. The Latin name of the Jesuit
province was Paraquaria.
2 José de Acosta, De natura noui orbis libri duo et De promulgatione Euangelii apud barbaros
siue De procuranda indorum salute libri sex (Salamanca: apud Guillelmum Foquel, 1588). The
two books on natural history were translated to Spanish and with the addition of five books
published as idem, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Seville: Juan de León, 1590). There
is a recent English translation: José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed.
Jane E. Mangan with introduction and commentary by Walter D. Mignolo, trans. Frances
López-Morilla (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004256774_��2

2 introduction

belong to the Baroque. The same can be said of the works on materia medica,
a belated product of the fertile school of sixteenth-century Spanish Humanist
medicine. In its attachment to a worldview on the brink of extinction, the
tradition of Jesuit science in Paraquaria proved to be a dead-end, just as the
missionary experiment that had been its condition of possibility. Although
most of the writings we will examine date from the eighteenth century, only
the late productions of the Jesuits in the Italian exile can be considered lesser
manifestations of the science of the Enlightenment as carried out in the coun-
tries of Catholic Europe. For the most, Jesuit science in Paraguay and Río de la
Plata can be best characterized as an expression of the Baroque Jesuit culture
that had its heyday in Rome, France, the Iberian domains, and the lands of the
Habsburg Empire during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.
One of the most distinctive traits of Jesuit science as practiced in the reduc-
tions was its relation to the knowledge of nature of the peoples among whom
the Jesuits lived and worked, such as the Guaraní and the tribes of the Chaco,
the valley covered by tropical forest situated between the eastern slopes of the
Andes and the Paraguay River.3 The Society of Jesus developed a missionary
style marked by the articulation of European forms of thought with native
categories and sensibilities. In consonance with this approach, Jesuit science
in Paraguay was configured upon what was basically a Western conceptual
matrix which processed and incorporated particular aspects of aboriginal lore.
One of the objectives of this book is to explore the different ways in which
the interactions between European sciences as practiced in Catholic Europe
and the representations of the natural world operative in aboriginal peoples
took place in the various areas of knowledge cultivated by the Jesuits. A sec-
tion (or part of it) in each of the chapters is dedicated to discuss the exchanges
between European science and indigenous practices and belief systems.

3 On the grounds of avoiding anachronism, English-speaking historians of science avoid the

use of the term “science” when referring to Early Modern times. I am not sure this stricture
should be applied to cultures in Romance languages. To begin with, the French Académie des
sciences was established in 1666, and its role as arbiter in things concerning the investigation
of nature in the Spanish world (in particular after Bourbon times, i.e., 1700 onwards) is well
known. The first edition of the Spanish dictionary published by the Real Academia Española
de la Lengua (1726–1739) grouped under the term ciencia the disciplines of the medieval uni-
versities: theology, philosophy, law, and medicine. See Diccionario de la lengua castellana,
1st ed., s.v. “ciencia.” The changes in the 1780 edition of the same work reflect the growing
influence of Enlightenment. Ciencia became “knowledge of human things as demonstrable
by certain principles, such as mathematics,” while the disciplines named in the first edition
were devalued as resting on “uncertain principles” (Diccionario de la lengua castellana, 2nd
ed., s.v. “ciencia”). The Jesuits of Paraguay used to refer to single disciplines, such as astron-
omy, electricity, materia medica, or natural history.
introduction 3

The missionaries expelled from Paraquaria in 1767 and sent to Italy were
deprived of their country—or, at least, of an adoptive homeland to which they
had become attached. With the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773,
they would also be dispossessed of their religious order. This exile situation
and vital destitution might account for the fact that their intellectual produc-
tion—for the most a continuation of the kind of writing they had been doing
in Paraquaria—took a new patriotic twist and was kindled by an enhanced
regional conscience. Some exiled Jesuits, such as Gaspar Juárez and Alonso
Frías, who having been born in the Río de la Plata thought of themselves as
americanos, actually tried to return to their mother country. In the meantime,
their work expressed the conscience of belonging to a scientific tradition from
which they could perhaps derive some sense of identity.
I hope the book will make a convincing case for the claim that the most
dynamic front of scientific learning in Paraquaria was situated in the missions.
While the students at the University of Córdoba (present-day Argentina) were
taught the eclectic natural philosophy that was characteristically Jesuit (basi-
cally Aristotelian with more or less elements of Cartesian and atomist science
as the teacher would admit), the scientific scene of the reductions was more
in line with the social circuits of communication and the instrumental and
experimental approaches of Early Modern science. Based in the Guaraní town
of San Cosme and San Damián, the astronomer Buenaventura Suárez sent
his observations to the Royal Society and translated a book which popular-
ized Newtonian ideas. Some of the maps drawn by the Jesuits were eventually
reworked and edited by the most prestigious French and English cartogra-
phers. Jesuits such as Sigismund Aperger, José Sánchez Labrador, and others
wrote the works for which they became famous in the mission towns, many of
which had considerable libraries.4
By encouraging scientific activities to be carried out in the missions, Jesuit
superiors and missionaries alike had in mind primarily religious goals. The book
discusses the particular ways through which science was ultimately related to
the work of evangelization of the Society of Jesus. In general lines and from
what can be judged from the available evidence, individual Jesuits were identi-
fied with this system of beliefs and harnessed their talents and abilities to their
apostolic travails. The ultimately religious goal of the Jesuits was mediated by
the pragmatic and urgent needs of the missionary situation. Life in the mis-
sions was rough. The constraints upon the degree of intellectual elaboration

4 It has been estimated that the number of books in the libraries of the missions in Paraquaria
ascended to around 56,000 volumes. See Martín Morales, La Librería Grande. El Fondo
Antiguo de la Compañía de Jesús en Argentina (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu,
2002), 16.
4 introduction

were great and there was not much leeway for excessive sophistications. As
a result, a spiritual pragmatism and a matter-of-fact approach to reality were
the prevailing attitudes, reflected in the plain and at times monotonous dis-
course of the scientific writings. Like the maps, handbooks of materia medica,
and tables containing the coordinates of the reductions, much of Jesuit sci-
ence in Paraquaria had a pragmatic purpose, which was instrumental to the
apostolic mission of the Fathers. In the brief conclusive chapter I will discuss
how empirical reference—in its wide spectrum of meanings—was one of the
epistemological hallmarks of Jesuit science in the reductions of Paraquaria.
These bare statements should certainly be nuanced and a few restrictive
clauses should perhaps be added to them, but I expect that after going through
the exposition and arguments, they will prove reasonably adequate as a gen-
eral characterization of Jesuit science in historical Paraguay and Río de la Plata.
Each of the chapters of this book is devoted to a single discipline, except for
the last one, which treats the activities of the Jesuits in Italy after the expulsion
as a whole. In the perusal of each field of activity I will focus on a small num-
ber of missionaries. This mode of proceeding will allow me to briefly explore
the articulation of the thematic with the biographical approach. The reason
for this strategy is historical: despite the fact that the missionaries worked as
members of a highly tight-knit organization and notwithstanding the fluid
networks of communication between the missions, colleges, and the differ-
ent stages of the hierarchical structure of the Society, it remains that Jesuits
worked on their own. Although their work usually reflects a consistent corpo-
rate style, it is also true that at times it impresses as highly individual.

1 Some Historiographical Remarks

Since the early 1980s historians of science in the English-speaking world have
given currency to the expression “Jesuit science.” This was not the result of any
particular enthusiasm about the Society of Jesus. It was one way, among many
others, through which critically-minded scholars heralding the advent of post-
modern times sough the revision of a canonical narrative which put so much
stock on the role of the Reformed Churches in the dawn of the New Science—
the famous thesis by sociologist of science Robert K. Merton regarding the role
of Puritanism in the “Scientific Revolution.” The continuing efforts to re-inter-
pret Galileo’s case, the coining of new expressions like “Baroque science,” and
the raising to the role of protagonists of characters who had so far been cast
as the villains of the story helped to redress the balance which, it was felt, had
introduction 5

been wrongly crystallized by d’Alembert in his prologue to the Encyclopédie.

The effort of these last three decades resulted in an enormous and rich out-
put, which has indeed provided us with a less anachronistic and richer picture
of the complexities of Early Modern science and the import of the involve-
ment of the Society of Jesus in the methodological and institutional transfor-
mations of natural philosophy and the resulting new image of the world.5
Cover terms like “Jesuit science” are useful notations, but because of the
multiple meanings they convey, they can also be misleading. There was a great

5 See “ ‘After Merton’: Protestant and Catholic Science in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” ed.
Rivka Feldhay and Yehuda Elkana, special issue, Science in Context 3, no. 1 (1989). For an
overall view on Catholic science (of which a fair portion was carried out by the members of
the Society of Jesus) see William Ashworth, “Catholicism and Early Modern Science,” in God
and Nature. Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David Lindberg and
Ronald Numbers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 136–166. See also the study
of Marcus Hellyer, Catholic Physics. Jesuit Natural Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Notre
Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). With his doctoral dissertation Steven Harris
was one of the first to frame Jesuit science as a “respectable” topic. See idem, “Jesuit Ideology
and Jesuit Science: Scientific Activity in the Society of Jesus, 1540–1773” (Ph.D. diss., University
of Wisconsin at Madison, 1988). Harris’s bibliographic review might be a good starting point
for all those wishing to enter the field of science in the Jesuit missions. See idem, “Jesuit
Scientific Activity in the Overseas Missions, 1540–1773,” Isis 96, no. 1 (2005): 71–79. Two collec-
tions of essays edited by Mordechai Feingold are by now standard references in the field. See
Mordechai Feingold, ed., The New Science and Jesuit Science (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003) and
idem, ed., Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2003).
Closer to our own research is the volume edited by Luis Millones Figueroa and Domingo
Ledezma, El saber de los jesuitas, historias naturales y el Nuevo Mundo (Frankfurt: Vervuert,
2005; Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2005) and Margaret R. Ewalt, Peripheral Wonders. Nature,
Knowledge, and Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco (Lewisburg: Bucknell
University Press, 2008). Andrés I. Prieto, Missionary Scientists. Jesuit Science in Spanish
South America, 1570–1810 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2011), recently published,
deals with the science in the Jesuit missions of the Andean region (Chile and Peru). Two
large collective volumes help to situate Jesuit science in a more general cultural outlook:
John O’Malley S.J. et al., eds., The Jesuits. Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1999) and idem, The Jesuits II. Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts
1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006). For Jesuit physics and astronomy see
John L. Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries: a Study of Early Modern Physics
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979) and idem, The Sun in the Church. Cathedrals as
Solar Observatories (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999). Los jesuitas y la cien-
cia. Los límites de la razón, ed. José Luis Bermeo, special issue, Artes de México, no. 82 (2005)
presents an overview of Jesuit science, with emphasis on Spanish America and contributions
mostly from Iberian American and Continental scholars.
6 introduction

diversity of themes, methods, and settings in the scientific activities the Jesuits
cultivated all over the planet in Early Modern times. Certainly, there were some
privileged subjects of research, such as astronomy, cartography, experimental
physics, and medical botany.6 An unmistakable family air hovers over the kind
of science carried out by the Jesuits in far apart geographical locations. But as
the much investigated history of Jesuit science in China demonstrates, there
were also local peculiarities.7 I hope it will be evident that the kind of science
the Jesuits cultivated in historical Paraguay and Río de la Plata was on the one
hand related to the universal pattern of the Society and on the other can be
best seen as an answer to local needs.
For reasons very different from those that prompted the recent wave of
research on Jesuit science, during the decades of 1930–1960 an Argentine Jesuit
historian undertook a vast research program aimed at reevaluating the cul-
tural and scientific contributions of the members of the Society of Jesus in the
Río de la Plata. Guillermo Furlong Cardiff, graduated from Georgetown, sought
to combat the then current historiographical view, fed by various currents of
anti-clerical opinion, according to which the alleged cultural waste that sig-
naled the colonial period of Argentine history was the result of Jesuit obscu-
rantism. Furlong may well be pardoned for an exaggerated enthusiasm which
saw in the missions of Paraguay the equivalent of a New World Athens, enlight-
ened and pious at the same time. He was the first to discover, collect, and edit
an amazing hoard of documents, and as any explorer entering a new land, he
was perhaps dazzled at the brightness of his own findings.8 But notwithstand-
ing his encomiastic discourse and somewhat uncritical historical approach, he
worked indefatigably, had the instincts of a scholar and, more to the point,
he did not miss the mark.

6 See Steven Harris, “Confession-Building, Long Distance Networks, and the Organization of
Jesuit Science,” Early Modern Science and Medicine 1, no. 3 (1996): 287–318 and idem “Long-
Distance Corporations, Big Science, and the Geography of Knowledge,” Configurations 6,
no. 2 (1998): 269–304.
7 See for example E. Bretschneider, “Early European Researches in the Flora of China,”
Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, n. s. 15 (1880): 1–194; Francisco
Rodrigues, Jesuítas portugueses: astrónomos na China, 1583–1805 (Macao: Instituto Cultural de
Macao, 1990); Benjamin Elman, On Their Own Terms. Science in China, 1550–1900 (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Florence C. Hsia, Sojourners in a Strange Land. Jesuits
and their Scientific Missions in Late Imperial China (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2009).
8 He resumed his many research papers and books on Jesuit science in the Río de la Plata in
Guillermo Furlong S.J., Historia social y cultural del Río de la Plata, 1536–1819, vol. 3, El trans-
plante cultural: ciencia (Buenos Aires: TEA, 1969).
introduction 7

From a historiographical perspective, Jesuit science in Paraquaria could

be interpreted as a chapter of science in Spanish America only with so many
qualifications that the resulting notion would have little significance. Funding,
networks of communication, research traditions, education, targets, goals, and
personnel, all these things pertained to the Society of Jesus, whose relations
with the secular colonial power were frequently delicate and at times openly
conflictive. This does not mean, of course, that Jesuit science in Paraquaria
was an isolated phenomenon. It goes without saying that Jesuit missionary
growth accompanied imperial Spanish expansion into the territories of the
New World. We will see that there were cases in which the interests of the
Jesuits and the crown coincided and others in which they were at loggerheads.
The Guaraní reductions were far away from any important center of colonial
power. There was no other higher education in the country but that provided
by the Jesuits. It was just “the world of the missions,” secluded from the rest
of the population—that was the very idea of “reduction.” As a border society,
they were unstable. Missions were being moved constantly from one place to
another out of the vagaries of armed conflicts and in look for a better settle-
ment. The style of science carried out in them was functional to this kind of
frontier life.
The number of Spanish Jesuits devoted to scientific work in Paraquaria was
not large. Many of those who engaged in scientific pursuits had been born in
South America or were Belgians, Germans, Italians, English, or from the vari-
ous peoples that constituted the Habsburg Empire. Out of the 2106 Jesuits that
were listed at one point or another as members of the province of Paraquaria,
little more than half were Spaniards, 25% were born in South America and
the rest were non-Spanish Europeans (Italians, Flemish, Austrians, Germans,
French, and others).9 True to the character of the Society, Jesuit science in
Paraquaria had a marked international flavor.

9 At first, the Spanish superiors denied to non-Spanish Jesuits permission to travel to Paraguay
and Río de la Plata (in 1651 there was even an attempt at banishing those who had arrived).
This restriction was a result of the policy of hermetic closure of the Spanish possessions in
the New World. By royal cédula of 1659 foreign Jesuits got the right to stay and during the last
three decades of the seventeenth century non-Spanish subjects of the Spanish king (Flemish
and Italians) were allowed to enter the Río de la Plata. In 1664, 1674, and 1695 a quota of
one-third of “foreigners” was established. See Ernesto J. Maeder, Aproximación a las misiones
guaraníticas (Buenos Aires: EDUCA, 1996), 84.
8 introduction

2 The Jesuits in Paraguay and the River Plate

The story of the Jesuits in Paraguay has been told dozens of times by the Jesuits
themselves and by their enemies, in popular and scholarly narratives, in pam-
phlets and thick volumes, in verse and prose.10 If I begin this book with a few
pages devoted to rehearse it, it is for the reason that I have learned a lesson
from the writers of the Society of Jesus in Paraguay: in order to fully appreciate
a tale, we have first to get a glimpse of its setting. Paraquaria has been seen as
a mirage of Baroque splendor in the midst of the luxuriant vegetation of the
subtropical forest, a Christian commonality evocative of the philosophically
ordered Republic of Plato, of Thomas Moro’s Utopia, of Tommaso Campanella’s
City of the Sun.11 The mission towns organized and administered by the Jesuits
in Paraguay were perceived as a wonder by the imagination of contemporary
savants, such as Montesquieu, Buffon, and Raynal, kindled by visions of the
Rousseaunian bon sauvage living in rustic plenitude under the paternal super-
vision of benevolent priests.12 The reducciones of historical Paraguay, the River
Plate and Upper Peru (present-day Bolivia) were the living core of the complex
of the religious, economic, and educational institutions which the Jesuits built
up in the province of Paraquaria. This geographical and administrative unit of

10 Since this book is concerned with Jesuit science, we will address ethnographic questions
only insofar as they impinge on our central topic. Those interested in an ethno-historical
approach should consult Bartomeu Melià S.J., El guaraní conquistado y reducido. Ensayos
de etnohistoria (Asunción: Centro de Estudios Antropológicos, Universidad Católica,
1986); Barbara Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2003); and Guillermo Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones de
guaraníes (Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2009). See also the collection of papers in Guillermo
Wilde, ed., Saberes de la conversión. Jesuitas, indígenas e imperios coloniales en las fron-
teras de la Cristiandad (Buenos Aires: Editorial SB, 2011), which attempts at presenting a
sampling of new approaches to the historiography of the Jesuit missions in Paraquaria.
11 For the historiography of the Utopian interpretation of the Paraguay reductions, see
Alberto Armani, Ciudad de Dios y Ciudad del Sol (Mexico, D.F.: FCE, 1996), 1–15.
12 The philosophes answered contrastingly to the Jesuit experience in Paraguay. The ideal
of the good savage and the building of a supposedly communistic ideal state were to be
praised. On the other hand, there was the allegedly despotic tutelage of the priests over
the Guaraní. The autonomy of the reductions, which seemed to defy the absolutism of the
crown, was also a cause of scandal. In his Essai sur les moeurs and in Candide, Voltaire was
strongly critical of the reductions. Diderot, in the Supplement au Voyage de Bougainville,
launched the most scathing anathemas against the Paraguay missions, comparing them
to a clerical Sparta. See A. Duméril, “Influence des jésuites considérés comme mission-
naires sur le mouvement des idées au XVIIIe siècle,” Mémoires de l’Académie des sciences,
arts et belles-lettres de Dijon, Section des lettres, 3rd series, 2 (1874): 1–33.
introduction 9

the Society of Jesus, created in the first years of the seventeenth century, com-
prehended the territories of Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, eastern Bolivia, and
southwestern Brazil. The Fathers arrived in those lands in the 1580s, but their
scattered efforts, parallel to those of famous Franciscan missionaries, such as
Fr. Francisco Solano (1549–1610) and Fr. Luis de Bolaños (1549–1629), were at
first discouraging. With the appointment of Diego de Torres (1551–1638) as the
first Jesuit provincial, the first missions began to be established.13 The reduc-
tions allowed the Jesuits to segregate the Guaraní from Spanish colonial soci-
ety in order to protect them from what they saw as the scandalous way of life
of the settlers, while instructing them in the Christian doctrine. This mission-
ary system, with antecedents in the aldeias of Brazil and the doctrinas of Juli
(Peru), succeeded beyond any expectations the first missionaries could have
harbored. Theirs was an expedient solution which took account of the circum-
stances and marshaled the available resources. But it was also an imaginative
creation with a dimension of “newness” that answered to the challenges of
what, after little more than a century after its discovery, was still the New World.
By 1732, at the peak of the population curve, more than 140,000 Guaraní
lived in the reductions.14 The number of Jesuits was comparatively small. In
1692 there were 249 in the whole province, out of which 73 were established in
the missions.15 Besides the famous “thirty towns” of the Guaraní, which con-
stituted the strong core of the missionary system of Paraquaria, there were
several clusters of reductions, the most famous of which was the Chiquitos mis-
sions in Santa Cruz de la Sierra (present-day Bolivia). The Jesuits also founded
reductions among groups of “wild” (montaraces) Guaraní, among the Lules
of Tucumán (central region of Argentina), and a few of uneven success with
the nomadic, horse-riding Guaycurú tribes of the Chaco, west of the Paraguay
River (Abipones, Mocoví and others). Despite fragmentary attempts, the peo-
ples of the Pampas and northern Patagonia (known as Pampas, Serranos, and
Puelches) proved refractory to mission life.16

13 For the dates of the Jesuits of Paraquaria and the spelling of their names I have used Hugo
Storni, Catálogo de los jesuitas de la provincia del Paraguay (Cuenca del Plata), 1585–1768
(Roma: Institutum Historicum S.I., 1980); for Jesuits other than those of the Province of
Paraguay, I utilized DHCJ.
14 Ernesto J. Maeder and Alfredo S. Bolsi, “La población de las misiones guaraníes,” Estudios
Paraguayos 2, no. 1 (1974): 125.
15 Magnus Mörner, The Political and Economic Activities of the Jesuits in the La Plata
Region; the Hapsburg Era, trans. Albert Read (Stockholm: Victor Pettersons Bokindustri
Aktiebolag, 1953), 98.
16 See Kristine L. Jones, “Warfare, Reorganization, and Readaptation at the Margins of
Spanish Rule: the Southern Margin (1573–1882),” in The Cambridge History of the Native
10 introduction

The missionary landscape was extremely mobile as towns were raised only
to be amalgamated or destroyed by Brazilian slave hunters or groups of bel-
ligerent natives. Large political and military scenarios, like the one staged by
the boundary treaty of 1750 between Spain and Portugal, conditioned the life of
the missions, which was also deeply affected by natural catastrophes and epi-
demics. New aboriginal groups were attracted to live in reductions and many
towns shifted their location in search of a better geographical situation. Jesuits
pushed the boundaries of the territory surveyed by Spanish adelantados and
engaged in missionary expeditions which had at the same time the charac-
ter of pioneering geographical campaigns. The other side of all the traveling
and exploring was the Jesuit effort to establish urban settlements. In the cit-
ies, the Fathers founded several colleges, among them the Colegio Máximo in
Córdoba, which in 1614 became a university approved by a royal cédula in 1622
(the fourth to be created in Spanish America). To this should be added the
building of churches, residences and other facilities.17 This complex enterprise
rested on the production of vast estancias, like those in Córdoba, manned by
black slaves and geared to the raise of cattle, mules, and sheep.18 The missions,
which fell under the jurisdiction of the local bishop and the royal authorities
(governors), had independent and self-sustaining pre-capitalist economies
based on cultivation and trade.
The huge “Christian Republic” of Paraguay came to naught in 1767. The
expulsion of the Jesuits from the Spanish possessions in South America was
ordered by the Bourbon king of Spain Charles III, in what has been understood
as an episode of regalism fostered by the same complex of ideological motives
and intrigues that eventually moved Pope Clement XIV to suppress the Society
in 1773.19 Anti-Jesuit feeling had grown in Paraguay at a pace that paralleled the

Peoples of the Americas, vol. 3, bk. 2, South America, ed. Frank Salomon and Stuart B.
Schwartz (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 138–187, in particular
138–165.
17 See Joaquín Gracia S.J., Los jesuitas en Córdoba (Buenos Aires, Mexico, D.F.: Espasa-Calpe,
1940), 183–197.
18 See Nicholas P. Cushner, Jesuit Ranches and the Agrarian Development of Colonial
Argentina 1650–1767 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983).
19 For a traditional account of the expulsión see Pablo Hernández S.J., El extrañamiento
de los jesuitas del Río de la Plata y de las misiones del Paraguay por decreto de Carlos III
(Madrid: Victoriano Suárez, 1908). Challenging this view, which stressed the role of anti-
Jesuitic intrigues among the ministers of Charles III, Mörner underlined the regalism of
Charles III. See idem, “The Expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and Spanish America in
1767 in Light of Eighteenth-Century Regalism,” The Americas 23, no. 2 (1966): 156–164.
introduction 11

map 1 Paraquaria and adjacent lands.

prosperity of the reductions, eventually resulting in large socio-political move-

ments such as the episode of Bishop Cárdenas and the revolt of the comuneros.
A long, bloody, and twisted conflict took place in the years 1644–1651 between
the Jesuits and the flamboyant Franciscan Bishop of Asunción Bernardino de
Cárdenas (1579–1668), who sided with the Creole oligarchy of Paraguay. Almost
a century later, from 1721 to 1735, the comuneros posed a new and greater threat
to the reductions. It was also a protracted and cruel fight between the Jesuits and
12 introduction

map 2 The thirty Guaraní missions.

the magnates of Paraguay, fueled by the economic competition in the produc-

tion of yerba mate or Paraguayan tea.20 The Creole elite of Asunción looked
askance at the enviable political autonomy of the Jesuit reductions, their com-
mercial entrepreneurship, their Indian militias armed with gunpowder weap-

20 For factual accounts of the episode of Bishop Cárdenas and the revolt of the comuneros,
see HIA 3: 289–334 and 4: 202–259, and Philip Caraman S.J., The Lost Paradise, an Account
of the Jesuits in Paraguay, 1607–1768 (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1975), 82–98.
introduction 13

ons, and their opposition to their own economic interests.21 The religious,
educational, and social decline experienced in the Rio de la Plata after the expul-
sion of the members of the Society of Jesus reveal to what point the Jesuits con-
stituted the backbone of colonial culture in the region. For the expulsos, the
exile meant the beginning of a precarious existence in Faenza and other Italian
cities, where the former missionaries languished melancholically or tried to
elaborate on their experiences through far-reaching intellectual endeavors.22

3 A Brief Survey of Events

The Jesuit province of Paraquaria, founded by Father Superior General Claudio

Acquaviva (1581–1615) in 1604, broadly comprehended the present-day repub-
lics of Paraguay, Argentina, Uruguay, south of Brazil, and Chile, which was seg-
regated from it in 1625. Jesuit presence in the region dated from the end of
the sixteenth century. Two missionary Jesuits had arrived in the region from
Peru in 1585 called in by the bishop of Tucumán, the Portuguese Dominican
friar Francisco de Vitoria (d. 1592).23 Two years later, the Spanish Juan Saloni
(1540–1599), the Irish Thomas Fields (1549–1625), and the Portuguese Manuel
Ortega (1560–1622) came from Brazil and began working in Paraguay. Other
Jesuit missionaries established themselves in Córdoba, which would eventu-
ally become the learned centre of the Society of Jesus in the country.24 General

21 In the face of the attacks of the bandeirantes, the Spanish administration granted the
use of firearms to the Guaraní by cédulas of 1640 and 1642, and royal provision of 1646. In
1661 the permission was cancelled. The cédula of 25 July 1679 revoked that of 1661 and the
Guaraní were able to use firearms until the expulsion of the Jesuits. See Pablo Hernández
S.J., Organización social de las doctrinas guaraníes de la Compañía de Jesús (Barcelona:
Gustavo Pili, 1913), 1:170–183. For a synthesis of the occasions in which the Guaraní served
as militia for the Spanish authorities, see Guillermo Furlong S.J., Los jesuitas y la cultura
rioplatense, 2nd ed. (Buenos Aires: Huarpes, 1946), 215–216 and Lía Quarleri, Rebelión y
guerra en las fronteras del Plata. Guaraníes, jesuitas e imperios coloniales (Buenos Aires:
FCE, 2009), 81–91.
22 This question is developed in chapter 5.
23 In 1563, the new gobernación of Tucumán was carved out of the Viceroyalty of Peru,
which at that time occupied almost the whole of Spanish South America. The rest of the
southern territories of the viceroyalty constituted another gobernación called indistinctly
either Paraguay or Río de la Plata (in 1617, it was split in the governorships of Paraguay and
Río de la Plata).
24 Unless stated otherwise, Córdoba refers to the city in the gobernación of Tucumán
(present-day Argentina).
14 introduction

Acquaviva decreed that the province should depend from Peru and ultimately
from the Jesuit Spanish Assistancy.25 But the option of a Brazilian Jesuit prov-
ince—depending from the Portuguese Assistancy—did not die until 1607,
when Father Provincial Diego de Torres arrived with twelve Spanish and Italian
companions, so that the territory entered into the orbit of the Spanish Jesuits
once and for all.26
During the first decades of the seventeenth century Jesuits colleges com-
menced to be founded in the main cities of Paraguay and Río de la Plata:
Córdoba and Asunción (1609), Tucumán and Santiago del Estero (1613), Buenos
Aires, Santa Fe, and Mendoza (1617).27 Eventually, eleven colleges would be
established in the province.28 Missionary activity focused from the onset on
the foundation of reductions. These rested on a mixed economy, which had
communistic aspects but allowed for private property and production. They
were governed by native officials, in the model of the municipal institutions of
Spanish America. In contrast with the already existing Franciscan reductions,
the Jesuit towns—with some exceptions at the beginning—were exempt from
encomienda, which consisted in granting a Spanish subject (born in Spain or
a member of the Creole aristocracy) a number of aborigines who worked for
him in conditions of servitude in exchange for being Christianized, educated,
and protected.29
The first planned missionary campaign took place in 1609, when Father
Torres, backed by the bishop of Asunción and the governor Hernandarias
de Saavedra (1561–1634), sent three groups of missionaries from Asunción in
three directions: northeast to the Guayrá, southeast to the Paraná River, and
southwest to the Chaco. In October 1611 and again in January 1612, Francisco
de Alfaro, visitador (inspector) of the Audiencia of Charcas (the tribunal in
Upper Peru, from which depended the governorships of Tucumán and Río de
la Plata-Paraguay) proclaimed his now famous ordinances, in whose making it
is highly likely that Father Torres had a hand. They prohibited the enslavement
and personal service (encomienda) of the natives in the Jesuit reductions, regu-
lated the mita, and granted them substantial exceptions from taxes (e.g., the

25 Assistancies (asistencias) are the large geographical, administrative, and religious units in
which the Society of Jesus is divided in the world.
26 Mörner, Political and Economic Activities of the Jesuits, 30–32.
27 Ibid., 34.
28 Córdoba, Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, Asunción, Corrientes, Tucumán, Tarija, Santiago del
Estero, San Miguel de Tucumán, Salta, and La Rioja.
29 For the Franciscan missions, see Louis Necker, Indiens Guarani et chamanes franciscains.
Les premières reductions du Paraguay (Paris: Anthropos, 1979).
introduction 15

Guaraní who entered the reductions did not pay taxes for a period of grace of
a decade, later extended to two). Alfaro’s ordinances decreed that the authori-
ties of the Guaraní reductions should be the caciques while it prohibited the
access of Spaniards to the towns.30 This legislation was the beginning of the
protracted conflict between the Jesuits and the Creole and Spanish encomen-
deros in Asunción, whose agricultural production was based on the exploita-
tion of native labor.
The Guayrá is the region east of the high Paraná River, between the Iguazú
River to the south and the Paranapanema River to the north (present-day estate
of Paraná, Brazil). The first two reductions in this vast territory were founded
by Fathers Simone Mascetta (1577–1658) and Giuseppe Cataldini (1571–1653).
Between 1622 and 1629 another eleven reductions to the east of the Guayrá
were created under the leadership of the Peruvian Antonio Ruiz de Montoya
(1585–1652), who would eventually become an expert in the Guaraní language
and was one of the outstanding figures in the early period of the missions.31
San Ignacio Guazú, the first mission in the lands neighboring the Paraná
and Uruguay Rivers, was founded in 1610.32 From 1615 onwards six reductions
were established in that region. The great figure of this missionary thrust was
the Creole Jesuit Roque González de Santa Cruz (1576–1628), born in Asunción
and active from 1610 until he was killed by chief Nheçu in 1628.33
From 1611 to 1641 the missions in the Guayrá underwent the continuous
attack of the bandeirantes, private military bands of Creoles from São Paulo
supported by thousands of Tupí who looked for slaves to be carried off to work
in the sugar mills of the Brazilian littoral. The worst onslaughts took place in
1629 and 1632; in the attack of 1630, the paulistas or mamelucos, as they were
also called, destroyed almost all the Jesuit reductions of the region.34 Those
who were left moved out south in what came to be called “the great migration”
(1631–1632). In this epic journey, more than ten thousand Guaraní from the

30 See HIA 2: 453–489. There were two kinds of service. The yanaconas lived in the house or
land property of the Spanish person to which they had been assigned. The mitayos lived
in their own towns and worked for a period or turn (mita) (this was an institution of the
Inca empire, adapted by the Spanish). For the history of taxation on the Guaraní in the
reductions, see Hernández, Organización social, 1:142–166.
31 See Guillermo Furlong, Misiones y sus pueblos de guaraníes (Buenos Aires: [Ediciones
Theoria], 1962), 102–107.
32 By the Jesuit Marcial de Lorenzana (1565–1632) and the secular priest Hernando de la
Cueva, with the people of the Guaraní cacique Arapizandú. See Furlong, Misiones, 92–102.
33 It has been argued that much of the organization of the reductions was due to the insights
of Roque González. See Melià, El guaraní conquistado y reducido, 127–155.
34 Furlong, Misiones, 117–127.
16 introduction

towns of Loreto and San Ignacio (the two surviving reductions) came down
the Paraná River in crafts and on foot through the jungle toward the missions
already established in the south. Led by Ruiz de Montoya, only half of them
arrived.35
In the region of Itatín (upstream the Paraguay River) the peak of missionary
activity took place during the decade of the 1630s and was mostly in the hands
of Flemish Jesuits, such as Josse van Suerck (1600–1666). But the flourishing
was short-lived. Besieged by the bandeirantes and the Guaycurú, by 1635 only
two missions were left, which eventually were transferred to the south of the
Tebicuary River (an affluent of the Paraguay).
In the Tape region (present-day state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil) ten
reductions were founded in the 1630s—four of them along the Ibicuy River
and six along the Jacuy River. The pioneer activity in the Tape was also due
to Roque González (he founded ten reductions in all). Between 1636 and
1638 the raids of the mamelucos, led by Raposo Tabares (1598–1658), turned
against these mission towns. Six of them were compelled to move out.36 But
in 1639 the Guaraní armed with firearms provided by the Jesuits and led by
cacique Nicolás Neenguirú won a victory against the bandeirantes in Caazapá-
miní, in the course of which Father Diego de Alfaro (b. 1596) died. Finally, in
March 1641, the Guaraní militia of the reductions repelled the bandeirantes in
the battle of Mbororé, a series of fluvial and land combats in the Uruguay basin
which marked the final defeat of the slave traders and curtailed Portuguese
westward expansion.
By then, of the 38 missions existing at the beginning of the wave of attacks
of the bandeirantes only twenty were left. Of these, ten towns were situated
around the Paraná River and ten along the west coast of the Uruguay River.
Those in the vicinity of the Paraná were San Ignacio Guazú, Encarnación de
Itapúa, Corpus, San Ignacio Miní, Loreto, Candelaria, San Carlos, Santa Ana,
San José, Santos Cosme y Damián. The missions of the Uruguay River were
Concepción, San Francisco Javier, Yapeyú, Santa María la Mayor, San Nicolás,
Mártires, La Cruz, Santo Tomé, San Miguel, and Apóstoles. In addition, there
were the two towns transferred from the Itatín: Santa María de Fe and Santiago.
It was not absolutely clear which missions pertained to the bishopric of
Asunción and which to Buenos Aires. Since 1640 and for almost four decades,
there were no more foundations.37

35 Caraman, The Lost Paradise, 64–68; Mörner, Political and Economic Activities, 90–91.
36 Furlong, Misiones, 132–134.
37 Maeder, Aproximación a las misiones, 33–34.
introduction 17

Between 1682 and 1706, seven new reductions were created to the east of the
Uruguay River, to which should be added four new reductions to the south of
the Paraguay River, established between 1685 and 1718. The missions east of the
Uruguay expanded toward Rio Grande do Sul, a vast plain with immense herds
of wild cattle which eventually turned into the basis of the large Jesuit estan-
cias of the region. As a result of some transfers and amalgamations, by the end
of the decade of 1710s there were thirty Guaraní towns: eight in what is now the
Republic of Paraguay, 15 in present-day Argentina and seven in Rio Grande do
Sul, Brazil.38 By the first decade of the eighteenth century, 100,000 Guaraní, 150
Jesuits and 1300 black slaves lived in the missions. The Jesuits purchased black
slaves from the English South Sea Company in Buenos Aires. In 1767 there
were a total of 3164 slaves working for the Society of Jesus in Paraguay: 1043 in
Córdoba, 381 in Buenos Aires and 570 in Asunción.39
The Chiquitos missions in the northern Chaco occupied what is today the
department of Santa Cruz, in eastern Bolivia. Since the foundation of the col-
lege of Tarija (1690) four reductions had been created in the period from 1692
to 1699. Between 1724 and 1745 the Jesuits established another four reductions
of Zamucos and Guarayos. By 1776 there were ten missions of Chiquitos, with
23,000 inhabitants.40 Despite many attempts, a route between Paraguay and
the lands of the Chiquitos could not be found until the eve of the expulsion, so
that these missions were never entirely integrated in the province of Paraguay.41
Seen from a distance, the Jesuit missionary movement in Paraguay and the
Río de la Plata appears as a non-stoppable expansion. But there were also set-
backs.42 In what concerns the Mbyás, the Jesuits established the reduction
of Jesús (1685), which moved three times and was finally integrated into the
mission towns of the Paraná. The nomadic and horse-riding Charrúas, who

38 Ibid., 44–51.
39 Cushner, Jesuit Ranches, 99–113.
40 Maeder, Aproximación a las misiones, 56–57. Cf. Caraman, The Lost Paradise, 170–188.
41 Mörner, Political and Economic Activities, 97–98. For the Chiquitos missions see Werner
Hoffmann, Las misiones jesuiticas entre los chiquitanos (Buenos Aires: FECIC, 1979), which
includes the brief report of Father Julian Knogler (1717–1772) and three letters of Father
Martin Schmid (1694–1772).
42 For example, the failed missions of the Guayanás, up the Eastern Paraná, in the 1720s and
1730s, and the several fruitless attempts at founding reductions with Tobatines during the
eighteenth century.
18 introduction

peopled Uruguay, Entre Ríos, and the south of Corrientes, never accepted the
reduction regime.43
The Guaycurú were a group of nomadic and horse-riding peoples who
used to attack the Guaraní missions. Between 1743 and 1765 the Jesuits par-
tially succeeded in establishing some reductions among them. There were
four reductions of Abipones (in Santa Fe, north of Córdoba, Chaco, and
Formosa), two reductions of Mocoví in Santa Fe, and the above mentioned
reduction of Mbyás.44 Late in the eighteenth century several missions sprang
up in Tucumán.45 During this century, conflict was focused on the lands east
of the Uruguay River, in what is today the state of Rio Grande (Brazil). After
the destruction of the missions of the Tape by the mamelucos, the Jesuits local-
ized an enormous herd of wild cattle in the southeastern plains of present-day
Uruguay (vaquería del mar). With cattle from this huge reserve, they set up
the vaquería de los pinares in Rio Grande, which was the source of beef cattle
for all the missions east of the Uruguay River founded between 1682 and 1706.
By 1715, 100,000 heads of cattle were taken annually from the vaquería to the
reductions. The Portuguese, in their advance southwards encroaching into the
territory that according to the Treaty of Tordesillas belonged to Spain, founded
in 1680 the city of Colonia del Sacramento on the northern shore of the Río
de la Plata. The expanse of land that today constitutes Rio Grande do Sul and
Uruguay became a meeting ground of conflicting imperial interests associ-
ated with the exploitation of the reserves of beef cattle. Against the advance
of the Portuguese toward the River Plate, the Jesuits sided with the authorities
of Buenos Aires, who were eager to use the vaquería del mar, pressed by an
increasing demand of leather for the French and British market. On account
of this alliance, the Guaraní served as militia in the sieges of Colonia by the
Spanish army of Buenos Aires (1681 and 1705).46
The most important single episode in the history of the Paraguay missions
during the eighteenth century was perhaps the Treaty of 1750 between Spain
and Portugal.47 The former received the much disputed city of Colonia in

43 In 1682 Father Francisco García (1686–1731) established the reduction of Jesús Maria,
which survived until 1708. See Maeder, Aproximación a las misiones, 58.
44 Ibid., 59. See also James Schofield Sager, The Chaco Mission Frontier. The Guaycuruan
Experience (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2000), 3–39.
45 One of Vilelas in Santiago del Estero (1735), another of Tobas in Jujuy and others of
Isistines and Toquistines, Lules and Omoampas in Salta. See Maeder, Aproximación a las
misiones, 59–60.
46 Ibid., 44–51; Mörner, Political and Economic Activities, 122–124.
47 For the treaty of 1750 and the ensuing Guarani wars, see the exhaustive study by Quarleri,
Rebelión y guerra en las fronteras del Plata.
introduction 19

exchange for the territories east of the Uruguay River, in which thrived seven
Jesuit reductions with their estancias, yerba plantations, and a population
of around 30,000 Guaraní. The Fathers tried all the diplomatic ways at their
disposal to get the Spanish court to annul the treaty while trying to keep the
Guaraní from revolt. The treaty, a brainchild of Alexandre de Gusmão (1695–
1753), secretary of king João V, was signed on the Spanish side by Minister José
de Carvajal y Lancaster (1698–1754), Secretary of State of Ferdinand VI. Lope
Luis Altamirano (1698–1767), Carvajal’s confessor, was the Jesuit visitador in
charge of making effective the moving out of the seven towns. Open rebel-
lion broke out in February 1753, when a Guaraní patrol stopped a party in
charge of establishing the limits. A month later, Father Provincial José Barreda
(1687–1763) formally renounced to the seven towns. At that stage the uprising
of the Guaraní was inevitable. In 1754 they managed to defeat a joint Spanish-
Portuguese force, but two years later they were routed by the Iberian conjoint
armies. By 1757 two thirds of the inhabitants of the seven towns had been
redistributed in other missions. Eventually, the Treaty of Pardo (1761) annulled
the Treaty of Madrid. Few years later, in 1767, the Jesuits were expelled from
Paraguay and the River Plate by Charles III.

4 Life in the Reductions

The famous Swiss anthropologist and human rights activist Alfred Métraux,
who did field work in Argentina in the early 1930s, claimed that the Jesuit “mis-
sions may well serve as examples of reasonable and humane colonization”.48
The Guaraní and other peoples were induced to enter mission life by pacific
means. The missionaries relied on already converted groups, on the lure of iron
objects or the need of the natives for protection from the Spanish encomende-
ros or Portuguese bandeirantes. Much of the magnetic attraction the Jesuits
exercised on the Guaraní depended on the aura of shamanic power that sur-
rounded them.49 This was, of course, a double-faced and dubious asset, for
their reputation as magicians won them the mortal enmity of the Guaraní sha-
mans. Used to keep large polygamous families—a base of power, prestige, and
labor force—the shamans fiercely opposed the white Fathers, for it was usually

48 Alfred Métraux, “Jesuit Missions in South America,” in Handbook of South American

Indians, ed. Julian H. Steward, vol. 5, The Comparative Ethnology of South American
Indians (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949), 645.
49 Ibid., 647; Melià, El guaraní conquistado y reducido, 17–30.
20 introduction

the native women who sought the protection of the reduction.50 It has also
been argued that the devastating epidemics brought to the Amerindians by
European settlers should be counted as a decisive factor at the time of explain-
ing the reason why the aborigines accepted entering reduction life.51
Life in the reductions was strongly ritualized and lived at the rhythm of the
ecclesiastical daily and yearly calendar.52 Although there was a local govern-
ment patterned on the municipal administration of a Spanish town, real author-
ity was in the hands of the Fathers (each reduction was run by two priests,
the cura and its vicario or associate). Municipal offices were held by caciques,
of which there could be as much as fifty in one reduction.53 In the Spanish
regime, caciques were considered petty nobles and were awarded material
privileges (such as exemption from taxes) and symbols of high status, like the
right to carry a sword o a preferred seat at church.54 Administration of justice
was in the hands of the missionaries and punishments tended to be moder-
ate: flogging, or for serious offences, serving a term in jail. There was no death
penalty.55 Priests were assigned to the reductions by the superiors of the
Society, not by the local bishops (although there were some formal constraints
on the nominations).
The basic plan of the reductions was a quadrangle: the buildings were orga-
nized around a central square. On one side stood the church, the house of the
fathers or “college,” the cemetery, the house of the widows (cotiguazú), the
school, hospital, guesthouse, workshops and storehouses. In front of each of
the other three sides there were several rows with the houses of the Guaraní
families, either of adobe with an earthen floor and thatched roof, or later in
the eighteenth century, made of stone. They consisted of a single large room

50 Lucía Gálvez, Guaraníes y jesuitas. De la Tierra sin Mal al Paraíso (Buenos Aires:
Sudamericana, 1995), 148–155.
51 See Daniel T. Reff, “The Jesuit Mission Frontier in Comparative Perspective,” in Contested
Grounds. Comparative Frontiers and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire, ed. Dona J. Guy
and Thomas E. Sheridan (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1998), 16–31 and idem,
Plagues, Priests and Demons. Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in the Old World
and the New (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
52 Melià, El guaraní conquistado y reducido, 202–210.
53 Each reduction was ruled by a municipal council (cabildo) and municipal authorities.
The yearly elected Guaraní municipal dignitaries were equivalent to those of a Spanish
city. See José Cardiel, Compendio de la historia del Paraguay (1780) (Buenos Aires: FECIC,
1984), 86; Hernández, Organización social, 1:110–112.
54 Métraux, “Jesuit Missions in South America,” 647.
55 José Manuel Peramás, La República de Platón y los guaraníes (Buenos Aires: Emecé,
1946), 192.
introduction 21

and had neither chimney nor windows, just an aperture in the front covered
with an ox hide.56 The pale pink ruins that still loom in the forests of Misiones
and Paraguay are the rests of the impressive late Baroque churches built by
the Guaraní under the direction of Italian Jesuit architects such as Giuseppe
Bressanelli (1658–1728), Angelo Camilo Pietragrassa (1656–1729) and Giovanni
Baptista Primoli (1673–1747).57
The main crop was yerba mate (Ilex Paraguariensis). At the beginning, it was
harvested from wild specimens, which meant that a large group of Guaraní
had to migrate temporarily, stay away of the mission for three or four months
collecting the yerba, and then come back carrying immense cargos on ox-carts.
In the decades of 1680 and 1690 the exportation of yerba rounded between
6000 and 9000 arrobas per year (one arroba is equivalent to 25 pounds of
weight).58 There were two kinds, the best and most expensive was the caaminí
(only the finest parts of the leaves) and there was also a coarser kind, the yerba
de palos, which included also the leaf stems and fibers. After 1747 the Jesuits
discovered how to treat the seeds so that they could be used to reproduce the
plants—they had them digested by a bird, so that the tough tegument of the
seed got dissolved. This meant that yerba could be cultivated, which changed
dramatically the pattern of production. The harvesting of yerba mate in the
reductions and its superior quality was a constant source of friction between
the Creole encomenderos of Paraguay and the Jesuits. By mid eighteenth cen-
tury the yerba trees in the seven towns east of the Uruguay River were no less
than 200,000.59 Although the production of yerba mate in the reductions did
not exceed a small percentage of that of the Spanish settlers, it was cheaper
and better. The trade was conducted by canoes that sailed down the Uruguay
River to the city of Santa Fe. They exchanged yerba mate, cattle skins, and other
products like wood, cotton, tobacco, honey, and sugar for cash used for paying
tribute and buying iron tools, salt, religious ornaments, and so on.60

56 Antonio Sepp, Relación de viaje a las misiones jesuíticas, trans. Werner Hoffmann (Buenos
Aires: Eudeba, 1971), 199.
57 For the architecture of the missions see Guillermo Furlong, Arquitectos argentinos
durante la dominación hispánica (Buenos Aires: Huarpes, 1946), Gauvin A. Bailey, Art on
the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1999), 155–160 and 169–173, Carlos Page, El camino de las estancias. Las estancias
jesuíticas de Córdoba y la Manzana de la Compañía de Jesús (Córdoba: Telefónica, 2000),
and Bozidar Sustersic, Templos jesuítico-guaraníes (Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y
Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2004).
58 Mörner, Political and Economic Activities, 158.
59 Furlong, Misiones, 418.
60 Caraman, Lost Paradise, 124.
22 introduction

In the reductions, money was used only for paying taxes and tithes; eco-
nomic exchanges were reduced to bartering. Private property consisted of the
tools and utensils made by the Indians and crops harvested from their own
fields. Tenure of the land was private and communal. Each family received a
plot of land for their use (land was not inherited and the houses were owned
during a lifetime). Each newlywed couple received a plot. In addition to the
family land (abambaé), there was the tupambaé (God’s acre), which was
the land cultivated in common on Saturdays and Mondays from Corpus to
Christmas or by people hired to that effect. A part of the produce of each family
was saved in common storage houses, on account of what the Jesuits deemed
the improvidence of the Guaraní. The main crops were maniac, corn, sweet
potatoes, cotton, vegetables, and wheat.61 Southern missions such as Yapeyú
and Santo Tomé had extensive estancias. Before the expulsion, the thirty mis-
sions in all owned around 700,000 heads of cattle beef. Some reductions had
tens of thousands of sheep, and also burros and goats.62
Education was restricted to the sons of the Guaraní elite, who would carry
on the ruling offices of their fathers, or to some particularly talented chil-
dren. It consisted of teaching them to write in Guaraní and perhaps in Latin.
Children were not encouraged to learn Spanish, a policy that was the source of
long conflicts with the crown and one of the motives of Spanish resentment
against the Jesuits.63
Widows, young women, orphans, and women whose husbands were tem-
porarily away lived in the cotiguazú. They spun cotton or wool thread, which
was sold.64 The Guaraní were polygamous. When a cacique accepted baptism,
the priest usually consecrated the first marriage.65 According to the sixteenth-
century soldier of fortune Ulrich Schmidl (1510–1579), who wrote a notoriously
dispassionate chronicle of the River Plate, the Guaraní used to sell their wives and
daughters for a knife, a hatchet, or a shirt.66 The heaviest works, like the clear-
ing of brushwood in the fields, pertained to women, so much so that infanticide
of girls was not uncommon. The status and life conditions of women improved
greatly with the Jesuits: the work of tilling the land was now in charge of the

61 Peramás, La República de Platón, 50–53; Métraux, “Jesuit Missions in South America.”

62 Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule, 64–65.
63 Maxime Haubert, La vie quotidienne au Paraguay sous les Jésuites (Paris: Hachette, 1967),
255–256.
64 Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule, 72–73.
65 Haubert, La vie quotidienne, 127.
66 Ulrico Schmidl, “Relación del viaje al Río de la Plata,” in N. Federman, U. Schmidl. Alemanes
en América, ed. Lorenzo E. López, 129–225 (Madrid: Historia 16, 1985), 155.
introduction 23

men, drunkenness—perhaps the main obstacle to mission life—was limited,

and the Fathers demanded monogamy.67
The working day of a missionary has been told by Anton Sepp (1655–1733), a
missionary from South Tyrol. He is woken up by his Guaraní child servant one
hour before dawn, goes to church to meditate for one hour, says mass and then
tells his prayers in his room. Afterwards he teaches catechism to the boys and
girls and visits and attends the sick, administering sacraments and medicines.
Then he begins the tour of inspection: the school for children (boys are taught
first letters and girls to spin and weave), the school of music (where he teaches
chant, instrumental music and dances), and finally the workshops: the brick
kiln, the flour mill, the bakery, the workshops of the sculptors, the painters, the
weavers, the lathers, and the butchers—in Sepp’s reduction, fifteen to twenty
cows were daily sacrificed for consumption. The Father supervises the orchard
and the garden and the distribution of rations for the sick. After he examines
his conscience, he has lunch and then enjoys an hour for his own work. In the
afternoon, he goes in a second round of inspection of the workshops and of
visiting the sick. Afterwards he buries the death, reads his liturgical hours and
goes through more religious exercises. After dinner, he goes to bed, but he is
usually woken up one or more times during the night on account of the sick.68
Perhaps the most astonishing feature of reduction life was the work of the
Guaraní artists and artisans recreating European models and trained by Jesuits.
There were all kinds of handcrafts in the reductions: brick makers, carpenters,
stone carvers, bakers, cooks, tanners, potters, joiners, goldsmiths, painters, and
more. They developed a characteristic mission style, patterned on Italian clas-
sicism, and later on Roman and Bavarian Baroque models.69 The Guaraní were
also very fond of music.70 The most famous Jesuit musician in the Río de la
Plata was Domenico Zipoli (1688–1726), a composer who worked in Córdoba.
Other Jesuit musicians worked in the first years of the reductions, such as
Jean Vaisseau (1583–1623, born in Tournay) or the French Brother Louis Berger

67 See Gálvez, Guaraníes y jesuitas, 203–208. Gálvez has written extensively on women’s his-
tory in the River Plate.
68 Sepp, Relación de viaje, 225–229. The routine varied according to the missions. Cf. Melià,
El guaraní conquistado y reducido, 202–210.
69 Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 148 and 158. See also Héctor H. Schenone, “Las misiones
jesuíticas,” in Historia General del Arte en la Argentina, ed. Academia Nacional de Bellas
Artes, (Buenos Aires: ANBA, 1983), 2:58–68 and Bozidar Sustersic, Imágenes guaraní-jesu-
íticas. Paraguay, Argentina, Brasil (Asunción: Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro
and Entidad Binacional Yacyretá, 2010).
70 See T. Frank Kennedy S.J., “Music and the Jesuit Mission in the New World,” Studies 39,
no. 3 (2007).
24 introduction

(1589–1639).71 Anton Sepp joined his ability as instrument maker to his talent
of musician. In the missions of the Chiquitos Johann Messner (1703–1769) and
Martin Schmid (1694–1772), an artisan who built organs and all kinds of musi-
cal instruments, organized polyphonic choirs and Baroque orchestras.72 The
printing press of the missions was built and put into operation thanks to the
efforts of the German Johann B. Neumann (1659–1704) and the Spanish José
Serrano (1740–1826). Only a handful of the works printed in that press reached
us, some of them in Guaraní. The first book issued in the reductions was prob-
ably a Martyrologium Romanum, printed around 1700. Two of the works were
authored by the Guaraní Nicolás Yapuguay under the direction of Father Pablo
Restivo (1658–1740): Explicación del catecismo en lengua guaraní (Santa María
la Mayor, 1724) and Sermones y ejemplos en lengua guaraní (San Javier, 1727).73

71 Furlong, Misiones, 475–492.

72 The discovery of a large repository of musical scores in the Chiquitos reductions (with
some works by Zipoli) has thrown light on the musical production of those missions.
See, for example, T. Frank Kennedy S.J., “Colonial Music from the Musical Archive of
Concepción, Bolivia,” Latin American Musical Review 9, no. 1 (1988): 1–17.
73 See Guillermo Furlong, Orígenes del arte tipográfico en América. Especialmente en la
República Argentina (Buenos Aires: Huarpes, 1947), 127–148 and idem, Misiones, 566–593.
 chapter 1

Natural Histories

“The action of the first human being in this golden age—wrote Linnaeus in a
paraphrase of the Biblical story of creation—was the inspection of the crea-
tures and the imposition of the names of the species according to genera”.1 The
naming of creatures was also very much in the mind of the eighteenth-century
Jesuit historian Pedro Lozano (1697–1752). In his Chorographic Description of the
Great Chaco (Madrid, 1733), while describing the animals of that land, Lozano
enumerated seven species of bees: yamacuá or mongrel bee, yalamacuá or
moromoro bee, aneacuá or small black bee, and so on.2 Unlike Linnaeus, whose
biological systematics was indissolubly tied to Latin, Lozano classified the bees
using their aboriginal names and the implicit native taxonomy.3 He took those
names from the vocabulary of the tongue of the Lules written by the Jesuit
Antonio Machoni (or Macioni, 1672–1753), who in 1711 founded the reduction
of San Esteban de Miraflores for this people from the eastern Andean valleys.
As a procurator of the province of Paraquaria in Madrid and Rome, Father
Machoni published his Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Lule y Tonocoté and also
saw through the press Lozano’s Chorographic Description, the earliest example
of the kind of natural history written by Jesuit missionaries in Paraquaria.4

1 Linnaeus, Systema naturae, 12th ed. (Stockholm: Salvius, 1766), 1:13.

2 Pedro Lozano, Descripción corográfica del Gran Chaco Gualamba, ed. Radamés Altieri
(Tucumán: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Instituto de Antropología, 1941), 46. Unless
when a translated edition is mentioned, all translations are mine.
3 For the names of bees among the peoples of the Chaco, see Raúl N. Martínez Crovetto,
Zoonimia y etnozoología de los pilagá, toba, mocoví, mataco y vilela, ed. J. Pedro Viegas Barros
(Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 1995), 67–70. For the classification of bees
among the Guaraní, see Arnaldo de Winkelried Bertoni, “Contribución a la biología de las
avispas y abejas del Paraguay (Hymenoptera),” Anales del Museo Nacional de Historia Natural
de Buenos Aires 22 (1912): 97–146. For a general account of the Lule-Tonocoté language, see
Willem F. H. Adelaar and Pieter C. Muysken, The Languages of the Andes (Cambridge, Engl.:
Cambridge University Press, 2004), 385–392.
4 Antonio Machoni, “Vocabulario de la lengua Tonocoté y Lule,” in idem, Arte y vocabulario de
la lengua Lule y Tonocoté (Madrid: Herederos de Juan García Infanzón, 1732), 2. Eventually
Machoni was named Father Provincial of Paraguay (1739–1743) and president of the
University of Córdoba (1743–1747). See DHCJ, s.v. “Machoni, Antonio,” by João Baptista and
C. J. McNaspy. For the Jesuit missions among the Lules, see Guillermo Furlong, Entre los lules
de Tucumán: según noticias de los misioneros jesuitas Antonio Machoni, Pedro Lozano, Pedro

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004256774_��3

26 chapter 1

Félix de Azara (1742–1821) was a military engineer who arrived in the Río de
la Plata as one of the experts sent by the Spanish crown to demarcate the new
boundary between Spanish and Portuguese territories according to the Treaty
of 1750. Unable to fulfill his commission because of the delay of the Portuguese
party, during the two decades he lived in South America Azara took to the study
of the geography and zoology of the region. His books on quadrupeds and birds,
modeled upon Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, were the first thorough and system-
atic accounts of the beasts and birds of the land.5 Azara’s most popular work,
Voyages dans l’Amérique Méridionale (Paris, 1809)—to this day a major source
of information about the land and peoples of Paraguay and Río de la Plata—is
strongly anti-Jesuitical.6 The naturalist Charles A. Walckenaer (1771–1852), who
translated the book to the French, tells in his introduction that Azara’s only
commentary after reading De abiponibus, the famous ethnographic memories
on the peoples of the Chaco written by the Jesuit Dobrizhoffer, had been that
the padre had written just what he had heard in Buenos Aires, without ever
seeing anything by himself.7 Azara’s arrogance was only matched by his lev-
ity: Martin Dobrizhoffer, a Jesuit from the Habsburg empire, had lived for 18
years in the missions, first among the Guaraní and then among the Abipones.8

Juan Andreu, Pedro Artigas, José Solís, Pedro Francisco Charlevoix, José Peramas, y Francisco
Barnechea (Buenos Aires: San Pablo, 1941).
5 See Barbara Beddall, “ ‘Un Naturalista Original’: Don Félix de Azara, 1746–1821,” Journal of the
History of Biology 8, no. 1 (1975): 15–66, and the ensuing polemic in Thomas Glick and David
M. Quinlan, “Félix de Azara: The Myth of the Isolated Genius in Spanish Science,” Journal
of the History of Biology 8, no. 1 (1975): 67–83 and Barbara Beddall, “The Isolated Spanish
Genius—Myth or Reality? Félix de Azara and the Birds of Paraguay,” Journal of the History of
Biology 16, no. 2 (1983): 225–258.
6 Felix de Azara, Voyages dans l’Amérique Méridionale, trans. C. A. Walckenaer, with notes of
Georges Cuvier, 4 vols. (Paris: Dentu, 1809). Vols. 3 and 4 of this work contain the French
version by Charles Sonnini de Manoncourt (1751–1812) of Azara’s Apuntamientos para servir
a la historia natural de los páxaros del Paraguay y Río de la Plata. Felix’s brother, José Nicolás,
was a Spanish diplomat in Rome who took active part in the process of the suppression of
the Society of Jesus by Clement XIV in 1773. See Isidoro Pinedo Iparraguirre and Inmaculada
Fernández Arrillaga, “Estudio introductorio. 1769: los jesuitas en el banquillo,” in Manuel
Luengo S. I. Diario de 1769. La llegada de los jesuitas españoles a Bolonia, ed. by idem (San
Vicente del Raspeig: Universidad de Alicante, 2010), 9–72. See also the collection of letters by
Azara to Manuel de Roda y Arrieta (1708–1782), Minister of Grace and Justice of Charles III of
Spain and a main protagonist in the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and its domains, in
José Nicolás de Azara, El espíritu de José Nicolás de Azara descubierto en su correspondencia
epistolar con Don Manuel de Roda, 3 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de J. M. Alegría, 1846).
7 Azara, Voyages, 1:27, note.
8 See below for bibliography on Dobrizhoffer’s life.
natural histories 27

Apparently, it was from the intellectual high-ground of enlightened reason

that Azara also disparaged the histories written by the Jesuit Lozano and by
his successor as official chronicler of the province, José Guevara (1719–1806),
“whose spirit was as small as his body”.9 It might be noticed as well that Azara’s
disdain for the members of the Society did not prevent him from drawing upon
Jesuit manuscripts for his own works.10 Admittedly, the chapters on animals
of Azara’s Voyage are more articulate and informed than their equivalents in
the Jesuit natural histories. While the Jesuit works are best seen as exemplars
of eclectic Baroque learning, Azara’s books on quadrupeds and birds are mod-
eled on the format of Buffonian histoire naturelle.11 However, the fact remains
that despite Azara’s priority claims, more than a century before he began his
researches, Jesuit authors had created a kaleidoscopic and richly textured
image of the landscape, peoples and creatures of those lands. The purpose of
this chapter is to characterize this kind of Jesuit writing.
The tradition of natural history in Antiquity was organized around two
major works: the zoological works of Aristotle and Pliny’s Naturalis historia.12
Medieval discourse on stones, plants, and animals was articulated in several
ways of writing, but although we find in the thirteenth century many com-
mentaries on the Aristotelian treatises on animals, the Plinian encyclopedic
tradition was by then all but ignored.13 Natural history came to life again in the
1540s, with Leonhart Fuchs’s De historia stirpium and Conrad Gesner’s Historia

9 Azara, Voyages, 1:23–25.

10 Azara, Voyages, 1:126. Were it not for the anti-Jesuitical quips, the chapters in Azara’s
Voyages devoted to wild and cultivated plants are almost indistinguishable from the anal-
ogous sections in the Jesuit natural histories. Like Lozano, Azara mentions seven species
of bees in Paraguay, although he does not consign their native names. See Azara, Voyages,
1:159.
11 For Buffon see Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History, trans. Sarah Lucille
Bonnefoi, ed. L. Pearce Williams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
12 See Roger K. French, Ancient Natural History. Histories of Nature (London: Routledge,
1994), 6–82 and 196–255.
13 It could be argued that the medieval encyclopedias, like Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum
quadruplex and works on the nature of things (de natura rerum) were a substitute for
Pliny’s natural history. I take it that the differences between the aims, structure and out-
look of both genres were enough to consider them as two distinct bodies of writing. See
Miguel de Asúa, “Stones, Plants and Animals from A to Z. The Inventory of the Natural
World in Albert the Great’s philosophia naturalis,” in Albertus Magnus. Zum Gedenken nach
800 Jahren: neue Zugänge, Aspekte und Perspektiven, ed. Walter Senner (Berlin: Akademie
Verlag, 2001), 389–400 and Thomas Glick et al., eds., Medieval Science, Technology, and
Medicine. An Encyclopedia (New York and London: Routledge, 2005), s.v. “Natural History,”
by M. de Asúa.
28 chapter 1

plantarum et vires.14 The genre took a new turn and acquired a new vitality in
the eighteenth century, when controversy raged over the issue of classifica-
tion of the living creatures between Buffon, the enlightened intendant of the
Jardin du Roi, and Linnaeus, the pious and entrepreneurial Swedish botanist
who eventually imposed his system of taxonomy and nomenclature.15
The publication of Buffon’s Historie naturelle, began in 1749, was one of the
great intellectual events of the Enlightenment. The clear and brilliant liter-
ary style of its author undoubtedly contributed to its enormous success in the
Parisian salons. Perhaps ironically in view of future events, the Mémoires de
Trévoux, a famous Jesuit weekly literary journal, hailed the appearance of the
first three volumes of Buffon’s magnum opus with four enthusiastic and sub-
stantial articles.16 Actually, natural history was one of the main scientific top-
ics cultivated by Jesuit authors during the eighteenth century. In terms of the
number of books and articles published by members of the Society of Jesus, it
ranked after the exact sciences and experimental physics and before medicine

14 Brian W. Ogilvie, “Natural History, Ethics and Physico-Theology,” in Historia. Empiricism

and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005), 76–103. For Renaissance natural history see William B.
Ashworh, Jr., “Natural History and the Emblematic Worldview,” in Reappraisals of the
Scientific Revolution, ed. David Lindberg and Robert Westman, (Cambridge, Engl.:
Cambridge University Press, 1990), 303–332 and Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing.
Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). While
Ashworth sets Renaissance natural history within the framework of a textual, visual and
symbolic way of knowing, Ogilvie has stressed the value of description, observation and
the “love of the particular.” For the development of Modern natural history see Phillip K.
Sloan, “Natural History,” in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy, ed.
Knud Haakonssen, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2: 903–938.
15 Buffon claimed that living beings should be classified taking into account all their observ-
able traits in order to disclose their natural relationships and thus arriving to a “natural
system.” In his turn, Linnaeus had developed an enormously successful “artificial” tax-
onomy, which adopted the organs of fructification as the single criterion for the ordering
of the plants—in the 1758 edition of his Systema naturae, he extended to animals the
binomial nomenclature he had first introduced in the 1753 edition of Species plantarum.
See Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1999), 47 and 53. For the the controversy between Buffon and Linnaeus see Phillip
K. Sloan, “The Buffon-Linnaeus Controvery,” Isis 67, no. 3 (1976): 356–375. An overview of
the problem of classification of life forms in the eighteenth century can be found in James
L. Larson, Interpreting Nature. The Science of Living from Linnaeus to Kant (Baltimore: The
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 28–60.
16 Roger, Buffon, 184–185.
natural histories 29

and pharmacy, and Aristotelian natural philosophy.17 Among the books on nat-
ural history by eighteenth-century Jesuits, we find editions and commentaries
on Pliny, literature on secreta naturae, critiques of Buffon’s theory of the Earth
and, most important of all for our argument, regional natural histories.18
The production of Jesuit natural histories in Paraguay and Rio de la Plata
spanned almost two centuries. The last ones were written in the Italian exile
during the last third of the eighteenth century, well after the works of Buffon
and Linnaeus had gained a wide readership.19 While acknowledging these two
models as the learned standards of the field, the natural histories of Paraguay
written after the dissolution of the Society made a spirited defense of the legit-
imacy of their own way of talking about the creatures of Paraquaria.
After briefly proposing a working typology which distinguishes three types
of Jesuit natural histories of Paraquaria, we will look at this corpus of literature
from two perspectives, vaguely reflecting the scholastic form-matter distinctio
(a point of view the Jesuit authors would have approved). Firstly, we will follow
a formal approach by discussing the common textual strategies used in these
works. In the second place, we will proceed to explore some aspects of the sub-
ject-matter in a representative case of each group of natural histories. While
the inquiry into the textual format aims at highlighting the family resemblance
between the works while relating them to the missionary situation in which
they were produced, the exploration of their contents will hopefully underline
the peculiarities of each of the groups and account for the temporal develop-
ment of this kind of writing. The final section of the chapter rounds up the
discussion by looking at a series of questions involved in the characterization
of the Jesuit natural histories.

1 The Jesuit Natural Histories of Paraquaria

The natural histories written by Jesuits missionaries in Paraquaria are an iden-

tifiable way of writing about the geography, land, climate, animals, plants, and

17 For a detailed discussion, see Harris, “Jesuit Ideology and Jesuit Science,” 107–190, in par-
ticular p. 156 and also the graphics in pp. 364, 398 and 417.
18 See the complete list in Sommervogel vol. 10, cols. 910–913 (general works on natural sci-
ences) and cols. 916–919 (zoology).
19 Although the natural histories written by Jesuits in the Italian exile would properly belong
to the last chapter, I will discuss them here in order to keep sight of the unity of this tradi-
tion of writing, which is one of the points I wish to emphasize.
30 chapter 1

peoples of that country.20 As a rule, they consist of a series of chapters and

constitute either complete treatises or, more frequently, form an integral part
of a larger work. On the basis of criteria like scope, language in which they
were written, authorial voice, and chronology, it seems possible to distinguish
three groups, related respectively to the discursive genres of chronicles, “eth-
nographic” memories, and encyclopedias.21
We begin with the “natural and civil/ecclesiastical histories” written by the
Jesuit chroniclers. This way of writing, which embraced in the same work an
account of the natural world and a narrative of the political or ecclesiastical
history of a region, had been cultivated by the Jesuits in the New World since
the end of the sixteenth century. The first of its kind had been the Natural and
Moral History of the Indies, written by José de Acosta (1540–1600).22 Acosta’s
work was an alternative to the General and Natural History of the Indies by
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478–1557), the first comprehensive survey of

20 For an overview of this topic, see the collection of papers in Millones Figueroa and
Ledezma, El saber de los jesuitas and Prieto, Missionary Scientists, 143–220. An article by
Huffine analyzes the natural histories of Paraguay mostly as ethnographic writing, argu-
ing that these works utilized “the methods and rhetoric of science” in order to foster “the
value and necessity of the Jesuit colonial order” (Kristin Huffine, “Rising Paraguay from
Decline: Memory, Ethnography, and Natural History in the Eighteenth-Century Accounts
of the Jesuit Authors,” in Millones Figueroa and Ledesma, El saber de los jesuitas, 295).
This claim results from an interpretation of the development of these natural histories
as a transformation from “a language of wonders, miracles, idolatry and reform into a
product of the Enlightenment science of race” (ibid., 281). For a different interpreta-
tion of Jesuit ethnography, see the Dissertation by Angelika Kitzmantel, who concludes
that “Viele ihrer Gedanken und Ergebnisse [i.e. those of Dobrizhoffer and Paucke],
besonders aber ihr Anspruch der Toleranz gegenüber den Kulturen der Abiponen und
Mocobier und die Betonung ihres Eigenwertes können auch heute noch Vorbild sein”
(Angelika Kitzmantel, “Die Jesuitenmissionare Martin Dobrizhoffer und Florian Paucke
und ihre Beiträge zur Ethnographie des Gran Chaco im 18. Jahrhundert” [Ph.D. disser-
tation, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität-München, 2004], 337). In her book on Joseph
Gumilla’s El Orinoco Ilustrado, Ewalt emphasizes that this famous natural history of the
Orinoco basin should be read as a hallmark of an “alternative pathway to modernity and
Enlightenment” (Ewalt, Peripheral Wonders, 172). My analysis of the natural histories of
Paraguay is congruent with her view of the Jesuit natural histories of the New World
as a “mediation of Catholic dogma with European scientific discourse and Amerindian
knowledge” (ibid., 98). But as I hope will be clear from what follows, notwithstanding the
case of Sánchez Labrador, the natural histories of Paraquaria are not best seen within the
framework of Spanish Catholic Enlightenment.
21 I am aware of the slightly anachronistic usage of the word “ethnographic” when referring
to eighteenth-century works. It is used here only for convenience sake.
22 See Introduction, note 2.
natural histories 31

the New World.23 Oviedo, a high-rank officer of the Spanish crown in the West
Indies and Tierra Firme, could be best described as a self-appointed “Pliny of
the Indies,” who sought to enumerate and describe the lands and creatures
of the Spanish empire in America while extolling the deeds of the Castilians.
By contrast, Acosta’s Natural History was strongly argumentative in style and
Aristotelian in outlook, insofar as its author conceived his work as an inquiry
into the causes of natural phenomena.24 Against what can be presupposed,
most of the Jesuits who adopted the “natural and moral history” as the appro-
priate way of writing about the New World did not write like the Aristotelian
Acosta, but followed instead Oviedo’s encyclopedic approach.
In the course of the 160 years of their activities in Paraguay and Río de la
Plata, nine Jesuits in succession were nominated official chroniclers of the
province. Two of them wrote “natural and civil histories”: Pedro Lozano and
José Guevara, both active around the middle of the eighteenth century.25
Lozano, the most interesting and productive Jesuit historian of Paraguay
and the River Plate, authored the above mentioned Chorographic Description
of the Gran Chaco and the History of the Conquest of Paraguay, Tucumán and
Río de la Plata.26 Guevara’s work bears a similar title, History of Paraguay, Río

23 The first part of Oviedo’s Historia natural y general de las Indias (19 books dealing mostly
with the island of Hispaniola), was published in Seville in 1535. The more popular La natu-
ral historia de las Indias, dedicated to Charles V, had been published in Toledo in 1526.
24 See Miguel de Asúa and Roger K. French, A New World of Animals. Early Modern Europeans
on the Creatures of Iberian America (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 62–85 for a brief compari-
son of both works.
25 Efraim Cardozo, Historiografía paraguaya. I. Paraguay indígena, jesuita y español (Mexico,
D.F.: Instituto Panamericano de Historia y Geografía, 1959), 285–314. Their predecessors
either did not leave a history or engaged in works which combined purely civil and mis-
sionary narratives. By 1649 Juan Pastor (1580–1658) had written a history which did not
survive, although it was used by Lozano and also by Nicolás del Techo [Nicolas du Toict,
1611–1685] for his idem, Historia Provinciae Paraquariae Societatis Iesu (Liège: J. M. Hovius
1673). The Jesuit historian Pierre-François-Xavier Charlevoix (1682–1761), author of his-
tories of Japan and Canada, wrote in Europe his influential Histoire du Paraguay, 3 vols.
(Paris: Desaint & Saillant, David, and Durand, 1756) to which we will come back in the
following chapter.
26 Pedro Lozano, Historia de la conquista del Paraguay, Río de la Plata y Tucumán, 5 vols., ed.
Andrés Lamas (Buenos Aires: Imprenta Popular, 1873–1875). There is a recent edition of
this work, see idem, Historia de la conquista de las provincias del Paraguay, Río de la Plata
y Tucumán, ed. Ernesto Maeder, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia,
2010). Lozano’s History of the Conquest, which remained in manuscript form until the late
nineteenth century, was in turn the “civil” prelude of his history of the Jesuit missions
in Paraguay: idem, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en la Provincia del Paraguay, 2 vols.
(Madrid: Viuda de Manuel Fernández, 1754–1755). For a complete bibliography of Lozano,
32 chapter 1

de la Plata and Tucumán. Its first part, on natural history, depends very much
on Lozano.27
A second group of natural histories are those forming part of the memories of
exiled Jesuits written after their expulsion in 1767. Contrarily to what occurs in
the chronicles, in these works the authorial voice is modestly but clearly heard.
Eventually, two of the German-speaking Jesuit missionaries who had lived in
reductions among the fierce nations of the Chaco returned home and settled
in the lands of the Empire under Maria Theresa. In the milieu of the court, the
Bohemian Martin Dobrizhoffer (1718–1791) wrote his De Abiponibus,28 while in
the more obscure refuge of a Cistercian monastery the Silesian Florian Paucke
(1719–1779) completed his Hin und Her (To and Fro), a story of his sixteen years
among the Mocoví in a reduction of Santa Fe (Argentina).29 Dobrizhoffer’s
and Paucke’s are quasi-ethnographic accounts of the Guaycuruan peoples they
knew, enlivened by a strong autobiographical accent. Both works include sub-
stantial sections on natural history, following the pattern which by that time
was typical of most Jesuit works on nature in the New World. The English Jesuit
Thomas Falkner (1707–1784), a surgeon with an unmistakable talent for natural

see Cardozo, Historiografía paraguaya, 285–306. For an overall view on Lozano’s life and
work, see Ernesto Maeder, “Estudio preliminar,” in Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed.
Maeder, 1:13–37. Unless otherwise indicated, in this chapter I will refer to the edition in
5 vols. (1873–1875) by the Uruguayan scholar Andrés Lamas (1817–1891).
27 For the several editions of the work, none of them satisfactory, see Cardozo, Historiografía
paraguaya, 306–314. The best available version is due to the nineteenth-century French-
Argentine scholar Paul Groussac (1848–1929). See José Guevara, Historia del Paraguay, Río
de la Plata y Tucumán, ed. Paul Groussac, Anales de la Biblioteca Nacional 5 (1908): 1–464
and 6 (1910): 1–367. For notices on Guevara’s life and a guide to further bibliography, see
DHCJ, s.v. “Guevara, José,” by H. Storni, and Paul Groussac, “Noticias del P. José Guevara
y estudio crítico de la Historia del Paraguay,” Anales de la Biblioteca Nacional 5 (1908):
ix–lxxxvi.
28 Martin Dobrizhoffer, Historia de Abiponibus, 3 vols. (Vienna: Kurzbeck, 1784). There is an
early nineteenth-century incomplete English translation: Martin Dobrizhoffer An Account
of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay, trans. Sara Coleridge, 3 vols. (London:
Murray, 1822). The Spanish translation is complete and reliable; see idem, Historia de
los Abipones, trans. Edmundo Wernicke, 3 vols. (Resistencia: Universidad Nacional del
Nordeste, Facultad de Humanidades, Departamento de Historia, 1967).
29 The manuscript, held in the library of the Cistercian abbey of Zwettl (Austria) has been
edited as Florian Paucke, Zwettler Codex 420, ed. Etta Becker-Donner and Gustav Otruba,
2 vols. (Vienna: Wilhelm Braunmüller, 1959–1966). There is a Spanish translation, Florian
Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá (una estada entre los indios mocovíes, (1749–1767, trans.
Edmundo Wernicke), 3 vols. in 4 bks. (Tucumán: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán
and Institución Cultural Argentino-Germana, 1942–1944). See Cardozo, Historiografía
Paraguaya, 353–357 for a complete discussion of the editions of Paucke’s work.
natural histories 33

history who traveled extensively and lived among the Indians of the Pampas,
published in 1774 in Hereford, England, his Description of Patagonia.30
Finally, we can distinguish the works written by Spanish and Spanish
American Jesuits exiled in Italian cities. José Sánchez Labrador (1717–1798),
who lived for two decades in the Chaco among the Mbyás, spent several years
in Ravenna writing an ambitious encyclopedia which consists of more than
ten manuscript volumes divided in three parts, devoted, respectively, (a) to
the native peoples and their conversion to Christianity (Catholic Paraguay),
(b) to the natural history (Natural Paraguay) and (c) to the agriculture of the
land (Cultivated Paraguay). This work, which has been published only frag-
mentarily, can be seen as an instance of the trend toward encyclopedic writing
which took hold of the Jesuits after the suppression of the Society.31 Another
book pertaining to this group is the Saggio sulla storia naturale della provincia
del Gran Chaco by José Jolís (1728–1790), published in Faenza in 1789 as the first
part of a four-volume work the rest of which was never written.32 A third late

30 Thomas Falkner, A Description of Patagonia and the Adjoining Parts of South America, 1774,
facsimile of the first ed. (Chicago: Armann and Armann, 1935).
31 The manuscript of the Paraguay Natural consists of six parts held in four volumes in the
ARSI, Paraquaria 16–19. The chapters on fish and birds have been edited as José Sánchez
Labrador, Peces y aves del Paraguay Natural ilustrado, 1767, ed. Mariano Castex (Buenos
Aires: Fabril Editora, 1968). Fragments of the material on materia medica have also
been edited, see idem, La medicina en el Paraguay Natural (1771–1776), ed. Aníbal Ruiz
Moreno (Tucumán: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 1948). For all practical purposes,
the Paraguay Cultivado is lost (according to Furlong, it was sold to a private collector in
1878). This work also comprehended four volumes, devoted respectively to agriculture,
forestry, orchards, and gardens. See Guillermo Furlong, Naturalistas argentinos durante
la dominación hispánica (Buenos Aires: Huarpes, 1948), 135. For the whereabouts of the
manuscripts of Paraguay Católico, see Héctor Sainz Ollero et al., José Sánchez Labrador
y los naturalistas jesuitas del Río de la Plata (Madrid: Ministerio de Obras Públicas y
Urbanismo, 1989), 108–117; cf. Cardozo, Historiografía paraguaya, 356–364. The collective
work edited by Sainz Ollero et al. is a thorough guide to recent work on Sánchez Labrador
which has brought to light important archival material and discusses all the relevant sci-
entific fields of Paraguay Natural, although with an anachronistic approach. We will refer
only to those sections of Paraguay Católico that have been edited: José Sánchez Labrador,
El Paraguay Católico [parts 2–3], ed. Samuel A. Lafone Quevedo, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires:
Coni, 1910). For an overall description of the encyclopedia, see Guillermo Furlong, “La
enciclopedia rioplatense de José Sánchez Labrador, S.J.,” Revista de la Sociedad Amigos de
la Arqueología 5 (1931): 263–307.
32 José Jolís, Saggio sulla storia naturale della provincia del Gran Chaco (Faenza: L. Genestri,
1789). There is a modern translation to Spanish. See idem, Ensayo sobre la historia natu-
ral del Gran Chaco, trans. María Luisa Acuña (Resistencia: Universidad Nacional del
Nordeste, Facultad de Humanidades, Instituto de Historia, 1972). For Jolís’s life and works
34 chapter 1

work of this kind is a barely known essay by Ramón María Termeyer (1737–
1814): Intorno ad alcuni osservazioni di Storia naturale Americana, published in
1810 in Milan, in the fifth volume of his Opuscoli scientifici.33
The works of Jolís and Termeyer were the modest relatives of a prominent
family of books on the different regions of Iberian America written by exiled
Jesuits in the course of the last two decades of the eighteenth century. These
authors followed what was by then the usual pattern of combining descrip-
tive natural history with properly historical narrative. But they introduced a
significant difference. These late works were written with the explicit purpose
of arguing against the thesis of the inferiority of the nature of the New World
set forth by Buffon and expanded by the Dutch scholar Cornelius de Pauw
(1739–1799) in his Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains, first published
in Berlin between 1768 and 1769.34 Among the rebuttals to these critiques by
Iberian American Jesuits we should recall the famous Storia antica del Messico
by Francisco Xavier Clavigero (1731–1787) and Juan de Velasco’s Historia del
Reino de Quito, a three-volume manuscript dated 1788, the first part of which
is devoted to natural history.35 Also to this group belong Gómez de Vidaurre’s
Historia geográfica, natural y civil del Reino de Chile and Juan Ignacio Molina’s
Saggio sulla Storia naturale and Saggio sulla Storia civile del Chili.36 All this

see Guillermo Furlong, “José Jolís S.J., misionero e historiador (1728–1790),” Estudios 46
(1932): 82–91 and 178–188.
33 Ramón M. Termeyer, “Intorno ad alcune osservazioni di Storia naturale Americana,” in
idem, Opuscoli scientifici d’entomologia, di fisica e d’agricoltura, 5 vols. (Milano, Stamperia
del Giornale Italico di Carlo Dova, 1810), 5:247–628.
34 Cornelius De Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les américains ou Mémoires interes-
sants pour servir à l’histoire de l’espèce humaine, 2 vols. (Berlin: George Decker, 1768–1769).
See Henry W. Church, “Corneille De Pauw and the Controversy over His Recherches phi-
losophiques sur les américains,” PMLA 51, no. 1 (1936): 178–206 and John D. Browning,
“Cornelius de Pauw and Exiled Jesuits: The Development of Nationalism in Spanish
America,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 11, no.3 (1978): 289–307.
35 Francisco X. Clavigero, Storia antica dell Messico . . . e dissertazioni sulla terra, sugli ani-
mali e sugli abitatori del Messico, 4 vols (Cesena: Biasini, 1780–1781). There is an early
English translation, idem, The History of Mexico, 2 vols. (London: printed for G.G.J. and
J. Robinson, 1787). Juan de Velasco’s work has been edited in mid-nineteenth century.
See idem, Historia del Reino de Quito de la América Meridional, 3 vols. (Quito: Juan
Campuzano, 1841–1844).
36 Felipe Gómez de Vidaurre, Historia geográfica, natural y civil del Reino de Chile, 2 vols.
(Santiago de Chile: Imprenta del Ferrocarril, 1865) and Juan Ignacio Molina, Saggio sulla
storia naturale del Chili. Saggio sulla storia civile del Chili, 2 vols. (Bologna: Stamperia di
S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 1782–1787). There is an English translation of Molina’s Saggio, see
idem, The Geographical, Natural and Civil History of Chili, 2 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst,
natural histories 35

literature puts forward the defense of the diversity of the creatures and the
variety of the nature of each author’s homeland in the context of proto-
nationalistic feelings. In their historical sections these works argued new
ways of judging evidence while challenging the current criterion of author-
ity in philosophical writings on the New World—what has been called “patri-
otic epistemology”.37 Other eighteenth-century works of the type written by
Jesuits embraced broad surveys of nature but were not particularly concerned
with this exaltation of the Spanish American countries, such as José Gumilla’s
El Orinoco Ilustrado y defendido and the four-volume Saggio di storia Americana
by the Jesuit missionary Filippo Salvatore Gilii (1721–1789).38 The Jesuits in
Brazil developed an analogous tradition.39
Summing up, the “natural and civil histories” of Lozano and Guevara,
the autobiographical accounts of Dobrizhoffer and Paucke, and the apolo-
getic essays on the nature of the New World by Sánchez Labrador, Jolís and
Termeyer, share a common kind of writing called by these authors “natural
history,” to which we now turn.

Rees and Orme, 1809). The anonymous Compendio della storia geografica, naturale e civile
del Regno del Chile (Bologna: Stamperia di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 1776) has been attrib-
uted to Molina by the Chilean Jesuit historian Walter Hanisch. See idem, “Juan Ignacio
Molina, sabio de su tiempo,” Montalbán no. 3 (1974): 238–239. The seventeenth-century
history of Chile written by the Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle, Historica relación del Reyno de Chile
y de las misiones y ministerios que ejercita en él la Compañía de Jesús (Roma: Francisco
Cavallo, 1646), also published in an Italian version that same year, comprehended three
parts: natural history, moral history, and religious activities of the Jesuits.
37 See Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories,
Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2001), 234–254. Cañizares has considered only the properly historical
books of these works. His argument about “patriotic epistemology” takes its force from a
larger body of writings.
38 José Gumilla, El Orinoco Ilustrado y defendido. Historia natural, civil y geográfica de este
gran río (Madrid: Manuel Fernández, 1741) and Filippo Salvatore Gilii, Saggio di storia
Americana, o sia storia naturale, civile e sacra de’ Regni e delle provincie spagnole di terra-
ferma dell’America meridionale, 4 vols. (Roma: Per Luigi Perego erede Salvioni, 1780–1784).
Gilii’s work has been translated to Spanish; the first three books were published as idem,
Ensayo de historia americana, trans. Antonio Tovar, 3 vols. (Caracas: Academia Nacional
de la Historia, 1965) and the fourth as idem, Ensayo de historia americana. Estado presente
de la Tierra Firme, trans. Mario Germán Romero and Carlo Bruscantini (Bogotá: Editorial
Sucre, 1955).
39 See José Honorio Rodríguez, Historiografía del Brasil. Siglo XVII (Mexico, D.F.: Instituto
Panamericano de Historia y Geografía, 1963), 127–149.
36 chapter 1

2 Textual Organization

Organizing, listing and naming can be said to be common factors of all the
ways of writing that from Pliny up to Buffon passed under the rubric of “nat-
ural history.” In what follows, we will discuss the specific ways in which the
Jesuit natural histories of Paraquaria organize the natural world through
the use of lists and autochthonous names.

2.1 Organizing
The thematic organization of the short section on natural history in Lozano’s
Chorographic Description of the Great Chaco can be taken as a condensed ver-
sion of the rest of the works. Its first seven chapters deal with geographic gen-
eralities, rivers, the land and the plants, animals and serpents, population,
and customs of the native peoples. Then come 10 chapters with accounts of
the several aboriginal nations of the Chaco. Lozano’s History of the Conquest
of Paraguay considers natural history more extensively. Its first book deals
with geography—with particular attention paid to the great rivers (Paraná,
Uruguay and Río de la Plata) and the land down to the Strait of Magellan—,
the yerba mate, trees, animals, serpents, birds, and fish. This is followed by a
discussion of the population of the New World before the Flood, two chapters
on the aboriginal peoples and a last chapter on St. Thomas, who was believed
to have preached Christianity in the New World in apostolic times.40 In his
History of the Conquest Lozano introduces each of the chapters on natural his-
tory with phrases evocative of the imagery of the Biblical narrative of creation,
emphasizing the usefulness for human beings of the different creatures of the
country:

Once the earth had been ornamented . . . the dexterous hand of the celes-
tial artisan commenced to people it with living creatures, which should
enjoy its fruits or serve the Prince with humble obedience . . . And it is
only reasonable that I, following that same order [of Creation], should
give notice of the living beings which these provinces yield.41

40 See Louis-André Vigneras, “Saint Thomas, Apostle of America,” Hispanic American

Historical Review 57, no. 1 (1977): 82–90.
41 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1: 271. Lozano’s sequence of creatures is differ-
ent from that of the narrative of creation in the book of Genesis, since he has cattle and
quadrupeds created on earth before birds and fish are created in the element of water.
natural histories 37

The trees are beneficial for they embellish the land; their fruits support the life
of the dwellers, their wood help human needs, and their virtues help restore
health.42 When he talks about animals, what he introduces first are the cattle.
Guevara’s natural history constitutes the first part of his History of Paraguay,
Río de la Plata and Tucumán.43 The opening section is on geography and
aboriginal nations; the second part considers trees and plants and goes on to
a list of 85 healing herbs.44 After discussing the petrifying properties of the
water in the Paraná and Uruguay Rivers and enumerating the lagoons, Guevara
proceeds to mention the aquatic animals, commencing with the whales, and
following with the sea lions, sea dogs, mermaids and mermen, two species
of river monsters, the capybara and the caiman, many river fish, turtles, and
ducks. Then appear the birds, the quadrupeds, serpents, and insects. In the
paragraphs on flora and fauna, Guevara’s transcription from Lozano is usually
literal, but the organization of the material is different and Guevara’s sequence
of creatures is closer to that in the Biblical story of creation.45
The first part of Dobrizhoffer’s De abiponibus, which occupies the whole
first volume of its English translation, deals with geography, history, and the
“Indians,” continuing with cattle, quadrupeds, amphibians, fish, birds, medici-
nal plants, fruit trees, and hot springs. Dobrizhoffer assigns a substantial quan-
tity of space to his chapters on domestic animals (including much information
on veterinary medicine) and to the quadrupeds. Birds he treats perfunctorily
as well as fish.
Unlike Dobrizhoffer, who opened his On the Abipones with the natural his-
tory, Paucke used it to close his Hin und Her. Paucke’s organization is perhaps
the most idiosyncratic of all, a result of the almost naïve atmosphere of the
work. His natural history covers the basic canon of geography and climate,
herbs, wild and cultivated fruit plants and trees, and animals. Paucke pays par-
ticular attention to birds, which he groups in aquatic birds, birds of prey, birds
in woods and country, parrots, toucan and ostriches, and European birds.
Falkner’s Description is not structured in chapters following the usual
sequence of geography, plants, animals, and peoples. The material on natural
history is concentrated in the first chapter of the work in the form of a broad

42 Ibid., 1:215.
43 The first two parts of the first book.
44 Guevara, Historia del Paraguay, 5:92–97. For further discussion of this list see p. 151.
45 It was Groussac who called attention to the derivative character of Guevara’s natural his-
tory. See idem, “Noticias del P. José Guevara,” p. lx.
38 chapter 1

historical-geographical account of the region. Falkner’s is perhaps the most

authentically chorographic of all these works.
Sánchez Labrador’s Natural Paraguay is the most ambitious of the natural
histories, for he conceived his work as the encyclopedia of Paraguay. It consists
of six manuscript books amounting to 1852 pages, with the following canonical
sections: (1) earth, waters and air, (2) plants, (3) quadrupeds, (4) birds, (5) fish,
(6) amphibians, reptiles, and insects. Jolís’s Saggio, which was intended as the
introduction to a larger work, adopts a very similar distribution of its subject
matter. Almost half of Termeyer’s Osservazioni on natural history consists of
accounts of the several aboriginal nations. This section ends with four large
tables summarizing the “barbarous” peoples of the gobernaciones of Rio de
la Plata, Paraguay, Tucumán, and Santa Cruz de la Sierra. Termeyer provides
the reader with a hierarchy of Indian nations living between latitudes 16° and
20° south, which begin with the Chiquitos and end with the anthropophagous
Guayaquí. In a passage which reveals his acquaintance with Buffon’s notion of
a continuous chain of beings, he insists on the necessity of spelling out “the
links of that chain that unites the human being with the beasts, without any
violent breach”.46 But, against Buffon, Termeyer argues that this diversity of
peoples is met without modification of the climate—the gist of Buffon’s argu-
ment about the inferiority of nature in the New World was that in America
the climate was hotter and more humid, which resulted in the degeneration of
the species.47 In the second part of his work, Termeyer begins with the quad-
rupeds, and proceeds to treat the birds, reptiles, fish, insects, and plants. The
latter he divides into eight groups (tuberous, herbaceous, medicinal, fruit trees,
those with wood useful for construction, balsamic, reeds, and palms), which he
admits are not properly botanical.48
As can easily be seen from this brief survey, the plans of the natural histories
bear a close resemblance to one another but are by no means exactly alike.
With more or less fidelity, historians Lozano and Guevara follow the Biblical
story of creation. The rest of the authors follow a patterned sequence of

46 Termeyer, “Intorno ad alcune osservazioni,” 455. The standard treatment of Buffon’s “great
chain of being” is Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1936), 227–231. See also Roger, Buffon, 87–89.
47 Buffon expounded his theory about the degeneracy of the animals of the New World is
idem, “Animaux du Nouveau Monde” and “Les animaux communs aux deux continents,”
in idem, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1761), 9:84–96
and 97–128. Cf. Antonello Gerbi, The Dispute of the New World; the History of a Polemic,
1750–1900, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), 7.
48 Termeyer, “Intorno ad alcune osservazioni,” 575.
natural histories 39

geography, plants, animals, and peoples, with slight variations. It may be rel-
evant to point out here that an analogous type of enumeration can be found
in Ignatius’ “Contemplation for attaining love.” At the end of the Spiritual
Exercises, he urges the reader to contemplate how God dwells in the creatures,
“in the elements, giving being, in the plants, causing growth, in the animals,
producing sensation, and in humankind, granting the gift of understanding.”
An analogous scale of beings is repeated in the following paragraph, which
urges to see how God works on one’s behalf in all created beings: heavens,
elements, plants, fruits, and cattle.49 This second enumeration understands
the creatures in relation to the utility or benefit the human being can derive
from them.
As a rule, all the works have prominent sections on matters of economic
and practical importance, like the cultivation of yerba mate (which constituted
the main export of the Guaraní reductions), cattle, and venomous serpents.
The description of the native peoples is also one of the main concerns of these
works. Animals were ordered according to the groups usually found in the
Early Modern literature on the subject (quadrupeds, birds, fish, amphibians,
reptiles, and insects).50 There is no suggestion of any profound familiarity with
Aristotle’s works on animals on the part of the authors (although Jolís says
that he uses Aristotle’s grouping of plants and Sánchez Labrador mentions the
Aristotelian classification here and there).51 This is congruent with Ogilvie’s
characterization of Early Modern classification as a kind of folk taxonomy, a
combination of local knowledge amalgamated with some Ancient schemes
and materia medica.52 The classification of plants used by Termeyer and Jolís
was based on a criterion of use, featuring for example medicinal herbs, dye-
woods, edible plants, and crops of economic value. As a whole, the general
layout of these natural histories seems to have been guided by the sequence
of creation of the living beings in the book of Genesis, some Western folk ideas

49 Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, in idem, Personal Writings (London: Penguin,
2004), 329–330 (§§ 235–236).
50 The great Renaissance encyclopedias on animals were structured along a similar plan.
Conrad Gesner’s Historia animalium (Zurich, 1551–1558) consisted of four volumes: vivip-
arous quadrupeds, oviparous quadrupeds, birds, fish, and aquatic animals. A fifth vol-
ume was published posthumously (1587). Ulisse Aldrovandi’s encyclopedia on animals
(Bologna, 1599–1642) comprehends volumes on birds, insects, animals without blood
(mollusks, crustaceans, animals with shell, and zoophytes), fish and cetaceans, quadru-
peds, serpents and dragons, and monsters. Volumes on trees and metals were posthu-
mously published.
51 Jolís, Ensayo, 91.
52 Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, 221.
40 chapter 1

about plants and animals, and utilitarian concerns. It is a kind of order consis-
tent with the worldview of persons familiar with the Sacred Scripture, trained
to systematize, and with a pragmatic cast of mind. There are few traces of
native lore at this level of organization of the text.53

2.2 Listing
In the course of his investigation on the effects of writing on the processes
of thought, Jack Goody has paid attention to the use of different kind of lists
in archaic and ancient societies.54 Rosenberg and Grafton have analyzed the
role of lists as a principle of temporal ordering in chronologies and annals.55
Hopefully, our discussion will show that the use of lists by Jesuit authors of nat-
ural histories derived from the practices associated to their missionary activ-
ity (in particular, the writing of lexica and dictionaries of the native tongues)
and their adoption of models of writing (like ancient and medieval works on
nature and pharmacopoeias) that employed listing as a principle of structur-
ing their materials.
The basic principle of textual organization within each of the sections of
these natural histories, either on plants or animals, is listing—not necessarily
as a bare enumeration of creatures, but as a sequence of paragraphs or short
chapters, each of them dealing with an animal or plant. Since medieval times,
most works on natural history—but by no means all of them—are organized as
a collection of paragraphs or short chapters, each devoted to a single creature.

53 It should be recalled that Linnaeus was received rather late in the Rio de la Plata.
Thaddaeus Haenke, the Bohemian botanist who had been the editor of the eighth edition
of the Genera plantarum (1789), arrived in the region with the Malaspina expedition and
established himself in Cochabamba (present-day Bolivia) in the 1790s. In the River Plate
properly, Linnaeus was introduced by Dámaso Larrañaga, an enlightened priest and natu-
ralist born in Montevideo. The works of Buffon circulated freely in Buenos Aires and it
was in that city that Azara was able to get hold of them. See Miguel de Asúa, La ciencia de
Mayo. La cultura científica en los años de la independencia argentina (1790–1820) (Buenos
Aires: FCE, 2010), 117–142.
54 See Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge
University Press, 1977), 74–111.
55 Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time. A History of the Timeline
(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2010), 10–25. I am not claiming that the use of
lists by those Jesuit authors who wrote natural histories turned their works into annals
(i.e., lists of events ordered in a chronological sequence). If anything, their texts are
closer to the genre of chronic. For the distinction between annals and chronics, see
Hayden White, The Content of the Form. Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 4–5.
natural histories 41

There might be attached a picture to each of the chapters. Pliny’s Naturalis his-
toria does not fit this scheme. Buffon’s does, if one accepts that the chapters are
rather long. Bestiaries fit eminently within this frame, as well as the sections
on plants, stones, and animals of the genre de natura rerum and encyclope-
dias of the natural world of the thirteenth century. Renaissance works on ani-
mals, such as the encyclopedias of Gesner and Aldrovandi, can only be said to
enter upon this scheme by a stretch of the imagination. Fernández de Oviedo’s
Historia natural y general de las Indias is structured as a neat sequence of short
chapters, but that is not the case in Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las
Indias.56 If enumerating the creatures is coextensive with the writing of natu-
ral history, listing seems to be a convenient principle in the order of discourse.
Lozano’s Chorographic Description of the Great Chaco assigns only two short
chapters to plants and animals. We find in them several lists, for example, the
seven names of species of bees in the language of the Lules, the four species
of wasps—also in the tongue of the Lules—or the 22 Spanish names of fish in
the Bermejo River.57 Perhaps the longest lists are those of the different groups
of the native peoples of Chaco. Drawing upon an unpublished relación by Luis
de Vega, Lozano enumerates 183 for the Tainos, 46 for the Teutas, 50 for the
Mataguayos, 8 for the Agoyas, 18 for the Xolotas, 19 for the Tobas, and 25 for
the Mocoví and Yapitalaguas.58 But his most intriguing catalogue is that which
amounts to a New World version of Augustine’s famous elenchus of the mon-
strous races of the world in book XVI of De civitate Dei.59 Upon the authority of
Franciscan chroniclers, Lozano describes the human beings with the face and
teeth of a dog who lived near Cuzco and the Tutanuchas of California, whose
unnaturally long earlobes hang down to the earth; also the tailed human beings
mentioned by Peter Martyr (1457–1526) in his Decades of the New World.60
The list is intended as a context for introducing the race of semi-human giants

56 As far as I can tell, the first mention of the significance of Acosta’s treatise as a part of the
Jesuit tradition of writing is Harris, “Confession-Building.” For a fuller (and in my view,
well taken) discussion, see Prieto, Missionary scientists, 143–168. For further bibliography
on Acosta see Asúa and French, A New World of Animals, 76–85.
57 Lozano, Descripción corográfica, 46, 54 and 24–25.
58 Ibid., 80–82. The relaciones were official reports or census by a Spanish colonial officer
informing about the natural and human resources of a region. See Howard Cline, “The
Relaciones Geográficas of the Spanish Indies, 1577–1586.” Hispanic American Historical
Review 44, no. 3 (1964): 341–374.
59 Augustine, De civitate Dei 16.8.
60 The works of the Franciscan chroniclers were Fr. Pedro Simón (1574–1628), Noticias his-
toriales de las conquistas de Tierra Firme en el Nuevo Reyno de Granada and Fr. Antonio
Daza, Quinta parte de la Crónica General de la Orden de San Francisco (Valladolid, 1611).
42 chapter 1

living in Chaco and called by the natives the Cullus, with horns on their heads,
without legs and with feet like those of an ostrich—an anatomical trait that
allows them to run faster than a horse. The Cullus use three spears in combat
and are credited with the quasi extinction of the nation of the Palomos. Lozano
“does not dare to give credence” to these things, even though the Jesuit pro-
vincial Diego Francisco de Altamirano (1626–1704) had written about this race
in the Littera annua of 1678. Lozano also tells us that in a 1628 letter addressed
to the Father provincial, the Jesuit Gaspar Osorio (1595–1639) reported that he
had found in the Chaco a nation whose members were so tall that they could
not reach the head with their hands and whose language, of extreme elegance,
had four synonyms for designating God.61
The sources mentioned by Lozano in the History of the Conquest of Paraguay
are literary and historical in character. He approached them as a historian,
with the knowledge of the natural environment that could have been available
to a missionary without any particular inclination for the study of nature.62 All
the trees and plants mentioned in the History of the Conquest are taken from
the Materia medica written by the Jesuit lay brother Pedro Montenegro (see
next chapter). There is a list of diferencias (species) of fish in Guaraní, made
short, says Lozano, for their names are “so twisted, that it would take too long
to mention them all,” and another list with the Guaraní names of 16 parrots
and popinjays.63 Serpents occupy an important place in the natural histories
we are considering. Lozano gives a more or less wondrous account of nine
serpents besides listing the native names of 16 species of them “in the gober-
nación del Paraguay” (this complementary list might have been taken from a
regional relación).64 Ruiz de Montoya’s Conquista espiritual (1639), a narrative
of the early years of the reductions full of miracles and religious wonders, has a
chapter devoted to animals and in particular to snakes. One of the vipers enu-
merated by Montoya conceives through the mouth and the breed torn apart
the mother to get out; another rots itself into putrefaction after having eaten a
wild boar and later regenerates its skin; there are still others which can prevent
their prey from running away using their breath—Montoya says that “he saw
this happen with great admiration”.65

61 Lozano, Descripción corográfica, 79.

62 For a complete list of sources in the History of the Conquest, see Ernesto J. Maeder, “Estudio
preliminar,” 25–29.
63 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:325 and 333.
64 Ibid., 1:317.
65 Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual (Rosario: EDEHI, 1989), 49–53. Variant
versions of these stories can be found in the Early Modern literature on geography and
animals of the New World, from Mexico to Río de la Plata.
natural histories 43

While Ruiz de Montoya allows us a glimpse into the perturbing side of the
Guaraní Eden, Lozano opens the chapter on snakes with a reference to divine
justice which condemned these noxious creatures to slithering since the begin-
ning of the world.66 All in all, while reading the pages on natural history of
Lozano’s historical works, one is struck by a sense of cumulative enumeration,
made particularly manifest in the History of the Conquest, where he names and
in some cases provides brief descriptions of about 70 birds.67
What Paucke did was to describe his orchard, his vegetable garden, and the
crops in his mission town. His is a local, almost private natural history which at
times reads almost like a Paraguayan Gilbert White:

Since my youth I have had a great contentment and pleasure in such

essays and experiences as those concerning the cultivation of seeds, as in
the metamorphosis of insects, vermin and other such curiosities.68

His voice has the ring of an expatriate, melancholic and almost elegiac in the
description of his orchard: “I had 68 trunks of such trees as I had myself planted
as Allé (poplar grove)”; “I also had a beautiful walnut and all the other fruit trees
that were within [the orchard]”.69 The number of medicinal herbs described by
Paucke (25 of them) is poor in comparison with other natural histories, for he
named only those he grew. Paucke assigned five chapters to cultivated plants
and trees, which all in all resemble more a text on agriculture and horticulture
than one on natural history. But he does mention 37 kinds of wild trees and,
though fish and serpents are poorly represented, he names and describes 41
species of birds, besides those he considered European. Distinctive of Paucke’s
work are his pictures, and particularly his drawings of birds (see below). If he
gives so minute a description of fowl it is because he had a “proper knowledge”
of the “great quantity and variety of duck-like birds that live near my reduction
in the waters of the surrounding regions”.70
Dobrizhoffer was a great storyteller. His prose is detached but never so much
and at times he waxes lyrical, as when he tells us about Don Pedro, the little
parrot he had as a companion in his reduction, or about his pet roebuck, which
had a collar of bells and ate scraps of paper.71 He admits that he is no naturalist
and that anyone wishing to know the creatures should consult “the celebrated

66 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:309.

67 Ibid., 1:326–344.
68 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, vol. 3, bk. 2, 215.
69 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 22 and 232.
70 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 297.
71 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 1:320–322 and 281.
44 chapter 1

Linnaeus and the Dutch savant Willem Piso, who has lived for a long time in
Brazil, and even others who have described everything with minute detail in
its order.” But he thinks that he is capable of “entertaining the readers” with
notable things so far never heard. With respect to plants, he says that he will
talk of them “in the order they come to my mind.” He concedes that the bota-
nists have written more soundly on the subject, but doubts that they have been
more faithful than him in their descriptions.72 Dobrizhoffer opens his account
of animals with those brought from Europe to the New World—horses and
cattle. Then he goes on with quadrupeds and amphibians. He mentions and
summarily describes around 40 birds and 20 kinds of “fish” (actually, animals
that live in water). Dobrizhoffer includes about 100 plants.73 One of the most
impressive lists in De abiponibus is that of the Abipón names of 17 serpents.74
Another significant list is that of the agricultural, animal, and mineral produce
and riches of the country.75 Unlike the other authors, who group several ani-
mals within a kind or class into collective chapters, Dobrizhoffer assigns to
each of his creatures a single chapter, and these are neatly divided.
In the second book of his Saggio, José Jolís enumerates and describes around
100 plants. He consecrates many pages to birds, with a prose inflamed by his
irate tirades against Buffon, against whom he strenuously hurls his arguments
on defense of the variety and magnificence of the fowl of the New World. In his
third book Jolís discusses around 50 fissiparous birds and 10 species of ducks.
In his turn, Termeyer’s more accomplished section is that on “insects” (includ-
ing worms), of which he discusses 12 kinds (Termeyer’s original contributions
to natural history laid in the fields of entomology and arachnology). At the
opening of his natural history he says that he is going to describe 38 quadru-
peds, 34 birds, and around 20 reptiles (actually, he deals with no more than
20 quadrupeds, 30 birds, and around 13 reptiles).76 Unlike most of the other
authors, Termeyer does mention his sources.77
Two chapters of Lozano’s History of the Conquest are devoted to trees
and medicinal plants. These long chapters have as a recognized source

72 Ibid., 1:349.
73 Ibid., 1:349–435.
74 Ibid., 2:286–294.
75 Ibid., 1:99.
76 Termeyer, “Intorno ad alcune osservazioni,” 20.
77 For example, for his passages on birds he drew upon Antonio de Ulloa’s Relación histórica
del viaje a la América Meridional (Madrid, 1784), Louis Feuillée’s Journal des observations
physiques, mathématiques, et botaniques (Paris, 1714), La Condamine’s travel account, and
the works on natural history by the Chilean Jesuit José Ignacio Molina.
natural histories 45

Montenegro’s herbal. In most of these natural histories, the sections of plants

are, when compared to the chapters on animals, more structured, better bal-
anced, and written in a more uniform register. This may be attributed to the
fact that the authors of the natural histories used codices of materia medica as
a source for their chapters on the vegetal world. Contrarily, the sources upon
which they drew for writing on animals were of very different kinds, which
turned out in the more haphazard and irregular character of the correspond-
ing chapters. In any case, we are in the presence of a case of articulation of
medical and natural historical discourses.78 This was not the result of any pro-
grammatic theoretical intention. Faced with the task of having to provide an
orderly account of the creatures of the country in which they were living (or
had lived), the Jesuit authors tried to carry it out in the most efficient possible
way. If they had at hand a work on native plants, such as Montenegro’s herbal,
they made good use of it. Besides, this procedure chimed in with the utilitarian
outlook of the Jesuit natural histories, which at every point stress the useful-
ness of things—antidotes for snake-bites, which were the trees to be used for
building, how to better cook the fish, and so on—so much so that at times they
read as a sort of field guide for future missionaries.
Browsing through an archive of eighteenth-century Iberian American
Jesuitica, one is struck by the omnipresence of documents with lists of every
kind. The daily chores of the Fathers in the reductions and colleges carried out
in the efficient style of Jesuit bureaucracy involved many listings: lists of the
Indians baptized, of Jesuits in the reductions, of students in the colleges, of
books, of goods, of all the innumerable commercial transactions and adminis-
trative proceedings, and so on. Listing was something connatural to a Jesuit. In
their natural histories, the Jesuits set themselves the task of providing a com-
plete inventory, of sedulously enumerating all the plants, animals, and nations
of the land. Prominent in these texts are the lists of native peoples, a central
concern of the missionaries who, in the end, were interested in bringing the
natives to Christianity. At times they used lists in the current sense of the word,
such as strings of Indian names of birds, or fish, or native nations. These were

78 Another instance of the articulation of medical and natural historical discourse occurs in
Dobrizhoffer’s De abiponibus. The discussion of diseases and plagues among the Indians
and of native medicine occupy a few chapters of his book 2. After that, we find four
chapters devoted to serpents and insects, remedies for poisonous bites of insects, and
other noxious insects and their remedies. See Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones,
2:286–346. The author decided to include serpents and insects in his section on medicine,
adopting the medical tradition of the antidotaria, which considered these topics in the
context of poisons and their antidotes.
46 chapter 1

“lexical” lists, in the sense that the conveyed questions of classification and
helped to organize experience.79 They were obviously written down from the
oral reports of native informants. Ruiz de Montoya collected his marvelous sto-
ries of serpents from a mixture of native tales and printed sources. Besides, we
already saw that most of the material that went into the chapters on trees and
plants of the natural histories was actually taken from lists of materia medica.
Guevara arranged alphabetically the section of medical botany of his work,
which might have been related to the fact that these pages were intended to
be consulted and used.80 The practice of writing dictionaries and lexica of the
native languages (discussed in the following section) involved an alphabeti-
cal arrangement of words. In some cases, for instance Dobrizhoffer, we find
that the quadrupeds are ordered beginning with the largest or most impressive
of them (the “tiger”, i.e., the jaguar) while the birds begin with the smallest
and perhaps the most curious and attractive, i.e., the hummingbird. But this
author declined to use any criterion of order with the plants. Certainly, alpha-
betical listing was not a universal criterion and most of the times the ordering
of names within a given category of beings is haphazard.
Listing, a practice to which the Jesuits missionaries were accustomed from
their commercial, administrative, and learned spheres of action, was a prin-
ciple of organization of the material which served the purposes of raising an
inventory of creatures and on occasion resulted from the use of works on mate-
ria medica as sources for the sections on plants, and, perhaps, from the repro-
duction of orally transmitted folk classifications.

2.3 Naming
In a vivid representation of the human being’s awareness of the diversity of the
animal world, the book of Genesis tells how Adam “gave names to all the cattle,
all the birds of heaven and all the wild animals”.81 Our Jesuits were also con-
cerned with naming the creatures of what later authors imagined as a Guaraní
Paradise. Certainly, the eighteenth-century Jesuit missions of Paraquaria have
evoked in writers of different ages a vision of Edenic bless. At the beginning of
his engaging romanticized history of the missions A Vanished Arcadia, Robert
Cunninghame Graham (1852–1936) recalls his visit to Paraguay in 1871, where
“old men kept the illusion that the missions in the Jesuits’ times had been a
paradise”.82 In his 1825 Tale of Paraguay, a poem in Spenserian stanzas inspired

79 Goody, Domestication of the Savage Mind, 94.

80 See p. 151 for a discussion of this list.
81 Gen 2:20 (The New Jerusalem Bible).
82 Robert Cunninghame Graham, A Vanished Arcadia (London: Heinemann, 1901), xx.
natural histories 47

by an episode told by Dobrizhoffer, Poet Laureate Robert Southey (1774–1843)

imagined Paraguay as a “woodlands waste” which, despite being “all unlike to
Paradise,” causes him to believe, rather inconsequentially, that “Something of
what in Eden might have been / Was shadow’d there imperfectly”.83 “A spec-
tacle worthy of the eyes of Paradise” was the truly Baroque simile employed
by Ludovico Muratori (1672–1750) to describe the Guaraní missions in Il cris-
tianesimo felice, first published in 1734.84 Muratori’s work interpreted the Jesuit
experience in Paraguay as a recreation of the communities of early Christianity
by the “new Christians,” the natives, whom he saw as “these wolves, these
bears, turned into tame lambs, into innocent doves”.85 The comparison of the
Guaraní to wild animals is a topos that opens a view into the contradictions in
the accounts of actors and historians alike. Human beings are animals and ani-
mals could be dangerous creatures which required taming. Ruiz de Montoya
claimed that he lived “in the Province of Paraguay like in a desert, looking for
fierce beasts, barbarous Indians . . . to be brought into the fold of the Church”.86
That snakes play so prominently a role in these Jesuit natural histories is attrib-
utable not only to the real fact that they were one of the perils which anybody
living in the missions had to face, but also to the symbolic certainty that ser-
pents constitute the dangerous dimension of every Paradise worth that name.
Of the religious autos regularly performed by the Guaraní in Paraguay, the
text of a short theatrical piece has survived. Written in Guaraní, with some
phrases in Spanish and Latin, the short representation tells the story of “Man’s
first disobedience.” One of the devils, Maldito [Accursed] at one point says
“I have learned that in Paradise there is a fruit of Knowledge. I will turn into
a serpent”—actually, who eventually addresses Eva in the play is Lucifer.87
In his History of Brazil (1810–1819) Southey passed a harsh judgment on
the Jesuits, but in the Tale of Paraguay he has kind words for Dobrizhoffer, “A
faithful chronicler in handing down / Names which he loved, and things well
worthy to be known” (my emphasis).88 It is not surprising that the Jesuit writ-
ers of natural histories always used the native names for the creatures of the
land, since the animals and plants of the tropical forest had no names in the
European tongues. Sánchez Labrador was obsessively bent on using the Indian

83 Robert Southey, A Tale of Paraguay (Boston: Goodrich, 1827), 54.

84 Ludovico Muratori, Il cristianesimo felice (Venice: Giambattista Pasquali, 1752), 91.
85 Ibid., 112.
86 Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual, 46–47.
87 Walter Rela, El teatro jesuítico en Brasil, Paraguay, Argentina. Siglos XVI–XVIII (Montevideo:
Universidad Católica del Uruguay, 1988), 174.
88 Southey, A Tale of Paraguay, 89.
48 chapter 1

names. In his encyclopedia he used them in the first place, even in the chap-
ters that deal with the general anatomy and physiology of the great groups of
animals. Paucke used German words for designating the creatures, but added
the Mocoví names. Dobrizhoffer provided the Abipón and Guaraní names of
animals and plants. Jolís took care to give the names of animals and plants in
several native tongues, like those of the Lules, the Vilelas, the Tobas, and the
Chiriguanos. The singular exotic atmosphere common to all these works is due
in no small measure to the richness of aboriginal names in them.
Missionaries all over the world have contributed to the knowledge of what
would be otherwise lost languages. In a substantial essay, the late Sabine
MacCormack has underscored the role of native languages in the Jesuit’s mis-
sionary program in Peru.89 Since 1570, the learning of aboriginal languages as
an instrument of preaching was the official policy of Jesuit authorities. Since
the Fifth General Congregation of 1593–1594 the learning of these languages
became an obligation for Jesuits about to be sent to the Indies.90 The members
of the Society of Jesus in Paraguay and Río de la Plata did their share in this
respect with a view to gain converts to their faith. The first Guaraní grammar,
Arte de gramática (Coimbra, 1595), was that of José de Anchieta (1534–1597),
a famous Jesuit missionary in Brazil. Ruiz de Montoya wrote a Grammar, a
Dictionary (Spanish-Guaraní), a Thesaurus of Guaraní terms and phrases, and
a Catechism in Guaraní. (All of them were published between 1639 and 1640,
while he was in Madrid trying to wrangle from Philip IV tax exemptions for
the Guaraní in the reductions and the assertion of their right to be free from
encomienda.) Montoya’s vocabulary and grammar were also published in the
presses of the reduction of Santa María la Mayor (1722, 1724) in an edition
revised by Father Paulo Restivo.91 In 1732 in Madrid appeared Machoni’s gram-
mar and vocabulary of Lule and Tonocoté, mentioned above. In 1606 Luis de
Valdivia (1561–1642) published a grammar of Mapudungun (the language of the
Mapuche) and a year later a grammar, short vocabularies and catechisms for

89 See Sabine MacCormack, “Grammar and Virtue: The Formulation of a Cultural and
Missionary Program by the Jesuits in Early Colonial Peru,” in O’Malley et al., The Jesuits II,
576–601.
90 Aliocha Maldavsky, “The Problematic Acquisition of Indigenous Languages: Practices and
Contentions in Missionary Specialization in the Jesuit Province of Peru (1568–1640),” in
O’Malley et al., The Jesuits II, 602–615. Maldavsky showed how this policy was challenged
by Creole Jesuits, who did not wish to go into missionary work. For a discussion of the role
of native languages in the missionary program of the Jesuit province of Peru as formu-
lated by Acosta, see Prieto, Missionary scientists, 31–35.
91 Furlong, Misiones, 589–590; Rudolph Schuller, “One of the Rarest American Books,”
American Anthropologist, n. s. 15, no. 1 (1913): 129–132.
natural histories 49

Millcayak and Allentiak (Lima, 1607)—two languages spoken by the Huarpes

in Cuyo, the Central Western region of present-day Argentina—. Andrés Febrés
(1734–1790) wrote a grammar of the Araucano language: Arte de la lengua gene­
ral del Reyno de Chile (Lima, 1765). In his Description of Patagonia, Thomas
Falkner included a short vocabulary of Tehuelhet. Father Joseph Brigniel
(1699–1733) and Dobrizhoffer left notes on Abipón, which ethnographer
Lafone Quevedo used for his reconstruction of the grammar of the language.92
Alonso de Barzana (1530–1597) was perhaps the greatest linguist of the Society
in Peru and Paraguay. Besides his Arte y vocabulario de la lengua general del
Perú (Lima, 1586) and several other books, he wrote a grammar of the Toba,
which remained in manuscript form until modern times and was also edited
by Lafone Quevedo.93 The Jesuit Joaquín Camaño (1737–1820) wrote a Chiquito
grammar, of which only fragments remained. And we have the several Quechua
and Aymara grammars and vocabularies of Diego González Holguín (1553–
1617) and Diego de Torres Rubio (1548–1638), and the five books on Aymara of
Ludovico Bertoni (Giovanni Luigi Bertonio, 1557–1625): grammar, vocabulary,
thesaurus, confessionary, and a life of Jesus, published between 1603 and 1612.94
All these linguistic instruments were not molded upon Antonio de Nebrija’s
Spanish grammar, but upon Latin grammars, for Latin was the lingua franca of
the Society of Jesus.95 The patient work of lexicography that Ruiz de Montoya
did for the Guaraní, Sánchez Labrador carried out with the Mbyá. He left a
grammar and an extensive vocabulary Spanish-Mbyá.96 Unger Elke has catego-
rized the terms of this vocabulary: 132 pertain to the field of flora (cultivated
and wild), 154 to wild fauna, and 56 to domestic animals.97 The collective Jesuit

92 Samuel A. Lafone Quevedo, Lenguas argentinas. Idioma abipón; Ensayo fundado sobre el
“De Abiponibus” de Dobrizhoffer y los manuscritos del Padre J. Brigniel, S.J. (Buenos Aires:
Coni, 1896).
93 Alonso Bárcena [Barzana], Arte de la lengua toba, ed. Samuel A. Lafone Quevedo (La Plata:
Revista del Museo de La Plata, 1893). See DHCJ, s.v. “Barzana, Alonso de,” by E. Fernández
and J. Baptista.
94 See DHCJ, s.v. “González Holguín, Diego,” by J. Baptista; “Torres Rubio, Diego de,” by
E. Fernández G.; and “Bertonio, Juan,” by F. Pease and J. Baptista.
95 Otto Zwartjes, “Modo, tiempo y aspecto en las gramáticas de las lenguas mapuche,
millcayac y guaraní de Luis de Valdivia y Antonio Ruiz de Montoya. La categoría de los
‘tiempos mixtos’,” in idem, ed., Las gramáticas misioneras de tradición hispánica (siglos
XVII–XVIII) (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 238–240.
96 José Sánchez Labrador, Gramática eyiguayegui-mbayá. Según el manuscrito del siglo XVIII,
ed. B. Susnik, 3 vols. (Asunción: Museo Etnográfico Andrés Barbero, 1971–1972).
97 Unger Elke, Resumen etnográfico del vocabulario eyiguayegui-mbayá del P. José Sánchez
Labrador (Asunción: Museo Etnográfico Andrés Barbero, 1972), 9–28.
50 chapter 1

enterprise of studying native languages in South America was synthesized in

the work of the Spanish Jesuit linguist Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735–1809),
who, based in Rome, received an uninterrupted stream of correspondence
from Jesuit missionaries from all over the world.98 When as a belated reaction
against the publication of the Encyclopédie the Jesuits turned to the writing
of encyclopedic works of all kinds, Hervás published in Cesena between 1778
and 1787 a 21–volume encyclopedia in Italian under the common title of Idea
dell’universo.99 The last five volumes of this work are devoted to languages.
Hervás rewrote the opening volume of this linguistic series, the Catalogo delle
lingue conosciute (1784, vol. 17 of Idea dell’universo) in Spanish and published
it in Madrid between 1800 and 1805 as Catálogo de las lenguas de las naciones
conocidas in six volumes, the first of which is a survey of the languages of the
Americas, going from south to north (chapter one deals with the languages of
Tierra del Fuego, Patagonia, and Chile; chapter two with those of Paraguay and
Brazil, and so on).100 In the last volume of his encyclopedia, the Saggio pratico
delle lingue, Hervás provided a summarized catalogue of the world languages,
mentioning 32 South American Indian tongues.101
The use of native names in works of natural history was not exclusive of
Jesuit authors, but it seems that they dealt with them in a recognizable man-
ner. In the course of the sixteenth century, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de
Sahagún (1500–1590) and the Spanish physician Francisco Hernández (1517–
1587) wrote monumental works on the natural world of New Spain which as
a rule used Nahuatl names to designate the plants and trees of those lands.102
As was acknowledged by Dobrizhoffer, the work which set the standard for
scholarly research on the nature of the New World was Piso and Markgraf’s
Historia naturalis Brasiliae.103 The Natural History of Brazil is the common title

98 See Charles Upson Clark, “Jesuit Letters to Hervás on American Languages and Customs,”
Journal de la Société des Américanistes 29, no. 1 (1937): 97–145.
99 Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, Idea dell’Universo, 21 vols. (Cesena: Gregorio Biasini, 1778–
1787). For Jesuit encyclopedic writing in the eighteenth century see Andrea Battistini, “Del
caos al cosmos: el saber enciclopédico de los jesuitas,” in De las academias a la enciclope-
dia: el discurso del saber en la modernidad, ed. Evangelina Rodríguez Cuadros (Valencia:
Ediciones Alfons el Magnànino, 1993), 303–332.
100 Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, Catálogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas, vol. 1,
Lenguas y naciones americanas (Madrid: Imprenta de la Administración del Real Arbitrio
de Beneficencia, 1800).
101 Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, Saggio pratico delle lingue (Cesena: Gregorio Biasini, 1787),
59–80.
102 See Asúa and French, A New World of Animals, 42–45 and 93–103.
103 Willem Piso and Georg Markgraf, Historia naturalis Brasiliae (Leiden: Franciscus Hack,
1648; Amsterdam: Ludovicus Elzevier, 1648).
natural histories 51

of what are actually two works, a treatise on Brazilian medicine (De medic-
ina Brasiliensi) by Willem Piso (1611–1678) and the Historia rerum naturalium
Brasiliae in eight books by Georg Markgraf (1611–1648). The latter consists of
short chapters accompanied by drawings, each of them devoted to one or
more animals. These are mentioned by their Tupí names, with their equiva-
lents in Portuguese and, on occasion, other European languages. Except for
the names, there is no trace of folk animal lore in Markgraf’s neat morphologi-
cal descriptions. The typographical arrangement adopted by Johannes de Laet
(1581–1649), the editor of the work, was functional to the purpose of keeping
the native names separated from the text, which bore the weight of the sci-
entific account. Names, pictures and description function as juxtaposed dis-
tinct elements. Ten years after the Historia naturalis Brasiliae came out, Piso
published another work entitled De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica libri
quatuordecim.104 Its first part consists of six books on Brazilian medicine and
natural history by him and two more books by Markgraf, all under the title of
Historia naturalis et medica Indiae occidentalis. The second part of this work
is the Historiae naturalis et medicae Indiae orientalis, a treatise on tropical
medicine and plants of the East Indies by Jacob de Bondt (Jacobus Bontius,
1591–1631), a Dutch physician sent to Batavia (present-day Jakarta, Indonesia)
by the Dutch East India Company.105 Montenegro and Sánchez Labrador drew
heavily on the works of Piso and Markgraf, but in the text of these Jesuits—and
those of his colleagues, to a lesser extent—native names were incorporated
into the fabric of the writing. In his Paraguay Natural, Sánchez Labrador used
neither Linnaean nomenclature nor classification, either of animals or plants.106
In the Jesuit works on natural history written in the Italian exile the ques-
tion of names took a new turn. In the prologue to his Essay on the Natural
History of the Great Chaco, Jolís says that he undertook his book

. . . by the pitiful and unflattering picture which certain authors paint of
the entire continent, describing its climate as so malignant that not only
the human beings degenerate there, but also animals, plants and trees
brought from Europe.107

Explicitly following on the steps of the Mexican Jesuit Clavigero, Jolís shows
himself as a champion of the New World facing the onslaught launched by

104 Willem Piso, De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica libri quatuordecim (Amsterdam:
Ludovicus and Daniel Elsevier, 1658).
105 See Asúa and French, A New World of Animals, 115–123.
106 Sainz Ollero et al., José Sánchez Labrador, 179 and 214.
107 Jolís, Ensayo, 37.
52 chapter 1

Buffon and de Pauw. Jolís concedes that the “modern” standards for writing
natural history involve microscopic descriptions and the classification of spe-
cies according to Linnaeus’s taxonomy. But he argues that an old-fashioned
way of writing and describing is enough for his aims, for what is ultimately
important is “to know that in a given place or country grows a plant which has
this or that virtue and is known there by a certain name”.108 As Dobrizhoffer
had done before, Jolís also admits that he is “not writing for the specialists” and
that he is “neither a botanist nor a naturalist.” His grouping of the plants, which
he says is not “philosophic,” is allegedly that used by Clavigero, one of the “mod-
erns” and “quite well-known by his History of Mexico”.109 These Jesuit writers
could have been described by Linnaeus as botanophili (botanical amateurs),
those who, in contradistinction to botanici (botanists), “have written botani-
cal [works], though they do not properly belong to botanical science”.110 In
the Osservazioni di storia naturale Americana Termeyer also claims that the
reader cannot expect from him “the exactitude of a naturalist,” for he worked
in his spare time, “without books, without corresponding with colleagues, and
without instruments”.111 Even in his field of expertise—we shall see in the last
chapter that he had written a good deal on entomology and enjoyed some rec-
ognition as an expert on spiders—Termeyer presents himself as “a mere col-
lector of insects” and recognizes that he is not “a methodical and systematic
entomologist”.112 This is in contrast with the Chilean Jesuit José Ignacio Molina,
who in his Saggio sulla storia naturale del Chili uses Linnaean nomenclature,
reproduces in notes the technical botanical descriptions, and provides a list
of the new species of animals described according to the Linnaean system.
Molina, who studied in Bologna, was perhaps the most accomplished botanist
of the exiled Jesuit writers of natural histories.113

108 Ibid., 90.

109 Ibid., 90–92. Jolís groups the plants into (a) delicate domestic plants and edible herbs,
(b) edible plants and trees, (c) medicinal plants, (d) noxious plants and trees, (e) dye-
woods, and (f) “peculiar” plants. Actually, Clavigero used a different classification.
He organized them in (a) remarkable for their flowers, (b) remarkable for their fruits,
(c) remarkable for their roots, leaves, stems or wood, (d) useful for their resins, gums, oils
or juices. See Clavigero, Storia antica dell Messico, 1:45–68.
110 Linnaeus, Philosophia botanica, 2nd ed. (Vienna: Johann Thomas von Trattner, 1783), 15.
111 Termeyer, “Intorno ad alcune osservazioni,” 248.
112 Ibid., 552.
113 For the Saggio, he depended on the 12th edition of the Systema naturae (1776), see José R.
Stuardo, “Trascendencia del primer Saggio sulla storia naturale del Chili de I. J. Molina, su
traducción, el Compendio y el Bicentenario,” Atenea 495 (2007): 83–107.
natural histories 53

Besides their protestations of humility, Termeyer and Jolís engaged them-

selves in a defense of the aboriginal names of beasts and birds, an important
component in a broader strategy on what has been called “the dispute over the
New World”.114 It has been already pointed out that Clavigero criticized Buffon
for his ignorance of the native languages, which resulted in his disregard of the
native taxonomies. Jolís and Termeyer joined in this common battle for the
defense of autochthonous names, which involved aboriginal ways of identi-
fying the creatures. Jolís claimed that Buffon and Azara, like many European
naturalists, “ignoring the true meanings of the words of the native tongues,
substitute new ones, which imitate the old ones, and recast the compound
terms”.115 In his turn, Termeyer was willing to forgive Buffon “for having taken
corrupt names from other authors” but his condescension did not extend
to Azara, who “lived for 40 years in Asunción and well could have learnt the
language”.116
As has been mentioned above, Félix de Azara wrote extensive works on the
fauna of Río de la Plata and Paraguay, notably the Notes on the Natural History
of the Birds of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata and the Essais sur l’histoire naturelle
des quadrupèdes de la province du Paraguay, which was first published in
French in Paris, 1801.117 In the last-mentioned book the spellings of the Guaraní
names of animals were adapted by the translator M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry
(1750–1819) for French pronunciation; for instance, the Spanish u is rendered as
the French diphthong ou. Thus, jaguareté is translated as yagouarété, chibigu-
azú as chibigouazou, and so on. Moreover, Moreau de Saint-Méry introduced
the work by a few pages indicating the correct French pronunciation of the
names of all the animals, the “Pronunciation syllabique des mots guaranís”
comprehending 92 animal names.118 There is also a glossary of terms used in
South America, arranged by alphabetical order, like “Buenos-Ayres,” “Pampa,”
and “toldería”.119 In his Osservazioni, Termeyer took issue with many of the
names of animals and their spellings as appear in the French edition of Azara’s
work without ever considering the question of transliteration. For example, he

114 See Gerbi, The dispute of the New World.

115 Jolís, Ensayo, 114.
116 Termeyer, “Intorno ad alcune osservazioni,” 486–487.
117 Félix de Azara, Apuntamientos para la historia natural de las páxaros del Paraguay
y Rio de la Plata, 3 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de la viuda de Ibarra 1802–1805); idem,
Essais sur l’histoire naturelle des quadrupèdes de la Province du Paraguay, 2 vols., trans.
M.L.E. Moreau de Saint-Méry (Paris: Pougens, 1801).
118 Azara, Essais sur l’histoire naturelle des quadrupèdes, 1:lx–lxiv.
119 Ibid., 1:lxvii–lxxiii.
54 chapter 1

says that Azara’s name for the anteater, Yoqoui is wrong, for the true name is
Yoquì, although he adds that in the end this is not important once we know that
we are dealing with Myrmecophaga jubata L.120 What Azara calls Pay, Linnaeus
Cavia Paca, Buffon Paca and Lacépède Agoutì-Paca, in Guaraní is called Pag,
says Termeyer.121 And although he rehearses Azara’s description of four species
of stags, he also recalls that its generic name is Guazù and not Gouazoù, as in
Azara (Termeyer uses Italian accent marks in his Guaraní words).122
In his work on quadrupeds Azara waged his own private war against Buffon
over the names of American animals. It must be said that in the Spanish edi-
tion of the work the Guaraní names were adapted for Spanish pronunciation,
thus rendering inane many of Termeyer’s critiques.123 As we have already dis-
cussed, the broader context of this lexicographic turmoil was Buffon’s thesis
of the inferiority of the New World. Azara’s attitude toward Buffon oscillates
between unbound admiration and harsh criticism—he himself says in the
introduction to the Apuntamientos para la historia natural de los quadrúpedos
del Paraguay that Buffon’s Histoire naturelle was the only book on the sub-
ject he had ever read.124 As a rule, in the first lines of the chapters on this or
that animal, Azara discusses the aboriginal names and their meanings with a
zoologist’s perceptiveness for the problems surrounding the naming of spe-
cies. But, for the most, his prose, orderly, methodical, uniform, and bristling
with careful anatomical measures, is free of aboriginal words.
Naming the plants and animals of the land, most of them unknown to
Europeans, was a primary concern of the Jesuit authors of natural histories.
As the allusions to the literary motif of Adam naming the beasts reveal, this
was done in the spirit of the human being set in Paradise among the crea-
tures—an ambiguous Paradise, certainly. Naming meant communication and
the ability of understanding the many aboriginal tongues. The Jesuits had to
write grammars, lexica, and linguistic instruments for preaching. In a sense the
natural histories can be seen as a complement to and a prolongation of the dic-
tionaries. First and foremost, the Jesuits used native names. This suggests that
they were at least as interested in learning the languages as in providing an
account of rivers, trees, and beasts. After the expulsion, the question of names

120 Termeyer, “Intorno ad alcune osservazioni,” 462–465.

121 Ibid., 488.
122 Ibid., 500.
123 Félix de Azara, Apuntamientos para la historia natural de los cuadrúpedos del Paragüay y
Río de la Plata, 2 vols. (Madrid: Viudad de Ibarra, 1802). The Spanish edition of the work
appeared later than its French translation.
124 Ibid., 1:vii.
natural histories 55

took a new turn: the use of Indian names was the watershed which separated
the natural histories of the Jesuits from those of the specialized naturalists
like Linnaeus and Buffon. The former used local names because their inten-
tion was to write an engaging story recreating the lands from which they had
been expelled. They did not claim to write learned works. This fever for native
names—and the worldview they connoted—permeates the natural histories.

3 The Natural Histories

So far, we have discussed the Jesuit natural histories as a whole, so as to offer a

succinct characterization of this kind of writing, stressing their dual character
of intellectual products carved out of language and at the same time with an
alert attention to the reality of things. These works were a catalogue of the liv-
ing beings of the real world and as such manifest their authors’ confidence in
the referential capability of language. These texts presupposed a created order
of nature, a system of creatures which the authors felt they could represent
and convey into words. On the other hand, with their immediacy to the native
tongues, their concern for the preservation of local names, and their close
association to instruments of translation and interpretation such as dictionar-
ies and thesauri, they seem to move very much within the realm of language
itself. In the Jesuit natural histories of Paraquaria words and things were not
divorced, but conceived as correlatives.
We will now take a closer look at a representative example of each of the
three types of natural histories distinguished above, an approach that will
hopefully allow us to perceive the transformations experienced by this genre
of writing in the course of time. The epistemological issues that arise here are
discussed against a broader context in the conclusion of the book.

3.1 Lozano and the Wondrous Nature of Paraguay

Lozano’s natural history was part and parcel of a broader project, undertook
by a Jesuit who, as the official chronicler of the province of Paraguay, was also
the author of the Litterae annuae of Paraquaria from 1720 through 1740.125 In
the beautiful retreat of Santa Catalina, one of the Jesuit estancias in Córdoba,
this Jesuit historian wrote his large historical panoramas of civil and religious
history of Río de la Plata and Paraguay. Notwithstanding Lozano’s lifelong per-
sonal acquaintance with the region, the sections on natural history of his works

125 Carlos Leonhardt, ed., Cartas Anuas de la Provincia del Paraguay, Chile y Tucumán de la
Compañía de Jesús (1609–1614) (Buenos Aires: Peuser, 1927), xxii.
56 chapter 1

sound at times bookish. In his Chorographic Description of the Great Chaco, he

bursts into joyful exclamations about the noble quality of the land, evoking
the rhetoric of the early discoverers of the New World with Columbian echoes.
The Chaco offers “the most happy recreation and beautiful sights,” with “fertile
and pleasant countryside and meadows” and “fine ponds and lagoons rich in
fish”.126 The inhabitants, by contrast, when tattooed with colors, are “utterly
ugly, such that they look like demons and strike terror in the bravest person”.127
Of all the Jesuit natural histories, this one is the most hospitable to marvels
and prodigies, a trait that can be traced back to his source material of early
chronicles as well as to the worldview that pervaded many Jesuit works on
the nature of the New World. We find many reports of transitions between
vegetable and animal life forms in the writings of Jesuit missionaries—tales
recovered from native legends and which might have evoked in the Fathers
memories of youthful readings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
For instance, Lozano mentions that the flowers of the guayacán engender a
kind of butterfly, which should be consider as the fruit of that tree. When this
creature perceives that its end is near, its sensitive life turns into vegetative ani-
mation, so that the substance of the butterfly is changed into the matter of the
tree. The tiny feet of the creature, embedded into the earth, are transfigured
into the root of a new tree, whose stem grows from the back of the insect—a
thing “worthy of admiration which invites to praise of the Author of nature”.128
The guayacán is not the only marvelous tree of Paraguay. The guembe
gives birth to a certain kind of mosquitoes, the múai. The small holes left in
the trunk by its falling leaves are filled with a resin which, either by itself or
through the corruption caused by the rain, is transformed into the insects,
which are extremely venomous.129 Lozano also tells that the leaves of the caay-
cobé shrink when they are touched and recover their usual shape once the con-
tact has ceased. The Guaraní infer from this that the caaycobé has sensitive life,
but the Jesuit is not convinced and prefers to interpret the phenomenon as a
symbol of purity.130 There are two other plants endowed with curious virtues.
They always grow in proximity to each other. One of them, if smelled, causes
copious nasal hemorrhage, while the scent of the other cures the bleeding

126 Lozano, Descripción corográfica, 38.

127 Ibid., 61. This outlook owes much to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chronicles of
the New World that Lozano used as sources.
128 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:219.
129 Ibid., 1:246.
130 Ibid., 1:267.
natural histories 57

instantaneously—Lozano heard this story from a Jesuit who witnessed the

experience made by an expert herbolarius.131
The kind of natural philosophy favored by the Society of Jesus legitima-
tized a perception of a marvelous nature, rich in prodigies and which called
for allegorical interpretation. Three authors embodied and fostered this
worldview: the polymath Athanasius Kircher, his disciple Gaspar Schott,
and the Biblical exegete and natural philosopher Juan Eusebio Nieremberg,
who taught at the Colegio Imperial in Madrid. In his Historia naturae max-
ime preregrinae (Antwerp, 1635) Nieremberg sets out to provide a commented
catalogue of marvelous beings (peregrinae), from the human being down to
minerals.132 For information about creatures of the New World, he relied on
Francisco Hernández’s Thesaurus, among other early chroniclers and natural-
ists. Nieremberg’s Neoplatonic optic sees in the animals a wondrous theatrum
from which the mind should elevate itself toward higher realities. This widely
read author was a defender of explanations that called into play occult virtues
such as sympathies and antipathies among creatures and inert things, a posi-
tion hinted at in the title of one of his books: Curious and Hidden Philosophy.133
His works enjoyed a great prestige in the Jesuit world of learning and his view
of nature was at the background of much that was written on the nature of the
New World by missionaries of the Society. Nieremberg’s perspectives on natu-
ral philosophy were in line with those of Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), one
of the most prestigious savants of the Catholic world. This German polymath
had written on almost every branch of human and divine knowledge: natu-
ral philosophy, Oriental languages, medicine, religion, mathematics, Ancient
history, and sundry other subjects. Based on the Collegium Romanum (the
teaching institution established by Ignacio de Loyola), Kircher cultivated a
peculiarly Jesuit kind of Baroque science, characterized by a blend of the new
experimental physics with late Renaissance Hermeticism—a compromise

131 Ibid., 1:267.

132 Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, Historia naturae maxime peregrinae (Antwerp: ex officina
Plantiniana Balthasaris Moreti, 1635). For Nieremberg in the context of Jesuit learning
about the New World, see Domingo Ledezma, “Una legitimación imaginativa del Nuevo
Mundo: La Historia naturae maxime peregrinae del jesuita Juan Eusebio Nieremberg,” in
Millones Figueroa and Ledezma, El saber de los jesuitas, 53–83.
133 Juan Eusebio Nieremberg, Curiosa y oculta filosofía: primera y segunda parte de las mara-
villas de la naturaleza . . . (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1643). This treatise had been originally
published as two separate works: Curiosa filosofía (Madrid, 1630) and Oculta filosofía
(Madrid, 1638). For the bibliographic history of the work, see Victor Navarro, “Tradition
and Scientific Change in Early Modern Spain,” in Feingold, Jesuit Science and the Republic
of Letters, 334, notes 22 and 23.
58 chapter 1

between the mechanical view of the world and the penchant for explanations
based on occult forces, correspondence among things, and an analogical inter-
pretation of nature.134
Lozano’s History of the Conquest has its quota of monstrous and marvelous
beasts. To begin with, he duly describes the sú or succarath, first mentioned
and depicted by the French Franciscan traveler André Thevet (1516–1590) in
Les singularités de la France Antarcticque (1557).135 Lozano took his account
from Nieremberg’s Historia naturae. The sú lives in Patagonia and his face is
like that of a lion or even of a man, for it is bearded. The tail is long and bushy
and it carries its cubs upon its back. The hunters dig a deep hole covered with
twigs and leaves. When the animal falls in the pitfall, it emits horrendous
screams and tears its breed to pieces, what prompts the pursuers to come
near and transfix it with their spears.136 In the third canto of the epic poem
La Argentina y conquista del Río de la Plata by Martín del Barco Centenera
(1535–1602) we find many tales of marvelous creatures. Of these, Lozano
rehearses almost literally the story of the micurén, who nurtures and breeds
its cubs in a sack, but lets them go away when confronted by an enemy.137 He

134 For a general introduction to Kircher see Conor Reilly, Athanasius Kircher: a Master of a
Hundred Arts, 1602–1680 (Wiesbaden and Rome: Edizioni del Mondo, 1974) and two col-
lections of articles: John E., Fletcher, ed., Athanasius Kircher und seiner Beziehungen zum
gelehrten Europa seiner Zeit (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988), which explores the net-
work of Kircher’s correspondents, and Paula Findlen, ed., Athanasius Kircher. The Last
Man Who Knew Everything (New York and London: Routledge, 2004), which gathers much
of current Kircher’s scholarship. In particular, see Findlen, “A Jesuit’s Books in the New
World: Athanasius Kircher and His American readers,” in idem, Athanasius Kircher, 329–
364, which discusses the reception of Kircher’s books in New Spain. A comprehensive
study of Kircher’s understanding of the New World can be found in Millones Figueroa,
“La intelligentsia jesuita y la naturaleza del Nuevo Mundo en el siglo XVII,” in Millones
Figueroa and Ledezma, El saber de los jesuitas, 27–51. Thomas Leinkauf, Mundus combina-
tus. Studien zur Struktur der baroken Universalwissenschaft am Beispiel Athanasius Kircher,
S.J. (1602–1680) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993) is a massive study of Baroque science with
a focus on Kircher’s ars combinatoria. Asúa and French, A New World of Animals, 162–182
offers a discussion of Jesuit natural philosophy of marvels and prodigies as concerns ani-
mals of the New World seen by Kircher, Nieremberg, and Schott. Further studies will be
cited as required.
135 Asúa and French, A New World of Animals, 154–155.
136 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:285–286; cf. Nieremberg, Historia naturae,
189. The monster is actually an imaginative version of an opossum.
137 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:298–299; cf. Martín del Barco Centenera,
Argentina y conquista del Río de la Plata (Lisbon: Craesbeeck, 1602), 17. The micurén is
another interpretation of the opossum.
natural histories 59

also reproduces Barco Centenera’s account of the beast that brings forth the
carbunclo, a rare stone—although he surmises that its fame is as fabulous as
that of the Arabian Phoenix.138 This elusive animal exhibits a mirror upon its
head, which to be seized has to be torn from the creature while it is still alive,
otherwise the stone becomes cloudy and its light dies off. Lozano takes from
Nieremberg the story of the quirquincho (armadillo) and the stag. While lying
on its back, the quirquincho collects rain in its concavity, thus attracting a
thirsty stag which comes to drink. The quirquincho then closes its shell around
itself and snaps the snout of the stag, which dies as a result of suffocation.139
La Argentina, a chronicle of the conquest of the Río de la Plata by Díaz de
Guzmán, is the source of Lozano’s tale about a monstrous serpent of 25 feet in
length, which the natives adored. A demon which had taken possession of the
creature talked to them through it, so that they fed it with human flesh of war
captives out of awe.140 In Lozano’s natural history snakes are creatures usually
endowed with prodigious qualities. From Ruiz de Montoya he rehearses the
tale of a serpent which can swallow an entire human being and also mates like
humans, “which has been ascertained in several cases.” One of these creatures
raped a native woman and kept her captive for a few days, until she was found
and died soon after, not before receiving the sacraments.141
Despite the occurrence of these tales of marvelous plants and animals,
Lozano’s History of the Conquest of Paraguay is quite factual—although not
always trustworthy; for example, he affirms that the yacaré (caiman) “is mon-
strous, for it has four eyes”.142 The author’s ambivalent attitude with respect
to the prodigies of the natural world is best exemplified by his account of the
hummingbird. The beauty and exceptionality of this bird perhaps contributed
to make it the subject of many aboriginal legends concerning its transforma-
tions and origin. The hummingbird has a prominent role in the Guaraní cre-
ation myth, nurturing and refreshing Ñamandú, the First Father of the Guaraní

138 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:299; cf. Barco Centenera, Argentina, 21.
139 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:304–305; cf. Nieremberg, Historia naturae,
160.
140 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:313; cf. Ruy Díaz de Guzmán, La Argentina.
Historia del descubrimiento, conquista y población del Río de la Plata (Buenos Aires:
Imprenta de Mayo, 1882), 104. Díaz de Guzmán’s work should not be confused with Barco
Centenera’s poem of the same name and similar subject matter.
141 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:315; cf. Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiri-
tual, 51.
142 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:320.
60 chapter 1

pantheon.143 Lozano had heard from several Jesuits that the bird emerged from
the metamorphosis of a butterfly that by and by covered itself with feathers—
the said Fathers “had seen some [of these creatures], in part hummingbirds
and in part butterflies, caught before the transformation was complete.” He
also mentions that the Jesuit Simão de Vasconcelos (1596–1671) in his Vida do
Padre J. de Almeida, affirms that he saw with his own eyes some little worms
bred upon the water, which were transformed into mosquitoes. These grew to
be lizards, which in turn were transfigured into butterflies, which were ulti-
mately metamorphosed into hummingbirds. Lozano admits that the creator of
nature can make this and other marvelous things, which cannot be understood
by our philosophy.144 But he adds, significantly, that “for all that, it cannot be
denied that the hummingbirds are propagated like other birds, because it is
possible to find in their nests small eggs like chickpeas”.145
The enlightened critique of the late eighteenth century censored the Jesuit
chronicles as the second-rate work of miracle mongers on the grounds that the
early texts of the genre were full of religious and natural wonders—the short
chapter on animals in Montoya’s Spiritual Conquest, for example, is a catalogue
of fabulous beasts. But this inclination for the supernatural and the marvel-
ous dimensions of reality was progressively abandoned. Sánchez Labrador,
who wrote much of his encyclopedia of natural history after the expulsion,
patterned his canon of belief after the moderate skepticism of Benito Feijóo’s
Teatro crítico—a model for late Catholic enlightened opinion. Lozano’s atti-
tude was halfway between Montoya’s wondrous world and the more reserved
stance adopted by Sánchez Labrador.
Most of Lozano’s writing has a strongly utilitarian approach, a quality com-
mon to all the Jesuit writers on nature. His views on the nature of Paraquaria
are still much informed by the outlook of the Spanish conquest. His natural
history opens with a discussion of the crop plants that did not grow in Paraguay
“before the Spaniards conquered these provinces.” As a whole, the native trees
and fruits which the Artificer of Nature planted in Paraguay as a substitute for

143 See the mythical tale “The Primitive Habits of the Hummingbird” (in Guaraní with a
Spanish translation), in León Cadogan, Ayvu Rapyta. Textos míticos de los mbyá-guaraní
del Guairá (Asunción: Fundación León Cadogan, 1992), 25–31.
144 There were many variants of this legend. See, for example, the version rehearsed by
Willem Piso, according to which the hummingbird originated from a particular kind of
caterpillar. Asúa and French, A New World of Animals, 122.
145 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:343–344. Cf. Simão de Vasconcelos, Vida do
Padre J. de Almeida (Lisbon: Craesbeeck, 1658), 112–113.
natural histories 61

the species of the Old World are inferior when compared to their European
counterparts.146 Lozano begins his account of the animals with those imported
from the Old World: farm and domestic animals, hares, and mice.147 In the end,
it must be born in mind that he was a religious historian whose primary con-
cern was to write the story of the Jesuit Christianization of Paraguay with an
eye on the repute that this could throw on the Society of Jesus at a time when
its critics began to launch their attacks on the Order.148

3.2 Paucke: “I Tell What I Have Seen”

Florian Paucke (also spelled Baucke) was born in Witsig (also spelled Winsig),
near Wroclaw (Breslau), in Silesia, in 1719. He studied philosophy in Prague and
theology in Wroclaw and Olomouc (Olmütz), while training himself in vari-
ous crafts. He arrived in the Río de la Plata in 1749 and finished his studies in
Córdoba. From 1752 to 1767 he worked with the Mocoví in the reduction of San
Javier, where he organized all kind of workshops, made musical instruments,
and kept an orchestra of young native catechumens with violins, cellos, flutes,
harps, and a horn. After the expulsion, he returned to Olomouc and after the
suppression of the Society in 1773 he moved to Neuhaus, in southern Bohemia.
During the last years of his life, Paucke was devoted to writing. He died in 1779.149
It seems that it was Dobrizhoffer, with good connections at the court, who
got an imperial pension for Paucke, which allowed him to engage in the writ-
ing of the memories of his life among the Mocoví. Dobrizhoffer had been
born in Frymburg (Friedberg), Southern Bohemia, in 1718. He studied philoso-
phy in Vienna, taught classical languages and rhetoric in several cities of the
Habsburg Empire, and read theology at Graz. He arrived in the Río de la Plata
in the same expedition that took Paucke, led by the Hungarian Jesuit Ladislaus
Orosz (1697–1773). Dobrizhoffer worked among the Mocoví in the reduction of
San Javier (1750–1754), and for a short time among the Abipones (1755–1756).
He was then assigned in succession to the missions of San Jerónimo and San
Bernardo in the Chaco, the Guaraní reduction of Santa María la Mayor, and

146 Ibid., 1:196–198.

147 Ibid., 1:272–278.
148 Maeder, “Estudio preliminar,” 23.
149 For Paucke’s life, see Gustav Otruba, “Der Anteil österreichischer Jesuitenmissionäre
am ‘heiligen Experiment’ von Paraguay,” Mitteilungen des Instituts für Österreichische
Geschichtsforschung 63 (1955): 430–445 (actually, a survey of Austrian Jesuits on
Paraquaria); Kitzmantel, “Die Jesuitenmissionare,” 195–225; and DHCJ, s.v. “Paucke,
Florian,” by J. Baptista.
62 chapter 1

the mission town of San Joaquín of Tobatines. After a second period among
hostile Abipón tribes, he returned to San Joaquín. Once expelled from the Río
de la Plata, Dobrizhoffer spent some time in Spain and eventually ended up
in Vienna. It seems that Empress Maria Theresa was fond of hearing him talk
about his adventures in Paraguay. It was in the imperial city where Dobrizhoffer
wrote the work that made him famous, before dying in 1789.150
The memories of these two Jesuits, both written in German, can be counted
among the most important productions of missionary ethnography in Spanish
America. Compared to Dobrizhoffer’s ornamented style and display of erudi-
tion, Paucke’s work looks humble and lacks any pretense. But both share in
several significant characteristics. We will focus on Paucke’s less known work
and extend the analysis to Dobrizhoffer when occasion requires.
“I tell what I have seen and experienced, in the form that I have known it,”
declares Paucke at the beginning of his Hin und her. Indeed, his writing is in
great measure guided by the principle of autopsia, of seeing with one’s own
eyes.151 The Silesian Jesuit recalls that since his childhood he had enjoyed the
“essays and experiences” of planting seeds, observing the metamorphoses of
insects and other bugs, and like curiosities.152 In his reduction of San Javier,
he carried out a series of trials, which amounted to personal testings of a phe-
nomenon or of the properties of a substance or a creature. For instance, he
tried the antidotal virtues of the teeth of the yacaré (caiman), which he had
heard from the Mocoví. It seems that the experiment was successful, for he
says that from thence onwards he always carried with him a “crocodile’s” tooth
as a trinket in a bracelet. However, he denies the legend that the crocodile
weeps for the human being it has killed, on the grounds that he “never saw a
crocodile crying or laughing”.153 Paucke was not sure whether the cochineal
insect that grows in the tuna (Opuntia), from which the Mocoví obtained the
cochineal dyestuff, was actually a living being.154 So he put some cochinillas in
a box and after a month saw that they had been transformed into small hairy
little worms, which eventually turned into little black wasps.155 He also refutes

150 See Jerome V. Jacobsen, “Dobrizhoffer: Abipón Missionary,” Mid America, n. s. 18, no. 3
(1947): 139–184; Max Kratochwill, “Martin Dobrizhoffer. Zu seiner Lebensgeschichte,”
Jahrbuch des Vereins für die Geschichte der Stadt Wien 23–25 (1967–1969): 198–205;
Kitzmantel, “Die Jesuitenmissionare,” 175–194; and DHCJ, s.v. “Dobrizhoffer, Martin,” by
C. J. McNaspy and P. Caraman.
151 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, trans. Wernicke, 1:5.
152 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 215.
153 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 295.
154 Cf. Dobrizhoffer’s account of cochineal, in idem, An Account of the Abipones, 1:405–407.
155 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, trans. Wernicke, vol. 3, bk. 2, 203.
natural histories 63

that the “ostrich” (ñandú) digests iron and that its eggs are hatched by the heat
of the sun, because he had never seen that such was the case. Like Lozano,
Paucke mentions several fabulous races of men, but takes care to add that he
has never seen them.156
In his memories, Paucke declares his confidence on experience as the bench-
mark for assessing the truth of a story. He is skeptical of the belief that sleeping
under the ombú tree brings about headache, because he has never proved it.157
Moreover, he disbelieves that the chicks of the ostriches are attracted out of
their eggs by the visual power of their mother, no matter what the philosophi
could argue, for if this were true, it would also be possible to change the cop-
per pennies into Kreutzer just by looking at them. In this connection, Paucke
pokes fun at the Jesuit natural philosopher Francesco Lana de Terzi (1631–1687)
for believing in “sympathies and antipathies,” i.e., the physical attraction and
repulsion of things at a distance.158 But Paucke’s skeptical view of the effects
of “sympathy” did not go too far. He believes that if a person wounded by a
“tiger” (jaguar) is given a drink made of the bark of the ceibo tree on which the
same enraged tiger cleaned its poisoned claws, she will be cured.159 He begins
his chapter on fish with the account of the fabulous jaguará, a legendary beast
of the Paraná River armed with sharp teeth and claws, which catches anyone
who dares to enter those waters and tears him or her to pieces, so that after a
moment of turbulence, only the entrails of its victim float on the surface of the
water. Aware that his readers could question the veracity of this tale, Paucke
transfers the burden of proof to an anonymous informant, and ends the para-
graph with the uncommitted “so it has been told to me”.160
Dobrizhoffer seems more permeable to stories of fabulous creatures. When
speaking of monkeys, he tells about the caruguà or “devil of the woods,” larger
and hairier than other apes and who can tear apart a person with his dagger-
like nails. He even recounts that he was almost assaulted by one of these beasts,
which he identified by a singing sound resembling a human voice.161 The aò is
another dweller of Dobrizhoffer’s fantastic zoo, although he confesses that he
“never saw even the shadow of such a beast.” Its head is similar to a mastiff, it
has no tail and displays great ferocity and swiftness; it is covered with wool and

156 Ibid., 2:134.

157 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 253.
158 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 332–333.
159 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 250.
160 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, pp. 166–167.
161 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 1:286.
64 chapter 1

usually lives in or near ponds.162 Dobrizhoffer is also confident of the sympa-

thies between creatures. For instance, he affirms that the huge snakes ampala-
bas (lampalagua, a kind of boa) “are fond of rabbits, goats and does, which
they attract with their breath, and swallow whole”.163 He maintains that this
serpent should be identified with Nieremberg’s “stupid snake” (culebra boba),
i.e., the canauhcoatl or anguis stupidus, which also exhibits this property.164
In his reduction of San Javier Paucke dwelled in rustic conditions sur-
rounded by wild and domestic animals. He describes his “Noah’s Ark” as a
large enclosure of reeds encircling a pond of backed bricks in which lived and
thrived 20 pairs of wild ducks, gallaretas, turtles, a small caiman, four rabbits,
and several aquatic birds. The Mocoví children as well as grown-ups stood up
in front of this domestic aviary to enjoy the uproar of the birds.165 Paucke also
had capybaras as pets and was careful enough not to allow them reach the
river, their usual habitat, lest they could escape.166
When he talks about the plants of the land, Paucke’s text is halfway between
a manual of practical horticulture and a cooking book. He begins by discuss-
ing edible and medicinal herbs and seems to have tasted every plant, root, and
fruit that grew in the surroundings of his mission. Paucke was probably a tal-
ented farmer, for he cultivated many crops. In the reduction of San Pedro, he
planted large fields with cotton and for a number of years he cultivated hemp
from a handful of seeds he received from Germany.167 The orchard of his mis-
sion, full of fruit trees and flowers, is lovingly described.168 The accounts of
the wild trees deal largely with the ways they were used by the Mocoví and
Spaniards—for example, he mentions that he used the wood of the molle to
make a trumpet.169 The animals are also mostly seen in terms of their uses, the
various methods put into practice by the Mocoví to hunt them, and their value
as food—Paucke enjoyed hunting and much of these pages in his To and Fro
consist in accounts of his hunting experiences. The descriptions of plants and
animals he provides are quite competent. For the most, he restricts himself to
the animals with which he was familiar. For example, he affirms that he had

162 Ibid., 1:302.

163 Ibid., 2:293.
164 Nieremberg, Historia naturae, 274. Nieremberg took this story from Francisco Hernández’s
Thesaurus.
165 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, trans. Wernicke, vol. 3, bk. 2, 298.
166 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 287.
167 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 216 and 219–220.
168 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 226.
169 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 251.
natural histories 65

seen three types of monkeys and that there were larger kinds, but the latter
he had never found.170 His descriptions of fish in the Paraná River are those
we can expect from a fisherman—it is not difficult to identify each of the spe-
cies. He talks about the size, the weight, the characteristics of the head and
the colors of the body, the taste and quality of the flesh, and the different ways
of cooking it. Dobrizhoffer shares this approach, but he pays slightly more
attention to description, habitat, and mores of animals than to culinary art,
although his account of the several kinds of armadillos is inferior to Paucke’s.
Paucke’s description of the natural history of Santa Fe is enlivened by the
tales of his own adventures. He tells how he took his own raft with trunks down
the Paraná River from Corrientes to his reduction in San Javier during several
days and remarks that, had he to tell about all the occasions in which he had
been attacked by a tiger, he would have to write too much.171 Thus he chooses
to pass over the subject.172 He also recalls the occasion when he slept a whole
night in the jungle in the company of a rattlesnake, which was hidden under
the tiger’s skin upon which the Jesuit had lain down to rest.173 Dobizhoffer’s
volumes are also full of his adventures with animals. For example, he tells the
funny episode that occurred to him during his first days in Paraguay, when on
his way from Buenos Aires to Córdoba he was attacked by a skunk and had to
bear with its intolerable stink and the mocking of his travel companions.174
When reporting about the alleged wood-petrifying properties of the waters
of the Paraná River, Paucke abstains himself from trying to explain the phe-
nomenon and prefers “to leave [the task of] showing its cause to the present
naturalists, who are eager to investigate everything”.175 After devoting two chap-
ters to the more characteristic aquatic birds of his surroundings, he renounces
to talk about the small fowl, arguing that “they are so different, of so many

170 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 372.

171 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 267–268.
172 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 340.
173 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 375.
174 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 1:275.
175 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, trans. Wernicke, vol. 3, bk. 2, 156. Cf. the brief report of
the petrifaction of wood and horn in the Paraná River in Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the
Abipones, 1:433. Sánchez Labrador and the rest of the Jesuits who wrote on natural his-
tory in the Río de la Plata also discussed the petrifying properties of the waters of the
Paraná river (actually, a contemporary explanation of the fossilized wood abundant in the
banks of the river). For references and a detailed discussion see Eduardo Ottone, “Jesuitas
y fósiles en la Cuenca del Plata,” in Los geólogos y la geología en la historia argentina, ed.
Florencio G. Aceñolaza (San Miguel de Tucumán: CONICET, 2008), 9–20.
66 chapter 1

colors and sizes, that the reports about them would consume too much time”.176
Evidently, Paucke did not conceive the section on natural history of his To and
Fro as a treatise of natural philosophy. From the opening page he makes it clear
that what he offers the reader is the narrative of his missionary adventures
among the Mocoví. The work encompasses his travel to the Indies, his sojourn
and work in those lands, the customs and languages of the native peoples, their
Christianity and, at last, the description of the great Chaco valley. Confronted
with the much vexed problem of the truthfulness of travel accounts, Paucke
proclaims from the start his guiding principle: “I will observe the sincere truth
of the report, which will not rest upon someone else’s notices but on my own
experience”.177 He also warns the reader that the contradictions that might
arise among the testimonies of different missionaries in Spanish America with
respect to some habit or peculiarity of the people should be explained con-
sidering that they lived in different regions of a very large continent. In the
chapters dedicated to plants and animals, Paucke’s adherence to the principle
of autopsia results in descriptions and accounts that are restrained in form and
factual in contents. He does not regard his chapter on tobacco as “the most
perfect.” Better than his are the reports written by the missionaries who lived
in the best tobacco fields and “are more expert on account of their constant
experience”.178
Dobrizhoffer also renounces to the title of natural philosopher. When talk-
ing about the fish mbuzú, for instance, he comments that “whether these fishes
are really eels, or of the serpent kind, I will not pretend to determine”.179 When
dealing with parrots, he enumerates the native names of those with which he
is more familiar and after warning that there are a few which have escaped his
memory, announces that he will “relate what is most remarkable respecting
those I know most of”.180 Paucke did not compare his memories with other
literary sources, but Dobrizhoffer did and felt sure enough of his own observa-
tions to criticize those of others. When he speaks about the anta (tapir), he
mentions that Woyt’s Medico-physical Thesaurus tells that “the anta is called
by the Germans elend thier, “the miserable beast”, because it is subjected to
epilepsy”.181 He comments that, actually, it was called elck by the old Germans,

176 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, trans. Wernicke, vol. 3, bk. 2, 304.
177 Ibid., 1:3.
178 Ibid., vol. 3, bk. 2, 212.
179 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 1:340.
180 Ibid., 1:320.
181 Actually, the encyclopedic dictionary mentioned by Dobrizhoffer does not mention epi-
lepsy as a property of the anta. See Johann J. Woyt, Gazophylacium medico-physicum oder,
natural histories 67

but since elks have horns and the antas lack them, “as I myself saw,” he thought
that they could be different animals and bore the same name on account of
some similitude.182 Seeing for oneself and trying to steer away from philosoph-
ical speculation were guidelines of these German narratives of natural history
in Paraquaria.
Paucke’s To and Fro is a work that consists of text and pictures. There are
more than one hundred pages of pen and pencil drawings illustrating the book
on natural history, which now constitute a sort of pictorial companion to the
manuscript text, since they are bound together in the same codex. The images
have descriptive legends, which suggests that they might have been originally
conceived independently of the written work.183 The pictures were apparently
drawn and hand-colored by Paucke himself. There are 70 representations of
plants and 130 of animals. For example, there are six plates on serpents and
ten plates on birds. Most of the pictures of the natural world surrounding the
mission of San Javier represent trees. The images of animals, fruits, and plants
lack perspective and are somewhat stiff, with repeated geometrical patterns, in
an unintended decorative style, which seems particularly true for the trees and
the serpents. Paucke drew a group scene of the Mocoví hunting peccaries and
another of a river hunt of capybaras. The flat and colorful depictions of birds
consists of several individual grouped in a single image—he used the same
technique for fish—much as it was usual in Early Modern treatises on animals,
like those of Markgraf and Piso. Penhos has claimed that the “synthetic style”
of the pictures aimed at a pictorial testimony of Paucke’s personal experience,
much as the text does.184 They were not included as an ornament, but as a

Schatz-Kammer medicinisch-und natürlicher Dinge, 6th ed. (Leipzig: J. F. Junius, 1767), s.v.
“anta.”
182 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 1:265. Dorizhoffer’s confusion of the elk with
the tapir arises from the fact that the former is called anta in Spanish, also a name of the
tapir.
183 See Simona Binková, “Las obras pictóricas de los PP. Florián Paucke e Ignacio Tirsch.
Intento de una comparación,” in Los jesuitas españoles expulsos, ed. Manfred Tietz and
Dietrich Briesemeister (Madrid: Iberoamericana; Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2001), 189–206.
There is a recent edition of Paucke’s pictures, see idem, Hacia allá y para acá (Santa Fe:
Ministerio de Innovación y Cultura de la Provincia de Santa Fe, 2010). The pictures have
also been reproduced in Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, ed. Wernicke.
184 Marta Penhos, “Tamandúas, yaguarondís y otros seres sudamericanos: entre Florián
Paucke (1749–1767) y Félix de Azara (1789–1809),” communication to the Symposium
Naturaleza figurada. Imágenes e imaginación en la ilustración científica, organized by
Escuela Española de Historia y Arqueología, Rome, 8–10 October 2010.
68 chapter 1

visual aid to convey a knowledge of the creatures that inhabited the country
of the Mocoví.

3.3 Sánchez Labrador’s Catalogue of the Natural World of Paraquaria

In 1760 Sánchez Labrador founded the reduction of Belén with Eyiguayeguis
or Mbyás (a Guaycuruan people), up north the Paraguay River.185 He had been
born in 1717 in the town of La Guardia, Toledo (Spain), entered the Society of
Jesus when he was 15 years old and sailed for Buenos Aires in 1732. He took
his courses of philosophy and theology in Córdoba, where he also taught phi-
losophy (1744–1749). For almost a decade he worked as a missionary in the
Guaraní towns and also taught theology at the college of Asunción.186 Sánchez
Labrador was the first Jesuit to find a viable route of communication between
the reductions in Paraguay and those of the Chiquitos: between 1766 and
1767 he journeyed from Belén to the mission of Sagrado Corazón and back.
He became famous among the members of the Society for his encyclopedia,
an enterprise begun in the missions and completed in the Italian exile in
Ravenna.187 The bulk of Sánchez Labrador’s writing about the natural world
is to be found in the section entitled Natural Paraguay. But what are perhaps
his most original accounts are contained in his diaries—in particular that of
his 1766–1767 journey across the Great Chaco—and in the chorographic intro-
ductions to the sections on the native peoples in Catholic Paraguay. In this
work, Sánchez Labrador wrote about “the Nations that inhabit the land,” either
infidels or converts to Christianity, while describing “the places they occupy,
their customs and mores, their disorders . . . and the practices of the barbarous
republics”.188
Certainly, Catholic Paraguay is about the aboriginal peoples and their con-
version to Christianity by the Jesuits. The entire work is preceded by an intro-
duction that contains a discussion on the origin of the Amerindians and the
fauna of the New World, and the color of its native dwellers. Sánchez Labrador
mentions with approval the opinion of the Benedictine Benito Feijóo, who
devoted a chapter of his celebrated Teatro crítico to a discussion about the

185 Mbayás or Mbyás was the name the Guaraní gave to the Eyiguayegui.
186 See DHCJ s.v. “Sánchez Labrador, José,” by J. Baptista.
187 It has been argued that, despite regulations to the contrary, at the time of the expulsion
Sánchez Labrador was able to take with him much of his writing. See Sainz Ollero et al.,
eds., José Sánchez Labrador, 106–107.
188 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, “Introducción,” Paraquaria 16:6r, ARSI.
natural histories 69

peopling of the Americas.189 After reviewing the many opinions about this
issue, the Jesuit briefly summarizes his views: the first humans who arrived
in the New World crossed from Asia, either by sea or by land, in which case it
should be admitted that Siberia and North America were at that time joined
by a stretch of land.190 With respect to the color of the original inhabitants
of the Americas, Sánchez Labrador believed that they were born white and
later acquired their particular hue: “The olive or dark red color of the Indians
comes from nature, which discolors and tans all those exposed continually to
open air, as the Indians are.” To this should be added the effects of the habit of
painting themselves with paints made of dyes and fish grease or oil, and also
the odors and fumes that fill their cabins.191
Sánchez Labrador’s opinions about the arrival of the animals in the New
World differed from Feijóo’s. The Spanish Jesuit recalls that God created the
animals and paraded them in the presence of Adam. Afterwards, he distributed
them in the different climates of the Earth. At the appointed time, God sent a
pair of each kind to Noah’s Ark and when the Diluvium was over, “with a new
miracle he established the birds and animals in the regions and climates that
they had before.” Sánchez Labrador comments that this explanation frees us
from “racking our brains trying to figure out land or water routes for explaining
the passage of the animals [to the New World]”.192 He does not seem to worry
about overcharging the creator with at least three major miraculous interven-
tions in the course of events. Feijóo had specifically criticized the opinion that
animals had been taken to the New World by angels (and also put into ques-
tion the more accepted belief that these same spiritual creatures had conveyed
them to Adam, and later to Noah). He argued that since this transit could be
explained by natural ways, there was no need to have recourse to supernatural
agents.193
One of the more extensive sections of Catholic Paraguay is that devoted to
the Eyiguayeguis (Mbyás), the nation among which Sánchez Labrador exer-
cised his apostolic labors. The first ten chapters of a total of forty amount to
a chorographic description of the region in which they lived. These pages can
perhaps be counted among the best that Sánchez Labrador wrote in terms of
natural history. He begins with geography, continues with the flora, and ends

189 Benito Feijóo, “Solución del gran problema histórico sobre la población de la América,” in
idem, Teatro crítico universal, 8 vol. (Madrid: Joaquín Ibarra, 1778–1779), 5:321–350.
190 Sánchez Labrador, El Paraguay Católico, 1:105.
191 Ibid., 1:128.
192 Ibid., 1:115.
193 Feijóo, Teatro crítico, 5:328.
70 chapter 1

with the beasts, birds, fish and aquatic animals, serpents, and insects of a given
region. Unlike the rest of the Jesuits who wrote on plants, Sánchez Labrador
perceives the vegetation in terms of its environment. Perhaps the best example
of this approach is the passage on the various species of palms. He is struck by
the fact that in the palm groves that surround the Paraguay River “each spe-
cies of palm has its independent jurisdiction, so that no one confusedly usurps
the right of another.” Each of the different kind of palms (eabuigo, namogoligi,
noyoliguagua, gatigegué, eyatigiguaga, nologiga) grows in its own territory.194
He is amazed at the destruction of the palm groves by the natives, who cut the
trees with axes in search of the heart of palms.195 These accounts have a warm
immediacy and the ring of the author’s easy familiarity with the landscapes
and creatures described, an atmosphere which emerges only occasionally in
the reading of Paraguay Natural. They also treat extensively of the uses to
which the Mbyás put the plants and animals of their country. It is important
to notice that Sánchez Labrador is fully aware of the differences between spe-
cies of the Old and the New World: “even those called here [in Paraguay] mock-
ingbirds, yellow-finches, nightingales, and sparrows . . . do not resemble the
Europeans except for their names”.196 And he provides examples of partridges
in Paraguay without parallel with those in Europe.
Sánchez Labrador’s Paraguay Natural is a rather uneven work. Some of its
books have the same fresh character as the Diaries and the chorographic sec-
tions of Catholic Paraguay, while others are mostly derivative, a summary of
encyclopedic material. The author claims that his plan follows Boyle’s “General
Heads for the Natural History of a Countrey, Great or Small,” but immediately
after declares that he will follow his own arrangement.197 The manuscript of
Paraguay Natural is divided into four volumes. The first dedicated to Earths,
Airs, and Waters (307 fols.); the second to botany (333 fols.); the third to quad-
rupeds, birds, and fish (312 fols.); and the fourth to amphibians, reptiles, and
insects (197 fols.). Sánchez Labrador announces that the scope of the work,
far from being confined to the natural history of [historical] Paraguay, will

194 Sánchez Labrador, El Paraguay Católico, 1:153–154.

195 Ibid., 1:160–161.
196 Ibid., 1:212.
197 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, “Introducción,” Paraquaria 16: 4r, ARSI. An abstract
of Boyle’s short work was published as idem, “General Heads for a Natural History of a
Countrey, Great or Small,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 1 (1665): 186–189;
the fuller version in idem, General Heads for the Natural History of a Country Great or Small
(London: Printed for John Taylor and S. Hedford, 1692). Sánchez Labrador’s commentary
on Boyle’s “heads” for Natural History has been transcribed in Guillermo Furlong, “La geo-
grafía argentina de José Sánchez Labrador,” Anales de la Academia de Geografía 1 (1957):
55–69.
natural histories 71

embrace many species of living beings related to those that live in that country.
Moreover, in order to avoid aridity, he will inform about how the productions
of the country are used or can be utilized “for the progress of the Arts” and
the “interests of commerce.” Unlike the rest of the Jesuit chroniclers, Sánchez
Labrador does not fear to tread on the field of natural philosophy. He declares
that to the “notices of nature” and the “various profitable uses”, he will add
“the explanation of such physical phenomena, general as well as particular,
admired in Paraguay and so far not examined as to their causes”. 198
Also contrarily to the earlier Jesuit writers, who wrote in the wake of Kircher
and Nieremberg, Sánchez Labrador renounces to explanations in terms of
“occult causes” for the reason that invoking them “leaves nature as occult as
before, among their draperies”.199 Endorsing Feijóo’s Catholic interpretation
of enlightened criticism, Sánchez Labrador denounces the celebration of the
“imaginary virtues of things, which, when contrasted with experience, reveal
themselves as sophistical,” and is proud to announce that his work “follows
a straighter path with the Moderns—neither it admits everything, nor it dis-
cards everything”.200 He dismisses the legend of the hummingbird, taken from
Nieremberg (and ultimately from Francisco Hernández), according to which
during the winter the bird sticks its beak in the trunk of a tree and lies dormant
until the advent of spring, when it resuscitates. (Sánchez Labrador had a few of
these birds in his quarters in Paraguay and they lived through the whole winter
without hibernating.) He also denies Vasconcelos’s claim in his Noticias . . . das
Coisas do Brasil (1668), according to which some butterflies can be turned into
hummingbirds.201 Besides, he criticizes Kircher’s claim in China illustrata that
the falling leaves of certain trees are turned into blackbirds—“he [Kircher] was
duped,” comments the missionary.202 With respect to the already discussed
virtue of the serpent lampalagua—which here is called ampalaba—Sánchez
Labrador denies that it attracts its prey either with its hiss or with the light of
its eyes (i.e., through action at a distance) and claims that “its breath and vapor
are its only weapons,” like the smell of the skunk or the smoke of [burned]
henbane.203

198 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, “Introducción,” Paraquaria 16: 5r-v, ARSI.
199 Ibid., f. 5v.
200 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, Paraquaria 16:6r, ARSI.
201 Sánchez Labrador, Peces y aves, 341. Cf. Simão de Vasconcelos, Noticias antecedentes, curio-
sas e necesarias das cousas do Brasil, in idem, Chronica da Companhia de Jesus do Estado
do Brasil, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: João Ignacio da Silva, 1864), 112–113.
202 Ibid., 351. Cf. Athanasius Kircher, China . . . illustrata (Amsterdam: Jacob van Meurs, 1667),
178.
203 Sánchez Labrador, La medicina en el Paraguay Natural, 142.
72 chapter 1

But we should be cautious of attributing to the author of the Natural

Paraguay too exacting critical standards. His empiricism stops at his blind
trust in the stories heard from his colleagues in Paraguay. Among amphibian
animals, he cites mermen and mermaids seen by other Jesuit missionaries
in the Paraná River and in long paragraphs rehearses the many stories about
these creatures that circulated in Early Modern literature on animals.204 Like
Dobrizhoffer, he believes in the antidotal properties of a yacaré’s tooth tied to
the patient, because “experiences made by skillful missionaries in Córdoba, in
the Guaraní missions of Paraguay, and in the missions of the Moxos in Peru,
allay any doubts in this respect”.205 Moreover, he is convinced that the caiman’s
teeth have the “very singular virtue” of helping women in labor, as Father Diego
Jurado and others had witnessed in the missions of Moxos and later made pub-
lic in the city of Ferrara.206 He also believes that the fact that there were no
bedbugs in the Jesuit College of Buenos Aires was a supernatural grace con-
ceded by God to a Jesuit coadjutor, who was tired of struggling with the bugs
in his daily task of attending the sick. Sánchez Labrador affirms that there is
no natural explanation for this phenomenon, so the lack of bedbugs has to be
considered “a real and personal [divine] privilege of the College”.207
In order to catch a brief glimpse of the Paraguay Natural, we will now look
at the books devoted to birds and fish. In tone with his intention of providing
a comprehensive encyclopedia of the natural work with a focus on Paraguay
Sánchez Labrador begins the sections dedicated to each kind of animal with a
long discussion of the general characteristics of that particular group. His char-
acteristic style of making the local universal is expressed in the opening sen-
tence of the book on fish: “Fish, called piscis by the Latins, pirá by the Guaraní
Indians, and nogoyegí by the Mbyás, is an aquatic animal with blood, which
inhabits the water and never leaves it”.208 The sentence is taken from Valmont
de Bomare’s dictionary of natural history, but it has been modified so that the
native denominations of the fish are on an equal foot with its Latin name.209
By the same token, the aboriginal names are granted a universal status through
their inclusion into a general and abstract definition.

204 Ibid., 198–199. It is current opinion that the many legends about mermaids and mermen
in the great rivers of South America probably originated from the sight of manatees.
205 Ibid., 185.
206 Ibid., 186.
207 Ibid., 108–109.
208 Sánchez Labrador, Peces y aves, 43.
209 Jacques-Christoph Valmont de Bomare, Dictionnaire raisonné universel d’histoire naturelle,
20 vols (Paris, n.p., 1800), s.v. “poisson.”
natural histories 73

There is a noticeable difference between the treatment of fish and birds in

the Paraguay Natural. The chapters on fish are mostly derivative. For instance,
Sánchez Labrador expounds five different species of acara fish, all of them
taken from Markgraf’s Historia rerum naturalis Brasiliae.210 Although Sánchez
Labrador cites Markgraf in many passages of the Paraguay Natural, in this and
other occasions he remains silent about his sources. Certainly, not everything
in the book on fish has been copied from other authors. Several descriptions
of fish species seem to be original, like those of the zurubí, manguruyú, the
atoanade, and the neeguagani.211 Besides, there are accounts which have the
ring of being based on personal experience, like the paragraph on schools of
fish and migrations in the rivers of Paraguay, the remark about the eels that
could live in the salty ponds found in the vicinity of the city of Asunción, or the
description of the lampreys Sánchez Labrador had seen in the missions of
the Chiquitos.212
Many of the accounts on birds seem to have been written as first-hand
reports. When talking about the apecu (woodpecker), Sánchez Labrador
describes several of them vividly and with colorful detail. He tells that he “had
a few in his room and noticed that their beaks were hard, long, and strong”.213
Even so, some of the bird descriptions have been taken from Markgraf.214 But
for the most, this is an original book, with good outlines of the morphology
and habits of fowl. There are many remarks about daily affairs in the reduc-
tions, the hunting of birds, and the author’s life in his natural surroundings.
The material of dictionaries is used for the sake of criticisms or to inform about
the medicinal uses of birds. Sánchez Labrador criticizes many legends, for

210 See Sánchez Labrador, Peces y aves, 141–145. What follows are the parallels with Georg
Markgraf, Historia rerum naturalium Brasiliae (the second part of Willem Piso and Georg
Markgraf, Historia naturalis Brasiliae): “species one,” acara (idem in HRNB, 168); “species
II” (acaraaya in HRNB, 167–8); “species III,” acarape and acarati (acarapeba in HRNB, 161–
162); “species IV,” acarapita (acarapitamba in HRNB, 155–56); “species V,” acarapucu (idem
in HRNB, 145). Besides, there is a sixth account, that of the fish acaramucu (HRNB, 163),
transcribed by Sánchez Labrador under the title of acarabucu (Sánchez Labrador, Peces y
aves, 98).
211 Sánchez Labrador, Peces y aves, 99 and 149.
212 Ibid., 67, 78 and 87.
213 Ibid., 364.
214 For example, the accounts of the guirapú guazú and the female guirapú (Sánchez
Labrador, Peces y aves, 369–370) are copied from Markgraf’s guirapunga and guirapunga
foemina (HRNB, 201–202). Sánchez Labrador describes four species of chorlitos (mbatuití)
(idem, Peces y aves, 422–424), of which species II and III are taken from Markgraf (HRNB,
199 and 217, respectively).
74 chapter 1

example, the medieval tale that female partridges are fecundated by expos-
ing their back to the wind.215 He also denies that herons have in their feet an
“attractive virtue” by which they draw the fish to them, because plain experi-
ence showed that they use their beak to catch them.216 In the book on birds,
Sánchez Labrador reveals himself as a harsh critic and even his respected
Valmont de Bomare is taken to task. Talking about the muitú he dismisses the
latter’s affirmation that its eggs are as hard as iron and declares that they are
“fragile and brittle”.217
The Paraguay Natural is illustrated with numerous pen drawings, most of
them representing plants and trees, in different styles (figs. 1.1 and 1.2).218 Some
are simple and schematic and others are more elaborate, with the use of shad-
ows and closer attention to detail. It is evident that they were drawn by differ-
ent persons. It might be that a few were originally drawn in Paraguay by native
artists. The two pictures of fish that illustrate the essay on the Eyiguayeguis in
Catholic Paraguay—one of them representing two aborigines fishing a surubí
and the other depicting a man with a large fish hanging from a spear he car-
ries on his shoulder—were probably done by local painters.219 A cursory com-
parison of the drawings in Paraguay Natural with those in Markgraf’s Historiae
rerum naturalium Brasiliae and Piso’s Historia naturalis et medica Indiae occi-
dentalis, shows that many of the pictures in Sánchez Labrador’s encyclopedia
were copied from those treatises (as discussed in the next chapter, this was also
the case for Montenegro’s herbal).220 There might be drawings of plants copied
from other works.

215 Sánchez Labrador, Peces y aves, 307.

216 Ibid., 430.
217 Ibid., 296.
218 Some of them have been reproduced in Furlong, Naturalistas argentinos. The 120 plates
in Sánchez Labrador, La medicina en el Paraguay Natural, are slightly better quality
reproductions.
219 Sánchez Labrador, El Paraguay católico, 1:222 and 224. It is also possible that the four
plates with drawings of serpents in that same work were done by a native artist. See the
reproductions in ibid., 1:230–236.
220 For example, the ambay or caaimbé guazú, the yacaré uguayra, and the yaracahay were
respectively copied from the ambaiba, the iamaracu, and the iaracatia in Marckgraf’s
work . Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 2, Paraquaria 17:153v, 183r, and 109v, ARSI.
Cf. the models in HRNB, 91, 125, and 129. The ybira, the tatayiba, and the zamuu were taken
from the ananas, the tatai-iba, and the saamovna in Piso’s treatise. Sánchez Labrador,
Paraguay Natural, pt. 2, Paraquaria 17:248v, 135r, and 121v, ARSI. Cf. the models in Piso,
Historia naturalis et medica Indiae occidentalis, 195, 163, and 175.
natural histories 75

figure 1.1 Sánchez Labrador, caraguatá, Paraguay natural, pt. 2, bk. 4, Paraquaria 17: 178v,
ARSI. Reproduced with permission of the Society of Jesus.
76 chapter 1

Almost all the pictures of quadrupeds in Sánchez Labrador have been cop-
ied from Markgraf’s Historiae rerum naturalium Brasiliae. The drawing of the
“tayazu I” (peccary) is copied from the tayacu caaigoara in HRNB, but Sánchez
Labrador—or the artist who worked for him—added the detail of a small bot-
tom on the back of the animal.221 As the Jesuit explains, this was once thought
to be a navel, but it is “a protuberance of glandular flesh, through which tran-
spires an annoying musky smell”.222 The pictures belonging to the book of ani-
mals are all grouped together at the end of it, except those representing the
two species of ant bear, which are included in the text. In this case, it is quite
clear that Sánchez Labrador just copied Markgraf’s animal pictures en masse.
This explains why the picture described as “tayazu II” (peccary) in the Jesuit
encyclopedia is a copy of Markgraf’s porcus guineensis, one of the animals
taken from Africa to the menagerie of Prince Maurits in Recife and described
by the German naturalist in his treatise.223
It is clear that Sánchez Labrador did not aim at providing pictures from the
live exemplar (he never claimed to do so). He could not have done it, for much
of his work was written in Ravenna. As a compiler of a vast encyclopedia, he
sought to illustrate his descriptions in the most expedient way, reproducing
pictures from what he considered scientifically reliable treatises.
Sánchez Labrador worked basically as a writer of Jesuit college courses. He
organized methodically his subject matter and under each heading rehearsed
in scholastic fashion the opinions of different authors, discussed the pros and
cons of each of them and ended by expounding what he considered the sound
opinion. This was the basic layout of the education which he and his fellow
Jesuits had gone through.
It is worth examining the introduction to his book on quadrupeds to see
that his purpose in writing the Paraguay Natural went beyond the usual
account of natural history and engulfed properly philosophical questions.
Sánchez Labrador begins with the notion of animal. After a rhetorical and con-
ventional introduction, he glosses Buffon’s definition of animal as “a generic
idea formed by singular ideas, which we forge [in our minds] when we see
different particular animals”.224 He also adopts Buffon’s version of “the great
chain of being,” at least in what concerns the living world, when he denies
that it is possible to “trace a line of separation between organized bodies.” He

221 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 3, bk. 1, Paraquaria 18:141r, ARSI (reproduced in
Furlong, Naturalistas argentinos, 179). Cf. Markgraf’s drawing in HRNB, 229.
222 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 3, bk. 1, Paraquaria 18:60r, ARSI.
223 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 3, bk. 1, Paraquaria 18:141r, ARSI; cf. HRNB, 230.
224 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 3, bk. 1, Paraquaria 18:4v, ARSI.
natural histories 77

figure 1.2 Sánchez Labrador, tero or teru-teru, Paraguay natural, pt. 3, bk.2, ARSI, Paraquaria
18: 185r, ARSI. Reproduced with permission of the Society of Jesus.
78 chapter 1

concludes that there is no essential difference between animals and plants,

“but Nature descends per degrees and imperceptible transits from an animal
that seems more perfect to another which seems less”.225 Not only that, but
also the notion of species as a group of creatures in which “through copulation
the likeness of the species is perpetuated and conserved” is likewise a para-
phrase of Buffon’s ideas (see below).
With respect to animal classification, Sánchez Labrador summarizes
Linnaeus’s six classes besides other taxonomies, such as those of Mathurin-
Jacques Brisson (1723–1806) and John Ray (1627–1705). But he concludes that
though all these efforts are commendable for the great amount of labor and
vast knowledge they demand from their authors, animal classifications of any
kind are condemned to being arbitrary and confuse.226 In an surprising taxo-
nomical marriage of opposites, he recommends the threefold animal grouping
of the first chapter of Genesis (“iumenta, reptilia et bestias terrae secundum
species suas”) on the grounds of Buffon’s demands for the simplest possibly
classification.227
Contrarily to Sánchez Labrador, who aimed at writing a work that should
comprise all that could be learned about the natural world of Paraquaria and
even used this material as a launching pad for excursions into the realms of
universal knowledge, Jolís’s Essay on the natural history of the Great Chaco was
mainly polemic. Jolís sets out to give “the exact and faithful portrait of the
practices and customs of the Savages, in contraposition to the distorted image
presented by some writers in their books”.228 His claim of superiority over his
rivals is that, unlike those armchair geographers, “he was there,” so that what
he writes is warranted “by 12 years in America and nine among the savages, and
three expeditions”.229
Like others Jesuit natural histories composed after the expulsion, Jolís’s
Essay shows an awareness of the need for a rational critique of traditional
views and legends, though in many respects the work remains anchored in
traditional ways of thinking. Jolís tested the alleged property of the incombus-
tibility of the salamander, on which the aborigines believed, and found that
it amounted to no more than a greater resistance to the fire, which was the

225 Ibid., 6r. But contrarily to the transition between the animal and plant world, the passage
from the living to the mineral world would not be continuous. Ibid., 6r.
226 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 3, bk. 1, ARSI, Paraquaria 18:10r, ARSI.
227 Gen 1:24–25 (Vulgata). Cf. Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 3, bk. 1, Paraquaria
18:7v, ARSI.
228 Jolís, Ensayo, 42.
229 Ibid., 42. For the expeditions of Jolís into the Chaco, see p. 167.
natural histories 79

origin of “that false and divulged opinion”.230 But he confirms the serpent’s
virtue of attracting its prey with its breath, granted to those creatures by the
Author of Nature, for otherwise “they could not live, given their monstrous and
enormous corpulence”.231 Furthermore, he endorses Della Porta’s claim that
snakes can be generated out of women’s hairs and horsehairs, on account of
what had been reported to him by “Señor Abate Don Jacobo Zeni” and Don
Ildefonso Peral, who had been “ocular witnesses” of this phenomenon—Jolís
himself made the experience of leaving a bunch of hair on a puddle and upon
his return, after a week, he had found them alive.232
Jolís’s position also rests on an unstable balance when it comes to establish-
ing the basis of his intellectual authority. On the one hand, he remains on the
safe side when he renounces emphatically to any pretense of being a learned
naturalist.233 Moreover, he declares that it is not licit to write books of natural
history for anybody who has not taken the trouble “of observing with a micro-
scope the tiniest particularities and of describing them immediately with pro-
lixity, according to the method and classes of Linnaeus”.234 On the other hand,
he proclaims his right to describe the plants of the Chaco using their vulgar
names and indicating only their properties and the place where they grow.
After all, he says, La Condamine’s description of the quina (Cinchona) does
not add anything to the febrifuge virtues of the bark. As a result, he does not
arrange the plants according to Linnaean taxonomical categories, but, as men-
tioned above, he groups them into common sense categories.235 As to animals,
although Jolís declares that he respects Buffon’s division of quadrupeds into
fissipeds and solipeds, in the Essay he actually resorts to the traditional three-
fold arrangement of animals taken to America, animals of both continents,
and quadrupeds of the New World—there are special articles on the arma-
dillo, the peccary, stags and goats of the Chaco, and so on. Jolís expressly tells
that he treats about the animals of the Chaco while “noting some of the many
mistakes divulged by modern writers and naturalists”.236 Actually, his account
of animals can be read as a protracted argument with Buffon and de Pauw. As
mentioned before, Jolís’s criticisms deal mostly with names, but not only. For

230 Ibid., 80.

231 Ibid., 220.
232 Ibid., 223–224.
233 “I do not write for the physicians and I have never been a botanist or a naturalist, either
professionally or practically” (Ibid., 90).
234 Ibid., 90.
235 Ibid., 90.
236 Ibid., 114.
80 chapter 1

example, he censures Buffon’s criterion of dividing the species of tatú or arma-

dillo according to the number of bands they possess, because this is an “uncer-
tain and equivocal” trait. Jolís distinguishes seven species of this animal, on the
basis “of properties, well-known for all those who have seen them in America
and have examined them”.237 Jolís also turns Buffon’s definition of species to
his own advantage. The latter had affirmed that the pheasant of the New World
was a different species from the pheasant of the Old World; something which
Jolís denies on the grounds that nobody has proved that they cannot mate.238

4 Writing on Nature in Paraquaria

The Jesuit natural histories of Paraquaria acquired different meanings depend-

ing on their immediate textual context: a setting of the stage for historical action
(as in the natural and moral histories of Lozano and Guevara), an expression of
the writer’s perception of an alien natural world filtered through reconstructed
memories (ethnographic accounts of Dobrizhoffer and Paucke), or an apol-
ogy for the nature of the New World (encyclopedias of Sánchez Labrador, Jolís,
and Termeyer). The Jesuit authors perceived themselves in turn as chroniclers,
writers of missionary memories among exotic peoples or amateur naturalists
defending their lost homelands. This development reflects the long, eventful
history of the Jesuit province of Paraquaria, with its initial moment of explo-
sive expansion and critical struggles for survival, the periods of growth and
stability, and its final demise with the aftermath of the Italian exile. In order
to convey a more complete characterization of these works, we will now look
at them from four points of reference: their historiographic background, the
notion of theatrical stage implied in them, their position in the textual constel-
lation of eighteenth-century natural history, and the articulation of native lore
with Early Modern discourse on nature. It is hoped that this discussion will
help to better understand the linguistic and empirical character of the texts,
their specific Jesuit character, and their Baroque quality with a strong element
of cultural mixture.

237 Ibid., 145–150.

238 Ibid., 186–187. Basically, Buffon conceived a species as a group of organisms that can mate
and reproduce with one another. See Paul L. Farber, “Buffon and the Concept of Species,”
Journal of the History of Biology 5, no. 1 (1972): 259–284.
natural histories 81

4.1 A Jesuit Genre of Writing

By the beginning of the eighteenth century there was a well-established tra-
dition of Jesuit writing on the nature of the New World, exemplified by such
works as Do clima e terra do Brasil by Fernão Cardim (c.1548–1625), the first two
books of Alonso de Ovalle’s Histórica relación del Reyno de Chile (Rome, 1646),
and the Historia del Nuevo Mundo, written by Bernabé Cobo (1582–1657) in the
College of San Pablo (Lima).239 Why did the Jesuits in the New World adopt
and cultivate the literary genre of natural and moral (or civil) histories?
In Early Modern times, the term historia was versatile enough to be appli-
cable indistinctly to an intellectual endeavor aimed at describing the realm of
nature and the sphere of human activity.240 The use of historia to designate
the investigation of nature and its creatures can be traced to Antiquity. Within
the framework of Aristotelian natural philosophy, historia was different from
philosophy in that the former did not aim at the investigation of the causes
of phenomena. Insofar as history dealt with particulars, it was set apart from
scientia, which comprehended only that which was universal and necessary.241
In the Jesuit plan of studies, history and geography were marginal and intro-
duced only as part of the commentary on the literary text in the studies of
the humanities.242 Outside the classroom, Orazio Torsellini’s Historiarum ab
origine mundi usque ad annum 1598 epitome (1599) seems to have enjoyed some

239 Fernão Cardim, Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil, ed. Baptista Caetano et al. (Rio de
Janeiro: J. Leite, 1925); Ovalle, Histórica relación; Bernabé Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo,
2 vols. (Madrid: Atlas, 1956).
240 In their introduction to a collection of essays on the use of the term and notion of histo-
ria in Early Modern times, Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi have underlined the “lack
of any clear boundary between the study of nature and the study of culture” (idem,
“Introduction,” in Historia. Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. by idem
[Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005], 5).
241 Ibid., 8–11 and French, Ancient Natural History, 1–3 and 10–15.
242 François de Dainville, “L’énseignement de l’histoire et de la géographie et la ratio stu-
diorum,” in L’éducation des jésuites (XVIe–XVIIIe siècles) (Paris: Minuit, 1978), 447. The
Jesuit plan of studies, expounded in the Ratio studiorum promulgated by Father General
Acquaviva in 1599, comprehended two cycles. The lower consisted of grammar, humani-
ties and rhetoric (these studia inferiora included the study of classical languages and the
reading of auctores). The upper cycle consisted of philosophy and theology. Philosophy
involved three years: logic and mathematics, natural and moral philosophy, and meta-
physics. See Eusebio Gil, ed., El sistema educativo de la Compañia de Jesús. La Ratio stu-
diorum (Madrid: UPCO, 1992), 48–49. For an English translation of the Ratio studiorum
see Claude Pavur S.J., trans., The Ratio Studiorum: The Official Plan for Jesuit Education
(St. Louis: The Institute of Jesuit Sources, 2005).
82 chapter 1

popularity. At least in French Jesuit colleges, by the end of the seventeenth

century there was a decline in the teaching of classical history accompanied by
a rise in the curricular presence of modern history.243 According to the scho-
lastic pattern, knowledge of plants and animals was considered as “physics of
self-moving bodies” and formed part of natural philosophy.244 Pliny’s Naturalis
historia did not play any significant role in the Jesuit’s curriculum.
There are some Early Modern witnesses to the division of history in natural,
civil and ecclesiastical. This threefold partition was expounded by Bacon in
the second book of the Advancement of Learning (1605)—actually, he added a
fourth branch, “literary” history, which he thought was not yet developed in his
times.245 In his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566) the politi-
cal philosopher Jean Bodin also divided history in natural, human and sacred.246
As to chorographic writing, there was a German tradition consolidated during
the sixteenth century, which depended on Italian models.247 At the time of
explaining the meaning of the word histoire, the 1771 edition of the Dictionnaire
de Trévoux—a contemporary Jesuit reference work—systematizes what the
Jesuit Claude-François Ménestrier had said in the preface to his Histoire civile
ou consulaire de la ville de Lyon (1696): with respect to its subject matter, history
can be sacred, natural, civil, personal or singular. “Histoire naturelle,” accord-
ing to this entry, is “the faithful description of the singularities of nature, of its
prodigies, of the alterations it suffers in the course of the birth, the progress,
the end, and the usage of each thing”.248 With its characteristic Early Modern

243 See A. Scaglione, The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System (Amsterdam: John
Benjamin, 1986), 90 and Dainville, “L’énseignement de l’histoire,” 439–449.
244 The Aristotelian notion of “movement” was wider than that of displacement through
space, which explains why it could be said that plants “move.”
245 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning (Chicago and London: Encyclopaedia
Britannica, 1952), 32–38.
246 Jean Bodin, Methodus, ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Paris: Martinus Iuvenis, 1566).
247 This German tradition followed Italian models of geographical cum historical writing
like Flavio Biondo (De Roma instaurata, Italia illustrata), Aeneas Sylvius Piccolominius
(Cosmographia), Ptolemy, and Strabo. See Gerard Strauss, “Topographical-Historical
Method in Sixteenth-Century German Scholarship,” Studies in the Renaissance 5 (1958):
87–101; cf. John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (London: Harper
Collins, 1993), 28–38. The Humanist use of the term “chorography” might have been
triggered by the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography. See Lucia Nuti, “Mapping Places:
Chorography and Vision in the Renaissance,” in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove, 90–108
(London: Reaktion Books, 1999).
248 Dictionnaire universel, s.v. “histoire naturelle.” Cf. Claude François Ménestrier, Histoire
civile ou Consulaire de la Ville de Lyon (Lyon: J. B. and N. Deville, 1696).
natural histories 83

concern for the unique and the marvelous, this account chimes well with the
contents of the first natural histories of Paraquaria.249 The models of the genre
of natural history proposed by the writers of Trévoux are classical: Aristotle,
Theophrastus and Pliny.
The entry on the adjective “naturelle” in the Dictionnaire de Trévoux also dis-
cusses natural history. The text paraphrases the definition of “Natural History”
in John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum.250 Natural history according to Harris, was
the description of any of the natural products of the earth, water or air, such as
beasts, birds, fish, metals, minerals, and fossils. The paradigms of the genre cited
here were authors like Daléchamps, Jonston and Nieremberg.251 Common to
these writers is what could be called an Early Modern “philological” approach
to natural history, inasmuch as their accounts of plants and animals are textual
elaborations and reinterpretations of previous literature, a journey into the
thickness of texts.252 In its love for words, this kind of discourse is not far from
what we have seen exemplified in the natural histories of Paraguay, with their
penchant for structuring much of their contents around native names and lan-
guages. But what counts in the end is that the native names that pervade the
Jesuit natural histories referred in a straightforward way, free of any textual or
philological mediation, to the natural creatures of Paraquaria.
If we now move to the Renaissance literature on Spanish America, we find
that around 1570 Juan de Ovando (1515–1575), president of the Council of the
Indies, developed the project of writing (a) the general and particular history
of the Indies, (b) its natural and moral history. This program was implemented
through a questionnaire devised by the Royal Chronicler-Cosmographer Juan
Ramírez de Velasco (d. 1597), which had to be filled out by the officers of the

249 For the role of wonders and prodigies in Early Modern natural history writing see Lorraine
and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books,
2001).
250 Dictionnaire universel, s.v. “naturelle.” Cf. John Harris, Lexicon Technicum, an Universal
English Dictionary of Arts and Sciences, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (London: printed for Dan Brown
et al., 1710), s.v. “Natural History.”
251 Jacques Daléchamps (1513–1588) was a French Humanist doctor and botanist, author of
a Historia generalis plantarum (Lyon, 1586). John Jonston’s Historia naturalis was a hand-
some encyclopedia with superb copper engravings, edited between 1650 and 1653, an
overmature product of the tradition of Renaissance encyclopedias of animals and plants
like those of Conrad Gessner and Ulisse Aldrovandi. In Renaissance times, the word his-
toria began to be used in titles of books devoted to plants and animals after 1540, while
the expression “natural history” appears only in historiographic discussions. See Brian W.
Ogilvie, “Natural History, Ethics and Physico-Theology,” 82.
252 Asúa and French, A New World of Animals, 184–209.
84 chapter 1

crown in all the Spanish possessions of the New World. The corresponding
reports came to be known as the relaciones de Indias, an ample source of infor-
mation on economic and social aspects of the Spanish possessions overseas and
also on questions regarding the natural environment.253 In De historia (1611),
the Spanish historian Luis Cabrera de Córdoba considered history as twofold,
divine and human; the latter in turn he divided into natural and moral.254 But
theory followed practice, for as mentioned above Fernández de Oviedo had
published his General and Natural History of the Indies in 1535 and Acosta his
Natural and Moral History of the Indies between 1588 and 1590. The writing of
natural and moral/civil/ecclesiastical histories was a practice born and culti-
vated by Jesuit missionaries and scholars in the Spanish Indies in response to
their missionary needs. In tune with all of Jesuit science in Iberian America,
the Jesuit natural histories of Paraguay and Río de la Plata have a utilitarian
approach, stressing the uses of natural products, the dangers of the wilderness
and the different ways of obtaining food, medicaments and shelter from trees,
plants and animals. They were the result of their author’s life experience in
the tropical forest and as such reveal their preoccupations and interests. This
empirical, pragmatic tone, was in line with the body of literature conformed by
the relaciones de Indias and other sixteenth-century works on the geography,
medical botany, and natural world of Spanish America.255
Of the texts discussed in this chapter only a few were published during their
authors’ lifetimes. Lozano published his Descripción chorographica in Córdoba
(Spain) in 1733. Most of the books written by exile Jesuits from Paraguay and
Río de la Plata were printed: Falkner’s Description of Patagonia (Hereford, 1774),
Jolís’s Saggio (Faenza, 1789), and Termeyer’s essay on South American natu-
ral history (Milan, 1810). The most famous of these works was Dobrizhoffer’s
De abiponibus (1784), published simultaneously in a German translation by
A. Kreil as Geschichte der Abiponer, 3 vols. (1783–1784). The book was translated
into English by Sara Coleridge and issued in three volumes as An Account of the

253 See Cline, “The Relaciones Geográficas.”

254 Luis Cabrera de Córdoba, De historia, para entenderla y escribirla (Madrid: Luis Sánchez,
1611), f. 18r–v.
255 Barrera-Osorio has made a case for the characteristically empirical approach of the
literature of the New World as a major input in the Scientific Revolution. See idem,
Experiencing Nature. The Spanish-American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), in particular chapters 4 and 5. William Ashworth
has proposed that the “new” animals of the New World were of primary importance in the
crumbling down of the kind of emblematic Renaissance natural history, like that embod-
ied in the encyclopedias of Gesner and Aldrovandi. See Ashworth, “Natural History and
the Emblematic World View,” 318–319.
natural histories 85

Abipones (London, 1822).256 In the January number of The Quarterly Review,

Robert Southey published a long and sympathetic anonymous commentary
on the book, which probably made something to promote it among the British
public.257 An Account of the Abipones was read as an ethnographic source
and as a natural history of Río de la Plata. In his Journal of Researches Darwin
points out that Dobrizhoffer had already called attention to the two species
of Rhea he himself distinguished in Patagonia.258 The British naturalist also
mentions Dobrizhoffer in his Descent of Man (1871) as does James G. Frazer
repeatedly in The Golden Bough (this is the source of Sigmund Freud’s mention
of Dobrizhoffer in Totem and Taboo).259
Falkner’s work was the first reliable account on Patagonia and as such has
been quoted by travel naturalists such as Charles Darwin (1809–1882) and
Alcide d’Orbigny (1802–1857).260 It was promptly translated into German,
French and Spanish.261 Falkner’s Description of Patagonia played a role in
the politics of Río de la Plata: it was as a result of its publication that in 1779
the Viceroy Vértiz sent an expedition to settle the country around the mouth
of the Rio Negro, which resulted in the foundation of the city of Carmen de
Patagones.262 Later, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Falkner’s
exposition of the military defenselessness of Patagonia was used as an argu-
ment in the political discussions that preceded the “Conquest of the Desert”

256 The different editions of Dobrizhoffer’s work are listed in Sommervogel 3, cols. 108–109
and Cardozo, Historiografía paraguaya, 344–351.
257 [Southey, Robert], “An Account of the Abipones, an Equestrian People of Paraguay.
Translated from the Latin of Martin Dobrizhoffer, Eighteenth Years a Missionary in that
Country. London, 3 vols. 8vo. 1821,” The Quarterly Review 26 (January 1822): 277–323.
258 Charles R. Darwin, Journal of Researches, 2nd ed. (London: John Murray, 1845), 83 and 116.
259 Darwin, Charles R., The Descent of Man, 2 vols. (London: Murray, 1871), 2:374. See Juan
Ramón Guardia Lezcano, “Referencias a jesuitas de Argentina hechas por Darwin y
Freud” (2007), http://juanramonguardialezcano.blogspot.com.ar/2007/09/4-referencias-
jesuitas-de-argentina.html.
260 Alcide d’Orbigny mentions Falkner’s description of the rests of a “tatou gigantesque”
(Glyptodon) in the cliffs of the Paraná River. See idem, Voyage dans l’Amérique méridi-
onale, tome 3, 3e partie, Géologie (Paris: Bertrand, 1842; Strasbourg: Levrault, 1842), 41–42.
In the 11th edition of the Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin mentions Falkner three times. See
Darwin, Journal of Researches, 11th ed. (London: Murray, 1913), 109, 112, and 122. For bibli-
ography on Falkner’s life and work, see chapter 2, section 3.3.
261 Guillermo Furlong, Tomás Falkner y su “Acerca de los Patagones” (Buenos Aires: Librería
del Plata, 1954), 98–100 and 121–133.
262 Michael G. Mulhall, The English in South America (Buenos Aires: Standard Office, 1878;
London: Stanford, 1878), 79.
86 chapter 1

in Argentina.263 Moreover, in the intellectual history of that country the Jesuit

natural histories were appropriated in succession as historical legitimatiz-
ing arguments for political propaganda, as scientific works that would vouch
for the Jesuits’ advance cultural policy, and as foundation bricks in the first
attempts at constructing a national history of literature.264 It should be clear
by now that these works were neither “history,” nor “literature,” nor “science,”
but the result of a peculiar Jesuit tradition of writing.

4.2 Theatrum naturae

Ewalt characterized Gumilla’s El Orinoco Ilustrado as a “textual natural history
cabinet”.265 What the natural histories of Paraquaria bring to mind is closer
to Aldrovandi’s “theater of nature.”266 Il teatro della natura, the expression
used by Aldrovandi to describe his famous cabinet of curiosities, conveys the
image of a natural world arranged as an exhibition to be contemplated. This
display of natural objects as a theatrical spectacle was also the organizing prin-
ciple of Kircher’s Museum in the Collegium Romanum.267 The Jesuit natural
histories of historical Paraguay, with their vision of the land as the stage of the
human drama of Salvation enacted in the midst of a natural Paradise, can aptly
be conceived as a discursive expression of a “theater of nature.”
If we take into account the religious goals of the Jesuits—and there is lit-
tle chance to arrive at any tolerable historical understanding if we choose to
leave them aside—it becomes evident that the natural histories of Paraguay
were permeated by the novelty of the New World, interpreted not only as terra
incognita, but also as a new field for preaching and gaining converts to the
faith. If one wished to tell a story set in Paraquaria or some other land with
some such name, redolent of exotic mystery, it was not ill advised to set the

263 In his book, Falkner pointed out that the Spanish defenses in the Río de la Plata were
weak, so that it would have been easy to invade the country either attacking the ports
of Buenos Aires and Montevideo or landing on the deserted Patagonia. Cf. Miguel de
Asúa, “Acerca de la biografía, obra y actividad médica de Thomas Falkner S.I. 1707–1784),”
Stromata 62 (2006): 227–254.
264 Miguel de Asúa, “ ‘Names Which He Loved, and Things Well Worthy to Be Known’:
Eighteenth-Century Jesuit Natural Histories of Paraquaria and Río de la Plata,” Science in
Context 21, no. 1 (2008): 39–72.
265 Ewalt, Peripheral Wonders, 63.
266 For Aldrovandi’s “Theater of Nature,” see Giuseppe Olmi, Ulisse Aldrovandi. Scienza e
natura nel secondo cinquecento (Trento: Libera Università degli Studi di Trento, 1976) and
Raffaela Simili, ed., Il teatro della natura di Ulisse Aldrovandi (Bologna: Compositori, 2001).
267 Paula Findlen, “Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman
College,” in Feingold, Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, 225–284.
natural histories 87

stage in advance for the action to take place. This orderly procedure—first
describe the setting (natural history), then tell the plot (civil and ecclesiastical
history)—could have been appealing to Jesuit writers, always careful of fol-
lowing a rational orderly procedure. The idea of providing a circumstantiated
account of the theatre where an action is to be deployed was natural for the
Jesuits, who were familiarized with the method of “composition: seeing the
place,” recommended by Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises, which
consisted in visualizing with the imagination the surroundings where a spiri-
tual drama was enacted.268
The strong scenic element in Baroque art and the current practice of the-
atrical exercises as a regular part of the curriculum in Jesuit colleges might
have contributed to an intellectual atmosphere where the notion of stage was
essential.269 In his History of the Conquest Lozano justifies the geographical
account he is about to begin, arguing that “a new world, not well known at the
present time” needs to be described. This depiction, he goes on, is like “point-
ing out the theater where the triumphs of faith and virtue of those valiant
knights [the Jesuits] against the forces of the abyss are to be represented”.270 In
Catholic Paraguay, Sánchez Labrador tells that the Jesuits wished to arrive to
the banks of the Paraguay River, “peopled by an innumerable multitude, as the
theater of their zeal”.271 Dobrizhoffer writes that the Spaniards considered the
Chaco “the theatre of misery,” a stage where they played out their stories of
greed, labors, and suffering haunted by menacing presences.272 Adequately, he
opens his account of the animals claiming “A quadripedibus feris exordiamur.
Prima in scenam prodeat tigris” [We will begin with quadrupeds. The tiger
appears first on the scene!].273 When writing about the Eyiguayeguis, Sánchez
Labrador says that his feather will sketch the country and the nature and uses
of this proud nation, offering “a beautiful theater hidden among barbarism”.274
Theatrical representations, ballets, military parades and mock battles were
organized in the reductions to celebrate the feasts of the liturgical year or civil
festivities. A favorite theme was the battle between angels and devils, where

268 Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises, 294, 312, and 329 (§§ 47, 151, and 232).
269 See Henry Schnitzler, “The Jesuit Contribution to the Theatre,” Educational Theatre
Journal 4, no. 4 (1952): 283–292; Jean-Marie Valentin, Les jésuites et le théâtre (1554–1680)
(Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 2001); and the several articles on Jesuit theater in O’Malley,
The Jesuits II.
270 Lozano, Historia de la conquista ed. Lamas, 1:7.
271 Sánchez Labrador, El Paraguay Católico, 1:6.
272 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 1:124.
273 Dobrizhoffer, Historia de Abiponibus, 1:283.
274 Sánchez Labrador, El Paraguay Católico, 1:130.
88 chapter 1

Guaraní groups of dancers disguised as celestial or infernal creatures enacted

ritualized combats to the sound of music. The Jesuits also organized dramatic
performances with Guaraní actors in the reductions enacting the victory of
Mbororé against the slave raiders from São Paulo. The inventories of the mis-
sion towns show the richness, creativity and variety of the costumes used by the
actors and dancers.275 In this connection, the natural histories bring to mind
the exuberant and colorful pageants that took place in the reductions and in
particular the feast of Corpus Christi. A few days before the celebration, the
Guaraní went to the woods to capture beasts and birds and gather branches,
fruits and flowers of all kinds. They used them to decorate and garland a series
of arcs set at regular intervals along the wide path that surrounded the main
square of the reduction—to some of them, they tied live monkeys and small
deer. After the mass of Corpus, the priest came out of the Church and headed
the procession, which stopped at each of the four corners of the square, where
the Guaraní, dressed as angels or in the trappings of Asians, Persians or Turks,
executed a series of dances and incensed the tabernacle containing the Holy
Eucharist, chanting with solemn voices the Tantum ergo, while the music of
violins, harps, basses, trumpets, tambourines, and flutes played by a native
orchestra thundered in the air.276 This cultural mélange, this actual and very
real presence of plants, birds and quadrupeds as exemplars of the creatures
of the Earth glorifying their creator, this sacramental celebration of Baroque
splendor helps to get a glimpse of the mental and material world in which the
natural histories of Paraquaria were conceived.

4.3 The Jesuit Works and Eighteenth-Century Natural History

The works we are looking at remained faithful to a pre-Linnaean, pre-Buffonian
way of seeing and talking, and as such escaped what has been described as the
eighteenth-century dissociation between natural history and folk taxonomy.277
As mentioned above, their authors claimed to be neither natural philosophers
nor “naturalists.” Only the later works written in Italy by exiled Jesuits (those of
Jolís and Termeyer) showed signs of an attempt to come to terms with the kind
of natural history written by Linnaeus and Buffon. Sánchez Labrador’s encyclo-

275 Furlong, Misiones, 489–492. See Hauber, La vie quotidienne, 272–284 for a description of
the different celebrations along the year.
276 José Cardiel, “Breve relación de las misiones del Paraguay,” in Hernández, Organización
social de las doctrinas guaraníes de la Compañía de Jesús, 2: 565–567.
277 Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge
University Press, 1990; Paris: Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 1990), 10.
natural histories 89

pedia was the only work which can be seen as trying to engage with the intel-
lectual current usually called Catholic Illustration or Catholic Enlightenment.278
Even when grounded on a traditional worldview based on Aristotelian natural
philosophy, Catholic doctrine and literal Biblical exegesis, Sánchez Labrador
ventures into some kind of dialogue with the Moderns, with whose conceptual
apparatus he became acquainted through his reading of Feijóo, of encyclope-
dias of natural history and medical dictionaries.

278 The notion of Catholic Enlightenment or Catholic Illustration was coined by the German
historian Sebastian Merkle in the first decade of the twentieth century. Originally,
it involved anti-Jesuitism as one of its main traits, but with time it has been accepted
that “anti-Jesuitism was not an essential characteristic of the Catholic Enlightenment.
Moreover, one can even detect some Enlighteners among the Jesuits themselves.
Particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century (and in France in the first
half), a minority of Jesuits became quite fond of the Enlightenment” (Ulrich L. Lehner,
“The Many Faces of Catholic Enlightenment,” in Brill’s Companion to the Catholic
Enlightenment in Europe, ed. U. Lehner and Michael Printy [Leiden and Boston, 2010],
32). The traditional treatment of Spanish Illustration is Jean Sarrailh, L’Espagne éclairée
de la seconde moitié du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1954). See an updated
discussion in Andrea Smidt, “Luces por la fe. The Cause of Catholic Enlightenment in 18th-
Century Spain,” in Lehner and Printy, Brill’s Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in
Europe, 403–452. There is much literature on Iberian American Catholic Enlightenment.
See, for example, Arthur P. Whitaker, Latin America and the Enlightenment (New York:
D. Appleton-Century Co., 1942) and for a historiographical discussion, idem, “Changing
and Unchanging Interpretations of Enlightenment in Spanish America,” in The Ibero-
American Enlightenment, ed. Owen Aldridge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971),
21–57. Ruth Hill has recently analyzed the discourse on natural philosophy in four
Humanists of Spain and the New World using the notion of “accommodation,” under-
stood as “a conscious effort to increase human knowledge through reason and experiment
and to safeguard Hispanic Catholicism by marking it off from reason and experiment,
i.e. by relying on authority” (idem, Sceptres and Sciences in the Spains: Four Humanists
and the New Philosophy (ca. 1680–1740) [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000], 6).
See also the collection of essays in Diana Soto Arango et al., La Ilustración en América
Colonial (Madrid: Doce Calles, 1995). José Carlos Chiaramonte has contended that “the
concept [of Catholic illustration] is contradictory, because while the most usual belief in
the European Enlightenment was Deism and to a certain point atheism, what was pecu-
liar of the Catholic position was theism” (idem, La Ilustración en el Río de la Plata. Cultura
eclesiástica y cultura laica durante el Virreinato, 2nd ed. [Buenos Aires: Sudamericana,
2007], 19). For the participation of Jesuits in Spanish Catholic Enlightenment, in particu-
lar those engaged in mathematical teaching, see Victor Navarro Brotóns, “Science and
Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Spain: The Contribution of the Jesuits before and
after the Expulsion,” in O’Malley et al., The Jesuits II, 390–404.
90 chapter 1

Surely the narratives of Dobrizhoffer and Paucke (in particular the latter)
proclaim the principle of autopsia as a path to knowledge, but this could be
better understood as a trait shared by many early chronicles of the New World
than as a sign of Modernity. Paucke’s empirical approach to intriguing natural
phenomena does not proceed beyond the medieval notion of experientia or
experimentum (more on this in the conclusions). Neither of them ever men-
tions Linnaeus or Buffon. Dobrizhoffer refines his text with references taken
from Woyt’s Gazophylacium medico-physicum (first edited in Leipzig, 1709)
and accepts the occult virtues so prominent in Nieremberg’s Historia naturae.
The writing of both authors conjures up the Baroque cultural milieu of the
Habsburg Empire and the Jesuit classical Humanism in which they had been
educated rather than any form of Illustration.279
Together with the folk nomenclature of the native peoples the Jesuits incor-
porated into their writings stories of fabulous beasts and beliefs about magi-
cal properties of animals, taken from native oral traditions. We have seen how
accounts of marvelous animals and trees are conspicuous in the early chron-
icles, like those of Ruiz de Montoya and Pedro Lozano. They linger in the nar-
rative of Dobrizhoffer, always fond of wonders and marvels, and are almost
but left out in the late natural histories written in the Italian exile, like that of
Sánchez Labrador.
Other authors have already discussed how the universal acceptance of
Linnaean taxonomy and the accompanying obliteration of native names
of plants were associated to the enterprise of surveying and localizing vegeta-
ble resources in the New World and the Far East that accompanied European
imperial expansion in the eighteenth century.280 In what concerns Spanish
America, Linnaeus’ nomenclature was the official standard for all the great
botanical expeditions launched by the Enlightened Bourbon monarchs.281
This attempt at official scientific uniformity did not pass unchallenged by the
representatives of a previous order. In Mexico, the Creole priest and physician
José Antonio Alzate (1737–1799) defended the use of Nahuatl names of plants

279 See R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550–1700. An Interpretation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 311–345 for a superb description of Jesuit learning
in the Habsburg Empire.
280 See, for example, Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire. Colonial Bioprospecting in the
Atlantic World (Cambridge, Mass.: London: Harvard University Press, 2004).
281 See Antonio Lafuente and Nuria Valverde, “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial
Biopolitics,” in Colonial Botany, Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World,
ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
2005), 134–147.
natural histories 91

against the imposition of Linnaean names promoted by Vicente Cervantes

(1755–1829) from the Botanical Garden of the city of Mexico created in 1787 as
a result of the botanical expedition of Martín Sessé (1751–1808).282 The conflict
over the names of plants and animals in Spanish America was very active after
the Jesuits had been expelled from the continent.
We have already discussed how a preoccupation for preserving the names
of the living creatures of the country was one of the distinctive characteris-
tics of the Jesuit natural histories of Paraquaria. The motives for this modus
operandi were diverse and changed over time. To begin with, the missionar-
ies were confronted with the task of describing plants that had no European
names. The expedient of giving them a Spanish or German name on account
of their similarity with a familiar species of the Old World was limited by the
enormous diversity of the flora they encountered and by the fact that many
species did not have European counterparts. The use of native names of plants
and animals was a natural solution to the problem and one that was conso-
nant with their interest in the native languages. (It might be pointed out here
as well that the descriptions of the plants made by German-speaking Jesuits
were rather competent. For example, out of the 186 plant names mentioned by
Dobrizhoffer, 169 have been identified by botanists.)283
Exile Jesuits writing after the 1760s had other concerns. While presenting
Buffon, de Pauw and other critics of the nature of the New World as armchair
philosophers, they sought to legitimatize themselves as the true interpreters
of the New World by harping on the fact that they had been there and could
provide sound descriptions of the things of which they had first-hand knowl-
edge. Their censure on Buffon’s spelling of Guarani words and their defense
of the aboriginal names of plants and animals were part of this larger effort,
wrapped in the rhetoric of patriotic nostalgia. Consistently, Termeyer and Jolís
renounced to call themselves naturalists and, as a consequence, to the use
of Linnaean nomenclature, arguing that a common-sense description of the
plants and animals was enough for anyone interested in them. This preoccupa-
tion for recovering the native names of creatures is also present in other Jesuits
from Spanish America. In his Historia del Reino de Quito, Juan de Velasco, who

282 Patricia E. Aceves Pastrana, “La difusión de la ciencia en la Nueva España en el siglo XVIII:
la polémica en torno a la nomenclatura de Linneo y Lavoisier,” Quipu 4, no. 3 (1987):
357–385.
283 Of these, 38 names correspond to Abipón environment, 46 to Guaraní environment and
27 to both; 14 to other regions of the New World and 61 to the Old World. See Pastor Arenas,
“Las fuentes actuales y del pasado para la etnobotánica del Gran Chaco,” Monografías del
Jardín Botánico de Córdoba 5 (1997): 17–25.
92 chapter 1

when possible used local names to designate the animals, gives a list of thir-
teen species of big cats with their Quechua names and another with the native
names of the animals that the Europeans introduced to America. It is while
talking about animals that he carefully discusses the differences in spelling
between the Quechua talked in Peru and the language of Quito.284 As the final
part of his Storia antica del Messico, Clavigero wrote nine dissertations on the
land, animals and native inhabitants of New Spain (1780–1781). His essay on
animals is actually a long polemic with Buffon’s view on the inferiority of the
nature of the New World. This is followed by three lists of quadrupeds, men-
tioned by their common names (Spanish or natives) and described in no more
than two lines: animals recognized by Buffon, those which Buffon had con-
fused with other species and lastly, beasts that Buffon had ignored.285

4.4 Native Lore on Nature

Segments of the knowledge of plants and animals of the Guaraní and the
native peoples of the Chaco—insofar as it was condensed in the recognition
and naming of plants—were absorbed into the natural histories of the Jesuits.286

284 Velasco, Historia del Reino de Quito, 1:82–134.

285 Clavigero, Storia antica dell Messico, 4:105–150 and 151–159.
286 Arenas has argued the relevancy of the Jesuit natural histories to the study of the ethno-
biology of the native peoples among whom they lived (idem, “Las fuentes actuales y del
pasado”). This approach lies beyond the scope of this book. What follows is a brief guide
to the rapidly growing literature in the field. Julio S. Storni compiled a Guaraní vocabu-
lary of fauna and flora with commentary and Linnaean identifications; see idem, Hortus
Guaranensis. La fauna (Tucumán: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 1940) and Hortus
Guaranensis. Flora (Tucumán: Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, 1944). Martínez-
Crovetto, Zoonimia y etnozoología de los pilagá, toba, mocoví, mataco y vilela is an exhaus-
tive study of Guaycuruan ethnozoology. For Guaraní ornithology, see the extensive study
by Marilyn Cebolla Badie, “El conocimiento mbayá-guaraní de las aves. Nomenclatura
y clasificación,” Suplemento antropológico 35, no. 2 (2000): 9–188. León Cadogan, “Some
Plants and Animals in Guaraní and Guayaki Mythology,” in Paraguay: Ecological Essays,
ed. Richard Gorham (Miami: Academy of Arts and Letters of the Americas, 1973), 97–104
is an excellent account of animals and plants in Guaraní mythology. The series of papers
by Héctor A. Keller provides an updated and extensive account of Guaraní ethnobotany
and agriculture. See idem, “Etnobotánica de los guaraníes que habitan la selva misionera,”
2001, http://www1.unne.edu.ar/cyt/2001/6-Biologicas/B-008.pdf; “Plantas textiles de los
guaraníes de Misiones, Argentina,” Bonplandia 18, no. 1 (2009): 29–37; “Plantas relaciona-
das con tabúes del ciclo reproductivo de los Guaraníes de Misiones, Argentina,” Boletín
de la Sociedad Argentina de Botánica 45, no. 1–2 (2010): 201–208; “Problemas de la etnotax-
onomía guaraní: ‘Las plantas de los animales’,” Bonplandia 20, no. 2 (2011): 111–136. Pastor
Arenas and Gustavo Porini, Las aves en la vida de los tobas del oeste de la provincia de
natural histories 93

We have already discussed the role played in these texts by aboriginal names
and lists of names of the creatures of the region. It is difficult to ascertain
the amount of the Amerindians’ contribution to the knowledge the Jesuits
acquired of their environment. There are no extant notebooks with records of
Guaraní words taken down by the Jesuits. What are left are the lexica and dic-
tionaries, on the one hand, and the natural histories on the other. In any case,
it seems quite plausible that the point of departure of much that is contained
in these natural histories is the identification and the naming of the species
described in them. Naming paved the way to take cognizance of the properties
of the plants or animals and the uses to which they could be put. What allowed
the Jesuits to describe their environments in the way they did were the names
of the plants and animals which the Jesuits learned from their catechumens—
and the folk classification those names implied.
Atran has argued how the continuities between any folkbiological taxon-
omy and the Early Modern classifications seem to be grounded on a common
human structure of cognition.287 This American-French anthropologist has

Formosa (Argentina) (Asunción: Tiempo de Historia, 2009) is a thorough ethnographi-

cal and ethnozoological study of birds among one of the peoples of the Gran Chaco.
The authors study the hunting of birds by the Tobas and how they use them in different
aspects of their material culture; also, the role of birds in medicine, shamanism, ritual,
their meaning in Toba cosmology, and Toba ethnoclassification of birds.
287 Scott Atran, “Origin of the Species and Genus Concepts: An Anthropological Perspective,”
Journal of the History of Biology 20, no. 2 (1987): 195–279. During the sixties, anthro-
pologists devoted to ethnoscience mostly concerned themselves with the description
of particular folk taxonomies. In the seventies, Brent Berlin began his researches into
what came to be known as ethnotaxonomy, the study of classificatory systems hierar-
chically structured. The most influential authors in this field, which cuts across the dis-
ciplines of ethnography, linguistics and cognitive science, have argued for some kind
of universal system of categories, taxa or hierarchies common to all cultures. See Brent
Berlin, Ethnobiological Classification. Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals
in Traditional Societies (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), which sum-
marizes his earlier work, and the books by Cecil H. Brown, Language and Living Things:
Uniformities in Folk Classification and Naming (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University
Press, 1984) and Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History. William Balée and
co-workers have applied this approach to the ethnobotanical studies in Tupí-Guaraní
communities. See William Balée and Denny Moore, “Similarity and Variation in Plant
Names in Five Tupi-Guarani Languages (Eastern Amazonia),” Bulletin of the Florida
Museum of Natural History, Biological sciences 35, no. 4 (1991): 209–262; idem, “Language,
Culture and Environment: Tupí-Guaraní Plant Names over Time,” in Amazonian Indians
from Prehistory to the Present. Anthropological Perspectives, ed. Anna Roosevelt (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1994), 363–80; William Balée and Marilyn Cebolla Badie, “The
94 chapter 1

also proposed historical threads that could account for some kind of conti-
nuity between folk taxonomy and scientific classification.288 In his study on
Renaissance natural history, Ogilvie has characterized it as “a peculiar kind of
folkbiology”.289 And even if he points out that late Renaissance botany went
beyond folk taxonomy in several respects, there seems to remain enough com-
mon basic ground between both approaches as to the process of recognition
of taxa.290 Although a revision of Guaraní and Guaycuruan folk taxonomy is
far beyond the scope of the present investigation, it remains that embedded
in the names of animals and plants was a way of organizing the creatures of
the natural world which was not all that different from folk notions of Early
Modern taxonomy.
Guaraní artists transformed the European decorative patterns of flora and
fauna into local equivalents of plants and animals.291 Conversely to what was
the case in art, what we see in the Jesuit natural histories is assimilation of
native words—sounds and the images and conceptual contents they convey—
into European discourse. This use of aboriginal names implies diversity and
cultural amalgam, expressions of the cultural Baroque that flourished in the
Jesuit reductions and was far from the uniformity and regularity that were a
hallmark of the Enlightenment. This intersection of Western and native cul-
tures is manifested also in the textual enactment of Greco-roman plots by local
actors. The motif of an almost ritual and patterned confrontation between two
animals, a commonplace topic in the literature on nature of the New World,
can be traced back to famous models in Pliny’s Naturalis historia, such as the
battle between the elephant and the serpent.292 Lozano describes the confron-
tation between the macaguá bird and the serpent, the fight between the “tiger”
(jaguar) and the bull, and the encounter between the “wild boar” (peccary)
and the ant bear.293

Meaning of ‘Tree’ in Two Different Tupí-Guaraní Languages from Two Different Tropical
Forests,” Amazônica 1, no. 1 (2009): 96–135.
288 Scott Atran and Douglas Medin, The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature
(Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2008), 25–27.
289 Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, 221.
290 Ibid., 209–264.
291 Bailey, Art on the Jesuit Missions, 181–182; cf. Josefina Plá, El barroco hispano-guaraní
(Asunción: Intercontinental Editora, 2006).
292 Naturalis historia VIII.1–13.
293 Lozano, Historia de la conquista, ed. Lamas, 1:256, 277, 287, and 289. The story of the
macaguá is taken from Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista spiritual, 52.
natural histories 95

This Jesuit assimilation of aboriginal realities to classical models is particu-

larly evident in Sánchez Labrador’s Diary, which abounds with descriptions
of the geography, fauna and flora of the Chaco region. Its reading brings to
mind the Decades of Peter Martyr, the Italian Humanist who chronicled
the epic of the discovery of the New World setting the Amerindians against
the rhetorical scenery of the Greco-Roman world. While the names of the
plants and animals are given in Mbyá language, Sánchez Labrador compares
this Guaycurú people to the Spartans and considers the caciques of the Chanas
greater than “the Alexanders, Caesars and Scipiones” of Antiquity.294 The
Spanish text, densely interwoven with the autochthonous names of places and
creatures, is adorned with Latin quotations. The chapter on ophidians in the
section of Catholic Paraguay devoted to the Mbyá people is also very telling of
the outlook that underlies Sánchez Labrador’s writing on the natural world.
Just as he did in the Diary, he sets the Mbyá names of the serpents side by
side with block quotations taken from the Latin version of Nicander’s Theriaca
and from Virgil’s Georgics. The effect of this juxtaposition of Amerindian and
classical vocabularies is ambivalent; it enhances the exoticism of the native
words while cloaking the creatures of Paraquaria in the trappings of classical
Antiquity.295 In any case, it is a striking manifestation of the interplay of cul-
tural referents in the Jesuits’ discourse on nature.
From this angle, the natural histories of Paraquaria can be seen as a result
of the encounter between Jesuits and the Guaraní, a cultural artifact that was
a symmetric counterpart to the churches and images of saints in the charac-
teristic style of art evolved in the reductions of Iberian America.296 For while
in the case of the artistic production the Guaraní appropriated and re-created
European patterns, this corpus of writing integrated into its fabric a flow of
words and ways of ordering the natural world provided by the aboriginal
inhabitants of the land.

294 Sánchez Labrador, El Paraguay católico, 1:38 and 27.

295 This very same discursive strategy had been used by the sixteenth-century Humanist
Peter Martyr in his Decades of the New World. See Asúa and French, A New World of
Animals, 54–62.
296 As a guide to further bibliography see the literature mentioned in the Introduction, “Life
in the reductions.”
 chapter 2

Herbals

In 1671 Francesco Redi (1626–1697), physician and naturalist who astonished

the courtiers of the Grand Duke of Tuscany with his outdoor dissections of
animals, published a book styled as a letter addressed to Athanasius Kircher
and destined to become a hallmark of Early Modern skepticism. Criticizing
Kircher’s belief on the occult virtues of exotic natural objects, Redi’s work was
conceived as an experimental attack on the alleged properties of medicinal
drugs brought to Italy from the Indies (meaning both the East Indies and the
New World). One of these exotica, Cinchona bark from Peru used against the
ague, was one of the very few which escaped Redi´s strictures and won his
approval: “For this the whole world owes a debt of gratitude to the Fathers of
your most venerable Society, who were the first, much to their glory, to bring it
to Europe”.1 Cinchona bark, one of the first specific remedies against a disease,
was a Jesuit business in more than one sense of the word.2 Although the story
of the transference of the first specimens of this tree to Europe is still disputed,
it is at least clear that it was a member of the Society of Jesus who took it to
Rome. The famous Cardinal Juan de Lugo (1583–1660), a Spanish Jesuit theolo-
gian, was among the first to experience its benefits. He was cured by it and as
a result began distributing Cinchona among the poor of the Papal city. “Lugo’s
powder,” wonderfully effective in malaria-ridden Rome, proved a blessing and
it was soon made available to the public from the pharmacy of the Collegium
Romanum and the Ospedale di Santo Spirito.3 Another Jesuit, the natural
philosopher Honoré Fabri (1607–1688), published in 1655 a tract extolling the

1 Francesco Redi, Esperienze intorno a diverse cose naturali, e particolarmente quelle, chi son por-
tate dall’Indie (Firenze: All’Insegna della Nave, 1671), 125. For the polemic between Redi and
Kircher, see Bruno Basile, “Redi, i gesuiti e le ‘maraviglie d’oltremare’,” in idem, L’invenzione
del vero. La letteratura scientifica da Galilei ad Algarotti (Roma: Salerno editrice, 1987), 49–88.
2 The name Cinchona came from the Countess of Chinchón, the wife of the viceroy allegedly
cured by the remedy.
3 See Jaime Jaramillo-Arango, “A Critical Review of the Basic Facts in the History of Cinchona,”
Journal of the Linnean Society of London 33 (1949): 272–309 and Saul Jarcho, Quinine’s
Predecessor: Francesco Torti and the Early History of Cinchona (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993), 4–17. There are two recent semi-scholarly accounts of the discovery of
Cinchona bark, Mark Honigsbaum, The Fever Trail: the Hunt for the Cure of Malaria (London:
Macmillan, 2001) and Fiammetta Rocco, The Miraculous Fever-Tree: Malaria, Medicine and
the Cure that Changed the World (London: Harper Collins, 2003).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004256774_��4

herbals 97

virtues of the drug brought to Europe by his religious brothers. In this, he was
answering to the attack that Jean-Jacques Chifflet (1588–1660), physician of the
Archduke Leopold of Austria at Brussels, had launched against the drug in a
pamphlet published two years earlier.4 Cinchona was soon being used in Jesuit
colleges all over the Continent. Even if the circumstances of the participation
of the members of the Society of Jesus in the early stages of this story are tinged
with legend, their role in the diffusion of the cure is undeniable, so much so
that Cinchona came to be known as “Jesuit’s powder.” Quinine is only the most
resounding example of the way in which all over the Americas Jesuit missionar-
ies profited from local knowledge of plants and their medicinal uses. In the phar-
macy of the house of the Jesuit Novitiate in Madrid several plant drugs from the
Indies could be found: sassafras, used for its diuretic and sweat-inducing proper-
ties, sarsaparilla, utilized for the same virtues, and canchalanga, a febrifuge and
stomachic—all of them drugs from the New World.5
No Cinchona was to be found in the Río de la Plata, but two pounds of balm
of aguaribay were exported yearly from Paraguay to the Royal Pharmacy in
Madrid.6 Félix de Azara, to whom we owe this information, attributed the dis-
covery of the balsamic properties of the tree to the Jesuit Sigismund Aperger.
In reality, they had been first described by his confrere Pedro Montenegro, who
in his treatise on materia medica recommended the balsam for nerve weak-
ness, arthritis, diarrhea, and also for repairing broken bones and stopping the
loss of blood in cases of dysentery, haemoptysis, menstrual discharges, and so
on.7 Eventually, “Jesuit balm” or “balm of the missions” became a very popular
remedy in the region.
Many plant drugs and remedies used by the Amerindians came to be known
by European pharmacists between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries.
Such is the case of the simples described by the Spanish physician Nicolás
Monardes (1493–1588) in his Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de
nuestras Indias Occidentales (Seville, 1574).8 To begin with, there were the

4 Antimus Conygius [Honoré Fabri], Pulvis Peruvianus vindicatus (Rome: Corbelletti, 1655);
Jean-Jacques Chifflet, Pulvis febrifugus orbis americani (n.p., 1653).
5 See M. E. Del Río Hijas and Manuel Revuelta González S.J., “Enfermerías y boticas en las casas
de la Compañía en Madrid, siglos XVI–XIX,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 64 (1995):
63–64. Species of sassafras also grew in East Asia.
6 Félix de Azara, Descripción e historia del Paraguay y Río de la Plata, 2 vols (Madrid: Imprenta
de Sánchiz, 1847), 2:74–75. Aguaribay (or aguaraibay) was also known as lentisco negro.
7 Pedro Montenegro, Materia médica misionera (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional, 1945), 198.
8 Nicolás Monardes, Primera, segunda y tercera partes de la historia medicinal de las cosas que
se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales (Seville: Alonso Escrivano, 1574). There were earlier
editions of each of the three parts that compose the book. For Monardes and his work, see
98 chapter 2

balsams used for curing wounds, like Peruvian balm (which despite its name
came from El Salvador) and Tolú balm from Colombia. Within the 150 years
after the discovery of the New World the four drugs that formed the bulk of
the exports to Spain were guaiacum (palosanto, lignum vitae), sarsaparilla
(also used for treating the pox, i.e., syphilis), sassafras bark from Florida, and
tobacco.9 Well into the seventeenth century Cinchona (later called quina) and
the emetic ipecac engrossed this list, which also included the purgative Jalap
syrup, rhatany for intestinal ailments, copaiba oil, the sweat-inducing jabo-
randí, the anthelmintic Chenopodium, dragon’s blood, canafistola (caña fistola,
cassia), and many more.10 These New World drugs and others from the East
Indies generated a prosperous system of global trade, but how much they were
actually used in Europe is a contested point.11 The standard view that most of
them were neither incorporated as valuable items in the European pharma-
copoeias, nor accepted by academic physicians, has been recently contested.12
In any case, the Jesuits in the missions of Paraguay wrote extensively about

Francisco Guerra, Nicolás Bautista Monardes. Su vida y su obra (México, D.F.: Compañía
Fundidora de Fierro y Acero Monterrey, 1961) and C. R. Boxer, Two Pioneers of Tropical
Medicine: Garcia d’Orta and Nicolás Monardes (London: Wellcome Historical Medical
Library, 1963).
9 J. Worth Estes, “The European Reception of the First Drugs from the New World,”
Pharmacy in History 37 no. 1 (1995), 9.
10 See the article by Estes, “The European Reception.” Cf. Ramón Pardal, Medicina abori-
gen americana (Buenos Aires: José Anesi [1937]), 345–368 and the more informative
Bruno Wolters, Drogen, Pfeilgift und Indianermedizin. Arzneipflanzen aus Südamerika
(Greifenberg: Urs Freund Verlag, 1994). For a comprehensive account discussing the
transference of plants from the New World to Spain, see the collection of articles in José
M. López Piñero et al., eds., Medicinas, drogas y alimentos vegetales del Nuevo Mundo
(Madrid: Ministerio de Sanidad y Consumo, 1992).
11 There is much literature on the history of drug trade from the New World in Early
Modern times. See, for example, Francisco Guerra, “Drugs from the Indies and the
Political Economy of the Sixteenth Century,” in Materia Medica in the XVIth Century, ed.
M. Florkin (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1966), 29–54; Antonio Barrera, “Local Herbs, Global
Medicines. Commerce, Knowledge and Commodities in Spanish America,” in Merchants
and Marvels: Commerce, Science and Arts in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela Smith and
Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 163-181; and Paula De Vos, “The Science of
Spices: Empiricism and Economic Botany in the Early Spanish Empire,” Journal of World
History 17, no. 4 (2006): 399–427.
12 See Estes, “The European Reception,” and Teresa Huguet-Termes, “New World Materia
Medica in Spanish Renaissance Medicine: From Scholarly Reception to Practical Impact,”
Medical History 45 (2001): 359–376.
herbals 99

these drugs and in many cases on the basis of information gathered from local
healers. The field of materia medica is a revealing example of how some prod-
ucts of Jesuit science in Paraquaria were a result of conceptual and practical
negotiations between native lore and Early Modern European learning.
In what follows we will look at the tradition of herbal literature embodied
in the manuscripts on materia medica written in the missions of Paraguay and
Río de la Plata. Of the native healers that collaborated with the Jesuits we have
no notice other than their names and the recognition of their skill or commit-
ment. The core of the Jesuit herbal tradition in Paraguay is Pedro Montenegro’s
treatise, usually mentioned as Materia medica misionera after the title given to
it by one of its modern editors. But there were other writers who contributed
to this literature and wrote medical handbooks for the use of the missionaries,
like Sigismund Aperger, Marcos Villodas, Thomas Falkner, and the anonymous
author of the Libro de cirugía (Book of Surgery).
In order to provide some context, the chapter begins with an impressionistic
account of Jesuit medicine and the practice of pharmacy in the missions. The
second section deals with the works of Montenegro and Aperger. After a short
biographical account of both Jesuits, we will reconstruct anew and discuss in
some detail the manuscript tradition of their treatises. The third section of the
chapter deals with other works of Jesuit medicine and medical botany: Marcos
Villodas’s Materia medica in Guaraní, the pages that Falkner wrote on the sub-
ject in his Description of Patagonia, and the anonymous Book of Surgery.

1 Jesuits Medicine and Pharmacy in Eighteenth-Century Paraguay

and Río de la Plata

“There are no physicians in the whole province,” wrote Dobrizhoffer, whose

bare statement is supported by the testimonies of his contemporaries. Given
the penury of qualified doctors and pharmacists, the missionaries did what
they could to attend the basic health requirements of the reductions.13 The
Littera annua of 1615 tells how Father Juan de Salas (1581–1662) prepared a
cough mixture which alleviated the symptoms of those affected by the epi-
demic respiratory disease that had struck the town of San Ignacio the year
before; the remedy was used in a second outbreak, but on this occasion the

13 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 2:247.

100 chapter 2

results were not altogether successful.14 Writing in 1691 to Germany from the
mission town of Yapeyú, Anton Sepp affirmed that

For those who are sick, the Father has to be both physician and apoth-
ecary. And even we [i.e., the Jesuits] have no other doctor than our dear
and providing Lord. If a missionary falls sick and neither God nor his
good nature helps him, he is lost.15

Dobrizhoffer recounts that the Fathers endeavored to supply “the want of phy-
sicians, surgeons, and druggists with remedies easy to obtain, with the reading
of medical books and with other means”.16 Among the things that José Cardiel
(1704–1781) recommended future missionaries to take with them to Paraguay,
he listed “[a book] of home medicine”.17
Missionaries cared for the health of the body because they were preoccu-
pied first and foremost with the health of the soul. As a rule, during the six-
teenth century Jesuits believed that sickness was sent by God as a punishment
for sins, so that outbreaks of a contagious disease were seen as an occasion for
conversion and perseverance.18 The primary cause of disease was considered
supernatural, and natural causes were seen as instrumental secondary causes.19
This belief accounts for the simultaneous implementation of spiritual and
medical measures to combat the disease. In cases of severe illness, the primary
concern of the missionaries was the administration of the sacraments to the
moribund. Sepp summarizes this attitude:

I was priest and Samaritan at the same time, cleaning not only the sores
of the soul but also those of the body, and easing the pains of the sick
with the sacred oil of apostolic love and Christian fervor.20

14 Carlos Leonhardt, ed., Cartas Anuas de la Provincia del Paraguay, Chile y Tucumán de la
Compañía de Jesús (1615–1637) (Buenos Aires: Peuser, 1929), 88–89.
15 Sepp, Relación de viaje, 194.
16 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 2:256.
17 José Cardiel, “Carta y relación de las misiones de la provincia del Paraguay,” in José Cardiel,
S.J. y su Carta-relación (1747), ed. Guillermo Furlong S.J. (Buenos Aires: Librería del Plata,
1953), 213.
18 A. Lynn Martin, Plague? Jesuit Accounts of Epidemic Disease in the 16th century (Kirksville,
Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1996), 89. See chapter 4 for a discussion on
Jesuit views on epidemics during the sixteenth century (pp. 89–113).
19 Ibid., 104.
20 Antonio Sepp, Continuación de las labores apostólicas, trans. Werner Hoffmann (Buenos
Aires: Eudeba, 1973), 149.
herbals 101

When the missionaries took notice that women in advanced state of preg-
nancy infected by smallpox inevitable died, they began to give them wine with
pepper to provoke an early parturition. In this way, the newborn could be bap-
tized before it and its mother die.21 In the outbreak of measles that hit the
reduction of Jesús María in the 1630s causing a mortality of around 1500 vic-
tims, the Fathers gathered the moribund Guaraní in a single place in order to
facilitate the teaching of a simplified catechesis, which was a requisite for the
administering of baptism before dying. As a result of this measure “nobody
died without having received the sacraments”.22 This last clause is almost never
absent from the Jesuit narratives of the epidemics.23 In his To and Fro, Paucke
recounts edifying stories of the death of Abipones converted to Christianity
during a severe outbreak of smallpox (all of them were sons of caciques or
musicians). Faced with this scenario, he asks himself: “are not these episodes
a delight for any seeker of souls and an encouragement for him to live among
the fiercest devils?”.24
The conceptual equipment of the earliest missionaries was not far from
the mental world of medieval Christianity, in which history was conceived as
the arena where God and Satan intervened directly in a dramatic contest for
human souls.25 During the first decades of the seventeenth century Jesuit mis-
sionaries in Paraquaria resorted to the kind of religious cures that were fre-
quent in the Middle Ages. In the course of an outbreak of pestilence in the
reduction of Santa María, the Fathers began to cure the afflicted by giving
them water touched with a little card inscribed with a prayer—the remedy was
recommended in Nieremberg’s Opera Parthenica (Lyons, 1659).26 Remedies
like “St. Paul’s earth” or “liquor of St. Nicholas,” which had powers invested in
them by the saints and acted in the same way as relics, were also used against
snake bites, which resulted in the conversion of the cured natives.27 During the

21 Cardiel, “Carta y relación,” 188. Since acting in this way the Fathers made themselves liable
to charges of abortion, there was a formal consultation to the experts in moral theology of
the faculty in Córdoba, who approved the procedure.
22 Leonhardt, Cartas anuas (1615–1637), 594 (Annua 1635–1637).
23 Ibid.: 617–618 (Annua 1635–1637).
24 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, vol. 3, bk. 1, 37.
25 Daniel T. Reff, Plagues, Priests and Demons. Sacred Narratives and the Rise of Christianity in
the Old World and the New (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 228–232.
26 Littera Annua 1663–1666, cited in Eliane C. Deckmann Fleck, “ ‘Da mística às luzes’—
medicina experimental nas reduções jesuítico-guaranis da Província Jesuítica do
Paraguai,” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 32 (2006): 170.
27 Leonhardt, Cartas anuas (1615–1637), 283–284 (Annua 1626–1627). St. Paul’s earth was a
white, gypsum-like earth supposedly originated in the cave where St. Paul lived in Malta,
102 chapter 2

1630s the Fathers of the College of Asunción used a relic of St. Ignatius as the
remedy for the alleviation of labor pains. Since newborn mortality was high,
it was assumed that the favor of the saint did not always extend to the infant.28
In those years, a Jesuit missionary collected sweat that oozed from an image of
Our Lady and used it successfully to treat different diseases “of the body as well
as of the soul”.29 In one opportunity, the oil of the sanctuary lamp was used for
curing pestilential abscesses.30 Even allowing for the fact that the narratives of
miraculous cures through the use of relics reported in the litterae annuae were
modeled upon Early Christian literary models, it is undeniable that religious
healing was a standard practice in Paraguay during the seventeenth century.31
It is significant that in Steinhöffer’s Florilegium, a Jesuit work on medicine writ-
ten in New Spain (on which more later), more than 150 saints are mentioned.32
Deckmann Fleck has argued that a progressive abandonment of these prac-
tices of religious healing gave way to a growing reliance in empirical medi-
cine.33 Certainly, the chronicles of later missionaries such as Dobrizhoffer and
Paucke show an increasing confidence on empirical treatment, a phenomenon
that went hand in hand with the proliferation of collections of medicaments
and medical handbooks in the reductions. In his Paraguay Natural, Sánchez
Labrador—as already discussed, the most enlightened of the Jesuit writers of
natural histories—provides a sketchy account of the epidemics of smallpox in
the missions which is thoroughly medical. This author attributed the increased
mortality among the Guaraní to their “corrupted humors” and their disregard
for healing measures.34 But the faith in heavenly intercession as a tool for
fighting epidemics seems to have never disappeared. Anton Sepp, for example,
gives a detailed account of the beneficial effects of the image of Our Lady of

to which antidotal properties were attributed (Murillo 1752, III: 404). St. Nicholas liquor
was water or oil, which allegedly oozed from the tomb of the saint.
28 Leonhardt, Cartas anuas (1615–1637), 527 (Annua 1635–1637).
29 Leonhardt, Cartas anuas (1615–1637), 519–520 (Annua 1635–1637).
30 Cited in Deckmann Fleck, “ ‘Da mística às luzes’,” 167.
31 This is the argument in Reff, Plagues, Priests and Demons, 207–236. For religious heal-
ing in the Middle Ages see Nancy Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine. An
Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990),
39–44.
32 María del Carmen Anzures y Bolaños, “Johannes Steinhoffer, médico y misionero jesu-
ita en el noroeste de Nueva España en el siglo XVIII,” in Juan de Esteyneffer, Florilegio
Medicinal, ed. Anzures y Bolaños, 2 vols. (Mexico, D.F.: Academia Nacional de Medicina,
1978), 1:80–81. Cf. Reff, Plagues, Priests and Demons, 181.
33 Deckmann Fleck, “ ‘Da mística às luzes’.”
34 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, part 1, bk. 3, Paraquaria 16:296r, ARSI.
herbals 103

Altoetting in combating the pest that ravaged the crops of the reduction of
Nuestra Señora de Fe between 1695 and 1701.35 The most important remedy
was always divine help. Paucke tells that after the 1760 smallpox outbreak in his
Abipón mission had slacken, he organized a thanksgiving to St. Francis Xavier
“for he had saved from the death most of the children in the village”.36
Besides fulfilling their Christian duty, the Jesuits sought to show the superi-
ority of their healing art over that of the medicine men thus eliminating “the
chief obstacles to the propagation of the holy religion,” for “nothing will pro-
cure you the good will of the savages so soon as skill in the healing arts”.37 In
the early stages of a reduction, an affectionate tending of the sick often awaked
the curiosity of the natives for the new religion and could result in conver-
sions.38 The abandonment of sick patients by relatives who fled in panic was a
common occurrence and a major cause of death during epidemic outbreaks.39
Paucke reports that the Abipones feared smallpox so much that after leaving
the sick person alone with a jug of water, roasted meat, and some fruit, they
escaped deep into the woods.40 Sánchez Labrador also attests to this practice.41
Against this backdrop, the Jesuits’ assiduous caring of the sick seems to have
attracted converts to Christianity. While the aborigines saw the Jesuits as sha-
mans and baptism as a shamanistic rite, the former understood that the divine
sending of disease and the missionaries at the same time was an opportunity
for the natives to decide between God and Satan.42
Contemporary chronicles gave alarming figures for the death toll of the epi-
demics of smallpox and measles in the reductions. Peramás tells that the num-
ber of deaths caused by the 1734 measles epidemic in the missions was 18,773
over a total population of 144,252; that of the 1737 smallpox outbreak rose
to more than 30,000.43 It must be borne in mind that the disease narratives
of the Jesuits expressed their religious worldview and were tailored to their
intended audience. It has been argued that the Jesuit accounts of plague in
Spanish America were shaped on the Christian models of late antiquity, while

35 Sepp, Continuación de las labores apostólicas, 163–166.

36 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, vol. 3, bk. 1, 38.
37 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 2:256.
38 Leonhardt, Cartas anuas (1615–1637), 88 (Annua 1616).
39 Massimo Livi-Bacci and Ernesto J. Maeder, “The Missions of Paraguay: The Demography
of an Experiment,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35, no. 2 (2004), 210.
40 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, vol. 3, bk. 1, 28.
41 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, part 1, bk. 3, Paraquaria 16:296r, ARSI.
42 See Reff, Plagues, Priests and Demons, 177–180.
43 Cited in Rafael Schiaffino, Historia de la medicina en el Uruguay. Tomo I (Montevideo:
Imprenta Nacional, 1927), 414–425.
104 chapter 2

the relations of New France that appeared in the Lettres édifiantes had in view
the conflictive situation of the Society of Jesus in the old country.44 In any case,
recent studies have confirmed the severity of the epidemics of smallpox that
ravaged the missions in 1695, 1718–1719, the decade of the 1730s (1733, 1735–36
and 1738–40), probably in 1749, and in 1764–65.45 It has been calculated that
between 40 and 56 percent of the population of several reductions died in the
smallpox epidemic of 1739–1740.46 The death toll of the outbreak of 1764–65
was around twelve thousand lives.47
The resources of the Jesuits who fought the outbreaks of infectious diseases
went not further than the implementation of measures of isolation, providing
some comfort to the sick, and administering the sacraments, which was of pri-
mary importance to them. Hospitals were organized only in case of epidemics.
The missionary José Cardiel has described how during an outbreak of mea-
sles in the town of San Juan the Fathers had organized a hospital outside the
reduction, where they took all the Guarani that fell ill. Cardiel visited the hos-
pital daily accompanied with the native male nurses to hear confessions and
administer the extreme unction. Each day he buried those who died—around
eight to ten—until he also fell sick.48 He also tells that in the course of an out-
break of smallpox he organized a group of cabins not far from the town, which
functioned as a quarantine station to which the Guaraní suspected of being
infected were taken. If the disease turned out to be smallpox, they were moved
to a second hospital set up further away, and the cabin in which the patient
had lived was burned. Cardiel attributed the gradual decrease in the mortality
rate of the epidemic to the earnest prayers and the sincere confessions of his

44 See Reff, Plagues, Priests and Demons, 207–236 and Thomas Worcester S.J., “A Defensive
Discourse: Jesuits on Disease in Seventeenth-Century New France,” French Colonial
History 6 (2005): 1–16.
45 See Livi-Bacci and Maeder, “The Missions of Paraguay,” 207–212; Robert Jackson, “Mortality
Crises in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay, 1730–1740,” World History Review 1, no. 2 (2004):
2–23, https://digital.library.txstate.edu/handle/10877/3105; and idem, “The Population
and Vital Rates of the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay, 1700–1767,” Journal of Interdisciplinary
History 38, no. 3 (2008): 401–431.
46 Jackson, “Mortality Crises in the Jesuit Missions,” 11. Jackson enumerates as possible
causes of these epidemics the comings and goings caused by the revolt of the comuneros,
the mobilization of the Guaraní militias in the latent war against the Portuguese, and the
movement of people and goods due to trade.
47 Jackson, “The Population and Vital Rates,” 409–414. See the table with the death rates (per
1,000) in each of the missions during the epidemics of 1695, 1719, 1733, 1738–39, 1749, and
1764–65 in Livi-Bacci and Maeder, “The Missions of Paraguay,” 203.
48 Cardiel, “Carta y relación,” 187–188.
herbals 105

catechumens.49 The Littera annua of 1637 for the reductions of Uruguay writ-
ten by Diego de Boroa (1585–1657) tells that in the town of Santos Mártires del
Caró there occurred an outbreak of diarrhea subsequent to a previous one of
measles. Father Jerónimo Porcel “set up for the Indians a hospital, where they
were accommodated with their personal belongings and beds, and assigned
them a few persons of charity.” The caretakers were Guaraní who belonged to
the Congregation of the Virgin and tended the sick preparing them food and
cleaning the place and the personal belongings of those who died.50 Sepp set
up a hospital “in the European style” (i.e., with one bed per patient), although
he substituted hamacas for beds.51
By an apostolic decree of Urban VIII of 1637, the pharmacies administered
by the regular clergy (this included the Jesuits) were not allowed the selling of
remedies to the general population. Although throughout the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries the Holy See issued more decrees of this sort prohibit-
ing the existence of pharmacies in religious houses open to the public, all the
orders and congregations (including the Society of Jesus) somehow managed
to go on running their boticas.52 Also, as was the case with all the clergy, the
Jesuits were excluded by Canon Law from the practice of medicine and surgery.
But in 1576 Gregory XIII had granted the Society of Jesus a special privilege that
allowed its members the exercise of medicine in cases when there were no
secular physicians in the region—surgery procedures like incision or cauter-
ization remained prohibited. This privilege was actually applied to permit to
Thomas Falkner the practice of medicine in the Río de la Plata, in response to
a request made from Córdoba to the Superior General Franz Retz (1673–1750).53
The Jesuits lay brothers who acted as health personnel are described in the
catalogues of the Province as male nurses, surgeons, pharmacists, and barbers.54
These professional tags are used rather indistinctly and not much stock should
be put in them. For example, Brother Marcos Villodas is described as a chirur-
gus in the catalogue of 1735, but he is mentioned as infirmarius when he was
in the missions (since 1720), and as pharmacist (pharmacopola) when he lived

49 Ibid., 188.
50 Diego de Boroa, “Noticias de algunas reducciones de la Compañía de Jesús en las provin-
cias del Paraná y Uruguay [1637],” Revista del Archivo General de Buenos Aires 4 (1872), 73.
51 Sepp, Continuación de las labores apostólicas, 155.
52 See Del Río Hijas and Revuelta González, “Enfermerías y boticas,” 46–48.
53 See Carlos Leonhardt, “Los jesuitas y la medicina en el Río de la Plata,” Estudios 57 (June–
August 1937), 103–104.
54 As far as I can tell, the category of “barbers” appears only in the catalogues of the seven-
teenth century.
106 chapter 2

at the College of Córdoba (1736). Information about the professional training

of those lay brothers devoted to health-related activities is available only in a
few cases. A perusal of the catalogues corresponding to the seventeenth cen-
tury shows that it was usual to find in the colleges a lay brother who acted as
male nurse (infirmarius), barber, tailor, carpenter and/or person in charge of
“rustic and domestic chores” (officia domestica et rustica). In the Littera annua
of 1635–1637, the Jesuit Blas Gutiérrez (1565–1636) is described as a Castillian
who emigrated to Lima “to ply his trade of barber and surgeon.” He entered
the Society of Jesus while in Chile and as a lay brother worked as a cook, male
nurse, person in charge of the pantry (sotoministro), and person in charge of
the refectory (refitolero).55
In a 1632 memorial addressed to the Superior General Muscio Vitelleschi
(1563–1645) the Jesuits from Paraguay implored for the sending of four lay
brothers (coadjutors): one to help with the crops, cattle and vines; a tailor;
a painter and carpenter; and a fourth, “skilled in pharmacy, medicine, the
office of barber, and the caring of the sick”.56 The number of pharmacists and
surgeons in the province was never large. In 1724 only two infirmarii lived in
the missions of the Paraná River (Montenegro and Joaquín de Zubeldía); in
the doctrines along the Uruguay River the only one at that time was Marcos
Villodas. Zubeldía (1657–1732) was a Spanish lay brother who arrived in Buenos
Aires in 1685 and worked all his life in the missions (mostly in those along the
Paraná River). In almost all the catalogues, from 1687 through 1730, he is listed
as infirmarius (in some of them, he is also mentioned as responsible for the
“domestic chores”). But in the 1710 catalogue it is claimed that de infirmis et
pharmaceuticam habet curam (“he takes care of the sick and pharmaceutical
matters”).57 During the seventeenth century, there were always one or two lay
brothers who acted as surgeons or pharmacists in the missions.58
Heinrich Peschke (1674–1729) was a noted pharmacist at the college in
Córdoba. He was born in Glatz (Silesia) on 5 November 1674, entered the Jesuit
province of Bohemia and arrived in the River Plate on 24 November 1698, in
an expedition which also took Brother Johann Kraus (1619–1714) and Enrique
Adamo (or Adán Enrique Guerriero, 1653?–1705). Kraus was born in Pilsen
(Bohemia) and worked as a male nurse until he died in Buenos Aires.59 His

55 Leonhardt, Cartas anuas (1615–1637), 469–474 (Annua 1635–1637).

56 Hernández, Organización social de las doctrinas, 1:355.
57 Catalogus publicus 1710, Paraquaria 6:43v, ARSI.
58 See the list in Guillermo Furlong, Médicos y enfermeros durante la dominación hispánica
(Buenos Aires: Huarpes, 1947), 60–61.
59 “Curam habet de febricis” (Catalogus publicus 1710, Paraquaria 6:40r, ARSI).
herbals 107

confrere, the Italian Adamo (or Guerriero), died in the missions of Chiquitos,
where he served as a male nurse. He had studied three years of medicine and
surgery before entering the Society of Jesus.60 Peschke is described in the pas-
senger list of the ship as “a physic, from Prague in Bohemia. Strong body, light-
blue eyes, 24 years old”.61 In a letter from 18 January 1702 to his parents, Peschke
described the pharmacy of the College of Cordoba. He tells them that before
his arrival,

there were no pharmacists, only barber-surgeons. That is why I found

here few of the necessary things, and instead a lot of completely useless
ones . . . There are no physicians and their place is occupied by the phar-
macist, so that it is enough for him to have prepared and at hand the
medicaments he needs for the sick.62

In view of the professional pride he displays, we should assume that Peschke

had been trained as an Apotheker at some point in his life. Since the phar-
macist in the College of Córdoba from 1698 through 1702 had been Pedro
Montenegro—the only Jesuit in Paraguay who wrote an original work on mate-
ria medica and who had worked many years as a pharmacist in the Hospital
General in Madrid—Peschke’s somewhat extravagant claims should perhaps
be attributed to his youthful pride.
At the time of the expulsion (1767) there were several Jesuit lay brothers
working as pharmacists in the missions and colleges.63 Almost all of them were

60 Catalogus publicus 1700, Paraquaria 4-2: 486r, ARSI. In the Catalogus publicus 1703,
Paraquaria 6:19v, he is listed as infirmarius in the missions of the Chiquitos. Cf. Furlong,
Médicos argentinos, 63. The catalogues give Milan as his city of birth, but Storni identifies
Enrique Adami (or Adamo) with Adán Enrique Guerriero, born in Caravaggio (Bergamo)
in 1653. See Hugo Storni, Catálogo, 2 and 131.
61 Vicente D. Sierra, Los jesuitas germanos en la conquista espiritual de Hispano-América
(Buenos Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Teología [San Miguel], Institución Cultural
Argentino-Germana, 1944), 281–282.
62 Heinrich Peschke, “Auszug eines und anders Brieffs . . . an seine Eltern . . . geschrieben zu
Cordoba . . . den 18. Jannuar 1702,” in Neuer Welt-Bott . . . von numero 454 bis numero 520, ed.
Joseph Stocklein (Augsburg: Philipp, Martin and Johann Veith, 1735), 98.
63 Wenceslas Horsky was apothecary in San Nicolás, Peter Kornmayr in San José, the sur-
geon Norbert Ziulak and Aperger worked in Apóstoles, and Rupert Talhammer in Yapeyú.
Besides, we find Juan de la Cruz Montealegre, a surgeon, in San Cosme; Christian Mayr at
the College of Salta; Joseph Jenig, Thomas William Brown and Thomas Falkner in Córdoba;
Esteban Font in Buenos Aires; and Thomas Heyrle in Asunción. See Storni, Catálogo, pas-
sim; Hernández, Organización social de las doctrinas, 1:357; Francisco Javier Brabo [Bravo],
108 chapter 2

from Central Europe.64 Thomas Heyrle (1697–1768), born in Vilsbiburg, Bayern,

arrived in Buenos Aires in 19 April 1729. Described in the public catalogues
as chirurgus, he worked in the missions as such and it is likely that he had
some previous training in his craft. In 1744 he was pharmacist at the College of
Córdoba; he died at sea during the return trip.65 Peter Kornmayr (1691–1769),
also from Bayern (Dillingen), came in the same expedition as Heyrle. He is
called pharmacopola in several catalogues—just like his compatriot Heyrle,
he died in the ship that took him forcefully to Europe. Kornmayr had been
assigned as a pharmacist to the College of Córdoba (1730), where he stayed
until 1743; in 1753 he lived in Asunción and from then on in the missions as
pharmacist and infirmarius.66 Rupert Dalhammer (also spelled Talhammer or
Thalamer) (1710–1780), from Laufen (Bayern), arrived in the 1745 expedition;
the 1748 public catalogue mentions him as coadjutor quirurgus [sic].67
The 1749 expedition brought to the River Plate four lay brothers from Central
Europe who would work as surgeons, physicians, or apothecaries: Joseph Jenig
(1724–1770), Johann Christian Mayr (also spelled Mayer or Maier, 1729–1773),
Carolus Kramer (1722–1750), who died soon after his arrival, and Norbert Ziulak
(1716–1769). Jenig was born in Brünn, Moravia and seems to have acted as a
surgeon in Córdoba at the time when the Catalan Esteban Font (1726–1772)
was a pharmacist there (the latter was eventually transferred to the Jesuit phar-
macy in Buenos Aires).68 Ziulak, from Iglau (Bohemia) is listed as a surgeon in
the town of Apóstoles at the time of the expulsion (he had been pharmacist
in Córdoba in 1753). Mayr was apparently “barber surgeon and pharmacist”.69
Wenceslas Horsky (Hordsky, 1723–1791), born in Königgrätz (Bohemia) arrived

Colección de documentos relativos a la expulsión de los jesuitas de la República Argentina y

del Paraguay en el reinado de Carlos III (Madrid: José Maria Pérez, 1872), 55–71 and 212–217;
María Cristina Vera de Flachs and Carlos Page, “Textos clásicos de medicina en la botica
jesuítica del Paraguay,” Cuadernos del Instituto Antonio de Nebrija 13 (2010), 121–122.
64 The following brief account of each lay brother has been made on the basis of the manu-
script catalogues collated with Anton von Huonder, Deutsche Jesuitenmisionäre des 17.
und 18. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Missionsgeschichte und zur deutschen Biographie
(Freiburg in Briesgau: Herder, 1899) and Sierra, Los jesuitas germanos, 207 and 187. For the
dates of birth and death, I have used Storni’s Catálogo.
65 Catalogus publicus 1744, Paraquaria 6: 215r–266v, ARSI; cf. Huonder, Deutsche Jesuiten­
misionäre, 142.
66 Huonder, Deutsche Jesuitenmisionäre, 145.
67 Catalogus publicus 1744, Paraquaria 6:316v, ARSI.
68 Catalogus publicus 1753, Paraquaria 6:343r–361r, ARSI; cf. Huonder, Deutsche Jesuiten­
misionäre, 144.
69 Huonder, Deutsche Jesuitenmisionäre, 146.
herbals 109

in Montevideo in 1755 and was pharmacist in San Nicolás at the time of the
expulsion—he died in his native land.
It seems that early in the seventeenth century some kind of pharmacy was
organized in the reduction of Candelaria by Father Cristóbal de Altamirano
(1602–1698), born in Santa Fe.70 The earliest reference in the litterae annuae to
a Jesuit botica in Córdoba is from 1637–1639, but it surely began to function ear-
lier, since the lay brother Blas Gutiérrez, who was in charge of it, died in 1636.71
In 1639 Superior General Vitelleschi enjoined Gutiérrez (who was by then dead)
not to intend any kind of profit with the selling of medicaments—although he
was allowed to sell the drugs that were in excess.72 By 1667 there was no Jesuit
pharmacy in the College of Buenos Aires, but by 1680 we find that a botica had
been opened to the public.73 Peschke’s correspondence is our main source of
information for the pharmacy in the College of Córdoba. In the letter that in
the early 1700s he wrote to the Superior General, he told him that “almost all
medicines come from Europe, at great expense and risks, so that many lose
partly or entirely their medical virtues”.74 The medicines that came from Chile
across the high passes of the Andes were so expensive that Peschke proposed
that all the drugs should be imported from Europe in order to save costs. The
pharmacy, which was the only one in the whole province of Paraquaria, was
running into debt because it served not only the inmates of the College of
Córdoba but also the rest of the Jesuit colleges and the slaves and employ-
ees of the estancias, plus the poor and rich inhabitants of Córdoba—the poor
had a right to free medicaments, and the rich would buy on credit, which they
never honored. The 1735 resolution of the Father Provincial according to which
from that moment on the colleges should pay their medicaments in cash to the
pharmacy in Córdoba was probably an answer to this administrative mess.75
The botica in Córdoba was very impressive, with its three rooms (dispatch,
laboratory, and deposit) lavishly furnished and fully equipped. The inventory
made after the expulsion, on 16 May 1769, when the Bethlemites brothers took

70 Furlong, Médicos argentinos, 60. No source is given. Furlong might have called “botica” to
a list of medicaments prepared by Altamirano and kept in the Archive of the Reductions
in Candelaria. Ibid.: 61.
71 Carlos, Page, ed., El Colegio Máximo de Córdoba (Argentina) según las Cartas Anuas de la
Compañía de Jesús (Córdoba: Editorial BR Copias, 2004), 119 (Annua 1637–1639); Storni,
Catálogo, 133.
72 Leonhardt, “Los jesuitas y la medicina,” 107.
73 Furlong, Médicos argentinos, 187.
74 Renée Gicklhorn, Missionsapotheker. Deutsche Pharmazeuten im Lateinamerika des 17.
und 18. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft MBH, 1973), 34.
75 Ibid., 35.
110 chapter 2

charge of it, corresponds to a large pharmacy even for European standards,

which required a trained apothecary and one or two assistants to be run. The
number of simples and compound medicaments of the inventory ascended
to 338.76 The immense majority of these drugs were imported from Europe.77
Drugs from the New World were represented by those that had found their way
into the European pharmacopoeia, such as ipecacuanha and Peruvian balm.
There were very few that had obvious local origin, such as copaiba balm and
Paraguayan honey. A second inventory made on 12 November 1771 estimated the
value of the botica (including the furniture and equipment) in 10,489 pesos.78
The pharmacy had by that time 75 books, of which 30 were in German.79 There
were even larger Jesuit pharmacies in Spanish America; for instance, the botica
in the College of Santiago de Chile, which was valued at 37,442 reales.80 It had
been created in 1613 and since 1724 it was served by German lay brothers, the
most distinguished of which was Joseph Zeitler (1724–1789), who had a medi-
cal library of 130 volumes.81 The pharmacies of the principal Jesuit colleges in
Spanish America, like those in Santiago de Chile and Lima, could be compared
with advantage with those in the four Jesuit houses of Madrid.

76 For this inventory see Félix Garzón Maceda, La medicina en Córdoba, 2 vols. (Buenos
Aires: Rodríguez Giles, 1916–1917), 2:147–154.
77 A list of the contents of 24 crates that Father Rico brought with him from Madrid men-
tions several books on pharmacopoeia and 31 different medicines. Compañía de Jesús,
S. IX 6.9.7 (c. 1745), AGN.
78 For a paleographic transcription of still another inventory of the Jesuit pharmacy
in Córdoba, made in July 1772, see Eliane C. Deckmann Fleck and Roberto Poletto,
“Transcriçao do inventário formado por Lorenzo Infante boticário em la ciudad de
Córdoba de los bienes medicinales, Julio de 1772,” IHS. Antiguos Jesuitas en Iberoamérica 1,
no. 1 (2013): 162–247.
79 See the reconstruction of this library in Vera de Flachs and Page, “Textos clásicos de
medicina.” There were 30 books on medicine and surgery, plus 15 of materia medica. The
figure of the 1771 valuation has been taken from this article.
80 Walter Hanisch Espíndola, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús en Chile (1593–1955) (Buenos
Aires and Santiago de Chile: Editorial Francisco de Aguirre, 1974), 150–151. One peso was
equivalent to eight reales, so that the value would be equivalent to 4,680 pesos.
81 Ibid., 148–149. The phenomenon of Jesuit German lay brothers who worked as apoth-
ecaries in the missions has been studied by Gicklhorn, Missionsapotheker and Sabine
Anagnostou, “ ‘Weil Gott die Menschen liebt, sollen wir einander lieben . . .’. Jesuiten
als heilkundigen Pharmazeuten in den Missionen Iberoamerikas (16. bis 18. Jh.),” in
Evangelium und Kultur. Begegnungen und Brüche. Festschrift für Michael Sievernich,
ed. Mariano Delgado and Hans Waldenfels (Fribourg: Academic Press, 2010; Stuttgart:
W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 2010), 530–544.
herbals 111

In the letter Peschke wrote to his parents he told that his excursions in
search for herbs took him as far as 60 miles from the city of Córdoba. The
young pharmacist was enthusiastic about what he found in his surround-
ings, because although local herbs looked slightly different when compared
to their European generic counterparts, “their inner virtues are entirely won-
derful.” He gives as an example the yerba del palo, which he used to cure a
little dog in whose head he had jabbed a knife so badly that the poor animal
was almost given up for dead. Peschke also tells that “in our fields there is an
immense excess of jalap and michoacan [both purgatives], which are very
expensive in Europe, while [here] in Córdoba they are considered weeds”.82 It
is likely that the Jesuit apothecaries of Córdoba used local equivalents for gum
elemi, dragon’s blood, rhubarb, and licorice, for in his book on materia medica
Montenegro mentions local analogues of all of these. He also mentions that
two kinds of gum elemi or isica were brought from Paraguay, one white and
the other black.83 At least in one case, Montenegro preferred the local vari-
ety of the plant over the drug imported from the Old World. Claiming that
he had found the “true” galanga depicted in Piso’s work on Brazilian medi-
cine, he adds that he would not dare to use that which was brought from Spain
“to the pharmacy of Córdoba”.84 Although the number of regional drugs used
in the pharmacy of Córdoba was not large, the case might have been different
in the reductions.
While the pharmacies of Córdoba and Buenos Aires were well stocked, those
in the missions suffered from a chronic penury of resources.85 Writing from one
of the reductions, Anton Sepp tells that “cinnamon, nutmegs, saffron, ginger,
cloves, rice, antimony, theriaca and mithridate [universal antidotes], as well as
other medicinal herbs and compositions, are not as much as known here.” He
laments the lack of spirits, spices, herbs, powders, poultices, ointments, and
balms and finishes by thanking the apothecaries of Altoetting and a certain
Jacob Spiess, who supplied him with pills before he set off in his adventure to

82 Heinrich Peschke, “Auszug eines und anders Brieffs,” 99.

83 Pedro Montenegro, Manuscrito Montenegro, in La farmacia en la época colonial. El arte
de preparar medicamentos, ed. Carmen Martín Martín and José Luis Valverde, 91–585
(Granada: Universidad de Granada y Hermandad Farmacéutica Granadina, 1995), 182.
84 Ibid., 389–390.
85 But it seems that the pharmacists somehow managed to obtain some drugs. Montenegro
found in the reduction of Concepción “the little heads of the anacardos” in a recipient
or envelope “labeled by Brother Domingo de Torres, brought from Spain.” Given the dire
effects of that plant, he hastened to throw the seeds away, see ibid., 580.
112 chapter 2

the New World.86 In the emergency, the missionaries had recourse to the kind
of materia medica used by soldiers and travelers, to which they added some
aboriginal or home remedies. Upon his belief that intestinal worms were the
main plague among the Guaraní, Sepp administered them regularly a cathartic
of tobacco leaves and then a draught of cow’s milk with drops of sour lemon
and some rue and mint.87 In an outbreak of smallpox, he gave the afflicted
Guaraní a daily diet of broth, half a pound of well-cooked meat, a ration of
manioc cake, and water with lemon juice and sugar. For the sores in the eyes
he used softened sugar and for the lesions in the external auditory canal he uti-
lized a cotton swab imbibed in vinegar.88 Paucke also used this kind of home
remedies to alleviate the sick in the course of a smallpox outbreak. He gave
them barley water to drink and applied butter to their sores, while he adminis-
tered the sacraments of confirmation and extreme unction.89
Dobrizhoffer’s favorite cure-all was hen’s fat, of which he says that “it would
be endless to relate all the cures that have been made” with it.90 He also praises
the curative virtues of the parts of the yacaré (caiman), which he learned from
the natives. Dobrizhoffer also recommends cataplasms of crocodile’s fat for
bruises and declares that the stomach of that animal dried to powder and
drank with water relieves the pain of the stone, while the powder of croco-
dile’s tooth works miracles against the bite of serpents.91 Among his scant
provision of drugs, he lists “sulfur, alum, salt, tobacco, sugar, pepper, the fat of
hens, tigers, oxen, sheep, etc., and gun-powder,” commenting that “scarce a day
passed that the sick did not ask for one of these things.” Besides, he had in store
three gourds with ointments,

One green, made of suet, and thirty different herbs; the second black; the
third yellow. We also had at hand plenty of sanative herbs, and the barks
of trees famed for medicinal virtues.92

He praises some of the remedies used by the Abipones, although he had not
a high notion of their healing skills. He says that chewing tobacco mixed with

86 Sepp, Relación de viaje, 195.

87 Ibid., 194.
88 Sepp, Continuación de las labores apostólicas, 155–157.
89 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, vol. 3, bk. 1, 32.
90 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 2:226.
91 Ibid., 2:258.
92 Ibid., 2:258.
herbals 113

salt and saliva of old women preserves from tooth decay and that the appli-
cation to the hollow of the teeth of tiger’s claws (jaguar) reduced with alum
into a calx and then into powder by laying them on hot coals, entirely removes
tooth pain and also its cause.93

2 The Major Works

Sigismund Aperger became the most famous Jesuit author of pharmacy

in the River Plate. In 1802, five medical recipes attributed to him were pub-
lished in the Telégrafo Mercantil, a cultural newspaper of colonial Buenos
Aires.94 Actually, these were not his own, but chapters of Montenegro’s work,
currently known as Materia medica misionera. This large herbal has come to
us in its entirety in only two illuminated codices. But regional and European
libraries hold a number of manuscripts with shorter, abstracted and non-
illuminated versions of the text. Some of the latter circulated under the name of
Aperger, which was (and still is) the source of much confusion and the ground
of Aperger’s local fame. Ironically, Aperger’s own Tratado breve de medicina
remained almost unnoticed to his immediate posterity. After presenting a bio-
graphical account of both Jesuits, we will discuss the manuscript tradition of
the herbals of the missions.

2.1 Montenegro
Pedro Montenegro was born in Santa María del Rey, Galicia (Spain) on 14 or 19
May 1663.95 When he was sixteen years old he began to work in the Hospital
General, in Madrid.96 On 6 April 1691 he joined the Society of Jesus, probably

93 Ibid., 2:220–221.
94 Asúa, La ciencia de Mayo, 99 and 218–219.
95 This account is based on Guillermo Furlong, “Pedro Montenegro, S.J. y su ‘materia
medica’,” Estudios 73 (1945): 45–56. In the 1703 catalogue of the province of Paraquaria
Montenegro’s birth day is given as 19 May, but in other catalogues it appears as 14 May. See
Catalogus publicus 1703, Paraquaria 6:18v, ARSI.
96 In the prologue of his book, dated 1710, Montenegro affirms that he had “begun to work
as a male nurse in the General Hospital in Madrid” 31 years before he took to writing
(Montenegro, Materia médica, 7). During the seventeenth and eighteenth century, it was
usual to acquire pharmaceutical training at the Hospital General in Madrid. See Rafael
Folch Andreu, “La instrucción farmacéutica durante el siglo XVIII en los Hospitales
Generales de Madrid,” Anales de la Real Academia de Farmacia 1 (1941): 27–57.
114 chapter 2

after he had arrived in the Río de la Plata.97 A year later he was a novice in
the Jesuit College of Córdoba.98 In 1697 Montenegro carried out his duties as
pharmacopola et infirmarius at that institution.99 (In his brief éloge, Sánchez
Labrador affirms that he excelled in “Botany, Pharmaceutics, Medicine, and
Surgery”).100
By that time he began to suffer from a “pulmonary ulcer,” contracted when
he took care of patients with phthisis. He administered himself a drink made
with a particular kind of guayacán (palo santo del Guaycurú, i.e., palo santo
used by the Guaycurús) and was cured.101 In his Materia medica, Montenegro
tells that at some point he left Córdoba for the College of Tucumán and later, in
1702, was assigned to the mission towns of the Paraná River, where he is listed
as chirurgus.102 But according to the catalogue for 1700, by that year he was
already in one of the reductions along the Uruguay River.103 In any case, in 1703
we find him in the town of Apóstoles, where on 25 April he pronounced his last
vows.104 Between the end of 1704 and the beginning of 1705 Montenegro acted
as a military surgeon with the Guaraní militia that took part of the Spanish
siege of Colonia del Sacramento, together with two other Jesuit apothecaries,
Joaquín de Zubeldía and Giuseppe Bressanelli, who eventually became one of
the most renowned architects of the missions.105 In 1710 Montenegro is regis-
tered as an infirmarius in one of the reductions along the Uruguay River.106 The
prologue of his famous work is dated on that year. In the Jesuit catalogues for
1720 and 1724 Montenegro is again listed as infirmarius, but this time in the
mission towns of the Paraná River.107 He died in the town of Mártires on 21
January 1728.

97 On the basis that his name does not appears on the lists of Jesuits arriving in the Río de la
Plata between 1690 and 1703, Furlong inferred that Montenegro traveled as a layman and
entered the Jesuits in the New World. See Furlong, “Pedro Montenegro,” 45.
98 Catalogus publicus 1692, Paraquaria 4–2:424r, ARSI.
99 Catalogus publicus 1697, Paraquaria 4–2:454r, ARSI.
100 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 1, bk. 3, Paraquaria 16: 296r, ARSI.
101 Montenegro, Materia médica, 77. Although both were called palo santo, the guayacán of
Argentina is a different tree from the guaiacum of Central America,
102 Montenegro, Materia médica, 375–376. Cf. Catalogus publicus 1703, Paraquaria 6:18v, ARSI.
103 Catalogus publicus 1700, Paraquaria 4–2:495r, ARSI.
104 Furlong, “Pedro Montenegro,” 46.
105 Ibid., 47.
106 Catalogus publicus 1710, Paraquaria 6:45r, ARSI.
107 Catalogus publicus 1720 and 1724, Paraquaria 6:87r and 118r, ARSI.
herbals 115

2.2 Aperger
Aperger disembarked in the Río de la Plata two decades after Montenegro’s
arrival. He had been born in Innsbruck (Tyrol) on 28 October 1687 and entered
the Society of Jesus on 9 October 1705. He studied humanities and the trien-
nium of philosophy in Graz and after four years of teaching grammar and
rhetoric in his natal city he returned to his former college to study theology.108
On April 1716 Aperger departed from Cádiz as a member of the missionary
expedition to the River Plate led by Fathers Bartolomé Jiménez (1657–1717) and
Julián de Lizardi (1696–1735). The British ship in which they embarked was
under the command of Mr. Moor[e] White. During the crossing, the craft was
battered by a mighty tempest that broke its main mast, flooded the deck, and
drifted it about a hundred leguas toward the coast of Brazil. Eventually, Aperger
and his companions made it to Buenos Aires and upon arrival on February 1717
the captain presented the Jesuit with a fine pocket clock.109
Shortly after Aperger completed his studies of theology in the College of
Córdoba and was ordained in 1717, an outbreak of smallpox began decimating
the population of black slaves of the college and the aborigines of the sur-
rounding countryside. It was usual for the Jesuits to help the population of the
city with spiritual assistance, remedies, rations of food, and whatever caring
of the sick was needed during the frequent epidemics that swept the town.110
Aperger had no formal qualifications as an apothecary or physician and it has
been suggested that he could have learned his art from Peschke.111 Be that as
it may, it seems that he had an outstanding natural talent for the job, for con-
temporary witnesses concur in praising his efficient commitment.112 In a letter
dated 3 May 1730 Father Franciscus Magg (1696–1737) told that he had heard
a Spanish priest affirm that “Were it not for that blessed Father [Aperger],

108 Renée Gicklhorn, “Österreischische und deutsche Missionsapotheker Sigismund Aperger,

1687–1772,” in Die Vorträge der Hauptversammlung der Internationalen Gesellschaft
fur Geschichte der Pharmazie. Teil II, ed. Georg E. Dann (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche
Verlagsgesellschaft, 1964), 50.
109 Guillermo Furlong, “Un médico colonial: Segismundo Aperger,” Estudios 54 (1936), 119.
Storni gives 21 September 1716 as the date of Aperger’s ordination as priest in Eichstadt,
Bavaria and 13 July 1717 as the date of his arrival in Buenos Aires. See Storni, Catálogo, 17.
110 See for example the description of the outbreak of 1634–1636 in Leonhardt, Cartas anuas
(1615–1637), 455–456 (Annua 1635–1637).
111 Gicklhorn, “Missionsapotheker Sigismund Aperger,” 51.
112 Garzón Maceda quotes a statement according to which the death toll of the 1717 epidemic
outbreak among the Indians in the city was of 17,000. He attributes this to Aperger, but
does not mention the source. See idem, La medicina en Córdoba, 3:560.
116 chapter 2

half the population of Paraguay would have died”.113 In a letter written in 1719
from the reduction of Mártires, the Jesuit Anton Betschon (1681–1738) told
that Aperger used the medicaments he brought from Europe and also “sev-
eral medicinal plants that he found in the vicinity”.114 In 1718 and 1719 the epi-
demic spread to the missions, where, according to Father Gaetano Cattaneo
(or Cattani, 1695–1733), the death toll was of around 50,000 Guaraní.115
On 1 February 1720 Aperger was in the mission town of Loreto.116 Four years
later, in April 1724, we find him in Itapúa, where he built the church and where
he remained as a priest for seven years.117 During February of 1732 Aperger
served as chaplain of the Guaraní militia that opposed the revolt of the
comuneros of Asunción. (In that year, he began acting as auxiliary priest in the
town of San Lorenzo.) In December 1732 the Superior General Retz wrote to
the Father Provincial asking to take Aperger out of the missions on account of
“several accusations concerning a question of honesty” (punto de honestidad).
The order of the Superior General was not obeyed and the Jesuit Provincial
Council held in April 1733 in Córdoba acquitted Aperger of the charges, which
were considered unfounded and the result of tales circulated by the Indians
(“enredos de indios”).118 In 1735 Aperger was in Santa María la Mayor, three
years later in San Nicolás, from 1742 to 1749 in Mártires, and from 1749 to 1754 in
Concepción. According to some interpretations, he could be counted among
those Jesuits who opposed the handing over to Portugal of the seven towns
east of the Uruguay as a result of the Treaty of 1750, but the evidence is contra-
dictory.119 From 1753 to 1772 he lived in Apóstoles, where he passed away on 23
February 1772. Aperger was the only Jesuit who remained after the expulsion,
for he was too old and sick to be transfered to Buenos Aires.

113 Cited in Furlong, “Segismundo Aperger,” 121.

114 Antonio Betschon, “Carta al R. P. Javier Am-Rhin” [Tres Mártires, 1719],” in La Argentina
vista por viajeros del siglo XVIII, ed. Juan Mühn S.J. (Buenos Aires: Huarpes, 1946), 37.
Cf. Furlong, “Segismundo Aperger,” 120–121 and Schiaffino, Historia de la medicina en el
Uruguay, 1:416–417.
115 Gaetano Cattaneo, “Lettera terza” [Santa María, 25 April 1720], in Muratori, Il cristian-
esimo felice, 320.
116 While in Loreto, Aperger might have helped with the installation of a printing press, for
there is a letter that describes his activity in that town as “praelo instruendo praeest”
(cited in Furlong, “Segismundo Aperger,” 122).
117 Furlong, “Segismundo Aperger,” 122–123.
118 Ibid., 126.
119 Ibid., 128–129.
herbals 117

2.3 A Jungle of Herbals

Since the nineteenth century some thorny issues of authorship have hovered
over the Jesuit herbals of Paraguay. A fresh start requires a somewhat arid
description of the manuscripts. But a brief excursion into the codices of the
herbals of the missions is indispensable to clarify the questions of who wrote
what and to what purpose.
To begin with, it is possible to organize the manuscripts containing
Montenegro’s texts on materia medica in two different groups. The first com-
prehends those that contain complete or partial versions of his work (Materia
medica misionera), attributed to him or anonymous. The second group is con-
stituted by manuscripts with texts that are shortened and/or slightly modified
versions of Montenegro’s treatise and circulated under the name of Aperger. It
is difficult to know whether any of these was the work of Aperger himself or if
we are in the presence of an anonymous version of Montenegro’s Materia med-
ica misionera attributed to Aperger as a token of authority. Pedro Arata (1849-
1922), an Argentine chemist and bibliophile who owned three manuscripts of
Jesuit materia medica and wrote the first paper on the subject, claimed that
“Aperger has copied [Montenegro’s work] in a servile manner”.120 Arata, an
anti-Jesuit patrician intent on discrediting the accomplishment of the mem-
bers of the Society of Jesus, was convinced that he had proved that the codices
of materia medica

were no more than a convent notebook which has circulated throughout

the whole Jesuit Province of Paraguay . . . just as the translations of Virgil,
Horace, the notes on metaphysics and theology, and the resolution of
conscience cases for the use of the Society’s confessors.121

On the contrary, Furlong, a champion of the Society, thought that “undoubt-

edly, none of these codices [that circulated under the name of Aperger] was
due to Aperger, although someone attributed them to the Jesuit”.122 Later he
modified his previous statement and claimed that “[Aperger’s] glory is based
fundamentally on Montenegro’s work, of whose manuscript the illustrious
Austrian Jesuit made full use”.123

120 Pedro N. Arata, “Botánica médica misionera. Los herbarios de las misiones del Paraguay,”
La Biblioteca 7 (1898): 445.
121 Ibid., 447.
122 Furlong, “Segismundo Aperger,” 138.
123 Furlong, “Pedro Montenegro,” 56.
118 chapter 2

Both positions are plausible. It could have been, as Furlong claimed in the
first place, that an unknown person copied Montenegro’s treatise and signed
it with Aperger’s name to confer authority on it (as discussed above, surgeons
and apothecaries in the missions were for the most part German and subdits
of the Habsburg Empire). As we will see below, most extant manuscripts with
Montenegro’s Materia medica are anonymous. The name of Aperger could
have easily been added to one of these unattributed versions.
The alternative possibility is that Aperger culled the texts himself, just as he
had recollected materials from different authors for his medical notebook (see
below). That autograph could have been further copied and modified. Among
eighteenth-century Jesuits the notion of authorship was far from being clear-
cut. The Uruguayan naturalist Father Dámaso Larrañaga (1771–1848) perhaps
hit the point squarely. In 1808 he wrote from Montevideo to Father Saturnino
Segurola (1776–1854) in Buenos Aires, announcing his sending of a manuscript
of materia medica by Aperger:

Your Asperger [sic] is more of a witch-doctor than a botanist . . . [his]

text is entirely copied from Brother Montenegro, so that it is possible to
infer that each copyist arranged the original descriptions as he wished,
extracting them, abbreviating them, and considering them as notes for
his personal use.124

Larrañaga did away with the deprecatory overtones invested by Arata on the
process of copying and saw it—correctly, to my mind—as a functional answer
to the need of circulating texts on materia medica within the boundaries of
a religious community where the issue of authorship was not relevant. The
hypothesis that Aperger himself extracted Montenegro’s work is not unlikely.
We know that the Austrian Jesuit wrote an herbal, which is now lost (the first
part of his Tratado breve de medicina), and we have some manuscripts with
herbal material attributed to him. Perhaps one or other of the versions of
Montenegro’s materia medica that circulated under the name of Aperger was
the first part of Aperger’s Tratado (more on this below). But it seems time to
look at the manuscripts themselves (see Appendix 1).125

124 Furlong, “Segismundo Aperger,” 140.

125 So far, the most complete list of manuscripts was that of Martín Martín and Valverde. See
Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 38-40. I have checked over all the refer-
ences again and added new items.
herbals 119

2.3.1 Manuscripts Containing Montenegro’s Materia medica misionera

The complete text of Montenegro’s herbal has been conserved in at least two
manuscripts. The codex which was held in the Archivo General de la Nación
(AGN, Buenos Aires) is dated 1710.126 Ricardo Trelles, who first published a tran-
scription of the text without the pictures, named it Materia medica misionera.127
The manuscript has 458 pages and includes 148 ink drawings. It comprehends
five sections, the last of which is entitled “Other curiosities and useful recipes.”
This section consists of a medical study of the ailments cured by the herbs
and it is evident that it was not written by Montenegro.128 This codex has been
edited by the Biblioteca Nacional (Buenos Aires) with full reproduction of the
plates.129
Another codex with the entire treatise is kept at the Biblioteca Nacional in
Spain (Madrid, Bib. Nac. Ms. 10,314). It bears the title “Of the properties and
virtues of the trees and plants of the Missions and province of Tucumán, with
some from Brazil and the East”.130 Unlike the codex in Buenos Aires, the manu-
script in Madrid is divided in two books, the first devoted to trees and plants
and the other to herbs and edible roots. It has 346 pages and 137 plates. The
text discusses 129 plants. This codex has been edited by Carmen Martín Martín
and José Luis Valverde, who have carefully listed the differences between the
two manuscripts.131 It is easy to infer from this collation that the illuminated
manuscripts in Madrid and Buenos Aires were in all likelyhood copied from a
now lost prototype.
In his history of Paraguay, the French physician and traveler Alfred Demersay
(1815–1891) mentions a third illuminated codex containing what was probably
the full version of Montenegro’s text. Demersay relates that he found a manu-
script with a text by Montenegro entitled “Treatise on the plants of Paraguay,

126 The manuscript is now registered as “lacking,” without any indication of the date when it
was lost. It was originally held in the Biblioteca Nacional (Buenos Aires) and with many
other documents transferred to the AGN in 1956. For convenience reasons I will continue
to refer to it as the codex in AGN.
127 Manuel Ricardo Trelles, “El hermano Pedro Montenegro. Su materia medica misionera,”
Revista patriótica del pasado argentino 1 (1888): 259–317 and 2 (1888): 3–299.
128 It has references to personages who lived after the expulsion of the Jesuits. See Furlong,
“Pedro Montenegro,” 54.
129 Montenegro, Materia médica.
130 “De las propiedades y virtudes de los árboles y plantas de las Misiones y Provincia del
Tucumán con algunas del Brasil y del Oriente.”
131 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 55–56. Dr. Carmen Martín Martín
kindly sent me a copy of her book, which is out of print.
120 chapter 2

their medicinal virtues, and so on”.132 It was a volume of 395 pages in octavo
dated in 1750. Like the manuscript now held in Madrid, the text was divided in
two parts and the codex was adorned with ink drawings.133
We will now turn to the shortened versions of Montenegro’s treatise, of
which I was able to examine five manuscripts. All of them are divided in two
books. None of them has any explicit indication of authorship.
We should begin with two manuscripts held in Brazilian libraries.134 Both
follow the order of plants in the manuscript held in Madrid. The codex kept
in the Instituto Anchietano de Pesquisas (São Leopoldo, Rio Grande do Sul)
is an untitled text of 132 folios copied in 1790.135 It begins with the dedication
to the Virgin, a preface to the reader, and the other preliminary sections of the
complete version, except for the glossary, which it lacks. This version consists
of 109 chapters in the same order of the original held in Madrid. But except for
a pair of cases, the copyist only reproduced the uses and virtues of the plants,
leaving aside their descriptions and the pictures.136
Another manuscript held in Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, Biblioteca Nacional, MS.
1311710) is evidently related to the previous one. It is entitled “Curiosity: a book
of Medicine written by the Jesuits in the Missions of Paraguay in the year 1580”
(there is a note in pencil indicating that this date “is not exact”). The manu-
script has 230 pages.137 The text is the same as that in the Instituto Anchietano,
with 109 chapters, also divided in two books. But, interestingly, this version

132 The codex was in the possession of Mr. Pedro Ferré, at one time governor of the province
of Corrientes (Argentina), in the city of Paso de los Libres, by the Uruguay River.
133 Alfred Demersay, Histoire physique, économique et politique du Paraguay et des établisse-
ments des Jésuites, 2 vols. (Paris: Hachette, 1864), 2:134. Demersay gives the title of the
codex in French.
134 While I was preparing the final version of this chapter Prof. Eliane Deckmann Fleck
informed me about these manuscripts and graciously sent me digital copies of them.
They are mentioned in Eliane C. Deckmann Fleck and Roberto Poletto, “Circulation and
Production of Knowledge and Scientific Practices in Southern America in the Eighteenth
Century: an Analysis of Materia medica misionera, a Manuscript by Pedro Montenegro
(1710),” História, ciências, saúde. Manguinhos 19, no. 4 (2012): 1121–1138.
135 Untitled, MS. H IV, 528, Instituto Anchietano de Pesquisas, São Leopoldo (Rio Grande
do Sul).
136 Although is some cases, the descriptions were also copied, e.g., anguay, pelitre arborescens.
137 “Curiosidad. Un libro de medicina escrito por los jesuitas en las Misiones del Paraguay
en el año 1580,” MS. 1311710, Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro. I did not inspect the
original, but from the scanned images, it seems that some pages are lacking at the end.
This manuscript has been discussed in Thimothy D. Walker, “The Medicines Trade in the
Portuguese Atlantic World: Acquisition and Dissemination of Healing Knowledge from
Brazil (c. 1580–1800),” Social History of Medicine 26, no. 3 (2013): 403–431.
herbals 121

has a last chapter (number 110) on esquinanto, which is absent in the original
held in Madrid and present in the manuscript which was held in AGN (Buenos
Aires). There is no indication as regards the place or date of the copy. Unlike
the other manuscript of Montenegro’s materia medica in Brazil, which sug-
gests a Portuguese-speaking copyist, this one is written in correct Spanish.
In the Biblioteca Paraguaya of Enrique Solano López, held in the National
Library of Paraguay (Asunción), there is a codex containing a version of
Montenegro’s herbal.138 It is entitled “Virtudes medicinales de varios árboles,
yerbas y plantas de esta Provincia del Paraguay,” and was copied in Asunción,
in August 1808. It belonged to Dr. Doroteo Vega and on 16 February 1882 it
passed to the hands of Juan Liberato Ayala. The manuscript has all the ini-
tial sections of Montenegro’s treatise, including the glossary, which is some-
what abbreviated.139 This codex belongs to the same family as the Brazilian
manuscripts. The sequence of 110 plants is the same (like the codex in Rio de
Janeiro, it includes the final chapter on esquinanto).140 Montenegro’s text is
accompanied by other materials. After a few pages of medicinal recipes, there
is an index of plants, with abstracts of their curative properties.141 The codex
is completed with an index of medicaments for different ailments and a last
section with recipes, numbered from 1 to 80.142
In the Library of the School of Medicine of Universidad de la República
(Montevideo) there is a codex of 195 pages which is a copy dated 1832 of a
Jesuit treatise on materia medica.143 The copyist was Captain Manuel Britos
del Pino, who worked for Carlos Carve. This manuscript consists of 108

138 E.S.L. 616.24 M467. Cf. Francisco Guerra, Historia de la materia medica hispano-ameri-
cana y filipina en la época colonial (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1973), 125–126 (with mis-
taken indication of the number of pages) and Catálogo de la Biblioteca Paraguaya “Solano
López” (Asunción: Talleres Nacionales de H. Kraus, 1906), 932. The director of the Library,
Lic. Zayda Caballero, made available the codex to M. Pierre Maurin, who most kindly
obtained digital images of the whole document. This recognition is also extened to María
Inés Rosas.
139 E.S.L. 616.24 M467, pp. i–xxxvi, Bib. Nac. Paraguay, Asunción.
140 Ibid., pp. 1–314.
141 Ibid., 317–334.
142 Ibid., 335–338 and 339–382.
143 I wish to thank Lic. María Amparo de los Santos, librarian at the School of Medicine
of Universidad de la República, for his kind assistance in the localization of the manu-
script and his sending of a fair number of images, which made possible an initial char-
acterization of the text. I am also obliged to Prof. Francisco O’Reilly (Universidad de
Montevideo)—whom I contacted through Ignacio Silva—and to his student, Mr. Manuel
Vivo, for generously sending me digital photos of the complete manuscript.
122 chapter 2

chapters.144 Up to chapter 20, the order follows approximately the sequence of

the manuscript in Madrid. The rest of the plants also appear in the latter, but
the order is somewhat altered. The body of the text is preceded by a table of
contents, which has been transcribed and published by Uruguayan historian
of medicine Pérez Fontana.145 The table lists only 92 of the chapters.146 As it is
usually the case, the last pages of the codex contain a number of nondescript
medical recipes.147 For the most, each of the chapters reproduces only the vir-
tues of each plant. As can be inferred from a comparison of the text with Pérez
Fontana’s transcription of the table of contents, in its present state the codex
lacks the first folios.
Another codex in this group was originally described by Arata as manu-
script “B”.148 Like the two other Jesuit herbals that were in his possession, this
one was so far considered lost. But it turned out that it is held in the collection
of the John Carter Brown Library.149 The copyist admits that he has no knowl-
edge of the art. He finished his work in the town of San Ángel on 3 May 1790.
The manuscript has 218 fols. (436 pp.). Like the version of Montenegro’s trea-
tise in the Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), this is also divided in two books; the
text includes only the virtues of each plant. The order of the chapters follows
roughly that in the manuscript held in Madrid. It comprehends 105 plants in
all. The main body of the text is followed by a table with the names of the

144 Untitled, MS. in Biblioteca de la Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de la República,

Montevideo, pp. 1–184.
145 Velarde Pérez Fontana, Historia de la medicina en el Uruguay, tomo I (Montevideo:
Ministerio de Salud Pública, 1967), 299–309.
146 The plants not included in the table of contents are those of the 16 final chapters in
pp. 155–184. In its present state, the codex lacks the first pages of the table (the summaries
of the first 24 chapters of plants), which were part of the manuscript when Pérez Fontana
transcribed it, for he provided the complete version.
147 Untitled MS. in Biblioteca de la Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de la República,
Montevideo, pp. 185–195.
148 Arata, “Botánica médica misionera,” 7 (1898): 439–442. This codex was taken from Paraguay
to Argentina by Dr. Ventura Gallegos, a surgeon during the war between Paraguay and
the coalition of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay (1865–1870). Gallegos, who was at some
point Argentine consul at Asunción, passed the manuscript to Dr. Pedro Mallo, a noted
Argentine military doctor and historian of medicine, who in his turn gave it to Arata.
149 Providence (Rhode Island), John Carter Brown Library, Codex/Sp/36, untitled. I am
indebted to Prof. Gabriela Siracusano, a colleague from the University of San Martin,
who called my attention to this manuscript while she was doing research in that library.
I have worked with a microfilm copy of it. Ms. Kimberly Nusco, Reference and Manuscript
Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library kindly helped me in the localization of the
manuscript.
herbals 123

trees and herbs in Spanish, Guaraní, and Tupí.150 The final section of the
manuscript is an abridgement of the curative properties of 54 plants arranged
alphabetically—the list has been cut short in the letter “m.”
A very short extract (11 fols.) of Montenegro’s treatise is the manuscript with
eight chapters held in the Wellcome Manuscript Library (Amer. 41) and dated
around the first quarter of the eighteenth century.151 It bears the title “Notices
of the medicinal species gathered in this Department of San Miguel, in the east
coast of the Uruguay”.152
It is evident that Montenegro’s treatise on materia medica was copied in
the region until the first decades of the nineteenth century (the latest copy
is that of 1832). The manuscripts are distributed in several locations of Brazil,
Río de la Plata and Paraguay, all of them within the area of cultural influ-
ence of the Jesuit Republic. Most of the copies consist of more or less abbre-
viated versions of the treatise that leave aside the descriptions of the plants
and reproduce only their curative virtues and the medicinal recipes. The only
illuminated manuscripts are the three ones that contain what we presume is
the complete original version (two of them are edited and there are no traces
of the third).

2.3.2 Manuscripts Containing Versions of Montenegro’s Materia medica

misionera Attributed to Aperger
Our second group of manuscripts consists of shortened versions of
Montenegro’s treatise attributed to Aperger. As discussed above, this compi-
lation from Montenegro’s Materia medica misionera could have been made
either by Aperger himself or by a copyist, and later attributed to Aperger.
I was able to examine only one manuscript in this group, which is held in
the AGN (Buenos Aires).153 Its title is “Notes of several things pertaining to
this province [of Paraguay], extracted from P. S. Asperger, famous physician

150 Ibid., 361–366.

151 Catalogued in Robin Price, An Annotated Catalogue of Medical Americana in the Library of
the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (London: The Wellcome Institute for the
History of Medicine, 1983), 251–252.
152 “Noticias de las especies medicinales recogidas en este Departamento de San Miguel de
la Rivera Oriental del Uruguay de la Rivera Oriental del Uruguay,” MS. Amer. 41, Wellcome
Manuscript Library, London. The plants described are árbol de menjuí (copal), contra­
yerba del Perú, canchalagua, lentisco negro, pino americano, [batatilla de] San Antonio, raíz
de la China, and yerba de la víbora.
153 Biblioteca Nacional, Catálogo por orden cronológico de los manuscritos relativos a América
en la Biblioteca Nacional de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de la Biblioteca
Nacional, 1905), 205.
124 chapter 2

and former Jesuit in these missions of Uruguay, and from D. Félix de Azara.”154
The date of this copy is 1805. The text is divided in two books.155 After a pro-
logue taken from a work by the Spanish botanist Antonio José de Cavanilles,
there is a table of contents, followed by a two-page abstract of the four elemen-
tal qualities.156 This is followed by the body of the work, i.e., the treatment of
104 plants, each chapter being an abridgement of Montenegro’s text (the table
of contents lists 101 of them). This section, which constitutes the bulk of the
codex, is paginated from 1 to 185. The order of the plants is, with some varia-
tions, the same as in the manuscript held in Madrid. The descriptions of the
plants are much shortened or directly eliminated. The manuscript ends with
an assortment of texts.157
Arata mentioned two other manuscripts credited to Aperger. One of them,
which he called “C,” was in the possession of José M. Gutiérrez (1832–1903),
a prominent Argentine intellectual. The text, without illustrations, describes
the virtues of 63 plants.158 The Argentine physician Leopoldo Montes de
Oca (1834–1906) presented Arata with yet another manuscript (which he
called “D”), entitled “Tratado de las yerbas y sus raices . . . Misiones, por el P.
Sigismundo Gur . . . r.” As Furlong guessed, the illegible group of letters that
stands for the name of the author might well have meant Aperger or any of the

154 “Apuntes de varias cosas pertenecientes a esta provincia (del Paraguay), sacadas del P. S.
Asperger, famoso medico ex-jesuita de estas Misiones del Uruguay y de D. Félix de Azara,”
Fondo Bib. Nac. 28, AGN, Buenos Aires. The manuscript belonged to the collection of
Father Saturnino Segurola, a priest and patriot who shared an interest in natural history
with Larrañaga. See Asúa, La ciencia de Mayo, 117–123. I believe that this is the manuscript
which the latter sent from Montevideo to Segurola in Buenos Aires (mentioned above).
A comparison of this manuscript with Montenegro’s herbal as preserved in the codex
in Madrid (edited by Martín and Valverde) clearly shows that Segurola’s manuscript is
just one of the versions of Montenegro’s Materia medica misionera that circulated under
the name of Aperger. This manuscript has been discussed by Fabian Fechner (upon the
assumption that the author of the text is Aperger); see idem, “Heilkunde und Mission—
zum Quellenwert der Heilpflanzenkompendien aus der Jesuitenprovinz Paraguay,”
Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 79 (2010): 89–113.
155 The second book is entitled “Libro segundo de las yerbas y raíces medicinales y comes-
tibles de estas Misiones y Paraguay, con algunas de Brasil y Chile.”
156 Fondo Bib. Nac. 28:[1r–2v, 4r–5r, 6r–6v] (not paginated), AGN.
157 An encyclopedia entry on the word “chemistry,” a short treatise on four different kinds of
quina, a list of mineral remedies, and a few pages on “qualities and virtues of certain herbs.”
Ibid., 187–197, 199–203 and 204–211 (the body of the manuscript is paginated), AGN.
158 Arata, “Botánica médica misionera,” 7 (1898): 443–446.
herbals 125

forms this name took in Paraguay.159 In any case, this 63 page codex contained
brief accounts of the medical properties of 73 plants.160 (I was not able to trace
the present location of these two manuscripts.)
In his history of medicine in Uruguay, historian of medicine Rafael
Schiaffino tells that thanks to Dr. Luis E. Mignone he was able to study a manu-
script, apparently due to Father Sigismund, which, he affirms, “amounts to no
more than a literal translation from Montenegro, but not so complete”.161 The
descriptive details of the plants are suppressed and what remain are their
medicinal uses, which fits with the contents of the extant codices. The author
added some new Guaraní plant names to those used by Montenegro or changed
them. The manuscript has a table which summarizes the properties of each of
the plants. There is no trace of the localization of this codex.
It is evident that the contents of the four manuscripts in this second group
are the same as those in the first, with the only difference that these are attrib-
uted to Aperger. In essence, all of them are abstracts of the “long,” complete
original version of Montenegro’s treatise.
In this connection, it is suggestive that when referring to Montenegro,
Sánchez Labrador also mentions the works of Farfán and Steinhöffer
(“Stoykneffer,” i.e., Esteyneffer), which although written for New Spain he con-
sidered useful for Paraguay, given the similarity of climates and of native drugs.
He also recommends Bontius’ book on Java and Piso’s work on Brazilian medi-
cine, but remains silent about Aperger.162

2.3.3 Manuscript History

Some conclusions can be drawn from the extant manuscripts, so as to propose
what amounts to an informal and tentative stemma:

(a) The two illuminated codices with Montenegro’s treatise (held in Madrid
and Buenos Aires) were copied from a lost prototype, which might have
been Montenegro’s holograph.163

159 Furlong, “Segismundo Aperger,” 140.

160 Arata, “Botánica médica misionera,” 7 (1898): 446–447.
161 Schiaffino, Historia de la medicina, 515. This Uruguayan historian of medicine did not
doubt that the text had been abstracted by Aperger himself.
162 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 1, bk. 3, Paraquaria 16:296–296v, ARSI.
163 As far as I can tell, this is also the view expounded in Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín
and Valverde, 46.
126 chapter 2

(b) The texts of all the non-illuminated manuscripts I have examined follow
more or less closely the version of the codex in Madrid, divided in two
books; for the most, the text reproduces only the virtues of the plants,
leaving the descriptions aside.
(c) There is a well-defined family of three manuscripts, all of them with the
same text, constituted by the two Brazilian codices and the codex held in
Asunción. All of these are anonymous. In this group, we can distinguish a
subfamily constituted by the two manuscripts that have the chapter on
esquinanto.
(d) Three other manuscripts follow with more or less deviations the sequence
of plants in the previous family (or in the codex in Madrid, which amounts
to the same): the codex in Montevideo, the codex in the John Carter
Brown Library, and the manuscript in the AGN (Buenos Aires). Of these,
the first two are anonymous and the last is attributed to Aperger.
(e) On the basis of present evidence, it seems difficult to decide whether the
manuscripts that circulated under the name of Aperger were an abstract
of Montenegro’s treatise made by him or were attributed to him by a
copyist.

2.4 Montenegro’s Herbal. European Pharmacopoeia and Guaraní

Plant Lore
We should now take a closer look at the text of Montenegro’s Materia medica
misionera.164 The work consists of a series of chapters, each of them with an
image of the plant and the accompanying text with its description, an account
of its medical virtues and a number of medical recipes for different ailments
and diseases. The work opens with a dedication to Mary Virgin of the Seven
Sorrows, followed by a prologue. The text properly begins with instructions for
the gathering of plants (taken from Matthiolus), an account of how to mea-
sure the degrees of the four qualities (hot, cold, humid and dry) extracted from
Dioscorides, Laguna and Matthiolus, a short paragraph on the preparation of
botanical simples, and a glossary of the terms used in the work.165
Montenegro addresses the reader humbly. He declares that after 12 years of
being in America and given the lack of apothecaries, “he was forced to become
an author.” In this path he “was moved more by charity and the wish to benefit
his brothers than by ambition.” The ultimate warrant of his work is experience,

164 I will refer to the manuscript held in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid, as Montenegro,
Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde.
165 Unlike compound medicines, “simples” were those medicaments constituted by a single
component.
herbals 127

since he writes “as someone who has experimented” and who “did not dare to
talk about the virtues of the plants before he was supported by his experience”.166
In the section on the assignation of degrees to the simples in terms of its taste,
Montenegro affirms that “I can attest that what I write here is what I have
practiced with extreme care”.167 Again, it is experience and the knowledge of
local circumstances which allows “this poor ignorant to go against the rules
of Dioscorides.” Although dealing with generalities, these initial pages hint at
regional conditions. “In these lands,” says Montenegro, it is better to dry the
flowers in the Sun than in the shadow, and he recommends that on account of
the climate, seeds should be kept in non porous vessels.168
Montenegro’s intellectual endeavor is framed within a religious worldview.
God created the plants so that the human being could investigate their virtues
for the good of the human genre.169 In the prologue of his work he proclaims
that He who ultimately communicates the remedies to man is God, although
this knowledge is transmitted through intermediaries, namely the auctoritates.
Montenegro is proud of his early botanical vocation, which he treasures as a
gift from God.170
On what authorities did Montenegro rely? His principal reference was
Laguna’s commentary on Dioscorides. Andrés Laguna (1499–1559) was a cel-
ebrated Spanish Humanist physician whose translation into Spanish from the
Greek of Dioscorides’ Materia medica with a commentary (Antwerp, 1555)
was one of the main sources for the Jesuit herbalists. Another favorite source
was Pietro Andrea Mattioli (Matthiolus, 1501–1577), author of an Italian ver-
sion of Dioscorides with a commentary (Venice, 1544), which was translated
into several languages, including Latin (Venice, 1554). Montenegro also claims
that he has read the works of Pliny, “Huerta”,171 the Jewish Spanish physician
and pharmacist Nicolás Monardes, Piso and Bontius, and a certain “León,” of
whom there is no further mention in the work.172 He also mentions “Sirena”,
i.e., the Augustinian Fr. Francesco Sirena, author of L’arte dello speciale (Pavia,
1679), and Gaspard Bauhin (1560–1624), the botanist and physician from Basel,

166 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 95.

167 Ibid., 106.
168 Ibid., 99–100.
169 Ibid., 310.
170 Ibid., 94.
171 Garcia d’Orta (1500–1568), the Portuguese physician active in India and author of Colóquio
dos simples e drogas e coisas medicinais da Índia (Goa, 1563).
172 This might have been Niccolò Leonicenus (1428–1524), also known as Nicolaus Leoninus,
an Italian Humanist physician and critic of Pliny.
128 chapter 2

author of the Pinax theatri botanici (Basel, 1596). Montenegro thinks of him-
self as a practitioner, not as a natural philosopher, since “more learned” people
“have written on this subject matter, which is long, with a good foundation on
the physical part which belongs to plant philosophy”.173
According to the Jesuit herbalist, the existence of healing plants in the
New World was a manifestation of the divine Providence, which compen-
sated for the lack of medical care “in these lands, deprived of physicians and
apothecaries”.174 Montenegro claims that in the space of the 21 years during
which he has been practicing the art in Paraquaria, he only saw “one physi-
cian and one surgeon”.175 If there were neither physicians nor barber-surgeons,
then there was no possibility of bloodletting. According to Montenegro,
the European practice of preventive bloodletting staves off the corruption
of the liver’s substance. What is “crude” should “descend” to the emunctories
to be discharged; otherwise the individual suffers from ill digestion, insofar as
these crudities can give origin to worms. To their elimination contribute wine,
spirituous liquors, and cacao. Since the Amerindians did not have any of these
things (there was no cacao in Paraguay), God compensated for this deficiency
and gave them tobacco, capsicum (ají ), guambé, and guabiras, which fulfill an
equivalent function.176
Montenegro, whose opinions impress as prudential and down-to-earth, also
complains about the doctors and surgeons who used purges and bloodletting
in excess and ignominiously, just because they ignored the cause of the dis-
ease.177 He has a better opinion of the physicians he met in Europe and from
whom he learnt his art. He reproduces a prescription for the “French disease”
(pox) of a Latin surgeon, “the most famous in my days in the court of Madrid”
and recalls how the herb galanga was administered “by a surgeon in Madrid”
to a man exhausted by his sexual excesses.178 In another passage, he mentions
Isidro Ortiz, a Spanish surgeon with many years of experience, whose writings
had come to his hands—he adds that they had been drawn from practice and

173 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 106.

174 Ibid., 230.
175 Ibid., 96.
176 Ibid., 249.
177 Ibid., 343.
178 Ibid., 292 and 390. Latin surgeons (cirujanos latinos) were those who had studied at the
university and spoke Latin. It is likely that these two mentions of surgeons refer to the
same person.
herbals 129

had benefited not a few.179 He also mentions an Italian physician in Paraquaria,

who had acted in Salta for a few years.180
The Jesuit herbalist candidly admits failures, like the case of a Guaraní with
a severe dislocation of the spinal column who was at first cured with an oily
extract of red sandalwood (sándalo colorado or yuquiripey) but in the end
passed away.181 At the same time, he is not shy about his successes. He men-
tions that the aromatic palo santo that grows in the Chaco and is used by the
Guaycurú is better for the cure of internal ulcers than the guaiacum, no matter
what Ancient and Modern authors might say. This has been shown “by experi-
ence,” for he used it to cure himself of a pulmonary ulcer which was considered
almost incurable.182 He also tested on himself the cañafistola (cassia fistula),
a mild purgative, of which he mentions two kinds: the solutiva from Peru and
Santiago de Chile and another that grows over the banks of the Paraguay River.
After trying both, he found that the former “is inferior but more emollient and
its pulp more agreeable to the stomach”.183 He mentions twice his successful
use of guayabas in the outbreak of dysentery that affected the Guaraní militia
that aided the Spanish troops during the siege of the city of Colonia.184 He also
cured with orozú (licorice) four Guaraní soldiers with serious chest wounds
caused by lances or bullets.185
Notwithstanding his empirical rhetoric, Montenegro is not beyond admit-
ting what the enlightened opinion of the eighteenth century would have con-
sidered legends. A telling example is when in his chapter on yerba del charrúa
or macaguá caá, he reproduces the tale about the enmity of the bird macaguá
and the viper told in Ruiz de Montoya’s Conquista espiritual. The chapter begins
with the claim that the yerba del charrúa is the “true” coltsfoot (tusílago) of
Dioscorides, although its flower and seed are slightly different. Montenegro
continues explaining that macaguá is the name of a bird that attacks the viper
and, once it has got hurt, flies away, eats the healing herb, and returns to the

179 Ibid., 432.

180 Ibid., 576.
181 Ibid., 216.
182 Ibid., 291–292.
183 Ibid., 166.
184 Ibid., 224 and 230. This is not the common fruit of that name (Psidium spp.). It could have
been Acca sellowiana, belonging to the same family (Myrtaceae). In the manuscript in
Madrid there is a chapter on guayaba campesina (araça mirí) and another on guayabo
(ybirá araçay). Ibid., 222 and 118. In the manuscript in Buenos Aires there is a chapter on
guayabas campesinas (arazá) and the following one is on guayabas (arazá guazú). See
Montenegro, Materia médica, 89 and 91.
185 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 450–451.
130 chapter 2

frail. In the end, the macaguá swallows up the viper, whose venom cures its
entrails.186

2.4.1 Identification of Plants

One of the most challenging problems faced by Montenegro and his col-
leagues was to identify the plants from the Mediterranean basin described by
Dioscorides with those of Paraguay and Río de la Plata. He claims that plants
in the New World may be different in form from their counterparts in the Old
World but still have the same properties.187 For instance, he affirms that the
yuquiripey was considered by the Indians a species of cedar, but “if I judge on
the basis of its parts and fruit, it is the sandal of these lands, because it smells
like red sandalwood”.188 In the chapter on orozú, Montenegro makes explicit
that his main criterion of identity for a plant is founded on its virtues or healing
properties. In his commentary, Laguna had criticized Dioscorides because the
licorice he had found in Spain was different from that described by the Greek
herbalist. In his turn, Montenegro chastises Laguna for not having taken into
account that the herbs portrayed by Discorides were those of Greece and Syria.
Montenegro claims that “as experience shows, herbs are not the same in the
different regions where they grow, for even if they have the same qualities, they
do not have the same figure”.189 On this account, he provides a picture of the
licorice from Paraguay, so that the reader could perceive the differences with
the plant described by Dioscorides. According to Montenegro, the tree called
caaroba in Brazil and ybira ucai in Guaraní is a species of guayacán “because
it has the same effects as the guayacán”.190 Moreover, there are plants which,
notwithstanding their similar curative properties, are plainly different in their
aspect. In the chapter on the lepidio or caá curuzú, Montenegro tells that he
reproduces its image because the plant that grows “in these lands” differs from
that originally described by Pliny. But although different in flower and seed,
it is nevertheless “the true Lepidio mentioned by Pliny”.191 In the chapter on
incense, Montenegro says that “the ayui, which is called laurel in Tucumán, is
the true tree of Arabic incense” (my emphasis).192 The identification of plants

186 Ibid., 458. Cf. Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual, 52. As pointed out in p. 94, this tale
was also rehearsed by Lozano.
187 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 95.
188 Ibid., 216.
189 Ibid., 450.
190 Ibid., 266.
191 Ibid., 421.
192 Ibid., 195.
herbals 131

on account of their properties was a rationale for the use of local substitutes
(quid pro quo). For instance, Montenegro gives a recipe to make gum elemi
ointment with the products that “can be obtained in these lands”.193 Martín
Martín and Valverde have listed 15 equivalences mentioned by Montenegro,
who was well disposed toward the use of local drugs.194 He says that Father
Gregorio Cabral (1638–1712), secretary of the Father Provincial, and later Father
Antonio Garriga (1662–1733) brought with them from the missions in Moxos
a species of cinnamon (canela). It was used by the “native Indians and the
Spanish settlers” to cure fevers caused by the heat and humidity resulting from
the putrefaction of the blood. This was confirmed, continues Montenegro, by
what Matthiolus said about cinnamon.195
Despite his inclination to identify the plants he found in Paraguay with
those in Europe or Asia, Montenegro recognizes that there are some plants of
the New World which have not been treated by the classical authors, like two
species of bledos pequeños, which have been seen neither by Dioscorides, nor
by Laguna, nor by himself in Spain.196 He is well acquainted with the local sur-
roundings and the habitats where the plants grow. For example, after claiming
that Laguna has grossly erred in his discourse on some kind of “long pepper”
(pimienta larga), he writes that he does not doubt that “it exists in these lands,
[and it is possible to find it] coming from Santa Rosa in the direction of Yapeyú
on a hill, fallen upon the ground and with the aspect of a climbing plant.” He
was not able to certify that the plant was the right one, for while he was look-
ing at it he was attacked by a pack of wild pigs and was forced to take flight.197
Of the tree animé or yataiba, he says that it can be found in the region of the
Paraná River, on the hills of Itapúa, and in the reduction of Jesús.198

2.4.2 Pictures
Arata blamed Montenegro for copying many of his images from those in Piso’s
De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica—he enumerates 25 plates reproduced
from drawings in the work of the Dutch physician.199 Actually, Montenegro
took his pictures from different sources. A comparison of the drawings
in the manuscript held in the AGN (Buenos Aires) with those in one of the

193 Ibid., 183.

194 Ibid., 605.
195 Ibid., 129.
196 Ibid., 548.
197 Ibid., 143.
198 Ibid., 190.
199 Arata, “Botánica médica misionera,” 7 (1898): 438-439.
132 chapter 2

editions of Laguna’s commentary on Dioscorides (1563) proves instructive in

this respect.200 Montenegro’s drawing of the artemisa is part of the picture
of the whole plant in Dioscorides.201 The picture of eupatorio americano or
taperibá caá has been copied from that of eupatorium avicennae in Laguna’s
commentary.202 The drawing of the copayba tree is a faithful copy from the pic-
ture in Piso’s treatise.203 In the image of the raíz de la China ( yuapecá mirí), the
root and the plant have been copied from Piso’s iupicanga, but the large leaf in
the foreground has been added.204 As has been pointed out by other authors,
one of the pictures (that of the wild white lily, azucena silvestre) has been taken
from Mattioli’s commentary.205
Montenegro relates that Piso’s work had come into his hands just when he
was finishing his own manuscript.206 In several opportunities he admits that
he reproduces the drawings he found in Piso’s treatise, like in the chapter on
pepper, where he justifies this on the grounds that the temple (complexion)
of the plant is the same in Brazil as in Paraguay.207 Montenegro declares that
since he had never seen the copaiba tree, he copied Piso’s picture.208 But the
Jesuit herbalist does not seems to have been fully aware that the six books of
Piso’s work written by Bontius dealt with the East Indies, for he says that he
copied the picture of the tamarind “from the works of William Piso and Jacob
Bontius, who wrote in Brazil”.209 Actually, a group of chapters of Montenegro’s
work are devoted to species from the East Indies, like nutmeg, cinnamon, and
clove.210
Were the pictures drawn by Montenegro himself? At least, he did not draw
all of them: he says that he had the Énula campana drawn “in a very natural

200 Andrés de Laguna, Pedacio Dioscorides Anazarbeo, acerca de la materia medica medicinal
y de los venenos mortíferos (Salamanca: Mathias Gast, 1563).
201 Montenegro, Materia médica, 223; cf. Laguna, Discorides, 345.
202 Montenegro, Materia médica, 317; cf. Laguna, Discorides, 400.
203 Montenegro, Materia médica, 186; Piso, De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica, 118.
204 Montenegro, Materia médica, 324; Piso, De Indiae utriusque re naturali et medica, 257.
205 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 44.
206 Ibid., 95.
207 Ibid., 145.
208 Ibid., 168.
209 Ibid., 151. Again, when treating of the papaya, he claims that he took its picture from “the
book on plants of Jacobus Bontius, written in Brazil, because the climate and plants in
Brazil are almost the same as in these missions and Paraguay” (ibid., 269).
210 These are the initial chapters in the manuscript in Madrid and the last chapters in the
manuscript in Buenos Aires.
herbals 133

FIGURE 2.1 Énula campana, ink drawing in the manuscript of Pedro Montenegro’s herbal
held in the Archivo General de la Nación. Reproduced from the edition of the
codex published as idem, Materia médica misionera.
(Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional, 1945).
134 chapter 2

fashion” (fig. 2.1).211 In one case, the drawing resulted from an identikit of the
plant. The Jesuit pharmacist says that the Siempreviva americana was drawn
“upon the description of a trustworthy and very religious person, from the land
[where it grows, Salta and Tarija]”.212 It is highly likely that the drawings
were done by one or more Guaraní artists. This had also been the practice of
Francisco Hernández in Mexico, who used Aztec artists to illustrate his work.213
Martín and Valverde have called attention to the important fact that the work-
shops set up in the missions by the Jesuits and manned by Guaraní did not use
the live model, but copied from pictures.214 At no point does Montenegro claim
that the pictures were drawn from life. Nineteenth-century critics, like Arata,
criticized Montenegro’s pictures for having been copied from books. A histori-
cally minded interpretation should take into account that the purpose of the
author was essentially didactic and his cast of mind pragmatic. In this case, as
in much of what the Jesuits wrote in the fields of natural history and pharmacy,
the goal was not to accomplish an original work, valuable from the scientific or
artistic point of view. Jesuit herbals were little more than glorified notebooks
for practical use, in which the author mingled material taken from consecrated
authors with his own observations culled from years of experience in the field.
“Originality” was not an issue. In the case of the pictures this approach was
intensified by the practice of Guaraní artists trained by the Jesuits to copy from
European models, to which they added a peculiar sensibility in the rendition.215

2.4.3 Montenegro’s Materia medica misionera, the Guaraní and the

“Galenization” of Native Herbal Lore
Montenegro used indistinctly and as a matter of fact both European pharma-
copoeia and native lore on curative plants. In the chapter on the wild black
myrtle (arrayán negro silvestre) he says that the variety depicted by Dioscorides
(arrayán montano) is called by the Indians guaviyú and in Tucumán matto; this
is the best in medicine, he goes on, as Laguna had affirmed in his commen-
tary. He then proceeds to enumerate the Guaraní names for the different “spe-
cies” of myrtle: guaviyú guazú, guaviyú mirí, añangapirí guazú, añangapirí mirí
(“guazú” is the Guaraní word for large and “mirí” for small). Each of these kinds

211 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 500.

212 Ibid., 574.
213 Asúa and French, A New World of Animals, 93–104.
214 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 38.
215 See Sustersic, Templos jesuítico-guaraníes, 219–224 for a discussion of the interaction
between European models and native interpretation.
herbals 135

could in turn be white or black.216 The Jesuit herbalist is clearly adopting here
the folk taxonomy of the Guaraní, after having reviewed the subject as treated
by an auctoritas.
But Montenegro’s attitude toward the Guaraní was ambivalent. To start
with, he minimizes the competence of Guaraní healers and extols European
medicine. In the prologue to his work, he tells that he has found “scarce accu-
racy in the unfounded sayings of healers and wise women”.217 On occasion,
he writes as if the natives were ignorant of every medicine and he would
teach them.
Montenegro affirms that his intention was not to duplicate the plants already
described and represented by other herbals (what he does); it was undertaken

for the good of these Indians, who lack physicians and medicines. I felt
obliged to make them know the better, more useful, and necessary [medi-
cines] for their ailments, which so abundantly grow in their lands.218

He believes that the Guaraní have an excess of blood and, since they do not
bleed themselves regularly—as they should, according to the then current
medical practice—the substance of their liver is eventually evacuated as diar-
rhea with much blood.219 Considering the case of French Jesuits in Canada,
Greer has pointed out that the Jesuit claims to superiority in questions of
materia medica were a rhetorical screen for their very real dependence on local
technical skill.220 From an epistemological perspective, Prieto interpreted that
Montenegro (and the Jesuits in general) did not consider the healing practices
of the Guaraní as proper medicine, insofar as the former lacked the theoretical
structure characteristic of Galenic medicine.221 My own view is that things
were more ambiguous and permeated by the contradictory attitudes that regu-
lated many of the cultural transactions between the Jesuits and the Guaraní.
Despite his strictures on native medicine, Montenegro clearly learned from
the plant lore of the Guaraní. It was a Guaraní returning from a yerba mate

216 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 203.

217 Ibid., 96.
218 Ibid., 493. The litterae annuae also report what the Jesuits understood as a lack of
medicines among the natives. Leonhardt, Cartas anuas (1615–1637), 88 and 134 (Annuae
1616 and 1617).
219 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 384.
220 Allan Greer, “The Exchange of Medical Knowledge between Natives and Jesuits in New
France,” in Millones Figueroa and Ledesma, El saber de los jesuitas, 135–146.
221 Prieto, Missionary Scientists, 83.
136 chapter 2

plantation that brought him one of the species of storax (estoraque) or anguay
(ibirá-payé) he describes.222
Sometimes the cures recommended by the natives failed the test of experi-
ence as understood by Montenegro. “A physician of this land [Paraguay]” had
told him that the gum elemi tree was able to resolve the stone in the kidneys,
but, he comments, “I have not seen in it such an effect”.223 At times the aborigi-
nal medicaments worked. The sassafras or apiterebi (huhuiba) “is celebrated
by all the nations, be them barbarians or domestic” as a cure for the stone
and internal ulcers in kidneys and the bladder, and it was so effective that it
was necessary to take care not to exceed the dose.224 In the chapter on female
Aristolochia rotunda, he says that the “infidels” used it for cold diseases and
the crippled conditions caused by morbus gallicus or by humidity and cold-
ness of the members, “although in a most barbaric way and without any other
preparation than cooking it with barks or splinters of ibirá payé or anguay,
a concoction which should be drank for several days”.225 It is not surprising
that Montenegro, steeped in the practice of European pharmacy, would have
considered the native informants as sources whose evidence should be tested
and sifted through the sieve of his Galenic medical categories. But as Greer has
remarked, the polarization between native and European pharmacy was not
unbridgeable.226 On the contrary, there was enough common ground between
herbal native medicine and herbal Western medicine to facilitate the borrow-
ings that actually took place (more on this below). What Montenegro did was
to invest the local use of plants with the whole Galenic conceptual apparatus
of qualities and degrees—after all, he was writing for a Western audience. In
the prologue, he claims that during 18 years he investigated the qualities [of
the simples] “according to their grade of heat, coolness, humidity, and dryness,
inquiring about the distempers of the bodies, the winds, and the causes of
illness”.227 In brief, what Montenegro intended was a “Galenization” of native
medicine, a codification in terms of Galenic theory (the four qualities, humoral
theory, the conception of disease as distemper, the six “non-natural” causes of

222 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 178.

223 Ibid., 182.
224 Ibid., 188.
225 Ibid., 373.
226 Greer, “The Exchange of Medical Knowledge,” 136–137.
227 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 95.
herbals 137

disease, and so on) of the effects of the simples he came to know either by
himself or through his native informants.228
Montenegro’s main informant about the virtues of local plants was Clemente.
The Jesuit says that the perfume of the leaves or twigs of altócigo (ibirá yapa-
carií) is good for shortness of breath, asthma and chest pain “if I must believe
a certain conscientious physician called Clemente, the most expert of those I
have found in these missions”.229 Clemente was a convert to Christianity who
worked as a male nurse in the reductions. When recalling that the batatilla de
don Antonio (caaparí mirí) was used by the Indians to treat cases of dysentery
with uncertain results, Montenegro adds that he

gave credit only to one of them, capable and a good Christian, called
Clemente, who for many years was curuzuya in Concepción and then
moved out to the town of San Ángel. He told me that this was a good and
effective remedy and I do not doubt what he said.230

In the Jesuit’s view, being a Christian added to Clemente’s reliability, for as a

rule medicine men were distrusted and held in contempt by the Fathers. The
secret of the antidotal properties of the yerba de la víbora (viper’s herb) of
Tarija (mboy caá) was kept hidden by a white person and revealed to others by
an Indian, who in doing this, says Montenegro, showed that “he was a better
Christian” than the others (i.e., the Spanish settlers and Creoles).231 The case of
Clemente shows that Christianity served an epistemological function as a war-
rant of the truthfulness of the accounts of native healers. But it was also a cri-
terion of moral rectitude, setting apart those who made public the techniques
of healing (like Montenegro himself was doing with the writing of his treatise)
from those who kept hidden the secrets of the art and used them for profit (no
matter if natives or white persons).
Montenegro drew upon Guaraní informants others than Clemente and also
members of other native peoples. Of the curative properties of the wild myrtle,
he says that he had been informed by “several Indian physicians, the most capa-
ble of them”.232 In the chapter dedicated to the cress (mastuerzo), he recalls

228 Monica Green has discussed the “Galenization” of Arabic gynecology. See idem, “The
Transmission of Ancient Theories of Female Physiology and Disease through the Early
Middle Ages” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1985), 73.
229 Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 250.
230 Ibid., 411.
231 Ibid., 471.
232 Ibid., 317.
138 chapter 2

that he was told about it by a Tupí Indian from San Borja, who arrived in the
city of Colonia.233 In the chapter on virga aurea (iboriyú), it is said that a native
physician of the Guenoas (a group of the Charrúas) told him that the natives
gathered this herb and used it for the cure of dysentery, which they believed is
caused by worms. Montenegro had not tested it.234 The anti-poisonous quali-
ties of the calamint (calaminta menor, yacaré caá) were also communicated to
him by “a certain old Indian, the best expert I found in these missions in the
knowledge of herbs and their applications”.235 Was this perhaps Clemente? In
any case, he tells that the virreina salvaje (ey reboray) “is used by the Indians in
cases of malfunction of the nerves.” They cook “much of the whole herb in a
vessel and, while lying in an hamaca, inhale the vapor of the brewing as hot as
they can tolerate it, so that they sweat copiously”.236 It seems that the camalea
or achicoria could be found in the vicinity of the reductions of San Ángel, San
Juan, San Miguel, and Concepción. Montenegro says that he was assured by
“a certain practical Indian” that the root of this herb, roasted and salted, was
good for diarrhea caused by worms, vomits, and a lax stomach.237

2.5 Jesuits and Guaraní Healers

The judgments passed by the Jesuits on native healing and healers were
highly contradictory, ranging from admiration to contempt, and seem to
have depended much on personal and local circumstances. The narratives of
the Jesuits usually highlight the fact that the Guaraní who acted as male nurses
(curuzuya) in the reductions were trained by the Fathers. Cardiel tells that in
each town there were three or four Indians who worked as such. They were
entirely devoted to their task, which consisted in taking care of the sick, pre-
paring them special food and medicaments, and accompanying the Father in
his ministration of the Sacraments to those in bed. Their mark was a staff, with
a length of 3.5m, the width of a thumb and a cross in its upper end (curuzuya
means “he who holds the cross”). Cardiel says that

they are taught since childhood to cure and prepare medicaments and
have certificates of this profession extended by the Brothers, nurses in
those missions, who had been surgeons and pharmacists before entering
religious life.238

233 Ibid., 333.

234 Ibid., 527.
235 Ibid., 474.
236 Ibid., 287.
237 Ibid., 555.
238 Cardiel, “Breve relación de las misiones,” 565.
herbals 139

Dobrizhoffer mentions by name a curuzuya in the town of San Joaquín,

Ignacio Yaricá, who had been attending to the sick for a period of eight years
and “whose dexterity and success I could not but admire.” It seems that Yaricá
could set and heal a broken limb “by means of swathes of reed and four little
herbs”.239 Dobrizhoffer also says that the curuzuya “have some knowledge of
herbs and common remedies, though they are not allowed to use any medicine
without consulting the missionary.” He goes on to explain that the curuzuya
made their reports to the Jesuit and were “informed by him about the remedies
that should be used.” As a rule, Jesuit chroniclers assigned to the native physi-
cians a subordinate role. But they were no less skeptical of the healing abili-
ties of their Jesuit brothers. Dobrizhoffer tells of the Jesuit surgeons that they
were “tolerably skilled” and, on account of the great distances, “not always at
hand to offer their assistance when it was needed”.240 Other chroniclers were
frankly sympathetic to the native nurses. Del Techo mentions a curuzuya,
Vicente Yapuy, who had been an accomplice in the killing of Father Roque
González and then repented and converted to Christianity. In the epidemic of
1631 Vicente Yapuy helped the sick, comforted his moribund Guaraní brothers
and sisters, and took to the town all those affected by the disease, until at last
he himself succumbed to it. He was succeeded by cacique Marcelo Maendi,
who also contracted the disease, but was eventually cured.241
Sepp, who extolled with sincere admiration the virtuosity of Guaraní crafts-
men, considered them useless as nurses. According to him, it was the priest
who had to take the pulse of the patients, bleed them and prepare for them
the emetics and any other medicament they could need, for the Guaraní were
incapable of performing even such simple tasks. If the Father did not take care
of the sick, the curuzuya “would soon undo the patient, administering her all
mixed up and causing more damage than good”.242 When in 1695 Sepp had
to face an epidemic of smallpox in the reduction of Nuestra Señora de Fe, he
ordered a preventive bloodletting for all the Guaraní between ten and fifty
years of age. This drastic measure was carried out by the Guaraní musicians
and the boys who worked at the forge. Since they did not have lancets they
used common knives, nails, and sharp pointed bones.243 (Scarification was

239 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 2:248.

240 Ibid., 2:256–257.
241 Nicolás del Techo, Historia de la Provincia del Paraguay de la Compañía de Jesús, trans.
Manuel Serrano y Sanz, 5 vols. (Madrid: Uribe, 1897), 4:122–123.
242 Sepp, Relación de viaje, 194.
243 Sepp, Continuación de las labores apostólicas, 151–153.
140 chapter 2

a usual practice among the Guaraní, either as part of rituals or as a curative

resource).244
In his Spiritual Conquest, Ruiz de Montoya rallies against the medicine men
who sucked from the patient small objects like a fish spine or a piece of char-
coal, allegedly the cause of the disease (the shamanistic conception of an ill-
ness as a result of object intrusion was common among the Guaraní).245 Paucke
also describes the practice of a native woman healer sucking a rather large
fragment of bone from the body of the person with dysentery and denounces
what he considered an imposture, for the relatives of the patient had paid for
the treatment with a horse or an expensive manta. In what could be seen as a
contest between two rival shamans, Paucke challenged the medicine men to
show their power while he denounced from the pulpit their “tricks and super-
stitious practices.” At the same time, he administered placebos like sugar and
sugared figs to the mothers of sick children provided they had not consulted
the Mocoví shaman (he says that all these children got well, while those who
went to see the “witch doctor” died).246 Dobrizhoffer also denounced the
Abipón medicine men as

worthy of contempt and ridicule . . . These knaves deserve to be flogged

everyday of their lives by the angry Galen and spit upon by Aesculapius,
Hippocrates and the whole tribe of physicians.247

This angry tirade could be easily attributed to the conflict between Jesuits and
shamans, competing for prestige and power, if it was not that the same Jesuit
praised highly the ability of the Guaraní—“it is incredible how well the sick are
taken care of in the Guaraní towns”.248 Unlike the Abipones, who scarcely know
by name the great variety of herbs that grow in their country, says Dobrizhoffer,
“the Guaraní tongue is as rich as the Abiponian is poor in names of plants and
not a few of the Guaraní are well acquainted with the use of them”.249

244 Pardal, Medicina aborigen, 100–101.

245 Ruiz de Montoya, Conquista espiritual, 80. For the theory of disease as object intrusion see
Erwin Ackerknecht, “Medical Practices. The Non-Andean Tribes,” in Steward, Handbook of
Latin American Indians, 5:621–633; Alfred Métraux, “La causa y el tratamiento mágico de
las enfermedades entre los indios de la región tropical sudamericana,” América Indígena
4, no. 2 (1944): 157–164; and Pardal, Medicina aborigen: 93.
246 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, 2:247–257.
247 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 2:248.
248 Ibid., 256.
249 Ibid., 253.
herbals 141

2.6 A Medical Handbook for the Missions

Aperger’s Tratado breve de medicina could be described as a medical com-
mon-place book. It contains excerpts from different medical treatises, lists of
medical recipes, and kindred material, the whole forming a medical handbook
aimed at being used as a reference work in the missions. Its first part, now
lost, was an herbal. Its second part has been conserved in a manuscript held in
the Academia Nacional de la Historia (Madrid).250 Another manuscript held in
the British Library has parallels with Aperger’s Tratado and might even throw
some light on its first lost part.
Collections of medical recipes which incorporated the local native phar-
macopoeia were popular in New Spain.251 Aperger’s Brief treatise of medicine
belongs to the same genre as the Florilegio medicinal (Mexico, 1712) written
by Jan Steinhöffer (Juan Esteyneffer, 1686–1698), a Moravian Jesuit lay brother
who acted as a physician in the north-western provinces of New Spain.252 The
complete title of Steinhöffer’s work declares its goal and contents: Medicinal
Florilegium of All Diseases, Extracted from Several Classical Authors for the
Benefit of the Poor Folk and of Those Who Lack a Physician, in Particular in
the Remote Provinces Administered by the Missionary Fathers of the Society of
Jesus. The Florilegio medicinal, which enjoyed several editions (Amsterdam,
1719; Madrid, 1729, 1755) consists of three books, devoted to medicine, surgery,
and pharmacy. In the preface, Steinhöffer adverts that besides the classical
authors mentioned in the title he included “medicines of this land [Mexico]”.253
Certainly, he drew upon authors such as Hippocrates, Galen, and Aretaeus, but
also resorted to medieval auctoritates, such as Zacutus Lusitanus and Arnau de
Vilanova, whom he (mistakenly, we know now) attributed the Regimen sani-
tatis, the Thesaurus pauperum, and the De virtutibus herbarum.254 Steinhöffer
employs 49 Nahuatl words, some of them in Spanish form, and 22 words in

250 It has been studied by Sabine Anagnostou, Jesuiten in Spanisch-Amerika als Übermittler
von heilkundichen Wissen (Stuttgart: Wissenschaftliche Verlagsgesellschaft, 2000), 334-
411. This work (the result of a doctoral dissertation) is a reliable start point for anybody
interested in Jesuit materia medica in Paraquaria.
251 See Juan Comas, “Influencia indígena en la medicina hipocrática, en la Nueva España
del siglo XVI,” América indígena 14, no. 4 (1954), 327–361 and George M. Foster, “On the
Origin of Humoral Medicine in Latin America,” Medical Anthropology, n. s. 1, no. 4 (1984):
364–366.
252 There is a modern critical edition of the work: Juan de Esteyneffer, Florilegio Medicinal,
ed. María del Carmen Anzures y Bolaños, 2 vols. (Mexico, D.F.: Academia Nacional de
Medicina, 1978). For biographical data see DHCJ, s.v. “Steinhöffer, Juan,” by M. C. Anzures.
253 Esteyneffer, Florilegio Medicinal, 1:145.
254 Anzures y Bolaños, “Johannes Steinhoffer,” 37–38.
142 chapter 2

other aboriginal tongues.255 It can be fairly said that the work combined local
herbal lore with European pharmacopoeia.256
Perhaps a more relevant antecedent of Aperger’s work is the book by Agustín
Farfán, also called Tractado Breve de Medicina (Mexico, 1592).257 Agustín
Farfán (1532–1604), one of the outstanding physicians of sixteenth-century
New Spain, had studied medicine in Seville and Alcalá de Henares before sail-
ing to the New World, where he graduated again from the University of Mexico.
In 1568 he was named protomédico of New Spain and one year later he joined
the Augustinian order. The first two books of Farfán’s work are devoted to pre-
scriptions for different ailments. The third book deals with fevers, the fourth is
a short treatise on surgery, and the fifth a brief anatomy. Comas has shown that
around eighty remedies mentioned in Farfán’s treatise were of native origin
(some of them are mentioned in Spanish and others in Nahuatl).258 As we will
presently see, Aperger took a fair amount of material from Farfán’s work, so
that it is evident that he used the latter as a model for his own.
We should now review the contents of Aperger’s treatise.259 In his intro-
duction, Aperger tells that he is not writing primarily for the physicians, but
for those who live where there are no doctors. He hopes to provide recipes for
those remedies that can be made at home and with ease, as the ancients did.260
The treatise begins with advice regarding the times and circumstances for the
gathering of medicinal herbs, so that the “charitable healing of your afflicted
brothers” could be carried out without inconvenience.261 Since the work is
written for a hot and humid zone and the natural heat of the body is weak,
Aperger urges to carefully measure the dose prescribed in each case. This is
followed by a list of equivalences of the weight units used in pharmaceutical

255 Ibid., 50–57.

256 Margarita Artschwager Kay, “The Florilegio Medicinal: Source of Southwest Ethno­
medicine,” Ethnohistory 24, no. 3 (1977): 251–259.
257 Agustín Farfán, Tractado breve de medicina y de todas las enfermedades (Mexico: Gerónimo
Balli, 1610) was a revised version of the author’s previous Tractado Brebe de Anathomia
y Chirurgia (1579). See Guenter Risse, “Medicine in New Spain,” in Medicine in the New
World. New Spain, New France, and New England, ed. Ronald L. Numbers (Knoxville: The
University of Tennessee Press, 1980), 48.
258 Comas, “Influencia indígena,” 109–123.
259 Sigismund Aperger, Tratado breve de medicina, Colección Mata Linares, Real Academia de
la Historia, Madrid.
260 But he adverts that even the doctors could use his work as a compendium, insofar as he
has drawn upon the most serious authors (“autores más graves”). Aperger, Tratado breve
de medicina, 1r–1v.
261 Ibid., 2r.
herbals 143

dosage (drachm, scruple, and so on) and a brief description of the veins used
in bloodletting. Aperger also recommends bleeding and purging before admin-
istering the remedies.262
Anagnostou has shown that the first part of Aperger’s treatise, consisting
of 46 chapters, has been taken from Farfán’s work.263 Aperger drew upon the
whole book one and chapters 1 through 16 of the second book of his model,
adding a paraphrase here and there.
The second part of Aperger’s Tratado breve is entitled “Short treatise of
fevers and their cure taken from Father Agustín Farfán, Doctor in Medicine”.264
It contains nine chapters on fevers followed by four others on diverse topics.
Chapter 14 is a list of eleven medical recipes also taken from Farfán and chap-
ter 15 is a collection of more than 30 ointments and poultices extracted from
a “General antidotarium” in Bartolomé Hidalgo de Agüero’s Thesoro de la ver-
dadera cirugía (first edited in 1604).265
Perhaps the more substantial part of Aperger’s treatise is its third part. It
consists of a collection of 177 prescriptions entitled “Brief treatise on effec-
tive and easy medicines which should be known in order to exert charity with
the poor”.266 The medical recipes do not follow any particular order and it is
possible to find several for the same ailment or disease. As has been shown
by Anagnostou, some recipes in Aperger’s treatise are more of less close para-
phrases of the recipes in Montenegro’s herbal.267
Many others are taken from the Thesoro de pobres. This was a Spanish ver-
sion of the Thesaurus pauperum, a thirteenth-century work attributed to Peter
of Spain (medicus), with some additions from Arnau de Villanova, a famous

262 Ibid., 2v–3r.

263 Ibid., 3r–98r. See Anagnostou, Jesuiten in Spanisch-Amerika, 338–340.
264 Aperger, Tratado breve de medicina, 98r–126v.
265 Ibid., 137r–139v (chap. 14) and 140r–148r (chap. 15). Cf. respectively Farfán, Tractado breve,
131–137 (bk. 2, chap. 13) and Bartolomé Hidalgo de Agüero, Thesoro de la verdadera cirugía
y vía particular contra la común (Sevilla: Francisco Pérez, 1610), 110r–130r (“Antidotarium
General”). Hidalgo de Agüero (1527–1597) was a Seville surgeon who battled against
the doctrine of the laudable pus; his Thesoro de la verdadera cirugía was posthumously
published.
266 “Tratado breve de remedios eficaces y fáciles para todas enfermedades que debian saberse
para exercitar la caridad con los pobres.”
267 Aperger, Tratado breve de medicina, 148v–204v. Anagnostou has pointed out textual par-
allels in four cases: “asoleados con gran dolor de cabeza,” “para picaduras de víbora,”
“veneno o ponzoña dada en la comida,” and “para heridas de saeta envenenada.” See
idem, Jesuiten in Spanisch-Amerika, 378–388.
144 chapter 2

Catalan medieval physician.268 Aperger’s medicaments for brow and eye pain,
temple ache and for the ahítos (indigestion) are taken almost literally and
completely from the Thesoro.269 On occasion, Aperger transcribed only a few
of the many medicinal recipes that the Thesoro proposes for a given ailment.
For example, the chapter on headache reproduces only the last half of the cor-
responding chapter in the Thesoro, the chapter on the rosa (pink spot) and
empeyne (perhaps tinea or lichen planus), transcribes only the last two recipes,
and the chapter on loss of speech duplicates all but the last remedy of the sev-
eral proposed in the Thesoro.270 In his chapter on how to stop nose bleeding,
Aperger copied almost all the recipes but in a different order.271
In his chapter on how to extract an iron dart from the body, to the three med-
ical recipes taken from the Thesoro Aperger added one more, which involves
the use of a local plant, mburucuyá mirí (identified as aristoloquia), which he
took from Montenegro’s work.272 Surely Aperger drew upon other sources
besides Montenegro and the Thesaurus pauperum. His use of the latter work,
a receptarium which can be traced to Antiquity and the Middle Ages, accounts
for the frequent use of animal materia medica, since many of the recipes in
the Thesoro come from Pliny, the second book of Dioscorides, and like sources.
The components, ways of preparation, indications and modes of application of
these medicaments are congruent with those in Montenegro’s Materia medica.
The fourth section of Aperger’s work is a list of “Several virtues of remedies
taken from another author and [also] discovered by me”.273 These include
secreta, like a recipe for conserving wine and for making vinegar.274 This sec-
tion is closed by a few chapters on the virtues of different plants.
The Tratado breve continues with a fifth section entitled “Other virtues
taken from another author”.275 Most of the vegetables treated here are used
in cooking and horticulture, although some medicinal herbs are also listed.

268 Its first edition was in Seville, 1532. See Alexander S. Wilkinson, ed., Iberian Books. Libros
ibéricos (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 429. I have used [Peter of Spain], Libro de medicina llamado
Thesoro de pobres (Pamplona: Federico Picart, 1727).
269 Aperger, Tratado breve de medicina, 164v, 165r, 195v. Cf. Thesoro de pobres, 8v (chap. 7), 8r
(chap. 6), 27v (chap. 23).
270 Aperger, Tratado breve de medicina, 164r, 193v, 197r. Cf. Thesoro de pobres, 7r (chap. 5), 17r
(chap. 11), 21v (chap. 14).
271 Aperger, Tratado breve de medicina, 184r. Cf. Thesoro de pobres, 20r (chap. 13).
272 Aperger, Tratado breve de medicina, 178v. Cf. Thesoro de pobres, 52v (chap. 56) and
Montenegro, Materia médica, 189–190.
273 “Varias virtudes sacadas de otro autor y por mí descubiertas.”
274 Aperger, Tratado breve de medicina, 205r–214v.
275 Ibid., 214v–218v.
herbals 145

The manuscript ends with a series of “General warnings,” a mélange of short

discussions of medical subjects.276
Furlong called attention to a text in a manuscript deposited in the British
Library (Add. 27,602) with the title “Medicinal recipes [Recetas medicinales]
in which the medicinal herbs of Paraguay are principally employed. A work
of Father Sigismundo Aperger, Jesuit and Missionary”.277 He thought that
this should be a version or a copy of one of the codices described by Arata.278
Although this is not the case, the manuscript is related to Aperger in more than
one way.
The text of “Recetas medicinales” answers nicely to its title. It contains a
list of 88 medical recipes, some of which have parallels in the third part of
Aperger’s work (“Tratado breve de remedios eficaces y fáciles . . .”).279 For exam-
ple, all the recipes for temple pain, facial rosa and empeyne, loss of speech, and
ahítos have parallels in Aperger’s Tratado breve.280 (A careful comparison of
the same chapters in the Thesaurus pauperum makes clear that the author of
“Recetas medicinales” took his material from Aperger’s text and not from the
Thesaurus, which was Aperger’s source for those chapters.) “Recetas medicina-
les” includes other sections besides this collection of recipes, but despite stray
parallels they do not correspond to anything substantial in Aperger’s treatise.281

276 Ibid., 219v–232r. Knowledge of pulses, knowledge of urines, treatment of metrorrhagia

followed by loss of conscience in pregnant women, how to deal with a traumatic child-
birth and with a death fetus, and several cures for accidents involving loss of blood
(a “broken vase in the chest”, hemorrhoids, apoplexy). The final paragraph on apoplexy is
taken from Samuel A. Tissot’s Avis au peuple sur sa santé ou traité des maladies les plus fre-
quentes (Lausanne: J. Zimmerli, 1761), in substitution of some pages lacking in the original
manuscript from which the one we are looking at was copied.
277 “Recetas medicinales en las que son empleadas principalmente las yerbas medicinales del
Paraguay/Obras del R. Padre Sigismundo Aperger, Jesuita y Misionero,” in “Topographical
and Scientific Notes on Paraguay Collected by Willian Gore Ouseley,” 77r–166v, Add.
27,602, British Library, London. This is a copy made from another copy made in 1856 by
Sir William Gore Ouseley (1797–1866), British consul in Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro.
The contents of the manuscript are described in Pascual de Gayangos, Catalogue of the
Manuscripts in the Spanish Language in the British Museum, 4 vols. (London: Printed by
Order of the Trustees by William Clowes, 1893), 4:138–139.
278 Furlong, “Segismundo Aperger,” 137.
279 BL Add. 27,602:77v–142v. Cf. Aperger, Tratado breve, 148v–204v.
280 BL Add. 27,602:92v, 94v, 100v, 101v. Cf. Aperger, Tratado breve, 164v, 193v, 197r, 195v.
281 There is a florilegium with passages on how to prevent the “loss of blood” (intestinal
bleeding) with tenesmus (BL Add. 27,602:142v–143v). Immediately after that we find a
series of 19 questions and answers (ibid., 143v–146v), followed by a paragraph about the
pulse and its differences, taken from Juan de Vidos y Miró, Cirugia racional y espagirica
146 chapter 2

In short, the manuscript in the British Library is a medical compilation whose

author has drawn upon Aperger’s Tratado breve (or some version of it) for his
own collection of medicinal recipes. 282
Another section of BL Add. 27,602 also seems relevant to our discussion. It
is the one headed by the legend: “See my notebook Rosado [sic], 10 February
1855, Medicinal herbs, dyes, gums, etc.” This nineteenth-century text consists
of a number of notes on medicinal plants from Paraguay written in English and
probably taken by William Ouseley himself (see above).283 There are 67 notes
on plants, plus another five non-numbered accounts. The texts of the notes
have been extracted from authors like Thaddaeus Haenke, Félix de Azara, and
the Dictionary, Practical, Theoretical, Historical of Commerce and Commercial
Navigation by John Ramsay McCulloch (first edition London, 1832). In several
cases, the author registered the tax or the price of the plant in question, so that
it is plausible that these notes were intended as some kind of guide for a com-
mercial enterprise. What is relevant for our argument is that one of the most
frequently cited sources of this nineteenth-century compilation is “Sigismund
I” or “volume I,” which likely denotates the lost first volume of Aperger’s work.
A comparison of the fragments attributed to “Sigismund I” with the cor-
responding passages in Montenegro’s Materia medica shows that there is lit-
eral coincidence or close to it in most of the cases. In other words, the brief
notes on particular plants that reproduce passages taken from what was prob-

sin obra manual de hierro ni fuego (Zaragoza: Pascual Bueno, 1674). The following sections
are two brief treatises on pulse and urine (BL Add. 27,602:147r–151v), different from those
in Aperger’s Tratado breve, and fragments on medical astrology and critical days (which
are the best days for bloodletting) (ibid., 152v) and on the ten signs that prognosticate
death (ibid., 153r–153v). These sections are followed by short excerpts on obstetrics: the
suppressed months (amenorrhea), the mal de madre (mother’s disease) and another on
how to promote the expulsion of blood in cases of amenorrhea (ibid., 154v–161v). (There
are some occasional literal parallels with Aperger’s Tratado breve in the section on mal
de madre). There is at last an alphabetic list of diseases and ailments (ibid., 162r–165r).
In fol. 166r there are three medical recipes with the title “Supplement to Sigismund”. The
description in Gayangos’s Catalogue has it that this is the title of all the text that follows,
from fol. 166r to fol. 202, but I think that it is clear that the “Supplement” refers only to the
contents of fol. 166r.
282 What comes next in BL Add. 27,602 is a group of 56 short chapters with descriptions of
the virtues of mineral and plant remedies, written in a different hand from what precedes
(BL Add. 27,602:166v–200v). This long section is followed by a two-column list of medica-
ments in Spanish and Guaraní (ibid., 201v–202v) and an index of the medicinal plants and
remedies mentioned in the work: “Lista de plantas medicinales y otros remedies mencio-
nados en esta obra” (ibid., 203r–204v).
283 BL Add. 27,602: 205v–222r.
herbals 147

ably “Sigismund’s” first volume have literal parallels in Montenegro’s work.284

This result suggests two alternatives. The first is that the author of the notes
just drew upon one of the manuscripts with Montenegro’s herbal attributed
to Aperger. The other possibility is that he actually used Aperger’s first vol-
ume (the herbal), which in turn consisted (at least partly) of materials taken
from Montenegro. As things stand, it seems difficult to decide between these
options.

3 The Lost and Minor Works

Montenegro’s herbal and Aperger’s medical handbook were not the only Jesuit
works on materia medica and medicine written in Paraquaria. The Spanish
lay brother Diego Basauri (1590–1629), who arrived in Río de la Plata in 1610
and after staying two years in Córdoba worked for 15 years as infirmarius
in Asunción, wrote a “book of medicine,” based on a collection of prescrip-
tions he had got from a doctor.285 A document from 1717 mentions a “list of
medicaments” in the Archive of the Missions, in the town of Candelaria, made
by Father Cristóbal Altamirano with the assistance of Brother Domingo de
Torres (1607–1688).286 Torres arrived in Buenos Aires in 1636 and worked all
his life in the missions. He is described in the catalogues as apothecary and
male nurse. To this kind of literature we should add the collection of medical
recipes in Guaraní by Marcos Villodas. In his encyclopedia, Sánchez Labrador
dealt with the medicinal properties of more than 150 plants. There are testi-
monies that Thomas Falkner wrote a work on diseases and their remedies in
the Río de la Plata. Although this work is lost, we still have a sketchy treat-
ment of medicinal plants in his Description of Patagonia. Besides, there is an

284 What follows are the 13 literal parallels between the notes that reproduce text from
“Sigismund I” and the corresponding chapters of Montenegro’s Materia medica (in each
case, the references correspond respectively to the folios in MS. BL Add 27,602 and the
numbers of pages in Montenegro, Manuscrito ed. Martín and Valverde): anguay (fol. 208r,
cf. p. 176), sangre de drago (fol. 208r, cf. p. 219); nuez moscada (fol. 210r, cf. p. 122), ace-
tosa mayor (fol. 210v, cf. p. 559), caaycí or almáciga verde de Plinio (fol. 210v, cf. p. 398),
arrayán negro silvestre (fol. 211r, cf. p. 204), isica or goma elemi (fol. 211r, cf. p. 108), piña de
la India (fol. 211v, cf. p. 201), sándalo colorado (fol. 212r, cf. pp. 216–217), molle blanco (fol.
212r, cf. pp. 233–235), algarrobo blanco (fol. 212v, cf. p. 243), ricino or ambay guazú (fol. 213r,
cf. p. 246), ceibo or zuinandí (fol. 213r, cf. p. 252).
285 See Basauri’s biography in Leonhardt, Cartas anuas (1615–1637), 432–433 (Annua
1628–1631).
286 Cited in Furlong, Médicos argentinos, 61.
148 chapter 2

anonymous eighteenth-century manuscript book, the Libro de cirugía (Book of

surgery), which could have arguably been written by a Jesuit. In what follows,
we will look at all these productions.

3.1 A Guaraní receptarium

In the corpus of extant medical and pharmaceutical works written by the
Jesuits in Paraguay, there is the unique case of a Guaraní text entitled POJHA
ÑAÑA [“Medicinal plants”]. Materia Medica Misionera o Herbario de las
Reducciones Guaraníes. The manuscript with this text, dated in 1725, is held in
the library of the Wellcome Institute.287 According to this codex, its author was
the Jesuit Brother Marcos Villodas. The work contains a collection of medi-
caments, an herbal, and other materials. The receptarium is divided into two
parts, with 28 and 13 chapters respectively.288 The beginning of the second part
is indicated by a legend in Spanish, which reads “Second Part of the Book of
Remedies by Brother Marcos Villodas”.289
The chapters deal with disease conditions like headache, fainting fits,
strains, evil eye, pox, earache, nose bleeding, toothache, bloody diarrhea, swell-
ings, spider bites, snake bites, and so on. Most of the plants recommended as
therapeutic are native, but there are some exotics, like barley, rosemary, sage,
rue, chamomile, and dill.290
The text is preceded by a table of contents.291 The numbers of the folios
of each of the chapters in the table do not correspond to the foliation of the
codex, so that it is evident that the copyist reproduced the table of contents
of his model without adjusting it to his own manuscript.292 From a perusal of
the numbers of folios, it is evident that the author made a selection of material

287 WMS, Amer 31, Wellcome Library, London. See Guerra, Materia medica hispano-ameri-
cana, 172–73 and Price, An Annotated Catalogue, 286–288. Cf. a description and discussion
of this manuscript in Anagnostou, “ ‘Weil Gott die Menschen liebt, sollen wir einander
lieben . . .’. Jesuiten als heilkundigen Pharmazeuten in den Missionen Iberoamerikas,”
535–538.
288 WMS, Amer 31:1v–45v.
289 “Parte segunda del libro de los Remedios del Hermano Marcos Villodas,” WMS, Amer
31:35v.
290 I owe this particular information to Dr. Pastor Arenas (CONICET-CEFYBO), a Guaraní-
speaking ethnobotanist, who most kindly looked at the text and sent me his report about
its contents.
291 WMS, Amer 31:1r–1v.
292 But next to the title of each of the chapters in the text, the copyst annotated the original
folio number to which the table of contents refers.
herbals 149

from a larger original.293 Besides, there are eight chapters in the text which are
not listed in the table of contents.294
The compilation of medicinal recipes is followed by 12 descriptions of plants
with accounts of their virtues (of these, only the first six are mentioned in the
table of contents).295 After two paragraphs with instructions comes a Guaraní-
Spanish glossary of 30 medicinal plants.296 The rest of the manuscript is occu-
pied by around 30 chapters, each devoted to an individual plant.297
It is likely that the work was intended to be used by a curuzuya. Other works
of this kind probably circulated in the missions, for Sánchez Labrador says that
Montenegro “composed some books in Guaraní and others in Spanish”.298
We do not know much about Villodas’s life, other than the bare facts that
signaled the events of his life as a Jesuit. He was born in Nanclares de Gamboa,
Álava (Basque country) on 1 May 1695 and joined the Society of Jesus on 25
May 1712, in Castille. He arrived in the Río de la Plata on 13 September 1717
and was immediately assigned to the reductions (the 1720 catalogue says that
by that time he had been infirmarius in the missions of the Paraná River for
two years).299 He then moved in and out among the towns along the Uruguay
River.300 By 1730 Villodas was in the College of Córdoba.301 Afterwards he
returned to the missions of the Paraná River, where he acted as chirurgus.302
In 1739 he was back in Córdoba.303 While in that city, he might have assisted
as physician the nuns of the Convent of Santa Catalina.304 Villodas died in the
College of Santa Fe on 13 November 1741.305
Villodas’s Guaraní receptarium cum herbal shows that the exchange
between Jesuit and Guaraní medicine was a two-way avenue—what Greer has

293 Apparently, three sets of chapters were copied (the numbers of folios refer to the original
manuscript, and are taken from the Table of contents): from fol. 1 to 57, from fol. 121 to 129,
and from fol. 153 to f. 191.
294 WMS, Amer 31:17v–30r. They correspond to fols. 59 to 75 of the original.
295 Ibid., 46r–51r.
296 “Nombres de algunas plantas que en este libro se piden en lengua guaraní puestas aquí en
sus correspondientes en lengua castellana.” Ibid., 52v–53r.
297 Ibid., 53v–60r.
298 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 1, bk. 3, Paraquaria 16:296r–296v, ARSI.
299 Storni, Catálogo, 307. Catalogus publicus 1720, Paraquaria 6:87r, ARSI.
300 Catalogus publicus 1724, Paraquaria 6:119v, ARSI.
301 Catalogus publicus 1730, Paraquaria 6:149v, ARSI.
302 Catalogus publicus 1735, Paraquaria 6:184v, ARSI.
303 Catalogus publicus 1739, Paraquaria 6:218r, ARSI.
304 Garzón Maceda, La medicina en Córdoba, 1:63–64.
305 Supplementum Catalogi Provinciae Paraquariae Anni 1741, Paraquaria 6:245r, ARSI.
150 chapter 2

already remarked of the French Jesuits acting in Canada.306 For what we have
here is a Jesuit missionary writing a medical handbook for the Guaraní in their
language. Since much of the materia medica of this collection of remedies was
local, it is evident that, in a sense, we have come full-circle from Guaraní folk
medicine to Guaraní users, through the intermediacy of a Jesuit pharmacist.

3.2 Medicinal Botany in the Paraguay Natural

In his Paraguay Natural, Sánchez Labrador took care to include a fair amount
of material about the medical properties of the plants, animals and minerals
he described. Argentine historian of medicine Anibal Ruiz Moreno excerpted
and edited these fragments which, dislodged out of their context and artifi-
cially reunited, provide the false impression that the Jesuit author was intent
on writing a pharmacopoeia.307 But even if this was not the case, it is unde-
niable that Sánchez Labrador was interested in the medicinal properties of
plants (the list in Ruiz Moreno’s edition amounts to 260 items). For the most,
the plants are mentioned in Spanish or Guaraní; in some cases, their names in
the language of the Mbyás or the Chiquitos are also provided. But as Sánchez
Labrador’s careful mention of his sources reveals, the bulk of his accounts was
rehearsed from pharmaceutical works and encyclopedias of natural history,
such as Nicolas Lémery’s Pharmacopée universelle (1697) and his Dictionnaire
ou traité universel des drogues simples (1698), Robert James’s Medicinal
Dictionary (1743–1745) in Diderot’s translation, the Abbé Pluche’s Spectacle
de la nature, in eight volumes (a favorite with Jesuits writers on natural his-
tory), Valmont de Bomare’s Dictionnaire d’histoire naturelle (first edited in 1765,
5 vols.), E. F. Geoffroy’s Tractatus de materia medica (1741) in seven volumes,
and so on. Besides, most of the names in Guaraní are taken from the works
of Piso and Markgraf. But as is always the case with Sánchez Labrador, inter-
woven with this derivative material there are original personal observations
and remarks. He makes reference to Montenegro when treating the caábo roy
or albahaca de campo, to Falkner when he talks about the culén, and to the
Jesuit lay brother Ziulak, who found ipecacuanha growing near the reduction
of Sántos Apóstoles.308 Besides, he says that the sandiabo guazú was used as
wormwood “by the Jesuit brothers learned in medicine and botany” and was

306 Greer, “The Exchange of Medical Knowledge,” 136.

307 Ruiz Moreno’s ponderous edition has been cited in p. 33, note 31 as Sánchez Labrador,
La medicina en el Paraguay Natural. In this line, see also José Luis Molinari, “Sánchez
Labrador y su contribución a la materia medica rioplatense,” Revista de la Asociación
Médica Argentina 51, no. 372 (1937): 182–184.
308 Sánchez Labrador, La medicina en el Paraguay Natural, 227, 252, and 281.
herbals 151

called by them ajenjo póntico. These Jesuit herbalists also affirmed that the
taperiba mirí was the senna.309
Much of what Sánchez Labrador has to offer in terms of materia medica are
compilations culled from works of reference. On the other hand, his mention
of the Jesuit pharmacists of Paraquaria reveals his familiarity with their work
and gives support to the idea that there was a common culture of herbal medi-
cine in the missions, based on the circulation of the manuscripts of the kind
described in this chapter.

3.3 The English Surgeon

In the second part of the Historia del Paraguay, Río de la Plata and Tucumán
written by Father José Guevara (1719–1806) there is an “Historico-Medical
Alphabetical Index” of 87 healing herbs, which follows the section devoted
to trees and plants of Paraguay.310 Guevara tells that the Father Provincial
Bernard Nusdorffer (1686–1762) had told him that this list had been written by
“Ventura Suárez” (Buenaventura Suárez).311 The herbs are listed in the alpha-
betical order of their Spanish names, with their equivalents in Guaraní. All of
these herbs, with the exception of one or two, are also treated in Montenegro’s
Materia medica misionera.312
A few years before Groussac’s edition of Guevara’s Historia del Paraguay,
and without any other ground that his intuition of rare book connoisseur,
Arata hypothesized that the original “herbal of the missions” had been written
by Buenaventura Suárez (whose work we will discuss in chapter 4) and after-
wards completed, glossed and copied by Montenegro, Falkner, and Aperger.313
As Furlong has already pointed out, the mere comparison of the dates of birth
and death of Montenegro (1663–1728) and Suárez (1678–1750) refutes Arata’s
unwarranted speculation.314 As it happens, it is likely that the inverse is true: in
all probability Suárez copied his list (if it was his) from any of the manuscripts
containing Montenegro’s Materia medica.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Falkner was a British surgeon who
traveled to the Río de la Plata, where he joined the Society of Jesus and since

309 Ibid., 316 and 318. Montenegro has a chapter on taperibá mirí or ajenjo póntico. See idem,
Manuscrito, ed. Martín and Valverde, 507.
310 Guevara, Historia del Paraguay, 93–97.
311 Ibid., 92.
312 This has been already established by Groussac, the editor of Guevara’s Historia del
Paraguay, see ibid., 98 note 1.
313 Arata, “Botánica médica misionera,” 7 (1898), 448.
314 Furlong, “Segismundo Aperger,” 139.
152 chapter 2

that moment on played a prominent role as a Jesuit missionary physician in

the region. The always imaginative Arata claimed that Father Dobrizhoffer
described more than ninety plants “on the grounds of the information gathered
by him and also based on the data provided to him by Father Thomas Falkner”.315
Certainly, in his De abiponibus Dobrizhoffer says that “Thomas Falconer” was
“an Englishman well versed in medicine and botany,” who declared that

Paraguay had been enriched by the bounty of nature with so many whole-
some plants, roots, gums, woods and fruits, that whoever was skilled in
the knowledge of those things would have no occasion for European
druggist to cure any disease.316

But the section on plants of Dobrizhoffer’s natural history is not particularly

concerned with medicinal herbs—what he mentions are palms, crop plants,
hardwoods, fruit trees, and so on. If we look in Dobrizhoffer’s work for lit-
eral parallels of Falkner’s Description of Patagonia we will find that the for-
mer quotes the latter in two cases, dragon’s blood and “alfaroba” (algarrobo).317
Dobrizhoffer’s brief chapter on the aguaribay has also been extracted from
Falkner.318 But that is all and, of course, these three quotations do not justify
Arata’s claim that Dobrizhoffer’s list of plants was based on Falkner.
On 20 October 1784 Father John Thorpe (1726–1792), a British Jesuit then
residing in Rome, wrote to fellow Jesuit Charles Plowden (1720–1792) that the
exiled Spanish-American former members of the Society were hoping to find
a “well known treatise on ‘American Distempers cured by American drugs’,”
written by Thomas Falkner, who had died on 30 January of that year.319 So far,
this treatise of materia medica has not been found. But in his Description of
Patagonia Falkner provides a number of original descriptions of medicinal
plants.

315 Arata, “Botánica médica misionera,” 7 (1898): 433.

316 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 1:349.
317 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 1:357–358 and 372; cf. Falkner, Description of
Patagonia, 41 and 30–32. In his chapter on the “alfaroba” (algarroba), Dobrizhoffer points
out his source. He affirms that the fruit, “according to Thomas Falconer will cure many
persons who, in Europe, could not be restored to health without the aid of salivation”
(idem, An Account of the Abipones, 1:372).
318 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 1:386; cf. Falkner, Description of Patagonia, 42.
319 George Oliver, Collections Towards Illustrating the Biography of the Scotch, English and
Irish Members of the Society of Jesus (London: Charles Dolman, 1845), 89.
herbals 153

Thomas Falkner (Falconer), the son of a Presbyterian apothecary, was

born in Manchester on 6 October 1707.320 He received his first education at
the Manchester Grammar School.321 Peramás says that he studied medicine
under the famous Newtonian London physician Richard Mead, but this is
not confirmed by any other source.322 It has been already questioned that
Falkner studied under Mead, who could have been perhaps at most a tutor or
patron.323 By those years Mead was at the peak of his fame, a social an intel-
lectual celebrity including among his clientele Queen Anne, members of the
Hannover dynasty, Isaac Newton, and Samuel Johnson.324 In the course of his
London life, Mead had been nominated physician in St. Thomas’ Hospital and
its School of Medicine and also gave lessons of anatomy at the Company of
Barber-Surgeons until 1715, when he began to act as governor of St. Thomas (at
that time Falkner was 15 years old). By 1723 there were four surgeons and three
physicians at St. Thomas’ as well as surgery apprentices, who paid 24 guineas
for 12 months of apprenticeship; since 1726 each of the three surgeons could
take a maximum of four students.325 The supposition that Falkner could have
been trained at St. Thomas is mere speculation. It is believed that Falkner plied
his trade in England for a while before embarking.326

320 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Falkner, Thomas,” by C. W. Sutton, revised by
Geoffrey Scott, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9124.
321 John Kirk, Biographies of English Catholics in the Eighteenth Century, ed. John H. Pollen S.J.
and Edwin Burton (London: Burns & Oates, 1909), 77–78.
322 Falkner is said to have studied ars medicinae “a clarissimo viro Richardo Mead” (José M.
Peramás, De vita et moribus sex sacerdotum Paraguaycorum [Faenza: Archii, 1791], 74–75,
in note). This was repeated by George Oliver, historian and secular priest who wrote
Falkner’s earliest biography in English: “[he is] said to have been a pupil of the celebrated
Dr. Richard Mead” (idem, Collections, 88). Kirk simply affirmed that Falkner studied “med-
icine and surgery” (idem, Biographies of English Catholics, 77).
323 The Argentine historian of medicine José L. Molinari had already put into doubt that
Falkner studied under Mead and affirmed that the latter was a friend of the Falkner fam-
ily, but he did not mention his source. See Carlos G. Ursi and José L. Molinari, “El Padre
Tomás Falkner, médico, explorador y cartógrafo en el Río de la Plata durante el siglo
XVIII,” Revista de la Asociación Médica Argentina 77 (1963), 622. In a previous paper, I have
shown the historical incongruity of the much repeated story according to which Falkner
would have been a “disciple” of Newton’s. See Asúa, “Acerca de la biografía,” 249–251.
324 Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, s.v. “Mead, Richard,” by Anita Guerrini, http://
www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18467.
325 Courtney Dainton, The Story of England’s Hospitals (London: Museum Press, 1961), 60.
326 Henry Foley, “Falkner or Falconer, Thomas,” in idem, Records of the English Province of the
Society of Jesus, vol. 7, The Collectanea of the English Provinces S.I. Part I (London: Burn &
Oates, 1882), 243. Elsewhere, I have shown that the much repeated story that has Falkner
154 chapter 2

Falkner arrived in Buenos Aires on May 1730 as the surgeon of a slave ship
of the South Sea Company which departed from Guinea. He travelled to Chile
across the Andes accompanying the slaves to be sold in the city of Santiago.
In the course of this exhausting journey he became ill and back in Buenos
Aires was cared for in the Jesuit College, as a result of which he converted to
Catholicism and entered the Society of Jesus in May 1732, when he was 24.327
Falkner studied philosophy and theology at the University of Córdoba, where
he also acted as a physician. It is possible that around 1742 he explored his sur-
roundings and might have even made a trip to Santiago del Estero.328 Falkner
developed his missionary activity in the province of Buenos Aires among the
Pampas. In 1744 he led an expedition to the Sierra del Volcán, where he con-
tacted the aborigines but was not able to establish a mission. After staying
two years and a half in the city of Buenos Aires, by mid-1746 he headed south
again and together with Father José Cardiel founded the mission of Nuestra
Señora del Pilar near what is today the city of Mar del Plata, by the Atlantic
coast.329 Falkner took his final votes in December 1749. By the end of 1751
the mission of Pilar was abandoned and Falkner was sent to Santa Fe as the
administrator of the estancia of the Jesuit College, where he remained for four
years, practicing medicine and exploring the region.330 His last residence in
the Río de la Plata was Córdoba, where he stayed for a decade, from 1756 until
the expulsion in 1767. Falkner returned to his country and after a short period
in Lancashire joined the English Jesuit province (1771) and lived in a series of
country houses of Catholic gentry. Firstly, he stayed as chaplain in Spetchley
Park (Worcestershire) in the state of Robert Berkeley, from 1769 to 1771 (in
any case, no later than 1773).331 He then moved to Winsley (Herefordshire),
at the Beringtons and in 1777 (or 1778) to Plowden Hall (Shropshire),
as chaplain to the Plowden brothers.332 In one of the registers of confirma-

as a “disciple” of Newton’s is historically unfounded. See Asúa, “Acerca de la biografía,”

249–254.
327 The Jesuits were apparently in good terms with the agents of the South Sea Company in
Buenos Aires (see p. 17). Furlong was cared for by Father Sebastián de San Martín (1678–
1759). See Furlong, Médicos argentinos, 100.
328 Furlong, Tomás Falkner, 25–26.
329 Cardiel was replaced in November 1747 by Father Matthias Strobel. See Guillermo Furlong,
Tomás Falkner, 38–40 and 50–51.
330 Ibid., 62–66.
331 T. B. Trappes-Lomax, “The Berkeleys of Spetchley and Their Contribution to the Survival
of the Faith in Worcestershire,” Recusant History 1 (1951): 45–58.
332 William Price, “Three Jesuits at Plowden Hall in Shropshire in the Eighteenth Century,”
Recusant History 10 (1969): 165–175.
herbals 155

tion of the Apostolic Vicar it appears that on 18 June 1777 Falkner confirmed
14 persons in Giffard’s Hall (Suffolk) and on 14 April 1782 confirmed 21 more
in Plowden Hall. In both cases he is mentioned as “Thomas Falkener [sic], ex-
Jesuit”.333 These confirmations took place after the suppression of the Society
in 1773, which could explain that he is mentioned as a former Jesuit, although
the members of the Society in the United Kingdom were not intimated by the
brief of Clement XIV. Falkner died on 30 January 1784 at Plowden Hall. There is
a diploma of the University of St. Andrews dated on 15 May 1774 conferring the
title of Doctor in Medicine upon magister artium Thomas Falkner on account
of the many years he plied his profession and the praises he received from
his colleagues.334 It is not impossible that Falkner, aged 67 years, succeeded
in renewing his medical credentials on the year his book was published (1774),
perhaps benefiting from the prestige he derived from it. In any case, we now
turn to his treatise on Patagonia.
Falkner’s Description of Patagonia is a rich source of information about the
actual use of medicinal plants by the aborigines and the Jesuits in Río de la
Plata. He describes the algarrobo and explains how the natives made a nutri-
tive flour with its pods (a practice still current in north-western Argentina) and
also a fermented drink or chicha. The Patagonian Tehuelches gave this fruit to
those suffering from consumption arising from sweats or hectic fever, so that
those affections were rare among those who had algarrobo as a staple in their
diets. Drinking a chicha fermented from a species of algarrobo, the aborigines
“cured themselves of the lues venereal.” Falkner witnessed several cures of this
disease “which in England would have required salivation”.335 Montenegro had
recommended the use of the balm of caá-isí in open wounds and to repair
broken bones.336 Falkner gave it to drink three times a day to two Indians who
had been transfixed by a lance, as a result of which their stomachs had been
perforated. They were restored, one in three and the other in six months, a true
success in cases which, adds Falkner with understandable pride, were “gener-
ally esteemed mortal by the faculty”.337

333 Frank Roberts, “The Confirmation Register 1768–93 of Thomas Tallot, Vicar Apostolic of
the Midland District,” Staffordshire Catholic History nº 12 (1972), 19.
334 University of St. Andrews, Diploma of Doctor in Medicine, Thomas Falkner, 15 May 1774
[photo], Colegio del Salvador, Buenos Aires. I thank librarian Marta Velázquez for access
to this document.
335 Falkner, Description of Patagonia, 31–32. The use of mercury ointment generates profuse
salivation.
336 Montenegro, Materia médica, 303–306.
337 Falkner, Description of Patagonia, 42.
156 chapter 2

The list of plants in Falkner’s Description is short and, besides, most of them
do not grow in Patagonia but in the center and north of present-day Argentina,
a region Falkner had explored.338 Besides those mentioned in the preceding
paragraph, he talks about the guaiacum or holy wood (palo santo), dragon’s
blood (which he deems more astringent than the drug obtained in Europe),
and the famous balm of aguaribay (“a kind of shrub lentiscus”), which he con-
sidered a digestive and also used for cicatrizing wounds and for hemorrhages,
dysentery, and catarrh. According to Falkner, gum isica (a kind of turpentine)
is used in plasters for sciatica, and also as a liniment and a “cephalic plaster” if
applied to the feet, which are always kept warm by it. He informs that the con-
trayerba root grows in abundance in Córdoba and also the valerian root, which
is larger and much stronger than that found in England (it is used for nervous
disorders and epilepsy). The Guaraní called schynant to two kinds of plant.
One is similar to the calamus aromaticus (Acorus) and the other, which Falkner
describes, is good for affections of brain and nerves.339 Many of these herbs
and roots can be found in Montenegro’s Materia medica, but the accounts are
different.340 Unlike most of those Jesuits who wrote on medicinal products,
Falkner did not depend on Montenegro but on his own medical expertise.
One of the goals of Falkner’s Description of Patagonia was to speculate on
the commercial profit that could arise from the exploitation of the natural
resources of Río de la Plata and Patagonia. It is no wonder then that he con-
secrates the most extensive discussion of herbs to a kind of tea, the “albahaca
de campo,” which grows in Córdoba, Tucumán, and Salta.341 Falkner care-
fully describes the plant and says that its taste is exactly as that of green tea,
although somewhat stronger, which could be due to the fact that the South
American tea is still fresh at the time of recollection and it is not prepared
in the same way as in China. He adds that there is another species of tea in
Chile, the “culem” (culén).342 Falkner tried this tea in several persons and

338 Ibid., 41–45. For an ethnobotanical study of the region see Bárbara Arias Toledo
et al., “Ethnobotanical Knowledge in Rural Communities of Córdoba (Argentina):
the Importance of Cultural and Biogeographical Factors,” Journal of Ethnobiology and
Ethnomedicine 5, no. 40 (2009), http://www.ethnobiomed.com/content/5/1/40.
339 Falkner, Description of Patagonia, 41–43.
340 For example, guayacán, sangre de dragón, contrayerba del Perú, gengibre, and caá-ísí.
Montenegro, Manuscrito, ed. Martín y Valverde, 154–160, 218–221, 452–457, 385–390 and
398–402.
341 Falkner, Description of Patagonia, 44–45. The species in Argentina is Otholobium higue-
rilla (Gill. Ex Hook.) Grimes –Fabaceae–.
342 Otholobium glandulosum (L.) J. W. Grimes –Fabaceae– . I owe both identifications to
Prof. Marcelo Wagner, Museo de Farmacobotánica, Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica,
Universidad de Buenos Aires.
herbals 157

observed that it stimulated the appetite, favored digestion, and cured head-
aches, “in these particulars far exceeding the tea of China”.343
A well known medicament of that time mentioned in Western and Eastern
pharmacopoeias was the bezoar stone, the chalky concretion in the digestive
tract of ruminants to which antidotal and curative properties were ascribed.
These stones occur in the stomach of South American camelids. During the
first decades of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits of the College of San Pablo
(Lima, Peru) had established a prosperous business with the massive expor-
tation of bezoar stones to Europe.344 In his Description of Patagonia, Falkner
talks about the bezoar found in guanacos, vicuñas, and tapirs, endowed, he
says, with diaphoretic virtues. He tells that he administered it in the dose of
one drachm or two scruples in cases of burning sensation in the stomach and
dizziness, founding it preferable to the chalky and mineral powders used in
Europe; he adds that the stone he owned weighted 16 ounces.345 It seems that
Falkner entertained the possibility of trading with bezoar stones in order to
strengthen the shaky economical basis of his mission town in the Pampas. In
an account made by a pulpero (manager of a small grocery store in the coun-
try) dated on 6 February 1747 and enumerating trade products sent to him from
the neighboring Jesuit missions, it is said that on 21 September [of the previous
year] he received “. . . 22 ponchos, 30 bezoar stones, 96 pairs of boots . . .”, and in
December 1745 he bought “. . . a manta, 30 bezoar stones”.346 But the missions
among the peoples of the Pampas soon came to naught.

3.4 A Book of Surgery

Among the medical works written by Jesuits in Paraguay there is an eighteenth-
century medical codex, now lost, which by the beginning of the twentieth
century was held in a Franciscan convent in Catamarca (western Argentina).
Its title is “Book of medical surgery. Transcribed from serious authors for the
alleviation of sick persons. Written in these doctrines of the Society of Jesus”.347
The manuscript is anonymous. On the grounds of the analysis of several

343 Falkner, Description of Patagonia, 45.

344 Luis Martín, The Intellectual Conquest of Peru. The Jesuit College of San Pablo 1568–1767
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1968), 100–101. Cf. Asúa and French, A New World of Animals,
96 and 106–108.
345 Falkner, Description of Patagonia, 89. One apothecary’s drachm is equivalent to 3.6mg; a
scruple is one third of a drachm.
346 Furlong, Tomás Falkner, 55 and 58.
347 “Libro de cirugía médica. Trasladado de autores graves para alivio de los enfermos. Escrito
en estas Doctrinas de la Compañía de Jesús.”
158 chapter 2

passages, historian of medicine Garzón Maceda, who first described it in the

second decade of the twentieth century, thought it was a Jesuit work, perhaps
written in the Chiquitos missions—apparently, the unknown author men-
tioned departures and arrivals of people from those reductions.348 Furlong,
who did not examine the work—for it was already lost by the time he wrote
about it—put into question that supposition. His own hypothesis was that
the work had been written by Montenegro. His arguments are suggestive but
I do not find them entirely compelling.349 The codex bears the same year as
Villodas’s Guaraní receptarium, i.e., 1725. By that time there were three Jesuit
brothers in the missions who worked in a medical or pharmaceutical capac-
ity: Montenegro, Villodas, and Joaquín de Zubeldía.350 The author could have
been any of them and besides, the manuscript could well have been a copy
of an earlier work (as Garzón Maceda thought), in which case the number of
candidates for its authorship widens.
The Book of surgery is a manuscript of 600 pages. In intent and contents,
the text is analogous to the second volume of Aperger’s Tratado breve. In the
introduction, the author admits that he has taken notes from different author-
ities because “being unable to carry many books, I frequently lacked those
who treated the matter of the particular case I confronted”.351 The work con-
tains a list of its sources: Juan de la Torre y Valcárcel, Espejo de philosophia y
compendio de toda la medicina theorica y práctica (Madrid, 1705); Luis Mercado,
Libro de la peste (Madrid, 1599); Felipe Borbón, Medicina demostrativa nece-
saria a los pobres (Zaragoza, 1686); Domingo Trapiella y Montemayor, Llave
de oro medicinal de la salud humana (Madrid, 1713); Agustín Farfán, Tractado
breve de medicina (Mexico, 1592); Jerónimo Soriano, Libro de experimentos
médicos fáciles y verdaderos (Zaragoza, 1595, last edition 1700). Among the sur-
gical works, the compiler drew on Diniosio Daza Chacón, Práctica y teórica de
cirugía (Madrid, 1605), António da Cruz, Recopilaçao de cirugía (Lisbon, 1601),
and Diego Antonio Robledo, Compendio quirúrgico (Madrid, 1687).352

348 See Garzón Maceda, La medicina en Córdoba, 1:479–481.

349 Furlong, Médicos argentinos, 74–81.
350 Furlong does not mention Zubeldía. Given the choice between Montenegro and Villodas
as the author of the Libro de cirugía, he chose the former, for by that time Montenegro had
been working for at least 18 years in the missions, while Villodas had arrived recently. See
Furlong, Médicos argentinos, 80–81.
351 Garzón Maceda, La medicina en Córdoba, 1:477.
352 This list is a reconstruction (the bibliographical data correspond to the first edition of the
works). The author of the manuscript mentions only the last name of each author and on
occasion one or two words of the title.
herbals 159

The now lost Libro de cirugía comprehended the following sections: a list
of prescriptions to be administered orally; an anatomy; a treatise on bloodlet-
ting; diseases of the head, of the chest and of the abdomen; women’s diseases;
a treatise on fevers; chapters on pulse, urine, and crisis; a book on surgery;
a chapter on the cure of morbus gallicus (syphilis); a treatise on prognostics
(medical astrology and bloodletting); a section with several topics including
vipers and the universal antidote; a list of simples and medicinal virtues taken
from Laguna’s commentary on Dioscorides;353 an appendix with medicinal
recipes and surgical procedures taken from the antidotarium of Juan Calvo; a
chapter on purges taken from Steinhöffer’s Florilegium; an index and a table of
simples. At the end, there is a section in a different hand with lists of vegetal
and animal remedies.354 It could be that part of this material occurs also in
Aperger’s Tratado breve.

4 The Herbal Tradition in Paraquaria

According to current opinion, the Jesuit works on materia medica written in

Spanish America profited from local herbal lore.355 Studies of the medical
compilations of Farfán and Steinhöffer show how these works incorporated
many products of native pharmacopoeia. On these grounds and taking their
cue from a 1954 paper by the Spanish-Mexican anthropologist Juan Comas,
López Piñero and Fresquet Febrer have talked of a cultural mestizaje in the
medicine of New Spain.356 Could something analogous be said of the herbals
of Paraguay?
Medical botany is the field in which native knowledge of nature and Jesuit
European science drew closer to one another. Recent ethnobotanical studies
have revealed the richness of the herbal traditions of the Guaraní and the peo-
ples of the Chaco valley.357

353 This section occupies pages 457–513 of the manuscript.

354 Garzón Maceda, La medicina en Córdoba, 1:488–496.
355 See for example, DHCJ, s.v. “Farmacia,” by S. Anagnostou and C. J. McNaspy.
356 Comas, “Influencia indígena en la medicina hipocrática.” Cf. José M. López Piñero and
José Luis Fresquet Febrer, “El mestizaje cultural de la medicina novohispana del siglo XVI
y su influencia en Europa,” in El mestizaje cultural y la medicina novohispana del siglo XVI,
ed. J. L. Fresquet Febrer and J. M. López Piñero (Valencia: Universitat de València-CSIC,
1995), 9–23.
357 An exhaustive expert survey of popular medicine in the area of the Jesuit reductions lists
around 450 species. See Raúl Martínez-Crovetto, Las plantas utilizadas en medicina popu-
lar en el noroeste de Corrientes (República Argentina) (Tucumán: Ministerio de Cultura
160 chapter 2

Our own analysis has hopefully shown that Montenegro’s Materia medica
can also be considered as a synthesis between European medicine and the
plant lore of the Guaraní and other native peoples. To begin with, all the plants
are designated by their Spanish and Guaraní names. The contents of the work
is a mixture of bookish knowledge taken from Laguna’s Dioscorides, the
author’s long experience as an apothecary in Madrid, and a number of reci-
pes obtained from Guaraní healers, some of which he mentions by name, like
Clemente. Its practical and utilitarian approach reveals it as a characteristic
product of the missions. Montenegro’s herbal, Aperger’s medical handbook,
and their likes were not conceived as learned treatises. They were tools designed
to help the missionaries to cope with the momentous questions of health care
in the reductions. The texts were copied and recopied, added to, kept and con-
sulted as a treasure of local experience, which answered local needs with local
resources, among which Guaraní knowledge of plants stood out.
But as discussed above, exchanges between European and native medi-
cine run along two ways. The existence of collections of medicinal recipes
in Guaraní, like that of Brother Villodas and those attributed by Sánchez
Labrador to Montenegro demonstrate that the interchanges were not lim-
ited to Jesuit borrowings from native plant lore. On the contrary, the Guaraní
received inputs from the world of European pharmacopoeia. According to
some Jesuit accounts, not all the curuzuya were acquainted with the native
uses of plants and many had to be trained in European methods. This could
have been a way through which Western ideas about the body, disease, and
therapeutics reached the native communities.358 It has been shown how in
New Spain the native uses of plants were absorbed into collections of medical

y Educación, Fundación Miguel Lillo, 1981). There are also ethnobotanical studies of
Mbyá-Guaraní communities and of the peoples living in the Chaco. For a general biblio-
graphical orientation in the field, see Cecilia Trillo et al., “Revisión de la etnomedicina en
Argentina: construcción de la disciplina y perspectivas para el futuro,” Bonplandia 20, no.
1 (2011): 405–417. For the peoples of the Chaco, see A. Filipov, “La farmacopea natural en
los sistemas terapéuticos de los indígenas pilagá,” Parodiana 10 no. 1–2 (1997): 35–74 and
Pastor Arenas, “Farmacopea y curación de enfermedades entre algunas etnias del Gran
Chaco,” in Farmacobotánica y Farmacognosia en Argentina (1980–1998), ed. A. G. Amat (La
Plata: Ediciones Científicas Argentinas, 2000), 87–118.
358 There has been a debate among medical anthropologists as to whether humoral pathol-
ogy entered South American popular medicine from a native tradition or as a derivation
of learned European medicine. See Audrey Butt Colson and Cesareo de Armellada, “An
Amerindian Derivation for Latin American Creole Illnesses and Their Treatment,” Social
Science and Medicine 17 (1983): 1229–1248 and Foster, “On the Origin of Humoral Medicine
in Latin America.”
herbals 161

recipes like those of Farfán and Steinhöffer only to re-circulate later as popu-
lar medicine, which drew upon those works.359 It might be that some of the
medicaments and plants used by the Guaraní in post-Jesuitical times were
taken from Jesuit receptaria. As shown by the manuscript tradition discussed
above, herbals were surely treasured by the Creole population of the region.
Ethnobotanists who study contemporary native communities find difficult to
distinguish between what is native and traditional from what has been bor-
rowed from Creole medicine.360
Since the pioneer work of Alfred Métraux, modern anthropological studies
of the medicine practiced by the Guaraní and the Chaco tribes have shown
that much of this is shamanistic in character. The most common theory of dis-
ease is that illness is caused by a projectile shot by a shaman at their victims
or by a magic substance inoculated in his/her body. Soul loss is an alternative
explanation.361 Among the Maka of the Paraguayan Chaco medicine includes
scarification, the use of amulets or “love bundles,” shamanism, and natural and
magical medicaments.362 This repertoire is consistent with historical studies
of Guaraní medicine.363 In most peoples of the Chaco, pharmacopoeia would
not have played a prominent role given the shamanistic character of their
traditional medicine.364 Cadogan has claimed that even if it were possible to
distinguish between Mbyá “rational” and “mystical” medicine, religion satu-
rates in such a way the life of that people that trying to discriminate medicine
from religion would conduce to a severe distortion of its understanding.365 To

359 See George M. Foster, “Relationships between Spanish and Spanish-American Folk
Medicine,” The Journal of American Folklore 66, no. 261 (1953): 201–217 and Kay, “The
Florilegio Medicinal.”
360 Gustavo F. Scarpa, “Etnobotánica médica de los indígenas chorote y su comparación con
la de los criollos del Chaco semiárido (Argentina),” Darwiniana 47, no. 1 (2009): 92–107.
361 Métraux, “La causa y el tratamiento mágico de las enfermedades,” 158–159.
362 Pastor Arenas, “Medicine and Magic among the Maka Indians of the Paraguayan Chaco,”
Journal of Ethnopharmacology 21 (1987): 279–295.
363 The classic study is Moisés Bertoni, De la medicina guaraní (Puerto Bertoni: Ex Sylvis,
1927). See also Pardal, Medicina aborigen americana, 93–118; Milcíades Alejo Vignati, “La
medicina entre los aborígenes argentinos,” Publicaciones de la Cátedra de Historia de la
Medicina 5 (1942): 229–271; and Carolina Remorini and Anahí Sy, “Las sendas de la imper-
fección (Tape rupa reki achy). Una aproximación etnográfica a las nociones de salud y
enfermedad en comunidades Mbyá,” Scripta Ethnologica 24, no. 24 (2002): 133–147.
364 See Arenas, “Medicine and Magic among the Maka,” 284 and Scarpa, “Etnobotánica
médica de los indígenas chorote,” 93.
365 León Cadogan, “Síntesis de la medicina racional y mística mbyá-guaraní,” América
Indígena 9, no. 1 (1949): 21–35.
162 chapter 2

the coexistence of shamanism and herbal medicine must be added the use
of magical plants. Keller’s ethnobotanical studies have called attention to the
intimate relationship between magic and plant remedies in the region.366
Particularly interesting are the plants associated with animals, almost all
of which are used in magical procedures or have magical meanings attached
to them.367 According to a member of a Guaraní community in the present
day province of Misiones (Argentina) the gods looked for deputies to solve the
problems of humanity in the interior of plants and ever since the spirits of
the vegetal world help humans in their ailments. In this cultural atmosphere
it is almost impossible to differentiate between magical and purely medicinal
plants.368
The Jesuit chronicles let transpire certain reluctance on the part of the
Fathers to use local vegetal remedies. This attitude might have been origi-
nated in the association of many plants with shamanistic and magical prac-
tices. Keeping oneself within the bounds of European pharmacopoeia was a
way to steer clear of contamination with beliefs and rituals considered satanic.
Montenegro’s stress upon the condition of good Christians of his native infor-
mants might well have allayed his doubts with respect to the suspicious char-
acter of the plants he learned to use from them. Ethnobotanical studies show
that in some Guaraní groups, expertise on the gathering and the use of plants
resides in the opygua or religious leader of the community.369 It is also likely that
shamans did not want to share with the whites their knowledge of the curative
plants as a strategy of cultural resistance.
Jesuit missionaries in Paraguay and Río de la Plata cared for the soul as well
as for the body of their catechumens. Outbreaks of infectious diseases were a
regular occurrence in the life of the villages with devastating consequences for

366 In an Mbyá Community in Argentina, 40% of the 226 plant species used as medicine
respond to the doctrine of the signature by which the form, color or scent of a plant indi-
cates its therapeutic use. For example, “kururu ka’a” (toad herb, hierba del sapo) is applied
to swollen legs (inflammation) because the toad augments and diminishes its size when
menaced. See Héctor A. Keller, “La doctrina de la signatura en una comunidad Mbya
Guaraní de San Pedro, Misiones, Argentina,” Comunicaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas.
Argentina, Instituto de Botánica del Nordeste, Facultad de Ciencias Agrarias, Universidad
Nacional del Nordeste, 2003, http://www1.unne.edu.ar/cyt/2003/comunicaciones/06-
Biologicas/B-001.PDF.
367 Héctor A. Keller, “Problemas de la etnotaxonomía guaraní: ‘Las plantas de los animales’,”
Bonplandia 20, no. 2 (2011): 111–136.
368 Héctor Keller, “Notas sobre medicina y magia entre los guaraníes de Misiones, Argentina.
Un enfoque etnobotánico,” Suplemento Antropológico 42, no. 2 (2007), 366–367.
369 Ibid., 358.
herbals 163

the native population. They also had to deal with epidemics in their colleges
and estancias. Following the universal Jesuit tradition, lay brothers trained as
apothecaries or surgeons came mostly from the German Assistancy and were
sent to the Guaraní missions or stayed in the colleges. Large pharmacies were
organized in Córdoba and Buenos Aires and eventually served the necessi-
ties of such large towns. Most of the drugs used and sold were imported from
Europe, but by and by Jesuit pharmacists began to use substitutes found in the
surrounding countryside. While the pharmacies in those urban centers could
boast of a rather rich stock of medicaments, the Fathers in charge of the mis-
sions had to use whatever they could. The care of the sick in the reductions was
in the hands of Guaraní male nurses supervised by the priests, but the ultimate
responsibility remained with the Fathers. A few of these curuzuya were skilled
in the healing practices of their peoples. Those Christian converts might have
played a role in the transmission of native knowledge of plants to the Jesuits.
This crucible of frequent and at times conflictive exchanges between two
cultures of healing, European and native, is the context out of which the Jesuit
literature on herbal medicine arose. The core of this tradition is Montenegro’s
Materia medica, copied widely in an abbreviated format that left aside the
descriptions of the plants and the pictures. Some versions of Montenegro’s trea-
tise circulated under the name of Sigismund Aperger. Aperger’s Tratado breve
de medicina was a medical handbook collated from works of popular medicine
such as those produced in other Jesuit mission territories. There were other
works of similar import, now lost, like the anonymous Libro de cirugía and
the book on local drugs which Falkner was said to have written. Descriptions
of herbs and their virtues also formed an extensive part of the botanical sec-
tions of the Jesuit encyclopedias of natural history, such as Sánchez Labrador’s
Paraguay Natural. Collections of medicinal recipes, fragments from medical
books, and lists of plants were copied and circulated in the region until the first
decades of the nineteenth century, which suggests a persistent and pervading
influence of Jesuit materia medica in popular medicine.
 chapter 3

Maps

In his Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America,

Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) admitted that “the missionaries . . . were
the only geographers of the most inland parts of the [American] continents”.1
Anybody conversant with the exploits of Fathers Marquette, Kino, and Samuel
Fritz would grant that the Humboldtian assertion applies to the Jesuits with
particular force. It is not exaggeration to say that the itineraries followed by
the members of the Society of Jesus across and along the Americas during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be taken as a short guide to their
geography.2 Hardly any region of Central and South America was left unex-
plored by them. Their geographical endeavors, either crowned by success or
fraught with disaster, were moved by the dynamo of their missionary zeal. The
goal of the Society of Jesus was to preach the Christian faith all over the world,
which frequently meant surveying territories so far unknown to Western eyes.3
The spatial deployment of the missionaries resulted in hundreds of journey
logs, diaries, geographical accounts, charts, and maps which are a rich source
of ethnographical, geographical, historical, and scientific information about
the natural and human environment of the New World in Early Modern times.
As Clossey has cogently argued, maps were the best possible visual medium
to express the Jesuit ideal of global mission and as such they were used and
interpreted.4
By the time the Jesuits arrived in the southern cone of South America, the
lands of Paraquaria were all but uncharted territories. The famous French
geographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville (1697–1782) claimed that “the
Paraguay demonstrates all that geography owes to the Jesuit Fathers, because

1 Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of the Equinoctial Regions of America: During
the Years 1799–1804, trans. Thomasina Ross, 3 vols. (London: Henry Bohn, 1852–1853), 2:430.
2 For a brief survey of Jesuit geographical exploration in South America, see Edward J.
Goodman, The Explorers of South America (New York: Macmillan; London: Collier-Macmillan,
1972): 87–101.
3 Anne Godlewska, “The Fascination of Jesuit Cartography,” in Jesuit Encounters in the New
World: Jesuit Chroniclers, Geographers, Educators and Missionaries in the Americas (1549–1767),
ed. Joseph A. Gagliano and Charles E. Ronan S.J. (Roma: Institutum Historicum Societatis
Iesu, 1997), 106.
4 Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Missions (Cambridge, Engl.:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 73–76.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004256774_��5

maps 165

without them we would be limited in what concerns the interior of this coun-
try to a small number of circumstances, drawn with effort from some Spanish
history or a voyager’s itinerary”.5 No less than in the rest of Iberian America,
Jesuits in Paraguay and Río de la Plata were actively involved in exploration
and mapmaking.6 Furlong, who has studied extensively the cartography of his
religious brothers, numbered 18 Jesuit maps of the River Plate region produced
between 1647 and 1730 and 80 between 1730 and 1798.7 His claim that all the
maps of these territories drawn in Europe during the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries were copies of Jesuit maps might perhaps be overoptimistic,
but it is undeniable that the core of the region’s Early Modern cartography
bore the Jesuit imprint.8
In the universe of Jesuit maps of Paraguay and Río de la Plata there are stars
of different magnitudes. For the most, what we find are schematic drawings,
rich in information and without aesthetic pretensions, drawn to illustrate the
diary of an expedition, to make a statement in a political dispute, or to resume
valuable data about the missionary field of action. Even if compared with
the productions of the famous Jesuits cartographers in the missions of the
Far East the maps of Paraguay make a poor show, it is still undeniable that in
a modest way they laid the foundations of the scientific geographical repre-
sentation of a large track of continent. The more elaborate maps, those that
were printed and circulated in Europe, were made after the 1730s with contem-
porary standard techniques. Moreover, consecrated European cartographers
often remade Jesuit maps, to which they added aesthetic value and the critique
of professional expertise.
Certainly, maps experienced a significant improvement in accuracy with
the astronomical measurement of latitudes and longitudes by José Quiroga,
Buenaventura Suárez, and other Jesuits. The introduction of these techniques
marked the major turning point in the Jesuit cartography of the region.9 Since
that time, many maps included a table with coordinates of the mission towns

5 Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, “Observations géographiques sur la carte du Paraguay

par l’auteur de cette carte,” Lettres édifiantes et curieuses 21 (1734): 429–448.
6 For an overall study of Jesuit cartography in Spanish America see David Buisseret, “Jesuit
Cartography in Central and South America,” in Gagliano and Ronan, Jesuit Encounters in the
New World, 113–162.
7 Guillermo Furlong, “Cartografía colonial,” in Ricardo Levene, ed., Historia de la Nación
Argentina, 3rd ed., 11 vols. in 15 bks. (Buenos Aires: Academia Nacional de la Historia, Editorial
El Ateneo, 1961), vol. 4, bk. 2, 193.
8 Guillermo Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica del Río de la Plata, 2 vols. (Buenos Aires, Peuser, 1936)
1:8–9.
9 Furlong, “Cartografía colonial,” 194.
166 chapter 3

and cities supplemented by an éloge of Suárez, the local glory of Jesuit astron-
omy (more on him in the next chapter). But Suárez was just the most visible
figure of a general trend, for a working knowledge of practical astronomy (i.e.,
measurement of latitude and longitude, observation of comets, construc-
tion of sundials), was not uncommon among those Jesuits who embarked on
missions overseas. Furlong cites an unidentified document enumerating the
instruments that the Swiss Martin Schmid (1694–1772) took with him to South
America: a micrometer, a pantometer, one volume of tables, and four volumes
of the mathematical works of Christian Wolff.10 Schmid is mostly known
for his labor among the Chiquitos as a musician, clockmaker, architect, and
wood artisan.11 A fellow countryman of his, Karl Rechberg (1688–1746), born
in Altdorf, arrived in Paraguay in 1717, where he eventually became procura-
tor of the college of Tarija and afterwards procurator general of the province.12
In a letter from 1740, Matthias Strobl told his correspondent that Rechberg,
“thanks to his astronomical and mathematical knowledge, began to work in a
great cartographical work of the whole country and has already composed a
beautiful map of Paraguay.” Furlong attributed to Rechberg the map entitled
“Missiones, quas Provincia Societatis Jesu Paraquaria excolit ad flumina Parana
et Uruguay ex natione Guaranica accurate delineatae,” engraved in Vienna in
1744 by Johann Cristoph Winkler (1701–1770).13 The Belgian Jesuit Ignace Chomé
(1696–1768), born in Douai, arrived in the Río de la Plata together with Schmid
in the expedition led by Jerónimo Herrán (1672–1743). He consecrated himself
to the care of slaves in Buenos Aires and later worked in the missions of the
Chiriguanos and Chiquitos. While a student and upon his wish of joining the
missions in the Far East, Chomé “was devoted to the study of mathematics
and languages.” In the diary he kept during the crossing of the Atlantic, he tells
that the pilot consulted him regarding the longitude of the position of the ship
and corrected the course according to his recommendations.14 Chomé wrote
a grammar of the language of the Chiquitos, now lost, and from his mission
among the Zamucos tried several times to find a route to Paraguay through the
Chaco.15 Paucke mentions that he had mathematical instruments, among them

10 These were surely Christian Wolff, Elementa Matheseos universae, 5 vols. (Halle, 1713–1741).
See Guillermo Furlong, Matemáticos argentinos durante la dominación hispánica (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Huarpes, 1945), 92–93.
11 See DHCJ, s. v. “Schmid, Martin,” by F. Strobel and A. Menacho.
12 Sierra, Los jesuitas germanos, 399.
13 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:67.
14 Louis Dechristé, Vie du R. P. Ignace Chomé (Douai: Dechristé, 1864), 13 and 18.
15 Sainz Ollero et al., José Sánchez Labrador, 279.
maps 167

a proportional circle entirely gilded that had cost him six ducats in Augsburg.16
As a rule, those Jesuits who had been educated in Germany and the lands of
the Habsburg Empire were familiar with astronomical instruments and were
able to draw maps and plans.17
The survey of the Patagonian coast by José Quiroga and José Cardiel, the
recognition of the Pampas and Patagonia by Thomas Falkner and Cardiel,
the upstream navigation of the Río Paraguay by Sánchez Labrador, and many
others expeditions resulted in more or less circumstantiated accounts accom-
panied by maps.18 The Pilcomayo River, whose headwaters are in the foot-
hills of the Andes in Bolivia, runs across the Chaco plains and flows into the
Paraguay River near Asunción. The first sketch of its course was the work of
the Jesuit Gabriel Patiño (1662–1729), who between 14 August and 1 December
1721 embarked in an upstream expedition, from Asunción, covering 471 leagues
(1224 miles). The economic burden of this enterprise was borne entirely by the
Society of Jesus. Patiño was accompanied by three other Jesuits and a crew
consisting of one Sergeant Mayor, six Spanish men, and sixty natives, distrib-
uted in a large vessel and two boats. Once arrived at a point where the river
diverges into two branches, Patiño and Father Bartolomé de Niebla (1672–1722)
continued in two boats with three Spaniards and 34 natives.19
Maps were also drawn to illustrate histories and chorographic treatises, such
as Quiroga’s map of 1749, which was undertook to accompany Lozano’s History
of the Society of Jesus in Paraguay, or Joaquín Camaño’s map of the Chaco
(1789), composed for José Jolís’s Saggio sulla storia naturale della Provincia del
Gran Chaco (fig. 3.1).20 Jolís was well qualified to write an account of the region.
He had made three attempts to enter the Chaco from Tucumán—in 1760, in
1765, and in 1767—and left diaries of each of them.21

16 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, vol. 3, bk. 1, 83.

17 The same happened in New Spain, see Buisseret, “Jesuit Cartography.”
18 The explorations of Quiroga, Cardiel and Furlong in the Pampas and Patagonia, and of
Sánchez Labrador up the Paraguay River will be treated below.
19 Patiño’s chart of the Pilcomayo is lost. See Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:43. For an
abstract of his diary see José Arenales, Noticias históricas y descriptivas sobre el gran país
del Chaco y Río Bermejo (Buenos Aires: Hallet, 1833), 15–28.
20 See Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:71–74 and 125–129.
21 See Ernesto Maeder, “Estudio preliminar sobre el Ensayo de historia natural de la provin-
cia del Gran Chaco del P. José Jolís S. J.,” in Jolís, Ensayo, 9–29. The diary of the third expe-
dition (1767) has been partly edited, see Guillermo Furlong, “Diario del viaje o entrada
que hizo el Padre José Jolís de la Compañía de Jesús a lo interior del Chaco. Año de 1767,”
Estudios 8 (1920): 294–302. Cf. Cardiel’s brief account of the Chaco, in Guillermo Furlong,
“Recuerdos del Gran Chaco por el P. José Cardiel S. J.,” Estudios 8 (1920): 372–383.
168 chapter 3

FIGURE 3.1 “Carta del Gran Chaco e paesi confinanti . . . ,” drawn by Joaquín Camaño, S.J. This
map is included in José Jolís, Saggio sulla storia naturale della Provincia del Gran
Chaco (Faenza, 1789). Map Collection, Biblioteca Nacional (Buenos Aires).
maps 169

There were of course many maps of the thirty Guaraní towns, like for instance
the aforementioned map attributed to Father Carlos Rechberg. The bound-
ary treaty of 1750 between Madrid and Lisbon fostered a flowering of polemic
Jesuit maps aimed at showing the dramatic results that would arise from the
cession to Portugal of the “seven towns” east of the Uruguay River, such as
Cardiel’s map of 1752.22
For the most, these Jesuit maps represent the territory in terms of the reli-
gious mission their authors sought to fulfill. Geography was at the service of
religion. One of the principal preoccupations of the Jesuit mapmakers was to
convey information about the localization of cities and towns of ecclesiastical
import and the native peoples they sought to Christianize. In this sense, most
of the maps were thematic, insofar as geography was seen as a stage of a par-
ticular event or process.23
The most credited cartographers of the Paraguay missions were the
Spaniards José Quiroga (1707–1784) and José Cardiel (1704–1781). To these
should be added Joaquín Camaño (1737–1820), who worked in Italy after the
suppression of the Society. But many maps remained anonymous. The most
sophisticated maps were those dedicated to the superior generals of the
Society of Jesus, such as the one dedicated to Father General Vincenzo Caraffa
(1585–1649), which Furlong tentatively dated circa 1647. The Latin verses of the
dedicatory in the 1667 edition extol the hills, woods, vast plains, and streams of
Paraquaria, a barely inhabited land, which is to be Christianized by the Jesuits.
This idea of a primeval, barbaric, pagan landscape that awaits to be cultivated
and consecrated by the efforts of the Fathers is a topos of much of Jesuit car-
tography.24 This particular map, entitled “Paraquaria vulgo Paraguay cum adja-
centibus” was reproduced in the twelfth volume of Willem J. Blaeu’s Le grand
atlas, ou Cosmographie Blaviane (Amsterdam, 1667), in Arnoldus Montanus’
De nieuwe en onbekende Weereld [The New and Unknown World] (Amsterdam,
1671), and in the translation of the latter into English, that is, John Ogilby’s
America, being an accurate description of the New World (London, 1671) (fig. 3.2).

22 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:78–80. See also José Torre Revello, Mapas y planos
referentes al Virreinato del Río de la Plata conservados en el Archivo General de Simancas
(Buenos Aires: Peuser, 1938), 12–13 and plate VI.
23 Norman J. W. Thrower, Maps and Civilization. Cartography in Culture and Society, 3rd ed.
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 95.
24 The notion of “the pristine myth” was coined by William Denevan in idem, “The Pristine
Myth. The Landscape of the Americas in 1492,” Annals of the Association of American
Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992): 369–385. See Denevan’s recent article for comments on
the historiographical fortune of this expression: idem, “The ‘Pristine Myth’ Revisited,”
Geographical Record 101, no. 4 (2011): 576–591.
 170 chapter 3

FIGURE 3.2 “Paraquaria cum adjacentibus.” Original in Colegio del Salvador (Buenos Aires).
Reproduced from Carlos Leonhardt S.J., ed., Cartas anuas de la Provincia del Paraguay,
Chile y Tucumán de la Compañía de Jesús (1609–1614). Buenos Aires: Facultad de
Filosofía y Letras, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, Documentos para la Historia
Argentina, 1927.

It has been claimed that it was also the basis for a map made by Nicolas Sanson
d’Abbeville (Paris, 1656).25 The map comprehends the territories of Río de la
Plata, Paraguay, southern Brazil, northern Chile, and southern Peru. Besides
indicating geographical accidents, it plots the main Spanish cities (those still
on foot and those destroyed), towns assigned to the care of secular clerics,
Jesuit reductions (those installed and those destroyed), Franciscan reductions,
and the lands inhabited by infideles. The conventions used in this map for the
representation of geographical accidents were standard in Jesuit cartography
of this region and of Iberian America.26 Mountainous terrain is symbolized

25 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:26–30. Apparently, maps 2 and 3 in Furlong’s atlas are two
different versions of this map (the text is muddled).
26 See for example the use of these conventions in the map that accompanies Gumilla’s
El Orinoco Ilustrado in Ewalt, Peripheral Wonders, 68–73.
maps 171

through the use of an accumulation of small “molehills” or “sugar loaves;” the

Paraná and the Uruguay Rivers are very wide, and wooded lands are repre-
sented through clusters of small tiny trees.27 The lettering that indicates the
lands of the native peoples is rather conspicuous, making manifest the value
of this kind of information. In one of the editions of this map, the cartouche
with the title is surrounded by a group of half-naked natives with head-dresses,
a goat, a jaguar, and a boy holding a parrot in his hand, very much in the style
of the allegorical representations of South America in seventeenth-century
European iconography.
It is interesting to note that the map entitled “Paraquariae Provinciae
Societatis Jesu cum adjacentibus novissima descriptio,” finished in 1722 and
printed in 1726 (i.e., 75 years after the chart described above), utilizes the same
cartographic conventions, and if we make allowance for its greater complexity,
shares an air of family with the earlier map. The 1722 map—perhaps the most
complete of those made by the Jesuits in Paraquaria until the middle of the
eighteenth century—represents South America between latitudes 10° to 36°
south. Some copies of this map were engraved in Rome by Joannes Petroschi in
1726, others by Matthaeus Seutter in Augsburg. Furlong has attributed this map
to the lay brother Juan Francisco Dávila (or de Ávila, 1663–1733), a native of
Buenos Aires, who is said to have employed ten years on its making.28 The map
is dedicated to Superior General Michelangelo Tamburini (1648–1730). In a let-
ter written in 1722, Brother Dávila explains that he made it as an answer to a
request of the Father Provincial, because the Superior General needed to know
the distances between the Jesuit establishments in order to arrange more effi-
ciently the transference of personnel in the country.29 The highly tight organi-
zation of the Society of Jesus and the necessity of elevating to Rome frequent
missionary reports (accompanied with maps) contributed to the consolida-
tion of the Jesuit culture of mapping.30
A map from 1732 and with the same title that the one described in the pre-
ceding paragraph also enjoyed some fame. It was also engraved by Joannes
Petroschi in Rome. The map is essentially the same as that of 1722/1726, but
there are corrections in the region of the Zamucos and Chiquitos. The number
of the rivers that flow into the Uruguay River is greater and those flowing to the
Argentine coast are better drawn. Furlong hesitatingly attributed this map to
Father Antonio Machoni, who was procurator of the province of Paraguay in

27 See Thrower, Maps and Civilization, 81 for the use of these cartographic symbols.
28 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:44–49.
29 Ibid., 1:47.
30 Buisseret, “Jesuit Cartography,” 161.
172 chapter 3

FIGURE 3.3 Map in Pedro Lozano’s Descripción Chorographica del terreno, ríos, árboles y
animales de las dilatadísimas Provincias del Gran Chaco (Córdoba [Spain]: Colegio
de la Asunción, 1733). Its author was Antonio Machoni S.J., procurator of Paraquaria
in Rome and editor of the book. Map Collection, Biblioteca Nacional (Buenos Aires).
 maps 173

FIGURE 3.4 Jean Baptiste Bourguinon d’Anville, “IHS / Le Paraguay, où les RR. PP. de la Compagnie de Jésus
ont répandu leurs Missions” (1733). In Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (Paris, 1781), 9:254.

Europe between 1731 and 1733. Machoni was the author of the map that accom-
panied Lozano’s Corographic Description of the Great Chaco (1733) (fig. 3.3).31
In October 1733, d’Anville finished a map entitled “Le Paraguay, où les RR. PP.
de la Compagnie de Jesus ont répandu leurs Missions.” It was eventually edited
in one of the volumes of the Lettres édifiantes et curieuses with a French trans-
lation of a letter of Father Jerónimo Herrán to the viceroy of Peru and other
letters and materials related to Paraguay (fig. 3.4).32 D’Anville wrote a short

31 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:54–56.

32 Jerónimo Herrán, “État présent de la Province de Paraguay,” Lettres édifiantes et curieuses
21 (1734), 279.
174 chapter 3

essay on his map, in which he affirmed that it was based on Jesuit maps, in
particular those dedicated to Father Tamburini (this is Dávila’s) and to Father
Caraffa (mentioned above). Beleaguered by a lack of data about longitude, the
Royal Cartographer faced an ungrateful task, which he sought to ease discuss-
ing his predicament in extent.33 He was familiar with Jesuit mapmaking, for
he had been the author of the maps in the famous Nouvel Atlas de la Chine, de
la Tartarie chinoise et du Thibet (The Hague, 1737) compiled by the Jesuit Jean-
Baptiste Du Halde (1674–1743).
Our look to Jesuit exploration and cartography will be focused on the work
of José Quiroga and the Jesuit expeditions to Patagonia, followed by a brief sec-
tion about the exploration of the Pilcomayo and Paraguay Rivers. Afterwards,
we will comment on the economic, political, and religious dimensions of map-
making in Paraquaria. The chapter ends with a discussion of the aboriginal
contributions to Jesuit cartography in the region.

1 Quiroga

Before becoming a Jesuit, José Quiroga had been a naval officer, although the
circumstances and character of his training are rather hazy.34 He was born near
Pontevedra, in Galicia (Spain) on 14 March 1707 and entered the Society of Jesus
either in Valladolid in 1736 or in Salamanca in 1739. After studying theology,
he taught grammar and studied mathematics in the College of San Ambrosio
(Valladolid). On 22 February 1785, the exiled Jesuit Joaquín Camaño—born in
La Rioja (Río de la Plata) and also a cartographer—wrote to his cousin, the
Jesuit Juan Francisco Ortiz de Ocampo (1729-1816), criticizing the latter’s admi-
ration for Quiroga´s mapmaking achievements. Camaño contended that the
enthusiasm some Jesuits felt for Quiroga was in explicit detriment of the fame
of Buenaventura Suárez. According to Camaño, Quiroga ignored algebra, dif-
ferential analysis, and higher geometry and his expertise was limited to “vulgar
geometry,” simple geography, and a spat of astronomy, in brief, all the subjects
“learned by the Spanish guardiamarinas (midshipmen) in their celebrated
Tosca, who if now came to life would have to learn again half of what he knew
if he wished to be called a mathematician”.35 It is not unlikely that Camaño’s

33 Anville, “Observations géographiques sur la carte du Paraguay.”

34 The more complete study of Quiroga is Guillermo Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga (Buenos
Aires: Peuser, 1930).
35 Cited in Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 43–49. Camaño is referring to the Compendio
mathematico in nine volumes (Madrid, 1707–1715) written by Tomás Vicente Tosca (1651–
maps 175

critique of Quiroga’s and his defense of Suárez were the expression of tensions
between the Jesuits born in the Rio de la Plata and their Spanish colleagues at
the time of the Italian exile. In any case, Quiroga’s nautical skills were enough
for the task he had been assigned. When he arrived in Buenos Aires on 15 July
1745, he was received as a “teacher of mathematics” hallowed with an aura of
scientific prestige. Soon the cabildo of the city took the opportunity of his pres-
ence and called a meeting of the sea pilots stationed in the port, hoping they
would establish the magnetic declination of the place.36 In that opportunity
Quiroga might have drawn a map of the city.37
Quiroga’s main claim to fame is perhaps his participation in the 1746 Spanish
naval expedition to Patagonia, which surveyed the coast in order to look for a
convenient location to install a settlement or a mission. The voyage was a result
of the congruent interests of the Jesuits and the crown. In 1743 the Jesuit procu-
rator in Madrid Jean Joseph Rico asked the Consejo Real to petition the king
for a ship that could help establish reductions in the southern territories of
the Río de la Plata.38 For his part, Philip V was worried about the incursions of
English ships along the seaboard that extends from Buenos Aires to the Strait
of Magellan. Besides, he wished to affirm a commercial route to the Pacific
through Cape Horn, once the old one, which went from Lima and then crossed
the Panama isthmus, was stopped after the British capture of Portobello in 1739
during the war of Jenkins’ Ear.39 In the early decades of the eighteenth cen-
tury the French had sent two scientific and cartographic expeditions which
sailed round the extreme tip of South America while recognizing the Río de
la Plata, Chile and Peru. Louis Feuillée (1660–1732), a member of the Order of
the Minims, visited the region between 1707 and 1711. This expedition was soon
followed by the circumnavigation of the engineer Amédée-François Frézier

1723), a standard text in Spanish and Iberoamerican nautical academies. Tosca was a
priest of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri from Valencia.
36 This was an important issue, because the boundaries of the urban lots and country states
had to be laid out according to the corrected compass course.
37 Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 28–29.
38 HIA 5:67. The Flemish Jesuit Jean Joseph Rico (1685–1748), born in Ostende, was procurator
of the province of Paraquaria from 1734 and stayed in Madrid attending the business of
the province from 1739 to 1745, together with the Spanish Diego de Garvía (1668–1759). See
Storni, Catálogo, 238.
39 Raúl J. Mandrini, “El viaje de la fragata San Antonio, en 1745–1746. Reflexiones sobre los
procesos políticos operados entre los indígenas pampeano-patagónicos,” Revista Española
de Antropología Americana 30 (2000): 236–238.
176 chapter 3

(1682–1773), between 1712 and 1714.40 The circumnavigation of George Anson

(1697–1762) between 1740 and 1745 caused the Spanish crown to dispatch a float
of five warships and an auxiliary vessel commanded by José Alfonso Pizarro
(1689–1762) with the order of intercepting him. When in March 1741 the Spanish
squadron reached the Strait, they were hit by a violent storm. One of the ships
capsized and the rest sailed back to Buenos Aires severely damaged and with
heavy losses among the crew. In the end, with the only frigate left, Pizarro left
Buenos Aires and crossed the Strait into the Pacific to engage the British.41 It is
against this backdrop of French and British interloping that Philip V decided to
launch an expedition to the southern Atlantic.
Given his nautical experience, Quiroga was one of the three Jesuits desig-
nated to join the expedition to the Strait. He was accompanied by the Austrian
Jesuit Matthias Strobl (or Strobel, 1696–1769) and the Spanish José Cardiel.42
For the Society of Jesus, this enterprise was part of an advancing front of mis-
sions among the peoples of southern Río de la Plata, warlike horsemen who
roamed the Pampas living on trade and pillage and who had so far proved
impervious to Christianization. The Jesuit attempts to establish reductions in
the province of Buenos Aires during the 1740s were also in line with the efforts
of the government to stabilize the situation of that troublesome southern
frontier.
After an attack of the Pampas led by cacique Cangapol on the settlement of
Magdalena that resulted in a massacre of 200 white persons and the robbery of
20,000 heads of cattle, a peace treaty had been signed that established the Río
Salado as a boundary.43 Eventually the Jesuits created three reductions south of
that border: Nuestra Señora de la Concepción with the Pampas (1740), Nuestra
Señora del Pilar with Serranos (1747) and Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados

40 Feuillée’s observations were collected in the two volumes of his Journal des observations
physiques, mathématiques et botaniques (Paris: Pierre Giffart, 1714). Frézier published his
account as Relation du voyage de la mer du Sud, aux côtes du Chili, du Pérou et de Brésil, fait
pendant les années 1712, 1713, et 1714 (Paris: J.-G. Nyon, 1716). The work includes a map of the
Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego.
41 Anson’s maps and charts of the coast of the southern extreme of South America (Atlas
to Anson’s Voyage round the World [London, 1745]) would be used by Falkner for his own
map.
42 Both had arrived in Buenos Aires in 1729 as part of the missionary party led by Jerónimo
Herrán and were soon assigned to Guaraní missions. In 1740 Strobl was sent to establish a
reduction with the Pampas, in the province of Buenos Aires, while Cardiel was involved
in the foundation of the first reduction of Abipones, in the north of Santa Fe (1743).
43 Jones, “Warfare, Reorganization, and Readaptation,” 160.
maps 177

with Puelches (1750).44 By the first years of the 1750s all three were gone.
Contemporary sources attributed the failure of this missionary experience to
the action of the frontier liquor traders and to the independent and belligerent
nature of the native peoples, who would not tolerate being reduced.45

2 Astronomical Instruments

Father Jean Joseph Rico, the procurator of the province of Paraquaria who had
conducted in Madrid the negotiations for the expedition to Patagonia, gave
instructions to the Jesuit cosmographer Manuel de Campos (1681–1758) in
Lisbon to buy telescopes and “precision clocks” (watches).46 Father Campos
was a distinguished figure in the Portuguese scientific scenario. At the begin-
ning of the eighteenth century the mathematical studies in the Jesuit colleges of
Portugal experienced a renovation promoted by Father General Tirso González
(1687–1715), on the grounds that those institutions did not provide well-trained
missionaries to the Far East.47 This reform resulted in the flowering of Jesuit
mathematicians like Inácio Vieira (1678–1739) and Manuel de Campos. The lat-
ter succeeded the former as a teacher at the Aula da Esfera in the Colégio de
Santo Antão and was eventually received as a geographical advisor in the Royal
Academy of Portuguese History. From 1721 to 1728 Campos stayed in Rome, where
he had arrived in the entourage of Cardinal Pereira. Subsequently, he taught

44 The Pampas, who spoke Gennaken, were called by contemporaries Querandí, Serranos and
Puelches lived in the grasslands north of the Negro River. See Ibid., 143.
45 The most important source for this episode is Sánchez Labrador. See idem, Paraguay
Cathólico. Los indios pampas, puelches y patagones, ed. Guillermo Furlong (Buenos Aires:
Viau y Zona, 1936). Guillermo Furlong, Entre los pampas de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires:
San Pablo, 1938) is a patchwork of the narratives of Strobl, Sánchez Labrador, Cardiel,
Falkner, and others. For a factual account, see HIA 5:56–83.
46 Campos acted as a business agent in Lisbon for the affairs of the province. See Guillermo
Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez (1679–1750),” in idem, Glorias santafecinas. Buenaventura
Suárez, Francisco Javier Iturri, Cristóbal Altamirano. Estudios biobibliográficos (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Surgo, 1929), 104–107. Furlong interprets that two sets of instruments were
bought, one for Suárez and one for Quiroga. See idem, Matemáticos argentinos, 62–65.
M. Galindo and M. A. Rodríguez-Meza have argued that Rico bough only one set of instru-
ments for Quiroga, which sounds likely. See idem, “Buenaventura Suarez, S.J. (1679–1750).
Part 1: Telescope Maker, Jovian Satellites Observer,” Revista Mexicana de Física 57, no. 2
(2011): 121–132. See p. 228, note 85 for further discussion.
47 Henrique Leitão, “Jesuit Mathematical Practice in Portugal, 1540–1759,” in The New Science
and Jesuit Science: Seventeenth-Century Perspectives, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Dordrecht:
Kluwer, 2003), 238.
178 chapter 3

at the Colegio Imperial in Madrid, but Philip V, who had named him cosmó-
grafo mayor of Spain, in 1733 ordered him to leave the country on account of
political intrigues. Back in Lisbon, Campos reassumed his teaching activities at
St. Anthony. He wrote some didactic works on geometry and trigonometry.48
The negotiations for obtaining the astronomical instruments were carried
out during the first months of 1744. Campos protested about the difficulty of
obtaining those things in Lisbon and suggested that they should be ordered to
London.49 In his next letter, around two weeks later, he kept complaining, for
as he said, “the Portuguese are not very fond of these trinkets,” so that obtaining
them in Lisbon was just a matter of luck.50 This letter included a list of instru-
ments which seems to be lost. But Furlong transcribes a list of astronomical
instruments with an estimation of their prizes, which has obviously been writ-
ten by an expert and could correspond to that of Father Campos.51 Rico’s order
included an English 15–16 feet telescope, an astrolabe, a 10–12 feet spyglass,
two or more Martineau watches, a book of Ephemerides (Campos suggested
that of Manfredi), and a set of mathematical implements.52 By 11 March 1744
Campos had commissioned two telescopes (of eight and 16 feet, respectively)
and two precision clocks.53 On 16 April he wrote again to Rico telling him that
the clocks were already in his hand and the telescopes were almost finished.54
Three weeks later, on 6 May, he wrote to Rico once more, this time informing
that a certain Amaral was carrying “a long and narrow crate which contained
the telescopes and the clocks in two small boxes”.55
In the rendition of accounts for the year 1744 that Father Rico elevated to
the Procurator General of the Indies Pedro Ignacio de Altamirano (1603–1770),

48 See Francisco Rodrigues, Historia da Companhía de Jesús na Asistência de Portugal, 4 vols.

in 7 bks. (Porto: Livraria Apostolado da Imprensa, 1931–1950), 1:298–299, and vol. 4, bk. 1,
400–424; DHCJ, s. v. “Campos, Manuel de,” by A. Dinis. Campos wrote his Elementos de
Geometría Plana e Solida (1735) for teaching in the Colegio de Santo Antão. In 1737 he
published Trigonometria Plana e Esférica and also wrote a Synopse trigonométrica plana
e esférica, which has not survived. See Antonio Alberto de Andrade, Vernei e a cultura do
seu tempo (Coimbra. Universidade de Coimbra, 1965), 16.
49 Campos to Rico, 19 February 1744, Compañía de Jesús, s. IX 6.9.7, AGN.
50 Campos to Rico, 7 March 1744, Compañía de Jesús, s. IX 6.9.7, AGN.
51 Furlong, Matemáticos argentinos, 62–63. There is no mention of the date of the document.
52 The watches are described in the documents either as “Martiron,” or correctly, as
“Martineau clocks” (Joseph Martineau was a well-known Huguenot clockmaker active in
London by mid-eighteenth century).
53 Campos to Rico, 11 March 1744, Compañía de Jesús, s. IX 6.9.7, AGN.
54 Campos to Rico, 16 April 1744, Compañía de Jesús, s. IX 6.9.7, AGN.
55 Campos to Rico, 6 May 1744, Compañía de Jesús, s. IX 6.9.7, AGN.
maps 179

he mentions “two English clocks by Martineau” ($ 62.400) and two telescopes,

one of 12 and the other of 24 palms ($ 36.000).56 It seems that these instruments
actually arrived in Buenos Aires.57 In another rendering of accounts (this one
addressed to the father provincial) dated 3 May 1745, Father Rico says that he
expended 30 gold coins (the equivalent of 300 pesos in Lisbon) to buy through
the intermediacy of Father Campos “the mathematical instruments which by
agreement of the Council [of the Indies] I was asked to obtain from England
for Father Quiroga”.58 A list that most likely corresponded to the instruments
acquired by Rico has been preserved: two telescopes (8 and 16 feet), two clocks,
a compass set, paper for maps, two globes, two maps and “a book of the south-
ern stars,” a sand clock, a book of Ephemerides, the nine volumes of Tosca,
four volumes of Jacques Ozanam, one volume of Newton, the tables of La Hire,
a volume of Frézier, tables of La Maire, an astronomical quadrant, and a few
other things.59

3 Charting Patagonia

The 1746 expedition of reconnaissance of the coastline of Patagonia can be

seen as the nautical correlate of the strategy deployed by the Jesuits on land
with the creation of missions in the Pampas. Quiroga, Cardiel and their
superior Strobl sailed off from the port of Buenos Aires on 5 December 1745
aboard the 150-ton frigate San Antonio, which carried eight pieces of artil-
lery and a party of 25 soldiers embarked in Montevideo.60 While Cardiel was

56 “Cuenta Cabal del P. Rico ajustado con el Rdo. P. Procurador Gral. de Indias Pedro Ignacio
Altamirano,” 15 October 1744, Compañía de Jesús, s. IX 6.9.7, AGN. Cf. “Ajuste de cuentas
con el P. Rico de todo este año corriente de 1744,” 26 August 1744, Compañía de Jesús, s.
IX 6.9.7, AGN, with the same amount. A palm (“palmo”) is equivalent to approximately
21cm, so that it is evident that these telescopes of 12 and 21 palms are the same as those
described in other documents as having 8 and 16 feet.
57 Furlong mentions a list of instruments identical to the one mentioned in the previous
note, except that his includes the cost of the box ($ 480). No indication of source is given.
See idem, Matemáticos argentinos, 64.
58 “Razón del P. P. Rico por el P. Pcial. del Paraguay desde el 23 de octubre de 1741 . . . ,” 3 May
1745, Compañía de Jesús, s. IX 6.9.7, AGN.
59 This list is transcribed in Furlong, Matemáticos argentinos, 88 and described as held in the
AGN in an undated document; despite repeated efforts I was not able to find it.
60 There are several diaries of this expedition. See Carmen Martínez Martín, “La expedición
del Padre Quiroga, S.J. a la costa de los Patagones (1745–46),” Revista Complutense de
Historia de América 17 (1991): 121–137 and Mandrini, “El viaje de la fragata San Antonio, en
180 chapter 3

stubbornly bent on establishing a mission, Quiroga acted as the technical expert

of the group. The expedition to Patagonia lasted four months—it entered back
into the port of Buenos Aires on 4 April 1746. Like most logs, Quiroga’s diary is
rather dull. In the final summary, he admits that he has written “more truly than
rhetorically the notices I was able to acquire in four months of navigation”.61
The expedition sailed in open sea, far from the coast, until it reached Cape
Blanco on 5 January. The next day they were at Port Desire. Quiroga mentions
and describes the few animals he sees, such as lobos marinos, “sea wolves,” and
leones marinos, “sea lions,” which he reckons as distinct species.62 Two explora-
tion parties were organized. While Cardiel and a group of soldiers surveyed the
land, Quiroga, Strobl, the captain and the pilot recognized the coast in a boat.
By mid January they sighted the Santa Cruz River and soon after they arrived
at Río Gallegos, the most southerly point they would reach. Quiroga measured
the density of the water from the mouth of the river to see if it was fresh or
seawater. He concluded (erroneously) “that what they call Rio Gallegos is not
a river, but an entry of the sea into the land which seen from afar looks like a
river”.63
On 24 January the San Antonio left the Santa Cruz River heading north on
its return trip and on 9 February it entered the Bay of San Julián, a geographical
accident Quiroga had been ordered to survey with particular care. The Jesuits,
the captain, and the pilots organized several parties for the recognition of the
coast. After having found an Indian tomb with the rests of one male and two

1745–1746.” Cardiel’s diary has been preserved in the report of the voyage written by Pedro
Lozano; see [Pedro Lozano, José Cardiel, and J. Quiroga], “Diario de un viaje a lo largo
de la costa del Mar Magallánico desde Buenos Aires hasta el Estrecho de Magallanes,”
in Pierre-Xavier-François Charlevoix, Historia del Paraguay, 6 vols. (Madrid: Victoriano
Suárez, 1916), 6: 399–449. Quiroga kept a log, which has been edited. See [José Quiroga],
“Relación diaria que hace al Rey nuestro Señor el P. Joseph Quiroga de la Compañía
de Jesús, de el viage que hizo de orden de su majestad a la costa de los Patagones en el
navío San Antonio,” in Colección de Diarios y Relaciones para la Historia de los Viajes y
Descubrimientos (Madrid: CSIC, Instituto Histórico de Marina, 1943), 1:125–168. For the
manuscripts of Quiroga’s diary see Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 53–54, which should be
supplemented with Martínez Martín, “La expedición del Padre Quiroga,” 131.
61 Quiroga, “Relación diaria,” 168.
62 For instance, on 6 January, at the latitude of Cape Blanco, in the southern tip of the large
Gulf of San Jorge, he describes a “sea lion” as different from sea wolves. Quiroga might
have considered the male and female individuals of the South American sea lion (Otaria
flavescens) as different species, for they exhibit a marked sexual dimorphism. But it is also
possible that he might have distinguished between sea lions and fur seals (Arctocephalus
australis). See Quiroga, “Relación diaria,” 135.
63 Ibid., 142.
maps 181

female individuals, Cardiel marched inland with 34 soldiers and sailors, but
after eight days of painful march they returned to the coast without having met
any human being. The ship continued sailing north. On 12 March it cruised off
the Bay of San Gregorio and on the next day it reached the Bay of Camarones,
where a scouting party went ashore. From that point, the San Antonio sailed
directly to Buenos Aires.
Quiroga’s diary amounts essentially to a daily register of nautical observa-
tions like latitude, longitude (estimated or fantasia), the reading of the com-
pass, the measurement of the depth of the sea, and so on. He refers frequently
to the works of those who already sailed along the coast and includes five par-
ticular accounts of geographical accidents which were considered of strategic
importance.64 The diary ends with a general description of the coast of the
Patagones, including the fauna, minerals, tides, navigability, channels, avail-
ability of fresh water, quality of the land, defensibility, and other features of
the geographical accidents. In the Bay of San Julián Quiroga saw the pájaro
niño (the penguin), of which he gives a common-sense description. He also
mentions “ostriches,” partridges “larger than those in Spain” and among land
animals, the guanacos, little foxes, vicuñas, and quirquinchos (armadillos)
“species well known in the whole of Peru.” In Port Desire, he describes a kind
of earth rich in saltpeter and mentions limestone, marble, and flint stone.65

3.1 Quiroga’s Maps and Observations

Quiroga’s observations and measurement of latitude and longitude were taken
into account by d’Anville at the time of drawing his “Carte de l’Amérique du
Sud” of 1748. This map consists of three sheets. The first represents Peru, the
Caribbean coast of South America, and northern Brazil. The second sheet
includes southern Brasil and Peru, northern Chile, and Paraguay. The third part
comprehends southern Chile, Río de la Plata, and the southern extreme of the
continent down to Tierra del Fuego (fig. 3.5). We should now look at the sources
d’Anville used for this third sheet. As he himself admitted in a communica-
tion to the Journal des savants, for the representation of the territory of today’s
northwestern Argentina he depended entirely upon Jesuit material, including
the 1647 map dedicated to the Superior General Caraffa.66 For the southern

64 The accounts describe Port Desire, Port Santa Cruz, Port San Julián, Cape San Gregorio,
and the Bay of Camarones.
65 Quiroga, “Relación diaria,” 156–157 and 139.
66 Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville, “Seconde lettre de M. D’Anville a Messieurs du
Journal des Sçavans, sur la Carte qu’il a publiée de l’Amérique Méridionale,” Journal des
savants 1750: 212.
 182 chapter 3

FIGURE 3.5 Jean Baptiste Bourguinon d’Anville, “Carte du Chili Méridional, du Rio de la Plata, des
Patagons, et du Détroit de Magellan” (Venice, P. Santini, 1779). Library of the Instituto de
Geografía Romualdo Ardissone, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires.

part of South America he used Feuillée’s and Frézier’s maps, as well as two
Jesuit maps: the chart in Ovalle’s Histórica Relación del Reyno de Chile (1646)
and the 1732 Jesuit map described at the beginning of this chapter. The details
of the territory of the Paraguay missions were “entirely taken from the several
charts that the Jesuits have done, by a combination of these maps.” In his paper
d’Anville also mentions that he had read Lozano’s acount of Quiroga’s expedi-
tion, which demonstrated that the alleged fluvial communication between the
Atlantic and the Pacific at the latitude of the Bay of San Julián was a myth.67
On the basis of Quiroga’s longitude of Port Desire, taken with respect to the
Isla de los Lobos (in the Atlantic, near the mouth of the River Plate), d’Anville
calculated the longitude of the Bay of San Julián with respect to the meridians

67 Ibid., 222–223.
maps 183

of Paris and Greenwich. But in the end he decided not to use this figure for the
mapwidth of the extreme of the continent would have been too narrow.68
Besides keeping his log, Quiroga drew a series of maps and plans. The
manuscript of his diary held in the Archivo de Indias is accompanied with 19
profiles of the coast (the number of these drawings in the manuscript held in
the Museo Naval, Madrid, is slightly larger). The Jesuit cartographer made also
sketches of Río Gallegos, Port San Julián and Port Desire, and a chart of the
Patagonian coast.69
Jesuit historian Pierre-François-Xavier Charlevoix, the author of one of
the most famous narratives of the Jesuits in Paraquaria, secured the collabo-
ration of the hydrographer of the French Navy Jacques-Nicolas Bellin (1703–
1772) to draw the maps that illustrate his work. Charlevoix had visited North
America twice (the second time he explored the Saint Lawrence, the Great
Lakes, and came down the Mississippi river). The maps in the three volumes
of his Histoire et description générale de la Nouvelle France (Paris, 1744) were
executed by Bellin. Charlevoix’s Histoire du Paraguay includes in its third vol-
ume plans of Port Desire and Port San Julián, a plan of the city of Buenos Aires,
a chart of the Rio de la Plata, a profile of the coast of Maldonado (in present-
day Uruguay), and a map of Spanish discoveries in the Patagonian coast, all
of them made by Bellin and based on the maps drawn by Quiroga in his 1746
expedition.70 The most notorious map of Charlevoix’s History of Paraguay
is perhaps a chart of the country entitled “Carte du Paraguay et des pays
voisins,” included in the second volume of the work.71 In his “Avertissement sur
les cartes géographiques,” Bellin highlights the Jesuit map of 1732 as the most
important chart of Paraguay, while assigning also some value to d’Anville’s maps
of the region.72 He declares that he is aware of the chart that “the Reverend
Father Quiroga, a skilful mathematician, has made upon the observations he
made in that province [of Paraguay]” as well as of Father Panigay’s observations
of latitude and longitude, but he had not been able to consult those materials.73

68 Ibid., 224–225.
69 See Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 72–75; idem, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:75–77; Julio F.
Guillén, “Cuatro cartas jesuíticas de la región magallánica,” Revista de Indias 1, no. 4 (1941):
67–72; Martínez Martín “La expedición del Padre Quiroga,” 132.
70 Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 80–81; idem, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:91–93.
71 This map illustrates the cover of this book.
72 Jacques-Nicolas Bellin, “Avertissement sur les cartes géographiques,” in Charlevoix,
Histoire du Paraguay, vol. 1, after title page, without pagination. He mentions d’Anville’s
map of Paraguay published in volume 21 of the Lettres édifiantes and his “Carte de
l’Amérique du Sud”, in three parts.
73 Ibid.
184 chapter 3

The map mentioned by Bellin is Quiroga’s 1749 map, to which we now turn
(more on Panigay below).74
Furlong dubbed Quiroga’s map of 1749 as “perhaps the most perfect map [of
Paraguay and Rio de la Plata] made by the Jesuits in the eighteenth century”.75
Engraved by Ferdinando Franceschelli and published in Rome in 1753, the map
represents all the territory occupied by Jesuit missions, from Santa Cruz de
la Sierra (Bolivia) down to the province of Buenos Aires (latitude 22° to 36°
south). It seems that Quiroga toured the missions and the central and north-
ern part of present-day Argentina during three years while he was working on
this map intended to be published in Lozano’s History of the Society of Jesus in
Paraguay. As Quiroga’s contemporaries pointed out, the map had some mis-
takes, notably the course of the Paraná River and the excessive mapwidth of
the Paraguay River. In its upper left corner it bears the portrait of Ferdinand VI
surrounded by an allegorical female figure holding a chalice with a host and
a lion, with a dedication in Latin hexameters. The verses offers the king the
“measured representation” of the fields, mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, and
“cedar roofed abodes” of Paraguay (Quiroga sent the map to the king by the
intermediacy of the minister Carvajal y Lancaster, who had been involved in
the preparation of the 1746 expedition). Quiroga’s map is surrounded by two
vertical columns (left and right) and an upper and lower horizontal band con-
taining texts. The left column is occupied by a table which gives the latitude
and longitude of the reductions and of the most important cities of Paraquaria,
such as Santa Fe, Asunción, Corrientes, Colonia, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires
(38 in total). The legend adverts that the lack of the coordinates of the towns of

74 Perhaps on the grounds that Bellin used without acknowledgement Quiroga’s maps of
Patagonia and the River Plate, Furlong became convinced that Bellin’s map of Paraguay
was some kind of remake of Quiroga’s chart of 1749. So much so, that in his book on Quiroga
the Jesuit historian dubbed Bellin’s map a “second edition” of the 1749 map (see idem, El
padre José Quiroga, 77). In his work on Jesuit cartography of the River Plate, Furlong went
so far as to affirm that Quiroga had drawn a map for Charlevoix’s Histoire du Paraguay. See
Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:87. In his “Avertissement,” Bellin declares that the chart on
which he depended for his map of Paraguay was “celle des RR. PP. Jésuites.” Did he mean
the map of 1732, which he had mentioned in a previous paragraph as the chart “dressée
en 1732 par les Jesuites Missionaires dans cette Province”? Or was he elliptically also refer-
ring to Quiroga’s map of 1749? Besides admitting that he had not been able to consult
Quiroga’s map and Panigay’s observations, Bellin affirms that “je n’ai osé m’écarter des
connaissances qui sont reçues, et qu’on a regardées jusqu’à ce jour comme les meilleures.”
After a comparison of the three maps, I am inclined to believe that Bellin used the 1732
map and not Quiroga’s map of 1749. See Bellin, “Avertissement,” no pagination.
75 Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 72.
maps 185

Tobatines, Minuanes, Mocoví, and Abipones are due to the fact that the mea-
surements had not yet been done. The right column and the horizontal band at
the bottom contain short ethnographic descriptions of several native peoples
(Charrúas, Bohanes, Minuanes, and others), indicating their habitat, food, reli-
gions, and so on.76
There are testimonies that Quiroga could have drawn a map of the divid-
ing line affecting the missions according to the treaty of 1750, which was to be
presented to the Father Provincial, but it is not clear whether this map was ever
published.77 In any case, in a memory written in 1751 while he was in Buenos
Aires, Quiroga advanced 15 reasons aimed at demonstrating how and why the
fateful treatise was utterly inconvenient for Spain. The Marquis of Valdelirios
(1711–1793)—the functionary of the crown responsible for the enforcement of
the treaties—sent copies of the memory to the king and to Father General
Ignazio Visconti (1682–1755), who reprimanded the Provincial for allowing its
diffusion. In a 1759 letter, after the heat of the conflict had died down, Valdelirios
made clear his mind that both, the writing with the 15 points as well as a map,
had been perpetrated by Quiroga with the purpose of hindering the royal will.78
Just like Cardiel, the Jesuit missionary was a vocal opponent of the treaty and it
seems that his cartographic efforts were consonant with this opinion.

4 An Expedition to the Mato Grosso

Despite Quiroga´s strong and open criticism of the Treaty of Madrid, in 1752
Valdelirios agreed to his nomination by Lope Luis Altamirano as chaplain of
the Spanish expedition that should sail up the Paraguay River to install one
of the boundary marks.79 Quiroga accompanied the Spanish-Portuguese party,
which sailed up the Paraguay River until it reached the Río Jaurú, and back
again, between 26 October 1753 and 8 February 1754. The eleven vessels (five
Spanish and six Portuguese), their crews and soldiers were commanded, on
the Spanish side, by Frigate Captain Manuel de Flores and on the Portuguese
side by Sergeant Major José Custodio de Sá y Faria. Their goal was to set up a

76 Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 75–79; cf. idem, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:71–75.
77 Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 78–80; cf. idem, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:81–83.
78 Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 30–31 and 36–37.
79 Lope Luis Altamirano (not to be confused with his brother Pedro Ignacio) had been
entrusted by Superior General Visconti to supervise the obedience of the Jesuits of
Paraquaria to the treaty of 1750. His proceedings have been condemned by all modern
Jesuit historians. See DHCJ, s.v. “Altamirano, Lope Luis,” by P. Caraman.
186 chapter 3

monument to mark the boundary, which they did on 14 January. Quiroga’s diary
of the journey is very different from his log of the trip to Patagonia. It has only
sparse indications of latitudes and longitudes and is mostly concerned with
the incidents of the expedition. Quiroga was not supposed to take measure-
ments. Father Juan de Escandón (1696–1772) would later affirm that he actu-
ally did observations, which resulted in “the most exact map he made of the
whole Paraguay River, from Asunción to Xarayes”.80 But in Father Camaño´s
letter of 22 February 1785—an embittered denunciation of Quiroga’s alleged
incompetence—it is said that “in the entire lengthy diary you will search in
vain for a single phrase that affirms ‘I observed’ or ‘we observed’, in reference to
latitude and longitude”.81 Camaño remarks that Quiroga had been nominated
as a chaplain and had never been in charge of making observations entrusted
to him by the crown, as rumor went at that time.
In his diary, Quiroga vividly describes the skirmishes with the Indians,
the slow sailing in dangerous waters, and the embalming of the corpse of a
Portuguese lieutenant by the surgeons accompanying the expedition.82 The
diary is followed by a brief natural history of the Paraguay River, with sections
devoted to the fish, the amphibious animals (among which he includes the
capybara), the birds, the terrestrial animals, and the species of trees and fruits,
including medicinal trees like cassia fistula and dragon’s blood, colorants like
gutabamba, and hardwoods like palo blanco.83 He also gives a short notice of
the villages of Cuiabá and Mato Grosso. The most rewarding and carefully writ-
ten section is that devoted to fish; Quiroga provides short and recognizable
descriptions of species like dorado, pacú, surubí, armado, palometa, bagre, and
others. There are short paragraphs devoted to the native peoples: the Mocoví,
Abipones, Tobas, the Lenguas, who lived east of Asunción city, the Tobatines,
the Mbyás, who had subjugated the Guanás, the Bororós, and the Paraguás or
Payaguás, a warlike tribe who sailed up and down the river and from whom the
country has taken its name. In 1752 Quiroga wrote to Father Domingo Muriel

80 Cited in Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 35.

81 Cited in ibid., 45.
82 [José Quiroga]. “Breve noticia del viaje que hizo el Padre José Quiroga por el Río Paraguay
con la partida que fue a poner el marco en la boca del Xaurú (1753–1754),” in Colección
de documentos inéditos para la historia de España, ed. Marqués de la Fuensanta del Valle
(Madrid: Imprenta de José Perales y Martínez, 1892), vol. 104, 407–448. The Diary proper
is divided in two parts. The first covers the navigation from Buenos Aires to Asunción
(May to September 1753, in pp. 409–416); the second is the log of the journey to the point
of destination and back to Asunción, up and down the Paraguay River (October 1753 to
February 1754, pp. 416–432).
83 Ibid., 432–448.
maps 187

(1718–1795), then secretary of the province of Paraguay, informing him that the
villages of the Mbyás were at a distance of 80 leguas from Asunción as the crow
flies and 100 leguas following the river or by land. There were villages on each
side of the river: those in the east margin would remain in Portuguese territory,
those on the west shore were assigned to Spain.84

5 The Chair of Mathematics

During the 1763 meeting of the 16th Provincial Congregation of Paraquaria, the
Fathers decided to ask the Superior General permission for the creation of a
chair of mathematics at the University of Córdoba—the first of its kind in the
Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. The grounds for the establishment of this chair
throw some light on what the Jesuits of Paraguay thought about this issue.85
The two first reasons indicate that the University of Córdoba could not be as
backward as to lack a chair of mathematics: “it would be a shame if our pupils,
professors and students ignored what is nowadays so common.” The third item
underlines that without mathematical expertise it is impossible to master
physics, whose knowledge had been recommended by the recent general con-
gregations. The last two reasons invoked are particularly interesting, for they
claim that knowledge of mathematics is necessary for missionary purposes.
Certainly, the document affirms that without mastering this discipline the mis-
sionaries run the risk of straying in their excursions through unknown hills and
jungles. Also, mathematics is necessary for establishing new reductions, for it
constitutes the basis of architecture, the wood industry, and hydromechanics.
Quiroga took charge of the chair until the expulsion.
According to the Ratio studiorum of 1599, mathematics was taught in the first
year of philosophy together with logic, and it comprehended Euclid’s Elements
and “aliquid Geographiae vel Sphaerae, vel eorum, quae se libenter audivi
solet, adiungat” (he [the teacher] should add some geography or astronomy
or similar matter which the students enjoy hearing about).86 In the libraries of

84 Jaime Cortesão, ed., Do Tratado de Madri à Conquista dos Sete Povos (1750–1802) (Rio de
Janeiro: Biblioteca Nacional, 1969), 25.
85 Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 39–40.
86 “Rules for the professor of Mathematics,” see Ladislaus Lukács, ed., Ratio atque Institutio
Studiorum Societatis Iesu (1586, 1591, 1599) (Rome: IHSI, 1986), 402. For Jesuit teaching
of mathematics see, for example, Antonella Romano, “Teaching Mathematics in Jesuit
Schools: Programs, Course Content, and Classroom Practices,” in O’Malley et al., The
Jesuits II, 355–370.
188 chapter 3

the Jesuit colleges of Paraguay and Río de la Plata there were several editions
of Euclid and of Sacrobosco’s Sphere, a basic text of cosmography.87 Domingo
Muriel, who between 1749 and 1751 renovated the teaching of philosophy at
Córdoba, taught his students “an excellent summary of mathematics, which he
took from the works of Father Dechales”.88 The French Jesuit Claude Francois
Milliet Dechales [1621–1678) was the autor of a popular text on Euclid and of a
Cursus seu mundus mathematicus (Lyon, 1674).
It has been argued that the chairs of mathematics in Jesuits colleges during
the seventeenth century were a powerful agent of legitimization of applied
mathematics.89 During the 1740s and 1750s there had been a new impulse to
the teaching of mathematics in the Jesuit institutions of higher learning in
Spain, i.e., the Seminary of Nobles and the Colegio Imperial, where the Czech
Johannes Wendlingen (1715–1790) had been named professor. These develop-
ments were related to the technical modernization of the Navy promoted by
Jorge Juan (1713–1773) and the minister Marquis of the Ensenada (1702–1781).90
The plan of studies of the Estudios Reales, which had been established in the
Colegio Imperial by King Philip IV in 1625, included two chairs of mathemat-
ics. The program of the first comprehended the sphere (system of the world),
astrology, astronomy, [use of the] astrolabe, perspective, and prognostics. The
second included geometry, geography, hydrography, and clocks.91 The prag-
matic and applied orientation of the study of mathematics is rather obvious.
The rhetoric of the first part of the document of the provincial congregation of
Paraguay for 1763 was in line with these plans. But the last paragraphs suggest

87 The Index librorum of the library of the University of Córdoba (1757) mentions “Euclides.
De elementis geometricis.” See Alberto Fraschini, ed., Index Librorum Bibliothecae Collegii
Maximi Cordubensis Societatis Iesu, 2 vols. (Córdoba: Universidad Nacional de Córdoba,
2005), 1:223. In the Fondo Antiguo, Colegio del Salvador (Buenos Aires), which holds
ancient books formerly in Jesuit libraries in the Río de la Plata, there is a Renaissance
editions of Euclid (Paris, 1566) and the commentary by Cristoph Dibvabius (Leyden, 1603,
2 vols.). That collection holds also an Italian edition of Sacrobosco’s De sphera (Venice,
1561) and two commentaries on that work, one by Clavius (Venice, 1601) and the other
by Franciscus Iunctinus (Lyon, 1578). See Martín Morales, La Librería Grande. El Fondo
Antiguo de la Compañía de Jesús en Argentina (Roma: IHSI, 2002), 94–101.
88 According to the testimony of Father Miranda, cited in Guillermo Furlong, Nacimiento y
desarrollo de la filosofía en el Río de la Plata, 1536–1810 (Buenos Aires: Kraft, 1952), 179.
89 See Steven J. Harris, “Les chaires de mathématiques,” in Les jésuites à la Renaissance.
Système éducatif et production du savoir, ed. Luce Giard (Paris: PUF, 1995), 239–261.
90 Navarro Brotóns, “Science and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” 392–393.
91 Albert Dou, “Matemáticos españoles jesuitas de los siglos 16 y 17,” Archivum Historicum
Societatis Iesu 61 (1997): 306.
maps 189

that the request for a creation of a chair of mathematics in Córdoba was also
the result of a genuine necessity felt by the local Jesuits which arose from their
missionary activity. The presence of Quiroga in the province, a natural candi-
date for the position, might have catalyzed the decision.
Quiroga left the Río de la Plata on 29 September 1767 and arrived in Cadiz in
January. Since 1768 he lived in Bologna with the young Jesuit astronomer Alonso
Frías, where he wrote a treatise on the art of navigation and a “Description of
the Province of Paraguay.” As a compensation for his services to the crown,
he received 20 gold doubloons in the presence of his nephew, Father Manuel
Quiroga and of Nicolás de Azara, the Plenipotentiary Minister of the Spanish
crown in Rome. Quiroga died on 24 October 1784.92

6 The Sources of the Paraguay River

The great Dutch mapmakers of the seventeenth century popularized a map

of South America which shows a large lake along the upper reaches of the
Paraguay River in the Mato Grosso. The Lake of the Xarayes (Laguna de los
Xarayes), as it was called, had been created by the Spanish historian of Indies
Antonio de Herrera (1549–1626), who based his account on the sixteenth-cen-
tury chronicles of Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca (c. 1490–c. 1560) and Ulrich
Schmidl (1510–1579), and whose General History of the Deeds of the Castilians
was in turn copied by the Amsterdam editors of atlases.93 Some Jesuit maps
or their sequels added a picturesque geographical accident in the middle of
the lagoon: the island of the Orejones (“large eared men”). This is the case of
Bellin’s map of Paraguay, for example.94 Moreover, in Quiroga’s 1749 map it is
affirmed that the Xarayes lagoon is the source of the Paraguay River. A diary
of a 1703 Jesuit expedition along the Paraguay River led by Fathers Bartolomé
Jiménez, José de Arce (1652–1715), Juan Bautista Zea (1654–1719), Francisco
Hervás (1662–1723), Johann Neumann (1659–1704), and Brother Silvestre
González (1657–1708) mentions that the exploring party actually navigated in
the Xarayes Lagoon and talks about the Island of the Orejones, where they
landed in search of a cross left by a previous expedition. According to this

92 Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 42–43.

93 What was considered a lake is the Pantanal, one of the largest wetlands in the world.
The Pantanal basin is fed by water from the Planalto highlands, which slowly flows into
the Paraguay River. When flooded, it looks like a lake.
94 This story is told in María de Fátima Costa, “El mito geográfico de la Laguna de los Xarayes
y el Pantanal brasileño,” Anales del Museo de América 7 (1999): 205–218.
190 chapter 3

account, the island was densely covered with vegetation and had 40 leagues in
length and ten leagues in width.95
In his Voyages Azara affirms that the Xarayes lagoon is not the source of the
Paraguay, but a result of its floods.96 But as Dobrizhoffer proudly proclaimed in
his History of the Abipones, the person who actually found that the Paraguay did
not originate in the Xarayes was the Jesuit Sánchez Labrador. After refuting the
notion that the Xarayes Lagoon was a Jesuit contrivance, Dobrizhoffer affirms
that the Xarayes swamp “is not the mother but the daughter of the Paraguay
river.” His claim is based on Sánchez Labrador, who explained how the belief
in the Xarayes and the island of the Orejones was an elaboration from earlier
chroniclers.97 As an explorer, Sánchez Labrador had been able to discover what
many of his colleagues had searched for in vain: a practicable route between
the missions of Paraguay and the lands of the Chiquitos. The horseback jour-
ney from the reduction of Nuestra Señora de Belén to the Chiquitos reduction
of Sagrado Corazón de Jesús took from 9 December 1766 to 16 January 1767 with
a return trip from 4 June to 7 August of that year.98
In the course of the last decade of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits
from the Province of Paraguay had founded a series of reductions among the
Chiquitos in Santa Cruz de la Sierra (present-day Bolivia). The usual way to
reach those missions from the port of Buenos Aires was the long and arduous
western land route through Córdoba, Santiago del Estero, Tucumán, Tarija, and
Santa Cruz. A potential and far better alternative was to navigate up the Paraná
and the Paraguay rivers until reaching the “lake” of the Xarayes and then turn
westward by land.99 The problem with this fluvial route was that the wetlands
proved a dead end.
Many Jesuit expeditions during the first decade of the eighteenth century
had tried to establish an itinerary between Paraguay and Santa Cruz de la
Sierra, either sailing up the Paraguay River or walking across the jungle from
the Chiquitos territory to the east (there had been attempts in the years 1691,

95 Patricio Fernández, Relación historial de las misiones de indios Chiquitos, 2 vols. (Madrid:
Victoriano Suárez, 1895), 1:195.
96 Azara, Voyages, 1:45.
97 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 1:278–279. Cf. Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay
Natural, pt. 1, bk. 2, Paraquaria 16:185r, ARSI.
98 Sainz Ollero et al., José Sánchez Labrador, 282–283.
99 Guillermo Furlong, “De la Asunción a los Chiquitos por el Río Paraguay. Tentativa frus-
trada en 1730. ‘Breve relación’ inédita del P. José Francisco de Arce,” Archivum Historicum
Societatis Iesu 7, no. 1 (1938): 54–79.
maps 191

1702, 1703, 1704, and two in 1705).100 In 1715 Fathers José de Arce and Bartolomé
De Blende (1675-1715) were able to connect the river with the Chiquitos sailing
up to Lake Manioré, only to be killed by the Payaguás.101 There were further
attempts, like that of Father Gabriel Patiño (1662–1729) and Lucas Rodriguez
(1684–1742) in 1721 and the several expeditions by Ignace Chomé and Agustín
Castañares (1687–1744) between 1738 and 1740.102 The rich diary of Sánchez
Labrador’s 1766–1767 journey is included in his Paraguay Católico.103 This
Castilian missionary left a number of maps, plans, and schemes illustrating his
diary and also maps of the Guaraní missions, the Tape region, the Guayrá, and
the Uruguay River.104
Rodolfo Schuller (1873–1932), an Uruguayan linguist who edited one of
Azara’s many works, affirms in his introductory essay that “the first scientists
who purportedly studied these regions [Paraguay and Río de la Plata] were
undoubtedly those in charge of the boundary demarcation between Spain
and Portugal.” Schuller goes on to praise Azara’s map as “one of the most exact
charts of Paraguay and limiting countries”.105 But this anachronistic contrast
between “inexact” and sloppy Jesuit maps on the one hand and “scientific”
maps product of the enlightened naval officers of the boundary commissions
on the other misses the point.106 The Jesuits enjoyed at that time a solid repu-
tation as cartographers. We have seen that the high officers of the crowns of

100 Ibid., 55–59. Setting out eastward from the Chiquitos missions, in 1702 Francisco Hervás
y Miguel de Yegros reached the river and marked the place with a large cross. The Jesuit
expedition which sailed next year up the Paraguay River from Asunción could not find it,
for it had been swallowed by the flood. See Fernández, Relación historial de las misiones,
1: 180–213 for a diary of this 1703 expedition.
101 We have two narratives of the journey of Fathers Arce and De Blende: Patricio Fernández,
Relación historial de las misiones, 2:109–141 and the diary by Father Francisco de Arce,
edited in Furlong, “De la Asunción a los Chiquitos por el Río Paraguay,” 65–79.
102 For an abstract of these late attempts, see Furlong “De la Asunción a los Chiquitos por el
Río Paraguay,” 61.
103 Sánchez Labrador, El Paraguay Católico, 1:5–74.
104 For an inventory and summary description of this material see Sainz Ollero et al., José
Sánchez Labrador, 305–312. The authors found a manuscript with a so far unknown text
of El Paraguay Católico and several maps in the Academia de la Historia (Madrid).
105 Rodolfo R. Schuller, “Notas biográficas y bibliográficas,” in Félix de Azara, Geografía física
y esférica de las provincias del Paraguay y misiones guaraníes, ed. R. Schuller (Montevideo:
Museo Nacional, 1904), lxxvi.
106 See for example Costa, “El mito geográfico,” 217, who affirms that the enduring Jesuit
myth of the Xarayes Lake was at long last dispelled by the “Enlightened knowledge” of the
boundary commissions sent to make effective the treaty of 1750.
192 chapter 3

Portugal and Spain did every effort to get advisors of the Society of Jesus to join
the parties in charge of setting up the boundary stones.
Some of Camaño’s strictures upon Quiroga’s proficiency as mapmaker might
well have been apposite. Jesuits in Paraguay were not interested in produc-
ing scientific maps per se, as a goal in itself. Charts which complied with the
highest academic and esthetic standards were the result of the reworking of
Jesuit maps by French cartographers such as Bellin and d’Anville, used to rely
on Jesuit field work at the time of drawing their maps of China, New France, or
Patagonia. Jesuit maps were tools of evangelization. They aspired to accuracy
insofar as exactness allows the reader of a chart to easily find his or her way.
The maps of the missionaries were rich in the kind of information they valued:
coordinates of reductions, towns and cities, routes of access, localization of the
different native peoples, and the extension of yerbales and estancias.
Against the technical sophistication of European cartographers, the Jesuits
pitted the I-have-been-there argument and the first-hand knowledge it implied.
Talking of maps, Father Juan Romero (1628–1688) claimed that

we can err, but if so, we err less than those European geographers who
never came to America, for at least we describe those lands we have gone
through and studied in our daily voyages.107

When it came to geographical discoveries, even the results of instruments

could be subordinated to experiential knowledge. For instance, Paucke claims
that California “was not discovered by geometers using mathematical instru-
ments, but by those who like the Apostles measure the steps of the pagans
[i.e., the native Americans] with their own footprints.” Real maps were the
consequence of hard-won experience, not a result of inferences mediated by
instruments. “In the maps of [South] America—goes on Paucke—I only con-
template what I have seen with my eyes and what I have trampled with my
feet”.108 As discussed in chapter one, Paucke’s reliance on autopsia as the sole
warrant of empirical knowledge might have been idiosyncratic, but in this case
his attitude was shared by other missionaries. Martin Dobrizhoffer admitted
that Jesuits’ maps might lack elegance, but claimed for them the credit of reli-
ability: “The plains which [the missionaries] traversed, the rivers which they
crossed, together with the distances of places, they have noted with the utmost
fidelity, though not always with equal art”.109 Indeed, the map he made for his

107 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:9.

108 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, 2:147.
109 Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, 1:2.
 maps 193

FIGURE 3.6 “Mappa Paraquariae, in multis a me correcta . . . ,” drawn by Martin Dobrizhoffer and published
in vol. 2 of his Historia de Abiponibus (Vienna: Kurzbeck, 1784). Library of the Instituto de
Geografía Romualdo Ardissone, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad de Buenos Aires.
194 chapter 3

History of the Abipones was not among the best of those drawn at the end of the
eighteenth century (fig. 3.6).110
In what follows we will take a closer look to the political, economic and
religious functions of Jesuit maps in historical Paraguay.

7 Maps and Politics

Cardiel, a hardy missionary whose life could be considered an epitome of

the Jesuit’s glories and disgraces in the last decades of the Paraguay experi-
ence, had an eventful career as explorer and mapmaker. After his return
from the surveying expedition to Patagonia with Quiroga, in 1747 he briefly
joined Father Thomas Falkner in the project of establishing a reduction with
the Serranos (northern Tehuelches). Animated by the tales of the City of the
Caesars, Cardiel set off again from Buenos Aires in March 1748 in an expedition
to Patagonia with a Jesuit student and four journey men. The fabulous city,
allegedly founded by Spanish survivors of a shipwreck, was supposed to hoard
enormous riches of gold and silver. Heading south and stopping at the Jesuit
reductions south of the Salado River, Cardiel was able to reach present-day
Claromecó, on the southern coast of the province of Buenos Aires.111 In the
letter he wrote on June 1746 to the governor of Buenos Aires, he made clear
that in consonance with the orders he received from the Father Provincial, his
purpose was to extend the Jesuit sphere of influence to the south, beginning
with the establishment of reductions among the Pampas in order to reach “the
famous Patagones and Césares until the Strait of Magellan”.112 Cardiel drew
various maps of the coast his inland expedition had explored. One of them,
from 1746 or 1747, represents the territory between latitudes 33° to 56° south,
specifying the localization of the native peoples (fig. 3.7). The surfaces painted
in green correspond to tribes that used horses, those in yellow to tribes that
traveled by foot. Red was the color used for depicting the lands with herds of

110 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:120.

111 See the diary of the expedition in José Cardiel, Diario del viaje y misión al Río del Sauce,
with preliminary studies by Guillermo Furlong Cardiff S.J. and Félix F. Outes (Buenos
Aires: Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Publicaciones del Instituto de Investigaciones
Geográficas, 1930), 243–287.
112 José Cardiel, “Carta escrita al Señor Gobernador y Capitán General de Buenos Aires sobre
los descubrimientos de las tierras patagónicas, en lo que toca a los Césares (11 de agosto de
1746),” in Colección de obras y documentos, ed. Pedro De Angelis, vol. 1, section “Derroteros
y viages a la Ciudad Encantada o de los Césares” (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado,
1836), 11–12.
 maps 195

FIGURE 3.7 José Cardiel, “[Chart of the Patagonian coasts] according to the most recent observations of the
years 1745 and 1746” ([Carta de las costas magallánicas] según las más recientes observaciones
[del añ]o 1745 y 1746). Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires.
196 chapter 3

horses and mares.113 It would seem that the main purpose of this map was the
representation of the human landscape of the land. Cardiel made other charts
of his southern trips. (In a following section, we will discuss his 1751 “Mapa de
Magallanes”).114 These maps and sketches of Buenos Aires and Patagonia were
related not only to Cardiel’s visionary desire to reach the Land’s End, but also
to his superior’s more sober interest in establishing reductions for the Pampas,
who were a continuous harass to Buenos Aires and its surrounding estancias.
As was the case with Quiroga’s surveying expedition to Patagonia, the recog-
nition and settlement of the southern lands was a goal in which the strategic
interests of the crown and the missionary impulse of the Jesuits coincided and
even potentiated each other. But this was not always the case.
Cardiel was at first a staunch opponent of the surrender of the “seven towns”
to the Portuguese, a consequence of the treaty of 1750. He even affirmed that
since the treaty was unjust, the order of the Father Superior General Ignazio
Visconti to submit to the agreement did not oblige in conscience to obedi-
ence. After the Guaraní wars of 1756, which routed any native armed resis-
tance, Cardiel collaborated in organizing the transfer of the reductions west
of the Uruguay River. In 1758 he concluded his Declaración de la verdad, which
was a polemic answer to the anonymous Relação abreviada, a libel inspired
by the Portuguese Sebastião de Carvalho e Melho, future Marquis of Pombal
(1699–1782), who would eventually instigate the expulsion of the Jesuits from
the Portuguese empire.115 In a sense, the Treaty of Madrid was a diplomatic
war played over maps. It has been argued that one of the sources for the
Portuguese “Mapa das Cortes” [Map of the Courts], which proved advanta-
geous to the interests of Lisbon, had been one of the most famous Jesuit maps
of Paraquaria: Juan Francisco Davila’s chart of 1722/1726.116

113 See Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1: 68–69 and idem, José Cardiel y su Carta relación (1747)
(Buenos Aires: Librería del Plata, 1953), 98–99. The map has been published with com-
mentaries in Félix F. Outes and Guillermo Furlong, eds., Carta inédita de la extremidad
austral de América construida por el P. José Cardiel S. J.en 1747 (Buenos Aires: Coni, 1940).
114 Furlong mentions two of them, described by Outes and held in the British Library. See
Furlong José Cardiel y su Carta relación, 99–100. Guillén studied three maps held in the
Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), see idem, “Cuatro cartas jesuiticas.”
115 See José María Mariluz Urquijo, “Estudio preliminar,” in Cardiel, Compendio de la histo-
ria del Paraguay, 18. Cf. José Cardiel, Declaración de la verdad, ed. Pablo Hernández S.J.
(Buenos Aires: Juan A. Alsina, 1900).
116 See Mario Clemente Ferreira, “O Mapa das Cortes e o Tratado de Madrid. A cartografia
a serviço da diplomacia,” Varia Historia (Belo Horizonte) 23, no. 37 (2007), 56. Of course,
the aspects of the maps favorable to the Portuguese had not been taken from the Jesuit
source.
maps 197

A map of 1752, attributed to Cardiel, represents Paraguay with the division

line of the treaty of 1750 and the previous boundary of the Treaty of Tordesillas
(1494). A contemporary note on its back affirms that the chart “is exact and has
been made with the intention of causing to move the line to the east as much
as necessary in order not to cut out the seven towns [of Paraquaria]”. This map
was given to the Marquis of Valdelirios by Lope Luis Altamirano, the repre-
sentative of the Superior General.117 Cardiel’s map was a visual argument in
defense of the stability of the Jesuit reductions and the integrity of the Spanish
possessions in the River Plate. Like all the efforts of the Jesuits in Paraquaria
to stop the consequences of the treaty, it proved futile. In exchange for the
city of Colonia, Spain handed over to Portugal a territory amounting to the
States of Rio Grande do Sul and Santa Catarina and a sizable portion of north-
ern Uruguay. The treaty was annulled by Charles III of Spain, but the damaged
infringed to the reductions and the massacre of Caybaté (10 February 1755),
when hundreds of Guaraní were mercilessly executed by the soldiers of the
conjoint Spanish-Portuguese army, could not be healed.118 Nusdorffer’s map
of the seven towns east of the Uruguay (see below) was also connected to this
conflict.
The treaty of 1750 put to the test the Jesuit’s cartographical expertise and
their allegiance to the secular powers in many sided ways. Just as the Portuguese
were looking for Jesuit astronomers to advise their demarcation parties, the
Marquis of Valdelirios asked the Provincial of Paraguay José Barreda (1687–
1763) for a Jesuit geographer. Barreda answered him that there were

only two Jesuit geographers in these provinces, Father Joseph Quiroga

who lives in the capital and Father Ignace Chomé, who is in the Chiquitos
missions, unable to travel here owing to his many ailments.119

To compensate for this lack of experts, Barreda volunteered to send prácticos,

(i.e., Jesuits who knew how to find their way in the country). As we have seen
in a previous section, in the event Quiroga served as chaplain in one of the
expeditions.
In the Portuguese commission of demarcation there was also a Jesuit expert,
Father Bartolomeo Panigay (or Panigai), of whose determinations of longitude

117 This map was also apparently used as a source for his own map by the Portuguese com-
missar for the demarcation, José Custodio de Sá y Faria. See Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica,
1:78–80; Torre Revello, Mapas y planos, 12–13 and plate VI (detail).
118 For a traditional account, see HIA, 5: 165–274, in particular, 234.
119 Cited in Furlong, El Padre José Quiroga, 31.
198 chapter 3

and latitude in Paraguay the cartographer Bellin was aware.120 Panigay, born
in Friuli (Italy) in 1720, entered the Society of Jesus in 1736. In April 1750, the
king of Portugal, his Secretary of State Marco António de Azevedo Coutinho,
and the diplomat Alexandre de Gusmão—the mastermind behind the 1750
treaty—launched a campaign geared to get Jesuits with mathematical training
from Italy or Germany to join the Portuguese boundary commission.121 Panigay
was recruited and sent to the Río de la Plata, where as we know he accompa-
nied the joint expedition of which Quiroga also partook. Back in Europe, he
devoted himself to astronomy in Venice. Sommervogel attributes to him sev-
eral “mathematical writings”.122
In the protracted conflict between Spain and Portugal, both countries tried
to get Jesuits to work as cartographical experts. As we will see in the next
chapter, there was an established and successful tradition, initiated by Fathers
Carbone and Capassi, of Italian Jesuits working in and for Portugal. In the case
of conflict between two European potencies, Jesuits remained faithful to the
interests of the temporal power to whose sphere of influence they belonged.
Those at the service of João V would try to advance the Portuguese plan, while
those of the Paraguay province served the cause of the Spanish crown. In this
particular case there was a second tier of divided loyalties, for the Jesuits of
Paraquaria understood that the interest of the missions was in conflict with
the diplomatic agreements signed by the metropolis.
Maps of colonial possessions embody projects of power and of territorial
control.123 This is particularly evident in the charts that resulted from the colo-
nization of the New World.124 The objective of some of the maps drawn by
the Jesuits in the course of the conflict generated by the treaty of 1750 was
immediately political, namely, to convince the Spanish king of the disastrous
consequences that the diplomatic agreement would have for the missions and
for Spain. But Jesuit Maps of Paraguay and Río de la Plata had also a strong
symbolic dimension. They represented the expansive power of the Christian
message in a virgin land, as spread by Jesuits and their secular allies, the

120 Bellin, “Avertissement.”

121 Jaime Cortesão, ed., Alexandre de Gusmão e o Tratado de Madrid (1750). Parte V. Execução
do Tratado (Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Rio Branco, Ministerio das Relações Exteriores, 1950),
15 and 26–27.
122 Sommervogel 6:167.
123 J. Brian Harley, “Silences and Secrets: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern
Europe,” Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 57–76.
124 J. Brian Harley, “Rereading the Maps of the Columbian Encounter,” Annals of the
Association of American Geographers 82, no. 3 (1992): 522–542.
maps 199

realization of the Biblical injunction to preach the word in the entire world. It
is this dimension we now wish to explore.

8 Maps and Mission

Maps from Paraquaria were published in the Neue Welt-Bott and the Lettres
édifiantes, the collection of letters and reports from Jesuit missionaries which
served both as a source of information on exotic lands and as inspiring litera-
ture and propaganda media for the missions.125 In a very concrete and mate-
rial sense, maps were instruments of preaching and helped in confirming the
believers in their faith.
A chart of the missions of the Paraná and Uruguay Rivers attributed to José
Cardiel and entitled “Part of America in which the zeal of the members of the
Paraguay province of the Society of Jesus is deployed” (1760) has been preserved
(fig. 3.8). This is a map of Jesuit martyrs. The chart represents the whole prov-
ince of Paraquaria, between latitudes 10° and 36° south, and longitudes 305°
and 330° west (Ferro). Its upper margin is occupied by a cartouche divided in
two, each half containing the iconic signs used in the map with their mean-
ings. The left half is “secular,” its symbols represent the realm of earthly powers;
the right one is “sacred,” it accounts for the space of the religious power. They
are side by side, but do not mingle. The secular world is arranged hierarchi-
cally. Particular signs are used to symbolize the city of Chuquisaca, where the
archbishop lives and where there is a royal audiencia, and the city of Santiago
de Chile, which also had this kind of tribunal and administrative institution.
Smaller signs are used to localize cities with resident bishop or governor. Even
smaller are those for Spanish or Portuguese cities. Then appear those settle-
ments described as villas and lugarejos (dingy hamlets). Spanish cities that
had been destroyed are indicated by a Maltese cross. On the semi-cartouche
situated to the right, we find the symbols for different kinds of Jesuit mission
towns or reductions: those which have been relocated, those which have been
destroyed, “some few” towns left to the care of secular clerics or friars; places
where the “barbarian gentiles” had killed Jesuit missionaries and destroyed the
town, geographical spots where the missionaries who brought the light of faith
to the pagan nations have been slain, and places where Jesuits have been killed
by the Portuguese. In the later cases the map has informative legends giving
the name of the martyred Jesuit and the name of the people that caused his

125 For the maps published in the Neue Welt-Bott see those reproduced in Sierra, Los jesuitas
germanos, 312.
 200 chapter 3

FIGURE 3.8 José Cardiel, “IHS/Parte de la América Meridional en que trabaja el zelo de los Religiosos de la
Compañía de Jesús de la Provincia dicha del Paraguai [sic],” in P. Calatayud, Tratado sobre la
Provincia de la Compañía de Jesús en el Paraguay, manuscript volume held in Archivo de Loyola,
Azpeitía.
maps 201

death.126 With its surface almost covered by legends in an elegant handwritten

lettering, the map bears a testimony of commitment and sacrifice. It was con-
ceived to impress upon Catholic believers the very real way in which the pagan
land had become consecrated by the blood of the Fathers. Jesuit maps with the
plotting of places of martyrdoms were usual in Spanish America.127
This message is also made explicit in Dávila´s map of 1722 (engraved in
1726), dedicated to Father Michelangelo Tamburini, Superior General of the
Society between 1706 and 1730. The six distiches of the dedicatory describe
“wide America” as inhabited by “wild nude people” whose barbaric necks
were progressively being subjugated by Christ’s gentle yoke. The map, the
verses proclaim, shows how fallow the land would have remained were it not
for the blood shed over it.128
In the course of this chapter, we have seen a few cases in which maps
accompanied the natural histories of Paraquaria. The textual and the graphical
description of the land can be seen as two complementary ways of conveying
the ultimate reason of the presence and action of the Society of Jesus in the
New World, that is, the evangelization of a new continent. In the first pages of
his History of the Conquest of Paraguay, Lozano argues that it is necessary to
first describe the country, for this will be like exhibiting before the eyes of the
reader “the field where the sons of the Society of Jesus obtained the illustrious
victories over idolatry and vice”.129
These examples show that the imaginary landscape of Jesuit cartography
was a gigantic geographical void sparely inhabited by ferocious savages which
called for the civilizing and Christianizing action of the Society of Jesus, in
other words, a fallow land that would yield a rich crop of conversion if properly
cultivated.130 As much attention was paid to the secular space—geographical
accidents, secular cities—as to the sacred space embodied in the reductions.
Jesuit maps of Paraquaria represent at the same time the territory and its
Christianization. Many of them include names of the native peoples converted
and convey as much ethnographical as geographical information. Looking at
the number of the Jesuit establishments, their distribution, and the expanse

126 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:97–98.

127 In this connection, Buisseret mentions a map drawn by Father Kino to illustrate his story of
the martyrdom of Father Saverio Saeta (1664–1695), a map of the Marañón by Father Fritz
with five crosses marking the death of Jesuits at the hands of natives, and Gumilla’s map in
El Orinoco Ilustrado. See Buisseret, “Jesuit Cartography,” 118, 122, and 161.
128 Cited in Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:44–45.
129 Lozano, Historia de la conquista ed. Lamas, 1:7.
130 See the papers by Denevan cited in note 24 in this chapter.
202 chapter 3

they covered, it is fair to admit that an implicit triumphalism is proclaimed in

these charts, an exhibition of occupied territory—not necessarily as a Jesuit
state or “empire”, but as a demonstration of the superior performance of the
Jesuits over other missionary orders.

9 Maps of the Productive Structure of the Missions

Since cattle estancias and yerbales were the foundations of the agrarian
economy of the missions, it seems natural that the Jesuits were interested in
registering their localization, extension, and limits. In what follows, we will
consider a few examples of this kind of maps.
What is probably the copy of a 1699 map of economic import has been
preserved. It is a plain drawing that represents the region surrounded by the
Uruguay and the Ijuí Rivers, between latitudes 27° and 29° south. The sketch
indicates the location of a few reductions, their estancias, and the lands dedi-
cated to the cultivation of yerba mate. It seems that this map was made as an
aid to settle a conflict between the reductions of Concepción and San Javier—
the former claimed lands for cattle raising that apparently belonged to the lat-
ter. The original was presumably the work of the Jesuit José Tolo (also known
as José Coco, 1643–1717). Furlong has attributed the extant copy to a Guaraní.131
Another map of this kind has come to us in a copy. Aimé Bonpland (1773-
1858), the French botanist who lived half of his long life in the Río de la Plata
and attempted to redevelop the cultivation of yerba mate in the territory of
the ancient Jesuit missions, reproduced a 1806 copy of a 1766 Jesuit map of
the yerba plantations around the mission town of Jesús (fig. 3.9).132 This map
had also been made to settle a dispute between two mission towns, in this
case the reduction of Jesús and the Franciscan town of Yutí. As the explanatory
legend in the map indicates, the motive of the litigation was the exploitation
of a group of yerbales. The map symbolizes with dotted lines the trail that the
Guaraní followed when they went from Jesús to the yerbales and also marks
the location of the huts where they lived during harvest time.
The transference to Portugal of the seven mission towns east of the Uruguay
River as a result of the Treaty of 1750 implied for the province of Paraquaria

131 See Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:130–134. Furlong later attributed this copy to a Guaraní
author. See idem, Misiones, 410.
132 Archivo Bonpland, Museo de Fármaco-botánica, Facultad de Farmacia y Bioquímica,
Universidad de Buenos Aires.
 maps 203

FIGURE 3.9 Copy made by the French naturalist Aimé Bonpland of an 1806 copy of a 1766 original map
of the yerba plantations of the reduction of Jesús. The map was drawn in order to settle a
dispute with the town of Yuti. Archivo Bonpland, Museo de Farmacobotánica, Facultad de
Farmacia y Bioquímica, Universidad de Buenos Aires.

the loss of much land and large herds of cattle. In the context of this conflict,
Father Provincial Bernard Nusdorffer visited the region in the year of 1752. On
that occasion, he drew a rather detailed map of the seven reductions, their
estancias, and the lands of the Spanish crown (tierras realengas), indicating
with dotted lines the track he had followed during his tour of visit among
them. This map also has manuscript notes. 133
More accomplished according to contemporary geographical standards was
the 1771 map of the reductions drawn by José Cardiel, which represents the
Guaraní reductions between latitudes 24° and 32° south and longitudes 54°
and 57° west (Ferro). This map does not attempt at representing the individual
estancias; it just identifies vast tracks of land as estancias de ganado (cattle
estancias), others as “woods of wild fruit trees,” and still others as “woods of

133 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:80–81.

204 chapter 3

several kinds of trees.” The yerbales are represented as small green spots. The
map also shows the Spanish settlements and the Jesuit mission towns.134
Political conflicts and litigations between the different reductions over pro-
ductive lands were occasion for the drawing of maps that could help to settle
matters. These were utilitarian instruments focused on representing the mate-
rial relevant to the issue in dispute. Maps like these containing strategic infor-
mation seem to have been intended for internal use of the order.

10 Jesuits, Natives, and Maps

It has been argued that one of the main objectives of the Jesuits who worked
in China had been to impress the Chinese intellectual elite with the advan-
tages of Western mapmaking.135 This could not have constituted a motive in
Paraguay, where the missionaries met native oral cultures whose members had
notions of space and ways of finding their directions that were quite different
from those of the literate priests. Maps of South American preliterate peoples
can contain relationships of political and spiritual power, besides physical

134 This map is accompanied by a series of notes by Father Diego González (1734–1812), who
declares that Cardiel used as a model a map made by the lay brother Juan Dávila, but the
longitude of Asunción was corrected according to that “which the great mathematician
P. Buenaventura Suarez puts in 245° 14’ in his Lunario.” Cardiel’s map was supplied with a
table of the coordinates of the reductions. The table, says the explanatory note, had been
taken from three concordant tables, one of them by Quiroga and the two others “from the
notebooks or tables, which the missionaries had in their respective towns, of the hour of
rising and setting of the Sun, the meridian, and so on . . . all or most of which have been
taken from the Lunario perpetuo of Father Buenaventura Suárez” (cited in Furlong, José
Cardiel y su Carta relación, 103–105). Granting that the data of the table were obtained
by “keen Jesuits knowledgeable of those missions,” González attributed the discrepan-
cies between the coordinates of the reductions as shown in the map and those in the
table to the error of copyists and to the fact that some reductions changed their loca-
tions. See Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:101–103. More maps of Paraguay and Chaco have
been attributed to Cardiel, all of them drawn in Italy (see Furlong, José Cardiel y su Carta
relación, 107–109). One of them accompanied a manuscript of his Breve Relación (1771),
which has been edited. See Cardiel, “Breve relación de las misiones del Paraguay.” For a
commentary on this map, see Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:98–99.
135 Theodore N. Foss, “A Western Interpretation of China: Jesuit Cartography,” in East Meets
West. The Jesuits in China, 1582–1773, ed. Charles E. Ronan S.J. and Bonnie B. C. Oh (Chicago:
Loyola University Press, 1988), 209.
maps 205

relationships.136 In any case, it is evident that the Guaraní learnt the techniques
of mapmaking, for there are a few examples of maps drawn by them according
to European patterns. In the preceding section we already mentioned the copy
of a 1699 Jesuit map of the lands of the mission towns of Concepción and San
Javier, probably made by a Guaraní.
In the collection of Jesuit charts edited by Furlong, there is one map, likely
from the beginning of the eighteenth century, which Furlong thought was the
work of a Guaraní. This attribution has been recently put into question.137 The
map represents the territory of Paraguay between latitudes 25°40’ and 27°22’
south and longitudes 54°30’ and 56°20’ west (Greenwich); it consigns the local-
ization of reductions like Itapúa, Trinidad, and Jesús, with their estancias, yer-
bales, and routes of communication among them. The author also indicated
the places where Jesuit priests had been slain by natives marked by the name
of the priest, like “Pay Joseph Arce” (José de Arce) or “Pay Hypólito Dactilo”
(Hipólito Dattilo, 1652–1708).
A map of the extensive yerbal of the town of Loreto has been preserved,
probably drawn by a Guaraní in 1762.138 And there is a map of the mission town
of Santo Tomé and its estancias, dated 1784 and attributed to a Guaraní author.
Actually, it represents the region between the northeastern Argentine prov-
ince of Corrientes and the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. It has a legend
at the bottom which explains that it has been made in the name of the Guaraní
authorities of the town.139 Barcelos, who discussed this chart in the context
of his argument about Guaraní appropriation of the techniques of mapmak-
ing, also called attention to a map of the lands and limits of the reduction of

136 Neil L. Whitehead, “Indigenous Cartography in Lowland South America and the
Caribbean,” in The History of Cartography. Volume Two, Book Three. Cartography in the
Traditional African, American, Arctic, Australian, and Pacific Societies, ed. David Woodward
and G. Malcolm Lewis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 321–326.
For an introduction to maps of preliterate people, see also Thrower, Maps and Civilization,
1–13.
137 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:42–43. Cf. Artur H. Barcelos, “El saber cartográfico indí-
gena entre los guaraníes de las misiones jesuíticas,” in Wilde, Saberes de la conversión, 196.
I do not find Barcelos’s arguments against native authorship entirely compelling.
138 “Yerbal de Loreto” (1762), in “Expediente en el que el Administrador General de los
Pueblos de Misiones Don Ángel Lazcano se querella contra José Martín y Velazco por
haber beneficiado porción de hierba en los yerbales del pueblo de Loreto, 1773,” S. IX 40-2-
5, AGN. Cf. Furlong, Misiones, 417.
139 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:122. According to Furlong, “it is very probable and likely”
that this is a Guaraní copy of a map made by a Jesuit.
206 chapter 3

La Cruz, in post-Jesuitical times (1784), which should be attributed to the

Guaraní cabildo of the town.140
All the maps attributed to Guaraní authors represent one or more reduc-
tions and their productive lands, estancias and yerbales with routes of com-
munication, and rivers. They are sketchy in character and pragmatic in intent.
Geographical information does not go beyond the course of rivers and the
localization of wetlands and lagoons. All of them were an answer to the need
for a visual representation of the agrarian basis and boundaries of a particular
reduction. These maps were intended as aids in legal conflicts between neigh-
boring towns.
How much did the Jesuits depend on aboriginal lore to draw their own
maps?141 Inclusion of native information in Europeans maps is a thorny issue.142
As Whitehead as argued, abstract representation of spatial relationships
among preliterate peoples is not necessarily aimed at geographic representa-
tion. Besides, European claims about the contribution of natives could have
been motivated by the desire to show that the author of the map enjoyed some
kind of privileged access to local information.143 In his study of Jesuit cartogra-
phy in Spanish America, Buisseret considered the degree to which local people
contributed to mapmaking as an open question.144
Every time the Fathers set off in an exploration, they were accompanied
by local guides conversant with the route, the courses of water, the accidents
of the terrain, the presence of hostile tribes, and any other danger that could
occur. In the diary of his expedition to the Chiquitos, Father Sánchez Labrador
tells that “the guides and conductors in all the journeys were the Guaycurús,
who did not find obstacles in flooded terrains, swamps, and rivers . . . for them

140 Barcelos, “El saber cartográfico indígena,” 198–203.

141 I owe a suggestion for this question to Steve Harris.
142 G. Malcolm Lewis has proposed a number of indicators for detecting unacknowledged
native information in European maps. See idem, “Indicators of Unacknowledged
Assimilations from Amerindian ‘Maps’ on Euro-American Maps of North America: Some
General Principles from a Study of La Vérendrye’s Composite Map, 1728–29,” Imago Mundi
38 (1986): 9–34.
143 “Given the complexity and intricacy of native mapping revealed by the ethnographic
reports, one might think there was little possibility for Europeans and indigenous South
Americans to understand each other’s space-time concepts” (Whitehead, “Indigenous
Cartography,” 322).
144 Buisseret, “Jesuit Cartography,” 161.
maps 207

any open field is a road”.145 Jesuits used to undertake their journeys, either short
or prolonged, accompanied by a number of their catechumens and baqueanos.
It has already been pointed out by other authors that Cardiel’s maps of
Patagonia depend heavily on the information of natives.146 His “Mapa de
Magallanes” (1751), held in the Biblioteca Nacional (Madrid), represents the
southern tip of South America from the River Plate to the Strait of Magellan.
The map shows the geographic accidents of the coast and the localization
of different peoples in the interior, such as the Araucaunos, Pehuenches and
Poyas. It also delineates the itinerary of cacique Cangapol. The map has a large
box with an explanatory note that throws some light upon the conditions of its
production.147 Cardiel declares that “the tract of land from Buenos Aires to the
Strait of Magellan has not been surveyed by white people, so that I had to rely
on what the Indians of different Nations say.” In order to “better approach the
truth” Cardiel interrogated different groups of aborigines at different times and
included in the map “that which is most likely and in which all of them agree.”
He also added the measurements he had taken in the 1746 expedition with
Quiroga, and delineated the course of the Colorado River and Río del Sauce
(Río Negro), “of which the Pehuenches and the Tehuelches tell many things.”
It is evident that Cardiel trusted his own information and that of previous
European maps more than the reports obtained from the natives, which he did
not see as entirely reliable. The issue of warrant is interesting, for it raises the
question of whether the supposed bias of information provided by natives was
due to some incommensurability of spatial conceptions or to the fact that they
wished to hide directions they considered strategic.
In his Description of Patagonia Thomas Falkner has left insightful testimo-
nies about the ways the native inhabitants provided him with reports about the
geographic and human landscape of the region. He says that he had “accounts
of native Indians and of Spanish captives who had lived many years among
them”.148 Translations were not easy and what the Patagonians said or signaled
about was frequently decoded in terms of the expectations of the white per-
sons. Falkner claims that the search for the mythical city of the Caesars, which
as we will see in the next chapter had caused the endless and unsuccessful

145 Sánchez Labrador, El Paraguay Católico, 1:10.

146 Luis I. de Lasa and María T. Luiz, “Representaciones del espacio patagónico. Una interpre-
tación de la cartografía jesuítica de los siglos XVII y XVIII,” Cuadernos de Historia 35 (2011):
22–23.
147 Guillén, “Cuatro cartas jesuiticas,” 77–79.
148 Falkner, Description of Patagonia, 25.
208 chapter 3

quest of Father Mascardi, was “entirely false and groundless, and occasioned
by misunderstanding the accounts of the Indians”.149 The decision to include
or not a geographical accident in a map was frequently difficult owing to
contradictions between conflicting sources of information. On the authority
of D’Anville’s map and despite Quiroga’s reports against it, Falkner decided
to include in his map the Camarones River, which supposedly opened into
the Bay of Camarones, north of the Gulf of St. George.150 An important argu-
ment for the reality of the river was that “the Indians talked of it as situated in
the country of Chulilaw.” Falkner speculates that the river, being small, could
have been “swallowed up in those deserts”.151 At one point he put into ques-
tion European maps because they did not agree with the things he had heard
said by the aborigines. A Spanish chart situated the mouth of the Río Negro at
latitude 40°42’ south. D’Anville had put it on his map 2 degrees further south.
According to Falkner, this would make too great a distance between the mouths
of the Negro and the Colorado Rivers, whereas “all the Indians” affirmed “that
these two rivers enter into the sea at no great distance from each other, there-
fore, in my map, I have taken a middle distance”.152 The native informants were
persons of rank and it seems that they were able to use some kind of non-
written symbolic representations that Falkner interpreted in terms of his own
conception of mapping.153 When talking about rivers that fall from the eastern
slopes of the Andes into the Colorado River (Primer Desaguadero) he tells that
a “Tehuel or Southern Cacique described upon my table as many as sixteen”
and told him their names, “but not having writing materials at hand” Falkner
could not set them down.154 “The great cacique Cangapol,” perhaps the single
most important native protagonist in the dealings among aborigines, Jesuits
and Spaniards in the 1740s, was among those who informed Falkner about the
country.155 The cartouche with the title of Falkner’s map, “A New Map of the
Southern Parts of America,” is flanked by two figures: on the left Cangapol and

149 Ibid., 113.

150 Quiroga does not mention the river in his description of the Bay of Camarones. See idem,
“Relación diaria,” 161.
151 Ibid., 87. Actually, it was Quiroga who was right, for the river does not exist. See Ricardo
Caletti, “El enigma del Río Cananor,” Portal Patagónico 5, no. 28 (November 2007), http://
www.portal-patagonico.com.ar/paginas/2007/09/97/el_enigma_del_rio_cananor/
152 Ibid., 84.
153 See Whitehead, “Indigenous cartography” for a discussion on these aspects of space-
related information interchanged between natives and Europeans.
154 Falkner, Description of Patagonia, 79.
155 Ibid., 26.
maps 209

on the right Huennee, one of his wives. Cangapol, who according to Falkner
“was tall and well proportioned,” is depicted as half-naked and armed with a
sword of European style, a lance, and a bow.156 The ornamental group is com-
pleted with the representation of two native dwellings and some animals:
skunk, armadillo, ant bear, and perhaps a capybara (the last two mentioned
beasts live way further north).
The map in Description of Patagonia is divided in two sheets, one from lati-
tude 30° to 44°30’ south and the other from latitude 44°30’ to 57° south. It
is not altogether clear whether Falkner had full control over the making of
the map, which was engraved by Thomas Kitchin (1718–1784), who had been
named hydrographer to the king one year before the publication of Falkner’s
work. The chart represents the southern tip of South America from Central
Argentina to Tierra del Fuego, including the Falkland (Malvinas) Islands and
Chile. According to a legend in the map, it was drawn following D’Anville’s map
improved by Mr. Bolton, an English cartographer. For the Strait of Magellan
Falkner used a chart from Bougainville’s expedition and for the inland coun-
try he depended on his own observations.157 We have already mentioned
D’Anville’s qualms about drawing a rather “narrow” Patagonia. Falkner claims
that he was able to reconcile this neither “to the relations of the Indians” nor
to his own observations.158 He also censures d’Anville for making the distance
between the cities of Córdoba and Santa Fe 40 leagues less than it was.
A look at the cartography of Buenos Aires and Patagonia by the middle
of the eighteenth century shows that, in what concerns coastal accidents,
European maps depended on the various charts raised by the surveying expe-
ditions of the imperial powers. As to the interior, the cartographers had no
other source but the maps of the Jesuit missionaries, which in turn depended
on their own explorations and the reports of local natives. But the examples
discussed above show that the flow of information was not simply unidirec-
tional from local lore to a cartographer’s cabinet in Paris, London, or Madrid.
Obscure Jesuits and the most renowned mapmakers of Europe copied and
corrected each other. Those Jesuits with specialized training and proficiency
in the use of astronomical or nautical instruments such as Quiroga, aimed at
drawing their maps on the basis of measurements of latitude and longitude
to fulfill contemporary cartographic standards. In a booklet that accompanied
a lost map of the Province of Paraguay drawn by a Jesuit (perhaps Quiroga)

156 About seven feet and some inches in height. See Falkner, A Description of Patagonia, 26.
157 Ibid., 25.
158 Ibid., 26.
210 chapter 3

after 1757, the author complains about the variety and discrepancy he found
in the informants. These (it is not said whether they were natives, creoles, or
travelers) “understand neither rhumbs nor graduations; they cannot declare
[sic] the distances and in the cases that two of them have seen something,
they disagree about the localization and quality of the thing”.159 Falkner also
resorted to crossing and comparing accounts from different sources and, at
least in one case, he contrasted the validity of European maps against informa-
tion obtained from the natives.

159 Cited in Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:94.

 chapter 4

The Heavens

To what purpose did Jesuits missionaries in Paraguay practiced astronomy? In

China, Jesuit astronomy was a hyperbolic operation of captatio benevolentiae.
Faced with a sophisticated civilization that valued highly knowledge of the
heavenly realm, the missionaries sent to China aspired to impress the imperial
dignitaries with their command of apparatuses and predictive accuracy in the
hope of gaining their intellectual respect and thus being allowed to preach
their message. Nothing of the sort occurred in Paraguay or Río de la Plata. The
indigenous peoples of South America had the astronomical lore of hunter-
gatherer societies. They learned to recognize celestial objects that could help
them find their way in the Chaco jungle or the Patagonian steppe; they used
the heliacal rising of stars to mark the beginning of the year, and organized the
heavely sphere into constellations associated with their myths of origin.1 As to
the Jesuits themselves, shortly after their arrival in South America they began
to collect observations of eclipses and comets. Romano has already pointed
out that Jesuit science played a different role in the Chinese missions and in
those set in other lands. In China, scientific knowledge and skills were used to
seduce political power; in other cases they just served the goals of the missions
in an instrumental or narrowly technical sense.2
This chapter is focused on Buenaventura Suárez, a Jesuit astronomer born
in the Río de la Plata who worked in the Guaraní missions during the first half
of the eighteenth century. In order to have a term of comparison, we will start
by considering the astronomical work of Mascardi, an Italian missionary to
southern Chile and northern Patagonia during the middle of the seventeenth
century.3

1 See for example Sixto Giménez Benítez et al., “Astronomía aborigen del Chaco: Mocovíes I.
La noción de nayic (camino) como eje estructurador,” Scripta Ethnologica 23 (2002): 39–48
and idem, “The Sun and the Moon as Marks of Time and Space among the Mocovíes of the
Argentinean Chaco,” Archaeoastronomy 20 (2006): 54–69.
2 Antonella Romano, “Les Jésuites entre apostolat missionaire et activité scientifique (XVIe–
XVIIIe siècles),” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 74 (2005): 226–227.
3 The episode described in the first section of this chapter has also been studied by Prieto; see
idem, Missionary scientists, 116–140.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004256774_��6

212 chapter 4

1 The Stars Lead to Kircher

A small contingent of Jesuits arrived in Chile from Peru in 1593. By the middle of
the seventeenth century they had established colleges, missions, and houses in
several cities, along with a seminary in Santiago. It was in Chile and Patagonia
where Nicolò Mascardi (1624–1674) would distinguish himself as a missionary.
He was the scion of a noble family from Liguria, who ran from his house at 14
to join the Society of Jesus.4 The person who kindled the imagination of the
young Nicolò with visions of souls to be saved in lands at the southern edge
of the world was Alonso de Ovalle, the author of the Historical Narrative of
the Kingdom of Chile. At the time when Mascardi met Ovalle in Rome, he had
finished his studies of philosophy in the Collegium Romanum, where he had
attended the lessons of Athanasius Kircher, the revered token of Jesuit omni-
science. Sailing to South America by way of Panama, where he stayed for two
years, Mascardi arrived in 1652 in the mission of Buena Esperanza, near the
city of Concepción (Chile). The 1655 fierce revolt of the Araucanos wiped out
this Jesuit establishment—the Italian missionary saved his life by chance, but
all his astronomical instruments and books were lost. In the event Mascardi
was assigned to Chiloé, the largest island in the archipelago off the coast of
Chile. While there, natives from the eastern side of the Andes told him stories
about the hidden City of the Caesars. Mascardi crossed that mountain range
and by 1670 he had founded a mission among the Poyas, in the northern shore
of the lake Nahuel Huapi (northern Argentinian Patagonia). It was from there
that he departed in search of the mythical city, in four expeditions carried out
between 1669 and 1773. In the course of these excursions Mascardi explored a
sizable part of the Patagonian plateau—in his third attempt he reached the
Strait of Magellan by land. Father Mascardi was killed by a party of hostile
natives on 3 February 1674.
Like many of his religious companions, Niccolò Mascardi felt proud of hav-
ing been a student of Kircher’s. His teacher was an avid collector of words and
things. From the four corners of the world Kircher gathered the observational

4 For Mascardi’s biography see Giuseppe Rosso, “Nicolò Mascardi missionario gesuita esplor-
atore del Cile e della Patagonia (1624–1674),” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 19 (1950):
3–74. For his missionary years, see Guillermo Furlong, Nicolás Mascardi y su Carta-Relación
(Buenos Aires: Ediciones Theoria, 1963). Furlong has also edited a short narration of
Mascardi’s life and martyrdom, which he attributed to Father Antonio Alemán. See idem,
“Vida apostólica y glorioso martirio del venerable Padre Nicolás Mascardi,” Anales del Museo
de la Patagonia Perito Francisco P. Moreno 1 (1945): 195–236 (Rosso attributed this account to
Diego de Rosales S.J. [1605–1677]).
the heavens 213

data that underlaid his folio volumes and the antiquities and objects of nature
that enriched his famous museum, one of Europe’s most visited cabinets of
curiosities and a center of courtly sociability.5 He received information and
specimens from Jesuit missionaries, who along with their reports on pastoral
activities sent to Rome records of eclipses, comets, and any other intriguing
celestial phenomena they observed in their lands of mission.6

1.1 Comets and Eclipses

In a letter dated on 1 June 1653, Mascardi told Kircher about a “cometa nebu-
losus” he had seen on 15 December 1652 from the Chilean town of Bucalemu,
where a Jesuit house was established.7 The comet appeared near Canopus—
the second brightest star in the sky after Sirius—and twelve days later it was
approaching the constellation of Perseus. It moved from southeast to north-
west at a pace of 10 degrees daily. This is the comet that Jan van Riebeeck (1619–
1677), commander of the Dutch settlement in South Africa, detected from the
Cape of Good Hope on the night of 16 December. It seems that Mascardi saw
it before van Riebeek.8
A few years later, in a letter from the city of Castro in the island of Chiloé
dated on 14 March 1666, Mascardi told Kircher about his observations of

5 See Silvio Bedini, “Citadels of Learning: The Museo Kircheriano and Other Seventeenth-
Century Italian Science Collections,” in Enciclopedismo in Roma Barocca. Athanasius Kircher
e il Museo del Collegio Romano tra Wunderkammer e museo scientifico, ed. Maristella Casciato,
Maria Grazia Ianniello and Maria Vitale (Venice: Marsilio, 1986), pp. 249–67 and Findlen,
“Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College.”
6 Steven Harris has discussed the role of missionary networks in the building of Jesuit science.
See idem, “Confession-Building.”
7 Mascardi to Kircher, APUG 567 (Kircher, Misc. Epp. XIII):110r–110v. A great part of Kircher’s
correspondence is conserved in the APUG in 14 volumes (old signature I–XIV, and new 555–
568). I have used the electronic edition of Kircher’s correspondence in the digital archive
organized by the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza (Florence), see http://archimede
.imss.fi.it/kircher/. Almost all of the correspondence between Kircher and Mascardi was
paraphrased and in part transcribed in Rosso “Nicolò Mascardi”. For corrections and addi-
tions see Josef Wicki, “Die Miscellanea epistolarum des P. Athanasius Kircher S.J. in mission-
arischen Sicht,” Euntes docete 21 (1968): 221–254. Wicki’s article is a commented catalogue of
the letters in the APUG between Kircher and missionaries in Asia, Africa and the Americas.
8 See Gary W. Kronk, Cometography. A Catalogue of Comets. Vol. 1, Ancient-1799 (Cambridge,
Engl.: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 346 (C/1652 Y1) and E. B. Knobel, “On Some Original
Unpublished Observations of the Comet of 1652,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical
Society 57 (1897): 434–438. Van Riebeeck has been considered the discoverer of this comet,
discussed in the first chapter of Johannes Hevelius’ Cometografia (Danzig, 1668).
214 chapter 4

another comet.9 Mascardi first saw it on 15 December 1664 at 01:20 A.M. in

the constellation of Hydra. He registered further observations on 16, 17, and 21
December (by this time it was near Sirius) and on 2, 3, and 4 January, when it
was advancing toward the constellation of Aries. The missionary still followed
its course from 16 through 21 January 1665. Mascardi provides its altitude, its
angular distance from reference stars, and an estimate of the length of its tail.
Interestingly, he also rehearses the observations of the comet made from the
city of Lima “by the expert astronomer Francisco Ruiz Lozano, a rich layman
devoted to the study of the sky and the stars, who deserves to be praised”.10
Ruiz Lozano (1607–1677), born in Lima and a pupil of the Jesuit college of
that city, completed his education at the University of Mexico, where he stud-
ied mathematics with the renowned Mercedarian Fr. Diego Rodríguez (1596–
1668), the author of the Discurso ethereológico del nuevo cometa (Mexico,
1652).11 This work expounds and interprets the observations Rodríguez made
with Lozano of the comet of 1652, which Mascardi had seen from Bucalemu.
Lozano eventually occupied the position of cosmographer (cosmógrafo mayor)
of the Viceroyalty of Peru from 1662 to 1677 and in 1665 inaugurated a chair of
mathematics for sailors in the Hospital of the Holy Ghost (Lima).12 His obser-
vations of the comet of 1664–1665, some of which were reported by Mascardi
in his 1666 letter to Kircher, were published as Tratado de cometas, observación
y juicio del que se vio en esta ciudad de los Reyes . . . por los fines del año 1664 y
principios de 1665 (Lima, 1665).
The comet of 1664–1665 was also studied by another of Kircher’s
Iberoamerican correspondents, the Jesuit Moravian astronomer Valentin
Stansel (1621–1675), at that time in the city of Bahia, in northeastern Brazil.
At the end of Kirchner’s clean copy of Mascardi’s 1666 letter, the former
annotated that Stansel had published a book on that comet.13 This was the

9 Mascardi to Kirchner, APUG 564 (Kircher, Misc. Epp. X):89r–90v.

10 Mentioned in the letter as “Franciscus Ruyz Pozzanus.” Ibid., 89v.
11 See Elías Trabulse, “Un científico mexicano del siglo XVII: Fray Diego Rodríguez y su obra,”
Historia Mexicana 24, no. 1 (1974), 50–54.
12 See Jorge Ortiz Sotelo, “El orureño Francisco Ruiz Lozano, general de la Mar del Sur,
cosmógrafo mayor del reyno del Perú y primer catedrático de matemáticas de la ciu-
dad de Lima,” Historia y cultura [Lima] 21–22 (1992): 139–156; idem “Los cosmógrafos del
Perú,” in A propósito de Raúl Porrás Barrenechea, ed. Antonio Garrido de Aranda (Córdoba
[Spain]: Universidad de Córdoba, 2001), 140–147.
13 Kircher’s note, in Mascardi to Kircher, Chiloé, 14 March 1666, APUG 564 (Misc. Epp. X):90v.
Both Rosso, “Nicolò Mascardi,” 30–31 and John E. Fletcher, “Astronomy on the Life and
Correspondence of Athanasius Kircher,” Isis 61, no. 1 (1970), 61 assumed that this note
had been written by Mascardi and inferred that the Italian and Stansel interchanged
the heavens 215

Legatus uranicus ex orbe novo in veterem (Prague, [1665] 1683), written in 1665
but published 18 years later.14 Valentin Stansel (1621–1705) was the most accom-
plished Jesuit astronomer working in Iberian America during the seventeenth
century. A native of Olomouc, he had studied in the college of his city and at
the University of Prague, where he also taught mathematics and astronomy.
In 1655 he arrived in Rome and stayed with Kircher during a year, after which
he was transferred to Portugal, where he taught at the Aula de Esfera of the
Colégio de Santo Antão in Lisbon and at the College of Élvas. By April 1663
Stansel was in Brazil, were he spent the rest of his life.15 One of his works, the
Uranophilus caelestis peregrinus (Ghent, 1685) is a description of the heavens
cast in the genre of a “celestial voyage,” much in the line of Kircher’s Iter exstati-
cum coeleste (1656).16
As can be seen from this brief account, astronomers in the Spanish and
Portuguese possessions in the New World added their share to the literature
on comets. Compared with the work of Rodríguez, Lozano and Stansel, who
enriched their observations with long theoretical disquisitions, Mascardi’s
own contributions seem rather poor. But he was able to relay to Kirchner, the
living center of the extended plexus of Jesuit science, hard data on the comets
of 1652 and 1664–1665.
The nature and significance of comets was a hotly debated issue during the
seventeenth century. Were they below the Moon, as Aristotle said, or beyond
the Moon, as Tycho and many Jesuits believed? How they originated? Was
their path straight, as Kepler and Hevelius maintained, or curve, as Aristotelian

correspondence. It was Wicki who cleared up this confusion, when he explained that the
note at the end of Kircher’s copy of Mascardi’s 1666 letter stating that Stansel had writ-
ten a book on the comet had been written by Kircher. See Wicki, “Miscellanea epistola-
rum,” 241. The annotation mentions Stansel as “olim meo in re literaria socio,” which does
not apply to Mascardi but does indeed correspond to Kircher, who had been Stansel’s
teacher and had kept with him a copious correspondence. In fact, this note is lacking
from Mascardi’s autograph letter. See Mascardi to Kircher, APUG 564 (Kircher, Misc. Epp.
X):159r–161v.
14 In this work Stansel reported the comets of 1664–1665 and 1665. See Juan Casanovas
and Philip C. Keenan, “The Observation of Comets by Valentine Stansel, a Seventeenth-
Century Missionary in Brazil,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 62 (1993): 319–330.
15 See Carlos Ziller Camenietzki, “Esboço biográfico de Valentin Stansel (1621–1705),
matemático jesuíta e missionário na Bahia,” Ideaçao 3 (January–June 1999): 159–182.
16 Carlos Ziller Camenietzki, “Baroque Science between the Old and the New World: Father
Kircher and His Colleague Valentin Stansel (1621–1705),” in Findlen, Athanasius Kircher,
312–315.
216 chapter 4

tradition would have it?17 Were they divine portents or was their effect on
Earth a result of secondary causes?18 In his letters, Mascardi never tackles
these issues, limiting himself to jot down the data required to reconstruct the
trajectory of the comet. In his 1666 letter, besides commenting on the comet
of 1664–1665, he tells Kircher about two other comets he had seen from Chiloé
in the course of 1665. The first appeared on 8 May in the constellation of the
Whale. By 12 May it was over the constellation of Eridanus (at that time it
showed two tails, one of them orientated toward the Sun, the other toward
Venus); by 8 June it approached Canopus. About those days, Mascardi began
to see a second comet, which appeared on 18 May at 06:00 A.M. in the con-
stellation of Dorado, passed by the constellation of Eridanus between 15 May
and 9 June, and finally approached the head of Hydra (the last report is from
10 June). Mascardi underscores that both comets moved in opposite direc-
tions (“sibi invicem motu proprio oppositis”). But his phrasing suggests that
he was not altogether sure of what he had seen (“si quid erratum, emendare
non gravetur”).19 He expressly says that he submits his observations to be
examined by expert astronomers, who might find in them a curious subject for
learning and matter for thought, while astrologers and preachers might wish
to “interpret these celestial tongues”.20 It is evident that, as most of the Jesuits,
Mascardi understood comets as both natural phenomena to be explained and
also portents susceptible of interpretation.
Two decades after Mascardi’s observations from South America, comets
would be the cause of a heated polemic between the famous Jesuit mission-
ary and explorer Eusebio F. Kino (Eusebius Franz Kühn, 1645–1711) and Carlos
de Sigüenza y Góngora (1645–1700), a New Spain savant and former Jesuit
expelled from the Society for reasons unknown.21 The controversy concerned

17 For these theoretical questions see J. A. Ruffner, “The Curved and the Straight: Cometary
Theory from Kepler to Hevelius,” Journal of the History of Astronomy 2 (1971): 178–194.
18 Carlos Ziller Camenietzki, “O cometa, o pregador e o cientista. Antônio Vieira e Valentin
Stansel observam o céu da Bahia no século XVII,” Revista da Sociedade Brasileira de
História da Ciência 14 (1995): 37–52. The author discusses the question taking the Jesuits
Vieira and Stansel as embodiments of two contrating views, one that saw comets as por-
tents sent by God and another which considered them as purely natural phenomena.
19 Mascardi to Kircher, 14 March 1666, APUG 564, (Kircher, Misc. Epp. X):89r.
20 “Haec duo phenomena haud dubio materiam dabunt astronomis philosophandi, astrologis
vero et divini verbi praeconibus lenguas hasce caelestes intepretandi” (ibid., 90v.)
21 This episode has been extensively studied. See Ellen Shaffer, “Father Eusebio Kino and
the Comet of 1680–1681,” Historical Society of Southern California Quarterly 34, no. 1 (1954):
57–70; Daniel R. Reedy, “The Writer as Seer: Baroque Views of Natural Phenomena in
the New World,” South Atlantic Bulletin 43, no. 4 (1978): 85–93; María del Carmen Rovira
the heavens 217

the comet of 1680–1681, which Kino first saw from Cádiz while waiting for the
ship that should take him to New Spain—he communicated his observations
in letters to the Countess of Aveiro y Arcos.22 By that time Sigüenza occupied
the chair of mathematics that had belonged to Fr. Diego Rodríguez. His reflec-
tions on the comet were published in his Manifiesto filosófico contra los cometas
(Mexico, 1681), a work which denied the significance of comets as omens and
has been considered a herald of Enlightenment in New Spain. Before leaving
the city of Mexico for Pimería Alta and California, Kino gave Sigüenza a copy
of his Exposición astronómica del cometa (1681), which sustained the oppo-
site opinion—Sigüenza later wrote against Kino’s tract his well known Libra
astronómica y filosófica, published in 1690. The wrangling between the Jesuit
and the professor of the Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico became
emblematic of the intellectual ferments that brewed in the Viceroyalty of
New Spain in the last decades of the seventeenth century—Sor Juana Inés
de la Cruz (1651–1695), perhaps the most accomplished representative of that
cultural milieu, dedicated his Sonnet 205 to the praise of Father Kino and his
comet.23 All the protagonists of this episode were in the long shadow of Kircher:
Kino, Sor Juana, and Sigüenza, a staunch Kircherian and collector of Kircher´s
books, who in his Libra challenged Kino’s interpretation of the sage.24 Kino

Gaspar, “Algunos matices ideológicos del siglo XVII en México. La controversia entre
D. Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora y el Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino sobre la naturaleza
y efectos de los cometas,” Cuadernos Salmantinos de Filosofía 12 (1985): 289–304; Víctor
Navarro Brotóns, “La Libra astronómica y filosófica de Sigüenza y Góngora: la polémica
sobre el cometa de 1680,” in Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Homenaje, ed. Alicia Mayer,
2 vols. (Mexico: UNAM, 2000), 1:145–185; Christopher Johnson, “ ‘Periwigged Heralds’:
Epistemology and Intertextuality in Early American Cometography,” Journal of the History
of Ideas 65, no. 3 (2004): 399–419; Jeremy Robbins, “From Baroque to Pre-Enlightenment:
Resolving the Epistemological Crisis,” Bulletin of Spanish Studies 82, no. 8 (2005): 233–238.
For the extensive bibliography on Kino see DHCJ, s.v. “Kino, Eusebio Francisco,” by Ernest
Burrus. For Kino’s biography see Herbert Eugene Bolton, Rim of Christendom. A Biography
of Eusebio Francisco Kino, Pacific Coast Pioneer, 3rd ed. (Tucson: University of Arizona
Press, 1984) and the bibliographical actualization in Ernest J. Burrus, “Review Essay of
Herbert E. Bolton, Rim of Christendom,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 65, no.
3 (1985): 553–558.
22 Edited in Ernest Burrus, Kino Writes to the Duchess. Letters of Eusebio Francisco Kino, S. J.,
to the Duchess of Aveiro. An annotated English Translation of the Non-Spanish Documents
(Rome-St. Louis: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1965).
23 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Poemas de la única poetisa americana, musa dézima (Zaragoza:
Manuel Román, 1682), f. 166. See the pages on Sor Juana, Kircher and Modern natural
philosophy in Hill, Sceptres and Sciences, 43–94.
24 See Findlen, “A Jesuit’s Books in the New World,” 333–335 and 343–347.
218 chapter 4

and Mascardi were hardy missionaries who chose to take their message to the
desert—the former into Sonora and Arizona, the latter into Patagonia. Kino
was probably better trained in astronomy, for he had studied at Ingolstadt,
Hall-Innsbruck, and Freiburg. Besides, while Kino published affirmative and
contentious interpretations of what he had seen, Mascardi felt almost insecure
about the accuracy of his own observations.
In a letter written to his father soon after he arrived in Chile, Mascardi
describes a terribile cometa (“a dreadful comet”) seen from the town of La Paz,
in the valley of Chuquiabo (present-day Bolivia): the Sun was surrounded by
42 circles and transfixed by a white lance, while a star moved from its proper
place only to return to it afterwards, and a large boulder came out from a
nearby mount. “God deliver us from bad omens . . .” finished Mascardi.25 The
same phenomenon was described to Kircher by the Flemish Jesuit Juan Ramon
(Jean Raymond) De Coninck (also spelled Koenig, 1625–1709), in a 20 July 1653
letter written in Latin from the Jesuit mission of Juli (Peru). It is likely that in
the letter to his father, Mascardi was actually rehearsing De Coninck’s account
of the meteor, which had taken place on 29 November 1652 (there are some
differences in the descriptions, e.g., De Coninck mentioned that the Sun had
been surrounded by five red circles).26 Both Jesuits were in contact. In his let-
ter, De Coninck tells Kircher that Mascardi was doing well in Chile and that he
had just finished defending his thesis of theology, which had been published
(the work is now lost).27 De Coninck had become acquainted with Mascardi in
1647 in Seville, when the two of them were waiting to be embarked to America.
He met him again in Lima during the third year of probation. Eventually,
De Coninck quit the Society of Jesus and succeeded Ruiz Lozano as cosmogra-
pher of the Viceroyalty of Peru.28
Mascardi also took notice of lunar eclipses. In his letter to Kircher of 1 June
1653 from Buena Esperanza, he mentions the eclipse he had seen from Panama

25 Cited in A. Neri, “Un missionario al Chili nel secolo XVII,” La Rassegna Nazionale 9, no. 3
(1882): 585.
26 De Coninck to Kircher, letter in APUG 567 (Kircher, Misc. Epp. XIII):135r–138v. It has been
edited in Josep Barnadas, “Un corresponsal del P. Athanasius Kircher SJ desde Charcas:
dos cartas de J. R. de Coninck SJ (1653–1655),” in Classica Boliviana. Actas del Segundo
Encuentro Boliviano de Estudios Clásicos (La Paz: Sociedad Boliviana de Estudios Clásicos-
Plural Ediciones, 2002), 144–149.
27 De Coninck also wrote to Kircher on 31 July 1655 from Potosí, sending him his own astro-
nomical observations—in this second letter he told about the 1655 upheaval of the
Araucanos in Chile, an event he had probably learned from Mascardi. See Barnadas, “Un
corresponsal del P. Athanasius Kircher,” 149–151.
28 Ibid., 139–140. See Ortiz Sotelo, “Los cosmógrafos mayores,” 146.
the heavens 219

in his way to Chile, on 8 November 1650 at 0:15 A.M., the end of which he could
not observe because the night was cloudy.29 In the same letter, he mentions
another eclipse seen from the town of Bucalemu on 13 March 1653, from 9:15
P.M. to 01:15 A.M. of the next day. The Italian missionary timed the onset, the
stage of the total eclipse, the beginning of the penumbra and its end. He also
wrote about it to the Jesuit astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli (1598–1671),
then in Bologna. Riccioli, who had observed the same eclipse from Bologna,
used these measurements to calculate the longitude of Santiago de Chile. The
method of obtaining the longitude of a given geographical location by compar-
ing the time of onset of the lunar eclipse both in that place and in the meridian
of reference was known from Antiquity. Riccioli described it in book eight of
his Geographiae et hydrographiae reformatae libri duodecim.30 The problem for
Riccioli was that, if he took seriously what Mascardi had told him, namely that
Santiago was located one degree west of Bucalemu, it turned out that Santiago
was 11 degrees to the east with respect to the longitude of Lima, whereas no
chart gave a value greater than 9 degrees.31 After Clavius, Riccioli was perhaps
the most famous Jesuit astronomer of the seventeenth century. He taught
mathematics, philosophy, and theology for 10 years at Parma and afterwards in
Bologna, where he collaborated with the Jesuit Franceso Grimaldi (1618–1666),
of light diffraction fame.32 Riccioli’s most famous work was his Almagestum
novum (1651). Mascardi received from Peru the two volumes of the first tome of
this work and asked Kircher to be sent the second and third tomes, which were
never published. He was eager to receive “whatever there is new in mathemat-
ics” and any kind of book describing the whole of “mechanics,” for he had lost
everything during the attack of the Araucanos in 1655.33

1.2 The Mission by the Lake Nahuel Huapi

According to the inventory of Kircher’s museum made by Giorgio de Sepi,
Mascardi wrote a geographical text about the lands of the Strait of Magellan

29 Mascardi to Kircher, APUG 567 (Kircher, Misc. Epp. XIII):110r–110v.

30 Giovanni Battista Riccioli, Geographiae et hydrographiae reformatae libri duodecim
(Bologna: Ex Typographia Herediis Victorii Benatii, 1661), 324–326.
31 Ibid., 396.
32 For a covering approach to Riccioli see Alfredo Dinis, “Giovanni Battista Riccioli and the
Science of His Time,” in Feingold, Jesuit Science, 195–224 and the various papers in Maria
Teresa Borgato, ed., Giambattista Riccioli e il merito scientifico dei gesuiti nell’età barocca
(Florence: Olschki, 2002).
33 Mascardi to Kircher, Chiloé, 7 February 1661, APUG 562 (Kircher, Misc. Epp. VIII):70r–71v.
220 chapter 4

and the Island of Chiloé.34 Two of his letters to Kircher, written in 1671 from
his mission on the lake Nahuel Huapi, are packed with geographical descrip-
tions of the region, the climate, the tides in Chiloé and the Strait of Magellan,
the Andean volcanoes from New Granada to the Land’s End, the height of the
mountains, the native peoples, their languages, religion, and customs.35 He was
eager to answer to Kircher’s demand of information with “exact observations
of the marvelous effects and the strange workings of sagacious nature which
influence the [southern] climate, entirely different from the one we have in
Europe”.36 The account is intertwined with the narration of his fatigues, efforts
and hopes as a missionary, and ends with a short exposition of his plans for
reaching the city of the Caesars.
Some of Mascardi’s affirmations are puzzling, such as when he says that
in the southern skies, from latitude 30° to the south, there are no stars brighter
than the fourth or fifth magnitude “as we astronomers call them,” exception
made of the Southern Cross.37 Mascardi also claims that in the torrid zone
of South America plants and fruits from Europe “degenerate and change into
new species of plants never seen before,” while in the temperate zone where
he was living the seeds brought from Europe grew true to their species and
adapted well.38 He also reports the marvelous phenomenon that in the coun-
try that lays on the western slopes of the Andes (i.e., in Chile) there are neither
vipers nor lightning and thunders, while over the eastern side, in the Pampas,
live “innumerable serpents and other venomous beasts and there is no lack of
frequent thunderclaps and lightning and other meteorological phenomena”.39
Mascardi leaves the investigation of these wonders to Kircher.
Even granting the condition of chronic penury and distress in which these
letters were written, it is evident that their author was someone whose enthu-
siasm about astronomy and geography was stronger than his proficiency
in these matters. Mascardi’s basic training allowed him to make some basic
observations of celestial events, like eclipses and comets, which he thought
interesting enough to be sent to Kircher and other Jesuit astronomers like

34 Giorgio de Sepi, Romani Collegii Societatis Iesu Musaeum Celeberrimum (Amsterdam: Ex

Officina Janssonio-Waesbergiana, 1678), 66.
35 Mascardi to Kircher, “Apud Poyas ultra Andes Chiloenses” [among the Poyas, beyond the
Chilean Andes], 10 February 1671 (in Latin), APUG 565 (Kircher, Misc. Epp. XI):185r–186v;
Mascardi to Kircher, APUG 566 (Kircher, Misc. Epp. XII):217r–220v, dated 1671 by Rosso (in
Italian). Unless otherwise indicated, I will quote from the letter in Italian.
36 Mascardi to Kircher [1671], APUG 566 (Kircher, Misc. Epp. XII):217r.
37 Ibid., 219r.
38 Ibid., 219v.
39 Ibid., 219v.
the heavens 221

Riccioli for interpretation. The explanation of the marvels of nature he dis-

covered was also Kircher’s department—Mascardi limited himself to provide
the narrative account. Like many other Jesuits around the world, his admira-
tion for Kircher was unbound. Writing from the mission by the Nahuel Huapi,
Mascardi tells him that he had taken with him from Chile the “most cherished
letter of his beloved teacher, as a dear thing, carrying it to the end of a wild
and unknown country, beyond the Andes”.40 In a moving passage, he goes on to
declaim that soon both of them, Kircher and Mascardi, will be seeing each other
face to face, and in that blessed state, “you will demonstrate better problems
than those you taught me long time ago, when I was your very dear disciple”.41
Mascardi’s letter from his mission by the Nahuel Huapi describes an exper-
iment he had done on 21 December 1666 in Castro (Chiloé), at latitude 42°
south, “only to obey” Kircher’s request.42 The day of the summer solstice for
the southern hemisphere he stacked in the ground a pole divided in 1687 parts
and verified that its shadow at midday measured 588 of those parts, while at
the same time he measured the altitude of the Sun (the value was 72°30’; he
does not say what instrument he used, neither collated this figure with the one
that can be deduced from the experiment). The idea was that Kircher should
compare Mascardi’s reading of the shadow at Castro with an analogous obser-
vation made in Rome, situated at (approximately) the same latitude north
of the equator. Mascardi complains about his lack of “exact instruments, as
those required for so delicate an operation” and remarks that to perform such
an experiment the sight of a lynx or an eagle, accustomed to look at the Sun,
would be required (as usual, he is not altogether sure of his own readings).
Kircher’s tradition of learning, heavily bent on instrumentation, demanded
from Mascardi standards of accuracy which his student found difficult to ful-
fill. In a letter from Chiloé, he explains that it is due to the lack of instruments
that he cannot oblige Kircher’s request of news about “coelestia, terrestria et
maritima huius antartici marginis”.43
The unending rains of the Chilean archipelago were for Mascardi a cruel
contrast to the mild springs of his Italian youth. Chronic famine, constant dan-
ger, crude winters, and the lack of a Jesuit companion contributed to make life
even harder when he crossed the Andes to establish his mission among the
Poyas. Mascardi spent 22 years in the southern cone of America—the last four
in the lake region of northern Patagonia. In what concerns scientific matters, he

40 Ibid., 217r.
41 Ibid., 220v.
42 Ibid., 220v.
43 Mascardi to Kircher, Chiloé, February 1662, APUG 562 (Kircher, Misc. Epp. VIII):102r–102v.
222 chapter 4

received some books and kept correspondence with two of the foremost Jesuit
scientist of his time (Kircher and Riccioli) and with two of the most significant
astronomers of the continent (Ruiz Lozano and De Coninck). The Jesuits dis-
persed across and along the three Americas not only sent their reports to Rome
but also were in communication among them. The fact that Mascardi was able
to carry out observations of eclipses and comets tells us about the adequate
training he had received.44 His ultimate aim, however, was to tell Kircher, “his
teacher in mathematics in Rome,” about all the “marvelous things in the face
of the southern skies, stars unknown in Europe, and anything that could serve
to enrich the study of geography and physics”.45

2 Buenaventura Suárez S.J.

Buenaventura Suárez was born in 1679 in the city of Santa Fe (present-day

Argentina) and studied in the Jesuit college of that city.46 He entered the
Society of Jesus in 1695, when he was 16 years old.47 Suárez spent two years in
the novitiate in Córdoba and then studied one year of philosophy and another
of theology at the University of Córdoba (1698–1699). We know that in 1700 he

44 Mascardi to Kircher, Chiloé, 7 February 1661, APUG, Kircher (Misc. Epp. VIII):71r.
45 Mascardi to Kircher, Chiloé, 14 March 1666, APUG 564 (Kircher, Misc. Epp. X):89r.
46 Even while Suárez was alive, some of his colleagues began to create a myth around his
person, which later crystallized in legendary accounts. The first author who firmly delin-
eated Suarez’s profile was Guillermo Furlong. See idem, “El primer astrónomo argen-
tino. Buenaventura Suárez S.J. (1678–1750),” Estudios 17 (1919): 103–117; 172–185 and idem,
“Buenaventura Suárez,” published in 1929. The account in Guillermo Furlong, Matemáticos
argentinos durante la dominación hispánica (Buenos Aires: Editorial Huarpes, 1945), 42–68
is a slightly augmented and corrected version of the author’s 1929 paper. See also Alexis
Troche-Boggino, “Buenaventura Suárez SJ: the Pioneer Astronomer of Paraguay,” Journal
of Astronomical History and Heritage 3, no. 2 (2000): 159–64. For Suárez’s chronology I will
follow the account of his life as given by him in a 1744 letter to Mateus Saraiva (see note 52
of this chapter), the information of the Jesuit catalogues for the province of Paraquaria,
the chronology that can be inferred from the place and dates of his astronomical observa-
tions consigned in his papers, and Furlong’s essays.
47 According to the Jesuit catalogues of the province of Paraguay, Suárez was born on 3
September 1678; see Furlong, “El primer astrónomo argentino,” 103. But although its birth
certificate indicates that the correct date is 14 July 1679 (Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,”
81) recent accounts still use the old date. See for example Storni, Catálogo, 278 and DHCJ,
s.v. “Suárez, Buenaventura,” by Philip Caraman.
the heavens 223

observed a lunar eclipse from the College of Corrientes.48 The catalogues affirm
that he taught two courses of grammar—it could have been in Corrientes or in
Córdoba just as well. In any case, in 1704 he was ordained as a priest, and on 3
June 1709 he professed his third vows.49 In the Annua of 1750 for the province of
Paraquaria it is claimed that Suarez “taught himself many mathematical mat-
ters with only his talent, genius, and application.”50 Certainly, we have seen in
the previous chapter that the first chair of mathematics in Córdoba was cre-
ated in 1763, so that at the time when Suárez was a student there was no formal
teaching of mathematics at the University of Córdoba or anywhere else in the
whole Jesuit province of Paraguay.
According to what can be inferred from the contemporary triennial cata-
logues of the Province, the year in which Suárez commenced to be active in
the missions could have been 1704, 1708, or 1710.51 Since between 1706 and 1709

48 Jacob de Castro Sarmento, “Observationes Astronomicae Variae Factae in Paraquaria,

Regione Americae Australis, ab Anno 1706 [1700] ad annum 1730,” Philosophical
Transactions 45 (1748), 671.
49 Supplementum Catalogi Provinciae Paraquariae Anni 1704, Paraquaria 6:35r–35v, ARSI.
50 “Alcanzó sin instrucción y con sólo su capacidad, genio y aplicación, muchas materias
matemáticas” (“Annua de la doctrinas del año 1750,” Fondo Bib. Nac. 8156, AGN). This
is not the Latin Littera annua for 1750–1756, but an Annua written in Spanish included
among the documents that Pedro de Angelis sent from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro in
the nineteenth century. I used a 1905 copy held in the AGN.
51 Furlong claimed that by 1706 Suárez began working as a missionary in the reduction of
San Cosme and San Damián (Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 84–85), but the catalogues
say otherwise. The public catalogues of the province give the total number of years during
which Suárez had lived in the reductions, so it is possible to infer the year when he began to
work as a missionary. According to the 1710 catalogue, he started in 1704. The 1730 catalogue
registers that he entered the missions as an operarius in 1708 (“in miss[ionibus] ind[orum]
22”) and according to the catalogue of 1744, the year would have been 1710 (“int[er] indo-
rum 38”). See Catalogus Publicus Provinciae Paraquariae Anno 1710, Paraquaria 6:44v, ARSI;
Catalogus publicus 1730, Paraquaria 6:146v, ARSI; Catalogus 1748, Paraquaria 6:262r, ARSI.
When Suárez arrived in San Cosme, the town was united to Candelaria, on the southern
margin of the Paraná River. In 1718 Suárez moved it one legua (around 5.5km) to the east,
where it remained until 1740. In that year it was moved again, this time to the northern
bank of the river, in what is now Paraguay, in a location three quarters of a legua (around
4km) to the west of Itapúa. (The reduction of San Cosme was moved once again in 1760
to where is now the town of San Cosme.) See Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 94; idem,
Misiones, 139, and Diego de Alvear, “Relación geográfica e histórica de la provincia de
Misiones,” in Colección de obras y documentos relativos a la historia antigua y moderna de
las provincias del Río de la Plata, ed. Pedro De Angelis (Buenos Aires, Imprenta del Estado,
1836), 5 and 64.
224 chapter 4

he observed a series of eclipses from San Ignacio Guazú, it is reasonable to

assume that during those years he was assigned to that town.52 The “brief”
(annual) catalogue for 1710 informs that Suárez was at that time in the reduc-
tion of Apóstoles.53 On 1 December 1713 he observed a Lunar eclipse from the
village of San José.54 According to Furlong’s biography, Suárez lived as associ-
ated priest of Father José Ignacio Astudillo (1678–1734) in the mission of Itapúa
from 1714 on.55 On 26 March 1717 he observed a lunar eclipse from San José.56
In a letter which summarizes the course of his life until 1744, Suárez tells that
from 1717 through 1727 he was in charge of San Cosme as párroco.57 This dec-
laration tallies with the fact that between 15 August 1719 and 3 January 1727
he made a continuous series of observations from San Cosme (we will look at
them in the next section of this chapter). It was in the course of this decade
when Suárez established that reduction as the main “observatory of the mis-
sions.” Suárez tells that while he was staying at San Cosme he also made obser-
vations from Itapúa, situated at that time to the west of San Cosme and distant
from it about six leguas (20–25km) across the Paraná River.58
Probably on account of his expertise on the use of mathematical instru-
ments, in 1722 Suárez was asked to survey some lands concerning a dispute
between the missions of San Ignacio Miní and Loreto (he was in San Cosme
at that time).59 On 24 February 1728 Suárez observed a lunar eclipse from San
Miguel.60 In 1729 he substituted as párroco the priest of San Ignacio Guazú.61

52 Castro Sarmento, “Observationes Astronomicae Variae Factae in Paraquaria,” 667–668.

Although on 27 April 1706 he observed a lunar eclipse from Itapúa. Suárez to Saraiva, 17
April 1744, BL Add. 4438:173r.
53 Catalogus brevis 1710, Paraquaria 7:47v, ARSI. This is confirmed by the triennial catalogue
for 1710, which says that Suárez was at that time in the missions of the Uruguay river. See
Catalogus publicus 1710, Paraquaria 6:44v, ARSI.
54 Castro Sarmento, “Observationes Astronomicae Variae Factae in Paraquaria,” 670.
55 Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 85.
56 Castro Sarmento, “Observationes Astronomicae Variae Factae in Paraquaria,” 670.
57 Suárez to Saraiva, 17 April 1744, BL Add. 4438:171r.
58 Ibid., f. 171r. In a table in the Relación by Diego de Alvear the distance between Candelaria,
on the southern bank of the Paraná, and Itapúa, across the river and somewhat to the west,
is of five leguas. We have already seen that in 1718 “old” San Cosme (on the southern bank of
the Paraná River) was moved one legua to the east of Candelaria (see note 51 in this chapter).
59 Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 85.
60 Castro Sarmento, “Observationes Astronomicae Variae Factae in Paraquaria,” 671.
61 Furlong mentions that Suárez still held his position as cura of San Cosme (idem,
“Buenaventura Suárez,” 85–86) but the Jesuit astronomer states that he left San Cosme
in 1727 and did not come back as párroco until 1730. Letter from Suárez to Mateo Saraiva,
17 April 1744, BL Add. 4438:171r.
the heavens 225

Between December 1729 and May 1730 he registered observations made from
that reduction.62
In his 1744 letter Suárez tells that he was back in San Cosme as párroco
from 1730 through 1735.63 During this period he continued with his program
of observation of the satellites of Jupiter. In 1733 he faced the severe epidem-
ics that greatly distressed that reduction.64 Two years later (apparently by the
end of 1735) Suárez was in Candelaria and in 1736 we find him in Santa María
la Mayor, where he had to fight another devastating episode of smallpox in the
years of 1735–1736.65 The Annua with his biography declares that Suárez served
the Guaraní “in several epidemic outbreaks, with religion, zeal and love, obedi-
ent to the rules of the Society [of Jesus] and to his obligations”.66 It seems that
at some point in 1736 Suárez moved to Itapúa.67
By 1738 Suárez was back in San Cosme.68 He spent the following two years
as párroco in Santa María, from where he registered two lunar eclipses (on 24
January 1739 and on 13 January 1740).69 Suárez tells that between 1740 and 1743
he was vice-rector of the College of Asunción, what agrees with the records
of the observations he made from that city.70 (But according to one of the
catalogues, in 1742 he was at the College of Corrientes.)71 Suárez returned to
the Guaraní missions during the last five years of his life: Trinidad (1744),72
Apóstoles (1745), Santa María la Mayor (1747), San Carlos (1749), Santa María la

62 Castro Sarmento, “Observationes Astronomicae Variae Factae in Paraquaria,” 669–670

and 672–674.
63 Letter from Suárez to Mateo Saraiva, 17 April 1744, BL Add. 4438, f. 171r.
64 Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 85–87. Confirmed by Catalogus publicus 1732, Paraquaria
7: 52v, ARSI.
65 Furlong cites a letter by Suárez dated in Santa María on 14 June 1736, in which he relates
his undismayed efforts to care for the victims of the epidemic outbreak. Furlong,
“Buenaventura Suárez,” 88–89.
66 Annua 1750, Fondo Bib. Nac. 8156, AGN.
67 Catalogus brevis 1736, Paraquaria 7:59r, ARSI. On 26 March 1736, he observed an eclipse
from that reduction. See Letter from Suárez to Mateo Saraiva, 17 April 1744, BL, Add.
4438:174r.
68 Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 90.
69 Letter from Suárez to Mateo Saraiva, 17 April 1744, BL Add. 4438:174v.
70 The annual catalogue for 1741 indicates that Suárez was in Asunción that year. Catalogus
brevis 1741, Paraquaria 7:64v, ARSI. Suárez observed two lunar eclipses from Asunción, on
1 January 1741 and on 1 November 1743, BL, Add. 4438:174v.
71 See the transcription of the document in Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 90–91.
72 Catalogus brevis 1744, Paraquaria 7:69v, ARSI. Between 12 April and 17 May 1744 Suárez
observed a comet from the town of San Ignacio. RS, Journal book 20, 267.
226 chapter 4

Mayor, and Mártires (1750). Father Suárez died in Santa Maria la Mayor on 24
August 1750, when he was 71.73

2.1 Suárez’s Telescopes

The Annua for 1750 affirms that Suárez was “extremely skillful for anything he
intended” and several historical testimonies support this statement.74 Around
the year 1733 he set up a foundry for bells at San Cosme, the reduction that
could be justly considered to have been his “home town” in the territory of
the missions. Suárez taught the Guaraní to gild chalices in the fire and he also
made metal tubes for organs.75 In the introduction to his book Lunario de un
siglo (see below), Suárez claims that he made his own astronomical instru-
ments: a quadrant graduated in degrees and minutes, a pendulum clock which
was accurate to a second, and telescopes.76 One of the quadrants he used had
a semidiameter of five feet and was divided in minutes.77
The “telescopes or spyglasses” (refractors) fabricated by Suárez had lenses
made of two convex glasses: “telescopios elaboravi duorum tantum vitrorum
convexorum”.78 Suárez says that he used the small instruments (8 and 10 feet)
to see solar and lunar eclipses between 1706 and 1739 and the large ones (rang-

73 Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 90–92. During 1747 Suárez had observed two lunar
eclipses from Santos Ángeles Custodios and from Santa María la Mayor. See [Jacob de
Castro Sarmento], “Observationes Aliquae Astronomicae a Reverendo P. P. Suarez e S.J.
in Paraquaria Habitae, et per D. Suarez M. D. Cum Soc. Regali Communicatae,”
Philosophical Transactions, 46 (1749): 8–10.
74 Annua 1750, Fondo Bib. Nac. 8156, AGN.
75 In the Annua mentioned in the previous note it is claimed that Suárez “made organs and
mirrors, perfected the art of founding bells, taught his Indians to gild chalices in the fire,
had a working knowledge of medicine, and directed painters and sculptors only with his
industry and curiosity” (Ibid.).
76 Buenaventura. Suárez, Lunario de un siglo (Lisbon: n.p., 1748), “Introducción.” The Annua
for 1750 tells that Father Suárez “made for his observations mathematical instruments,
spyglasses, [and] long pendulum clocks, imitating those made by the English only after
having examined them” (Fondo Bib. Nac. 8156, AGN). Félix de Azara, the Spanish natural-
ist who toured the missions during his years in Paraguay, says that it was possible to find
in the reductions “good English clocks and pendulum clocks, of which each town had one
or more, for the most part useless in the deposit” (Félix de Azara, “Viajes inéditos de Félix
de Azara (continuación),” Revista del Río de la Plata 4 [1873]: 380-381).
77 “Eclipses Solis et Lunae observatae . . . in oppido S S Cosmae et Damiani 1719–1726, a
P Bonaventura Suarez S J,” RS, MS. 57:44r, London. A quadrant is a quarter of a circle with
an alidade turning at the centre for measuring the altitude or declination of a star.
78 Suárez to Saraiva, 17 April 1744, BL Add. 4438:173r. Cf. “Eclipses Solis et Lunae observatae,”
RS, MS. 57:46r.
the heavens 227

ing from 13 to 23 feet long) to look at the immersions and emersions of the
satellites of Jupiter.79
According to Sánchez Labrador, Suárez used crystal rock for the lenses,
which is easy to obtain in the region. The hexagonal crystals of itaberá (shining
stone) reached a length of little more than eight inches and a width at the base
around 1.5 to 2 inches.80 Notwithstanding common opinion that quartz is not
fit for the fabrication of lenses because of the “veins” or impurities it posses,
Sánchez Labrador tells that Suárez used pieces of rock crystal that were clear
and unblemished for making very good spectacles.81
It is not clear whether Suárez made metal tubes for his telescopes (which
is plausible, since he made them for the organs) or if he used wood planks.
As to the system of support of the telescopes we can only speculate. For some
observations, he might have used a tower, for towers made of wood were not
uncommon in the churches of the missions. According to a local oral tradition,
Suárez made astronomical observations from the tower of the church of the
city of Asunción, lying down on a table.82 But Suárez himself tells that when
he was in Asunción, given the height of his room and of the Church, he was not
able to make observations of the satellites of Jupiter.83
The inventory of the state left by the Jesuits at the time of the expulsion
mentions a few instruments found in Candelaria, the mother mission of San
Cosme: a quadrant, a spyglass and three wood globes, which could have been
earth or celestial globes (we will come back to the subject of instruments at the
end of the chapter).84
It was after Suárez had finished writing his Lunario that the procurator Jean
Joseph Rico embarked on his trip to Europe and took with him the manuscript
of the book to be printed there. In that occasion, Father Rico negotiated with

79 The large ones had 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, and 23 feet of focal distance. Suárez, Lunario,
“Introducción.” As we will see later, in others of his writings Suárez mentions telescopes
of lengths other than those specified here.
80 Sánchez Labrador, El Paraguay Natural, pt. 1, bk. 1, Paraquaria 16:97r–101r, ARSI.
81 Sánchez Labrador, El Paraguay Natural, pt. 1, bk. 1, Paraquaria 16:100v, ARSI. Sánchez
Labrador also mentions the famous seventeenth-century Roman maker of optical instru-
ments Eustachio Divini, who had made telescope lenses of rock crystal.
82 Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 100.
83 Suárez to Saraiva, 17 April 1744, BL Add. 4438:171r.
84 Bravo, Colección de documentos, 272. Azara’s disparaging description of the instruments
he found in his tour of the former missions fits with Bravo’s account, and only adds that
the wooden quadrant had a radius of 14 inches and “had been built by Father Diego [sic]
Suárez, so unskillfully that it was impossible to take measurements with it” (Azara, “Viajes
inéditos,” 380–381).
228 chapter 4

Father Campos in Lisbon the buying of astronomical instruments, as has been

discussed in the previous chapter.85

2.2 Observations from the Mission of San Cosme

In the introduction to his Lunario Suárez tells that he had been observing
the emersion and immersion of the satellites of Jupiter for 13 years from San
Cosme, with telescopes made by him. This provided him with 147 data which
he sent to the Jesuit astronomer Nicasius Grammatici (1684–1736).86 Jupiter’s
satellites had been discovered by Galileo on 7 January 1610 (the famous
Medicean stars) and it was also the Florentine natural philosopher who first
thought of using their eclipses for the measuring of longitude. The method was
described in Riccioli’s Geographia et hydrographia reformata, a book that was
held in the library of the University of Córdoba.87 By 1680, the observation of
the immersion and emersion of Jupiter’s satellites became the official method
of determining longitude for the French crown and the Académie des sciences.88
The instant of the eclipse of a given satellite was determined at a certain place
of the Earth and this was compared with the analogous determination in a
meridian of reference such as Paris or St. Petersburg. The difference between
the time measurements yielded the difference in longitude between the points
of observation.

85 See chap. 3, note 46 (p. 177). While Furlong claimed that the English clocks and telescopes
Rico bought in Europe were destined to Suárez, Galindo and Rodríguez-Mesa have argued
that these instruments were acquired for Quiroga. There still remain some open ques-
tions. Nowhere in his diary does Quiroga mention the use of telescopes and a 16 feet
telescope seems hardly the thing to take in a surveying sea voyage. Of course, he could
have used the smaller one and besides, arguments from silence are hardly conclusive. It is
not implausible that at some point between the end of the expedition (1746) and Suárez’
death (1750), one or both of these telescopes were dispatched to the missions. In any case,
Suárez makes no mention of them and no further trace of these instruments has so far
been found.
86 In the introduction to the Lunario, Suárez claims that he had observed the satellites of
Jupiter “for a space of 13 years in the town of San Cosme, and the most exact [observa-
tions] amounted to 147” (idem, Lunario, “Introducción”).
87 See Riccioli, Geographiae et hydrographiae reformatae, 327. The method is analogous to
the use of eclipses for the calculation of longitude, also described by Riccioli (see p. 219).
See Fraschini, Index Librorum, 1:303.
88 See Albert Van Helden, “Longitude and the Satellites of Júpiter,” in The Quest for Longitude.
The Proceedings of the Longitude Symposium. Harvard University, November 4–6, 1993, ed.
William J. H. Andrewes (Cambridge, Mass.: Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments,
Harvard University, 1996), 86–100.
the heavens 229

When the Swedish astronomer Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin (1717–1783) pub-

lished his second mémoire on the first satellite of Jupiter, he tabulated obser-
vations made at different locations around the Earth between 1668 and 1742.
In his table, he included 43 observations made by Suárez from San Cosme
between 10 February 1720 and 26 December 1726, and remarked that Suárez’s
data were “. . . not only outstanding but also beautifully consistent”.89
Wargentin took care to mention that he had got these results from Anders
Celsius (1701–1744), who in turn had obtained them in the course of his travels
in the Continent. Celsius had also secured some of Grammatici’s own obser-
vations through the intermediacy of Christfried Kirch (1694–1740), Johann
Doppelmayr (1677–1750) and Eustachio Manfredi (1674–1739).90 It is possible
that Suárez’s data also arrived into Celsius’s hands via Grammatici. But since a
paper with Suárez’s 147 observations of the satellites of Jupiter from San Cosme
also reached the Royal Society (see below), it is evident that the Jesuit astrono-
mer circulated those data as widely as he could.
It has been claimed that Suárez corresponded with the Jesuit astronomer
Ignaz Kögler (1680–1746), at that moment in Beijing, and with Joseph-Nicolas
Delisle (1688–1768) in St. Petersburg.91 But in the preface of his Lunario
Suárez explicitly affirms that the data from Kögler and Delisle were commu-
nicated to him by Grammatici, along with the latter’s own observations from
Amberg (Bavaria) and Madrid, in exchange for his own data from San Cosme
(Grammatici had taught at the Real Seminario de Nobles between 1727 and
1728).92 Suárez used the information he got from Grammatici for calculating

89 “Quod non tantum egregiae sint, sibique pulchre consentientes” (Pehr W. Wargentin,
“Series observationum primi satellitis Jovis, ex quibus theoria motuum ejusdem satelli-
tis est deducta,” Acta Societatis Regiae Scientiarum Upsalensis, series 1, vol. 3, 1748 [cor-
responds to the year 1742], p. 5). For the pages of the table with Suárez’s data, see ibid.,
26–28. It was Celsius who in 1741 prompted Pehr Wilhelm Wargentin into initiating his
research about the satellites of Jupiter. In 1746 Wargentin, located in the Observatory of
Uppsala, published his first tables on the subject. See DSB, s.v. “Wargentin, Pehr Wilhelm,”
by Sten Lindroth. In 1748 Wargentin published his second memory on the subject in
which he compared his calculations on the first (interior) satellite with a collection of
observations received from different parts of the Earth, among them, those of Suárez; see
idem, “Series observationum primi satellitis Jovis.”
90 Wargentin, “Series observationum primi satellitis Jovis,” 5.
91 Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 113–14; idem, Matemáticos argentinos, 59; and DHCJ, s.v.
“Suárez, Buenaventura,” by Ph. Caraman.
92 “Y llegaron a ciento y quarenta [sic] y siete las más exactas, que con otras observaciones asi
de los mismos Satélites, como de los eclipses de Sol, y Luna, despaché a Europa al P. Nicasio
Grammatici de la Compañía de Jesús, quien me comunicó sus propias observaciones
230 chapter 4

the longitude of the mission of San Cosme: 321°45’ with respect to the merid-
ian passing through the island El Hierro (Ferro) in the Canary Islands. He
affirms that he reached this figure once he had taken hold of the observations
of Jupiter’s satellites from Madrid, Amberg (Bavaria), St. Petersburg, Beijing,
and Lima, which he compared with his own.93
At this point it seems necessary to briefly explore the relationships between
Suárez’s correspondents. To begin with, Grammatici and Kögler were in con-
tact. Students of Jesuit science in China have shown how Grammatici sent
Kögler, who was director of the Imperial Board of Astronomy in Beijing, his
lunisolar tables calculated according to Newton’s theory of the Moon: the
Tabulae lunares ex theoria et mensuris Geometrae celeberrimi Isaaci Newtoni
(Ingolstadt, 1726). Kögler and his Jesuit colleague André Pereira (1689/90–
1724), also in China, translated Grammatici’s brief booklet into Chinese—this
work contributed to the introduction of Newton’s theory of the Moon in China.
Moreover, Kögler and Pereira sent a copy of the brief publication to Delisle, at
that time in St. Petersburg, who received it in 1734.94 Besides these lunar tables,
Grammatici published several works for the prediction of lunar and solar
eclipses (Freiburg, 1720, and Nuremberg, 1734) and also edited the 1702 tables
of Philippe de La Hire (1640–1719).95 The scope of topics that Grammatici cul-

hechas en el Colegio Imperial de Madrid, y en Amberga del Palatinado, y las copiosas,

y exactas observaciones de Don Nicolás del Isle [sic] hechas en Petersburg, y las del
P. Ignacio Koegler hechas en la corte de Pekín” (Suárez, Lunario, “Introducción”). Grand
claims about Suárez seem to have been usual in the eighteenth century. In his Ensayo
sobre la historia natural del Gran Chaco José Jolís mentions an article in the Memoriae
Encyclopedicae Bononiae in which it was said that Wargentin “gives preference to the
accuracy of Suárez’s observations over those of the astronomers of Paris, London, St.
Petersburg, Beijing, and other places.” Jolís soberly comments that he was “unable to find
in Wargentin’s books his preference for the observations of Suárez over those of the other
astronomers” (Jolís, Ensayo, 342–343).
93 “Conferí las mias” (Suárez, Lunario, “Introducción”). Sánchez Labrador emphasizes the
comparison of Suárez’s data with those obtained by Delisle from St. Petersburg. Sánchez
Labrador, El Paraguay Natural, pt. 1, bk. 3, Paraquaria 16:262v, ARSI.
94 See Han Qi, “The Compilation of the Lixiang kaocheng houbian. Its Origin, Sources and
Social Context,” in History of Mathematical Sciences. Portugal and East Asia II. Scientific
Practices and the Portuguese. Expansion in Asia (1498–1759). University of Macau, China,
10–12 October 1998, ed. Luis Saravia (Hackensack, N.J.: World Scientific, 2004), 147–152 and
Shi Yunli, “Reforming Astronomy and Compiling Imperial Science in the Post-Kangxi
Era: The Social Dimension of the Yuzhi lixiang kaocheng koubian,” East Asian Science,
Technology and Medicine 28 (2008): 53–54.
95 Philippe de La Hire, Tabulae astronomicae planetarum omnium . . . anno 1702 [ed. Nicasius
Grammatici] (Ingolstadt: Thomas Grass, 1722). This edition included the tables of
the heavens 231

tivated was akin to the astronomical pursuits of Suárez. In any case, it was
Grammatici who introduced Suárez to the circle composed by him, Kögler,
and Delisle and centered in Ingolstadt.96 Deslisle had arrived in St. Petersburg
in 1725 called by Peter the Great as founder and director of the Observatory
of St. Petersburg. He published five papers on the satellites of Jupiter in the
Commentarii Academiae imperialis scientiarum petropolitanae, whose first vol-
ume, corresponding to 1726, appeared in 1728.97 The Jesuit library in Córdoba
held at least volumes 1, 2, 5, and 6 of this collection.98 It is evident that Suárez’s
figure for the latitude of San Cosme was obtained no earlier than 1726.
Suárez also corresponded with the Creole polymath Pedro de Peralta y
Barnuevo (1663–1743), poet, engineer, historian, professor of mathematics at
the University of San Marcos (Lima), and cosmographer of the Viceroyalty of
Peru (1708–1740).99 Peralta continued the publication of the ephemerides called
Conocimiento de los Tiempos initiated by Juan Ramón De Coninck. According
to La Condamine’s journal, Peralta’s almanacs were well known.100 Peralta
published 17 issues of his almanac, from 1721 through 1743. El conocimiento de
los tiempos contained meteorological forecasts and a lunar calendar, with a
calendar of religious feasts and some astrological information, all calculated
for the meridian of Lima. In the title of the edition of 1727 Peralta announced
that he used La Hire’s table and the Ephemerides of Antonio Ghisleri for his
calculations.101

Cassini on the satellites of Jupiter. For Grammatici’s publications, see Sommervogel, s.v.
“Grammatici, Nicaise.”
96 Christian Stücke, “Gott und den Sternen—vom Leben des Chinamissionars Ignaz Kögler
SJ (1680–1746),” in http://www.ikg-landsberg.de/unsere-schule/ignaz-koegler-portrait/
Kurzbiographie.
97 See Joseph-Nicholas Delisle, “Eclipses satellitum Jovis observatae Petropoli,” Commentarii
Academiae imperialis scientiarum petropolitanae 1 (1728 [1726]): 467–474; cf. DSB, s.v.
“Delisle, Joseph-Nicolas,” by Seymour L. Chapin.
98 Colección Jesuítica en la Biblioteca Mayor de la Universidad de Córdoba, CD-ROM (Córdoba:
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, 1999).
99 See Hill, Sceptres and Sciences, 147–190. Cf. the biographical sketch in Manuel de
Mendiburu, Diccionario histórico biográfico del Perú, 2nd ed., 11 vols. (Lima: Imprenta
Enrique Palacios, 1931–1934), s.v. “Peralta y Barnuevo, Pedro de.”
100 Charles Marie de La Condamine, Journal du voyage fait par ordre du roi, à l’Equateur,
servant d’introduction historique à la mesure des trois premiers degrés du méridien (Paris:
L’Imprimerie Royale, 1751), 22. Cf. Hill, Sceptres and Sciences, 147.
101 José Toribio Medina, La imprenta en Lima (1584–1824), 4 vols. (Santiago de Chile: [in the
author’s own printing press], 1904), 2:343. See Medina’s bibliography of the early press in
Lima for all the editions of Peralta’s almanac, in idem, La Imprenta en Lima, 2:297–414.
The copy of La Libra astrológica. Prognóstico y Lunario para el año 1711 (Lima: Imprenta
232 chapter 4

2.3 A Lunar Calendar

Suárez’s Lunario de un siglo (finished in 1739) is a book of astronomical
tables for the years 1740–1841 in the tradition of calendars and almanacs like
those edited by Peralta. The lunar almanac (lunario) was a popular genre of
literature in colonial Iberian America. A list of a cargo of books arrived in
Buenos Aires in 1728 mentions “lunarios,” without further specifications.102
Another booklist from 1671 enumerating works allowed by the Inquisition
to be shipped to the New World also mentions “two lunarios by Cortés” (“2
lunario[s] [de] Cortés”).103 This was El non plus ultra del Lunario y pronóstico
perpetuo . . . compuesto por Gerónimo Cortés, a famous work (Valencia, 1594)
which enjoyed several editions and translations.
In one of his memories, Anton Sepp seems to imply that Suárez’s Lunario
was first published in the printing press of the missions (we have seen that the
printing press of the Paraguay reductions operated from the first years of the
eighteenth century). If this was the case, no copy of that edition has remained.104
In the introduction to the work, Suárez affirms that since he arrived in San
Cosme as a missionary, he began reckoning and distributing lunar calendars,
an activity he continued for the next 33 years.105 It is not clear whether they
were handwritten or printed.
When Father Rico came back from Europe in 1745 taking with him the astro-
nomical instruments Campos had acquired, he also brought to Buenos Aires
two boxes with 600 copies of the Lunario. No copies of this first edition have
been preserved.106 The first known edition of the work was in Lisbon in 1748—

de Joseph de Contreras, 1711) held in Beinecke Library (Yale) has written on the first page
with rusted ink: “asegurado que hizo D. Pedro Peralta” (It is certified that this was done by
Don Pedro Peralta).
102 José Torres Revello, “Lista de libros embarcados para Buenos Aires en los siglos XVII y
XVIII,” Boletín de investigaciones históricas 8, no. 43–44 (1930), 42.
103 Ibid., 46.
104 “Buenaventura Suárez wrote astronomical tables, called ephemerides, which were pub-
lished as a formulary for all the days of the year with calendar, mention of the seasons, the
course of the planets, eclipses, weather forecasts, and so on, everything according to our
latitude and very nicely done, so that the book is sent to Peru” (Antonio Sepp, Jardín de
flores paracuario, trans. Werner Hoffmann [Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1974], 184). Sepp does
not say explicitly that the book was printed in the missions, but the context seems to
imply it.
105 Suárez, Lunario, “Introducción.” The expression he uses is “to communicate to the curiosi
the yearly lunar calendars” (“haber comunicado a los curiosos los lunarios anuales”).
106 Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 115.
the heavens 233

the editor suppressed the tables corresponding to the years 1740–1748.107 The
book was also edited in 1752 in Barcelona, without the pages corresponding to
1739–1751. There was another edition in Ambato (Ecuador) in 1759.
Suárez’s Lunario is the kind of work that can be done with paper, pencil,
astronomical tables, and the relevant know how. The layout of the book is
such that opposing pages correspond to the astronomical events of one year
(fig. 4.1). In each even-numbered page there are two tables. The first, on the
top, brings the data for the computus and the liturgical year: numerus aureus,
epact, dominical letter, the ember days and movable feasts such as Septuagint,
Ash Wednesday, Easter, and so on. The other table, on the bottom, enumerates
the solar and lunar eclipses predicted for the year in question, reckoned from
the coordinates of San Cosme. The book indicates the time of beginning and
ending of the eclipse, its duration, and magnitude. Each odd-numbered page
is an almanac of the moon’s phases for the corresponding year.
The Lunario includes also a table with the differences in longitude and
latitude between San Cosme and other 70 cities in the world. Suárez added
practical instructions to extrapolate his predictions, so that the book could be
used in Siam, Athens, or Warsaw. The problem case he presents to illustrate his
method is that of an observer situated in Madrid. The copy of the Biblioteca
Nacional (Buenos Aires), which has been used at least until 1803 (the year of
the latest marginal gloss), has a table in one of its margins written with a hand
different from Suárez’s, which establishes the correction factor that should be
applied in order to use the book in 12 cities located in the territory of present-
day Argentina (Buenos Aires, Corrientes, and so on). Another handwritten
note (again in a different hand) bears witness to the efforts of a former user of
this copy to calculate the time difference between San Cosme and the city of
Santiago del Estero.
The book brings practical instructions to continue with the calculations and
predictions from 1841 on.108 The several eighteenth-century editions and the
existence of two manuscripts and a nineteenth-century edition (Corrientes,
1856) with continuation of the predictions, indicate that the work enjoyed a
moderate diffusion.109

107 There is a copy of this edition with notes by Suárez made shortly before his death, held
in the Biblioteca Nacional (Buenos Aires). For detailed bibliographic information see
Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 114–21; cf. Furlong, Matemáticos argentinos, 45–54.
108 See Horacio Tignanelli, “El primer Lunario criollo,” Saber y Tiempo 5, no. 17 (2004), 40-45
for an explanation of this method.
109 Furlong, Matemáticos argentinos, 52–55.
 234 chapter 4

FIGURE 4.1 Buenaventura Suárez, Lunario de un siglo (Lisbon 1748). Page for the first semester of 1750.
Rare Book Section, Biblioteca Nacional (Buenos Aires).

In the introduction to the Lunario, Suárez says he used for his calcula-
tions the tables of Philippe de La Hire (1702) “among others,” but as what
regards the eclipses, he also depended on his own observations from 1706 to
1739.110 The mathematician and astronomer Philippe de La Hire, who acted
in the Paris Observatory and the College Royal, had been close to the Jesuit
scientist Honoré Fabri.111 Among several works, he published in 1687 astro-
nomical tables of the Sun and the Moon and in 1702 the Tabulae astronomicae,
of which Suárez had a copy.112
In the introduction to his Lunario, Suárez claims that the intention of his
book is to be useful for “agriculture and medicine.” The reference to agriculture
is obvious. The Guaraní used the phases of the Moon as a calendar for the fish-

110 Suárez, Lunario, “Introducción.”

111 DSB, s.v. “La Hire, Philippe de,” by René Taton.
112 Suárez most probably used Grammatici’s edition of La Hire’s 1702 tables (Ingolstadt, 1722).
the heavens 235

ing and hunting seasons, for the planning of agriculture, and the preparation
of herbal remedies.113 Medicine is mentioned because it was thought that the
phases of the Moon were related to the moment of bloodletting and to the best
time for recollection of medicinal herbs. As most of his colleagues in the mis-
sions, Suárez was carried by the force of the circumstances to practice some
medicine. As has been already mentioned, more than once he had to face epi-
demics in the reductions.114 The Lunario was actually used as a religious cal-
endar. There is a long letter from Suárez, dated on 29 March 1730, answering a
previous letter of the General Procurator of the Jesuit province of Paraguay, in
which the Jesuit astronomer was asked a series of questions about the inter-
pretation of the epact in the Lunario—the difference in days between the solar
and lunar year.115
Suárez’s Lunario was an unpretentious work, but very useful for daily life
and as a guide for the liturgical year. The marginal notes in the copy held
in the Biblioteca Nacional (Buenos Aires) and the several editions it went
through show that the book was actually used. Suarez’s Lunario can also be
seen as a metaphor of its author’s persuasion of the universal irradiation of
the missions. The predictions of the Lunario are referred to the coordinates
of the town of San Cosme, but the book also provides the means to extrapolate
them to any city in the world. Suárez, born in Santa Fe and educated in his
natal town and in Córdoba, did not thought of himself as somebody living in
the utmost margins of European civilization; on the contrary, the otherwise
negligible San Cosme became the center from which calculations could be
extrapolated to any point of the earth. In 1744 Suárez sent to one of his cor-
respondent his predictions of the times of immersions and emersions of the
satellites of Jupiter for 1745, as they should be seen from London, hoping that
his numbers would be confirmed by observation.116

2.4 Suárez and the Royal Society

The first notices of Suárez’s work reached London through a certain Mr. Pym, a
factor of the South Sea Company who sent to the Royal Society a paper entitled
“Immersiones et Emersiones Satellitum Jovis observatae in oppido S. S. Cosmae

113 Germano B. Afonso, “Mitos e Estações no céu Tupi-Guarani,” Scientific American Brasil 14
(2006): 46–55.
114 As we have seen in chapter 2 (p. 151), a list of medicinal herbs in Guevara, Historia del
Paraguay, has been attributed to Suárez.
115 “Carta del P. Buenaventura Suárez sobre la epacta” (San Ignacio, 29 de marzo de 1730).
Transcribed in Furlong, “El primer astrónomo argentino,” 175–78.
116 Suárez to Saraiva, 17 April 1744, BL Add. 4438:177r.
236 chapter 4

et Damiani 1720–1726, a P. Bonaventure Suarez S.J.”117 It was read before that

learned body on 28 January 1731.118 This paper consists of three groups of data.
The first is a series of observations of seven lunar and solar eclipses seen from
San Cosme between 15 August 1719 and 10 October 1726, for which Suárez used
a ten-foot telescope, his pendulum clock, and a quadrant with a radius of five
feet.119 The second group comprehends the 147 observations of emersions and
immersions of the Jovian moons made from San Cosme between 5 February
1720 and 3 January 1727, which Suárez had also sent to Grammatici and which
were partially published by Wargentin. In this case, Suárez utilized telescopes
of 16 and 18 feet.120 The third group includes 29 observations of conjunc-
tions between the first four satellites of Jupiter and of their transits across the
disk of the planet, also made from San Cosme between 25 February 1720 and
25 June 1722.121
The entry in the Journal book of the Royal Society does not say where Mr.
Pym was at the time he got hold of Suárez’s paper.122 Contacts between Jesuits
in the Río de la Plata and the South Sea Company were not infrequent. Since
the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) the Company had been granted the monopoly to
sell slaves in Spanish America (the asiento).123 Of the 8600 slaves sold by the
Company between 1715 and 1738, 95 had been bought by the Jesuits.124 We have
seen that when Thomas Falkner, who arrived in Río de la Plata as a surgeon in
one of the Company’s ship, fell ill, he was taken care of in the Jesuit College of
Buenos Aires.

117 RS, MS. 57: 44r–49r.

118 RS, Journal book 14, 553–554. I have corrected the date to N. S. (New Style) calendar. Cf.
Raymond Phyneas Stearns, Science in the British Colonies of America (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1970), 385.
119 RS, MS. 57:44r–45v.
120 RS, MS. 57:46r–47v.
121 RS, MS. 57:48r–49r.
122 In August 1716 there was a factor of the Company in Cartagena, named Diego Pim. See
Rafael Donoso Anes, “Las cuentas de la Isabela y el Bedford: los dos navíos autorizados,
un regalo de Felipe V a la reina Ana de Inglaterra en 1713,” De computis. Revista Española
de Historia de la Contabilidad, no. 10, 2009, p. 198. The first secretary of the Company, dur-
ing the 1710s, was James Pym, see John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1960), 61–62.
123 Helen Paul, “The South Sea Company’s Slaving Activities” (2009), in http://eprints.soton
.ac.uk/79227/
124 Cushner, Jesuit Ranches, 100–101.
the heavens 237

On 17 April 1744, Suárez sent a letter from San Ignacio Guazú to Dr. Saraiva,
in answer to a letter of the latter from 8 September 1743.125 The Jesuit astrono-
mer included in his letter a register of observations analogous to the one he
had sent to Mr. Pym, but covering more data. The first group of observations
correspond to eight eclipses of Sun and Moon seen from San Cosme between
15 August 1717 and 19 June 1731, preceded by one made from Itapúa on 27 April
1706, which he compared with the data of Cassini and Maraldi with the aim
of calculating the latitude of that reduction with respect to the meridian of
Paris (his result was 3h 53min). This is followed by further observations of six
Moon eclipses: two seen from Itapúa (on 26 March and 19 September 1736),
two from Santa María la Mayor (on 24 January 1739 and 13 January 1740), and
two from Asunción (on 1 January 1741 and 1 November 1743). The second part of
the report contains 190 observations of the immersions and emersions of the
satellites of Jupiter observed from San Cosme between 21 February 1720 and 1
November 1736. The letter is closed by the group of 29 observations of conjunc-
tions of the Jovian moons and transits over the disk of the planet for 1720–1721
that Suárez had sent to Mr. Pym.
Mateus Saraiva, the recipient of Suárez letter, had been born in Rio de
Janeiro, studied medicine in Coimbra, and afterwards returned to his natal
city, where he held an appointment as doctor of the penitentiary. He also acted
as physician of the Senate and actively participated in literary salons, like the
Academia dos Felizes (1736–1740), which he presided. He had been admitted
to the Royal Society on 23 April 1743.126 In the certificate of election to this
learned body he is described as “a Gentleman very curious in Natural History
and Astronomy”.127
In his letter of 17 April 1744, Suárez asked Saraiva to be sent the observations
made in London of the comet he had observed on the evening of 12 January
(1744) and was afterwards seen as a morning star during the first days of March.
Suárez hoped to make further observations of the comet once he arrived at
the town he was bound to, where he had astronomical instruments at hand.128

125 Suárez to Saraiva, 17 April 1744, BL Add. 4438:171r–177b.

126 For Saraiva see Grande enciclopédia portuguesa e brasileira, 40 vols. (Lisbon, Rio de
Janeiro: Editorial Enciclopédia, 1936-1960), s.v. “Saraiva, Mateus.” In 1747 Saraiva sent an
account of a Brazilian balsam and a sample to the Royal Society. RS, Journal book 20,
300, entry for June 25; cf. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 394. He is mentioned as
Matthew Sarayva in the registers of the Royal Society.
127 RS, EC/1743/01, in http://royalsociety.org/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni=Dserve.ini&dsqApp
=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqSearch=RefNo==’EC%2F1743%2F01’&dsqCmd=Show.tcl.
128 Suárez to Saraiva, 17 April 1744, BL Add. 4438:171r.
238 chapter 4

This he actually did, and the results were sent to Saraiva and communicated
to the Royal Society by Dr. Jacob de Castro Sarmento almost three years later,
on 14 May 1747 as “Some observations made between the 12th day of April and
the 17th day of May N. S. in 1744, upon the Comet which then appeared in the
town of St. Ignazio in the province of Paraguay made by Father Bonaventura
Suarez”.129 This should have been the “Great comet” which was seen during the
last months of 1743 and the first months of 1744.130 This communication was
not published in the Philosophical Transactions.
Jacob de Castro Sarmento was a distinguished Jewish Portuguese physi-
cian whose parents had been persecuted by the Inquisition. He studied in
Évora and graduated in medicine from Coimbra in 1717. Sarmento arrived in
England by 1720 and joined the London Jewish community, associating himself
to the rabbi Hakham Nieto, a Newtonian physician. He joined the College of
Physicians and set up a medical practice in the city. It has been argued that
Castro Sarmento’s scientific interests might have been integral to his convic-
tion that by advancing modern scientific culture and introducing modern
science in Portugal he could further the demise of the Inquisition.131 Castro
Sarmento was admitted to the Royal Society in February 1730 and besides his
communications of the work of Jesuit Portuguese astronomers, he contributed
information on Iberian America, for instance, a paper on Brazilian diamonds.132
From what Suárez told to Saraiva in his letter of April 1744, we know that it
was Castro Sarmento who in the first place had asked him, through the inter-
mediacy of the Brazilian phisician, to send to the Royal Society his data on
the longitudes of the reductions “for the reform of the tables [of longitude].”
Suárez was eager to oblige, trusting that if his observations were printed in
the Philosophical Transactions, future generations would have at their disposal
sound information about the longitudes of the missions, which so far had
never been measured with exactitude.133

129 RS, Journal book 20, 267. Cf. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 393–394.
130 Kronk, Cometography, 408–411 (C/1743 X1). Kronk says that the last recorded sight of the
comet in the southern hemisphere was a naked eye observation made by sailors south of
São Paulo (Brazil) on 22 April 1744. The dates of Suárez’s observations are given in New
Style (N. S.) calendar.
131 Matt Goldish, “Newtonian, Converso, and Deist: The Lives of Jacob (Henrique) de Castro
Sarmento,” Science in Context 10, no. 4 (1997): 668.
132 Jacob de Castro Sarmento, “Letter from Jacob de Castro Sarmento M. D. and F. R. S.
to Cromwell Mortimer concerning Diamonds lately found in Brasil,” Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society 37 (1731): 199–201.
133 Suárez to Saraiva, 17 April 1744, BL Add. 4438:171r–171v.
the heavens 239

Suárez’s Portuguese connections also operated providing the Royal Society

with material of natural history from Paraguay.134 On 10 April 1746 “Dr. De
Castro presented a manuscript account of Paraguay in the Spanish lan-
guage . . . and he was desired to give an account of the contents for the satisfac-
tion of the Society”.135 The entry of the Journal book for 5 May 1748 says that
Castro’s abstract of Lozano’s “historical account of Paraguay” written in 1744
“at the request of Dr. Mattheus Sarayva of Rio de Janeyro in Brazil F. R. S.,” was
finally communicated to the Society.136 This was surely a copy of the natural
history section of the History of the Conquest of Paraguay, or an abstract of this
work, which Lozano finished in 1745.137 The Royal Society was avid to get news
from the Spanish dominions in America, which due to the crown’s tight policy
of secrecy remained for the most opaque to the European potencies.138
On 19 January 1748, Castro Sarmento again communicated to the Royal
Society “some astronomical observations made by father Bonaventura Suarez . . .
together with a Letter from father Suarez to Dr. de Castro dated Paraguay 3rd
July 1746 N. S.” The observations were in the end referred to the astronomer
James Bradley (1693–1762).139 The letter that accompanied Castro Sarmento’s
1748 communication says that Suárez’s observations and his letter had been
sent to Dr. Saraiva, who relayed them to “Dr. Saquet,” who in his turn sent

134 In a former paper I had hypothesized (falsely, as it turned out) that Suárez’s observa-
tions reached Castro Sarmento through the good offices of Father Campos. See Miguel
de Asúa, “The Publication of the Astronomical Observations of Buenaventura Suárez SJ
(1679–1750) in European Scientific Journals,” Journal of AstronomicalHistory and Heritage
7 no. 2 (1004): 81–84. While preparing the first draft for this book, by the end of 2009, I hit
on the right track after stumbling upon Stearns’s Science in the British Colonies. Stearns
made a wonderful job of pointing out the relevant pages of the Journal books of the Royal
Society which make clear that Suárez’s data were sent from Brazil to Castro Sarmento by
Mateus Saraiva. Meanwhile, in 2011 Galindo and Rodríguez-Meza published a paper along
the very same lines and with the correct solution, also based upon Stearns’s book. See
idem, “Buenaventura Suarez.” Dr. Galindo Uribarri, who in May 2011 asked me for an elec-
tronic version of my 2004 paper, did not try to clarify the point with me before publishing
his own article. The account I present here is based on digital copies of the manuscripts
of the Royal Society (kindly made available to me by Joanna Hopkins), and other manu-
script sources.
135 RS, Journal book 20, 79. Cf. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 393.
136 RS, Journal book 20, 508. Cf. Stearns, Science in the British Colonies, 394.
137 Maeder, “Estudio preliminar,” 17–18.
138 See Phyllis Allen, “The Royal Society and Latin America as Reflected in the Philosophical
Transactions 1665–1730,” Isis 37 (1947): 132–138.
139 RS, Journal book 20, 436.
240 chapter 4

them to Castro Sarmento.140 João Mendes Sachetti Barbosa was a Portuguese

physician in the city of Élvas, who was admitted to the Royal Society on 10
May 1750, after having been rejected in a previous opportunity (1747). The
certificate of election says that he was thought worthy of becoming a mem-
ber “by the ready assistance he has given to some of our members in Natural
Enquiries” and because “he will prove to the Royal Society one of the best cor-
respondents in the two kingdoms of Portugal and Spain”.141 A few years later,
in 1755, Castro Sarmento communicated to the Royal Society an observation
of a lunar eclipse by Sachetti Barbosa.142 Sachetti Barbosa was the founder of
the Medical Academy of Oporto and a member of the Medical Academy of
Madrid. Together with Castro Sarmento and António Nunes Ribeiro Sanches,
he belonged to a close network of physicians within the larger group of
estangeirados, the enlightened savants active in the reign of João V.143
The paper presented by Castro Sarmento to the Royal Society in 1748 was
published in the Philosophical Transactions of that year. It describes a series
of observations made by Suárez from 1706 through 1730, and is in two parts;
the first deals with lunar and solar eclipses, and the other with eclipses of the
Jupiter satellites.144 The first group of observations report on six lunar eclipses,
three solar eclipses, and an eclipse of Jupiter by the Moon, obtained during
a twenty-three year period, from 5 November 1706 to 18 January 1730. All of
these were obtained with a five-foot refractor, except for the lunar eclipse of

140 The letter is held in the Wellcome Library. For a transcription, see Richard Barnett, “Dr
Jacob de Castro Sarmento and Sephardim in Medical practice in 18th-Century London,”
Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 27 (1982), 100.
141 RS, EC/1750/02, in http://royalsociety.org/DServe/dserve.exe?dsqIni =Dserve.ini&dsqApp
=Archive&dsqDb=Catalog&dsqSearch=RefNo==’EC%2F1750%2F02’&dsqCmd=Show.tcl.
142 Jacob de Castro Sarmento, “Lunae Defectus Elbis a Doctore Joanne Mendesio Sachetto
Barbosa . . . Observatus Die 27–28 Martii, Anno 1755,” Philosophical Transactions 49 (1755),
265–268.
143 See Ana Carneiro et al., “Enlightenment Science in Portugal: The Estrangeirados and
their Communication Networks,” Social Studies of Science 30, no. 4 (2000): 591–619 and
José Pedro Sousa Dias, “Jacob de Castro Sarmento e a conversão a ciência moderna,” in
Primeiro Encontro de História das Ciências Naturais e da Saúde, ed. Clara Pinto Correia
(Lisbon: Instituto Rocha Cabral and Shaker Verlag, 2005), 55–80. For Sachetti Barbosa,
see M. Lemos, “Amigos de Ribeiro Sanches,” Arquivo Histórico Português 8 (1910), 288–95
and A. Gonçalves Rodrigues, “A Correspondência cientifica do Dr. Sachetti Barbosa com
Emmanuel Mendes da Costa, Secretário da Sociedade Real de Londres,” Biblos (Coimbra)
14 (1938): 346–408. Cf. also the Grande enciclopédia portuguesa e brasileira, s.v. “Barbosa,
João Mendes Sachetti.”
144 Castro Sarmento, “Observationes astronomicae.”
the heavens 241

24 February 1728, which was seen through a ten-feet refractor. In order to deter-
mine the progression of the umbra (the shadow of the Earth over the Moon),
Suárez used a clock which was accurate to a second.
The eclipses were seen from different Jesuit reductions. Seven of these
observations were made from San Ignacio, four of them between 1706 and 1709
and the other three between 1729 and 1730. The paper mentions Moon eclipses
seen from San José (1 December 1713), San Cosme (26 May 1717), and San Miguel
Arcángel (24 February 1728)—this latter made with a ten-foot refractor. In each
case Suárez indicated the longitude of the place as calculated from the merid-
ian of Paris. The first part of Castro Sarmento’s paper also mentions a naked-
eye observation of the lunar eclipse of 4 March 1700, made when Suárez was a
21-year-old student at the Jesuit College of Corrientes.
The second part of this 1748 paper is much longer, and deals with thirty-
four immersions, emersions, and conjunctions of the satellites of Jupiter,
all seen from the town of San Ignacio between 26 January 1729 and 10 May
1730 with thirteenth- and eighteenth-foot telescopes. These observations are
arranged in three groups. The first records three observations made between
21 December 1729 and 8 December 1730, each of them compared with the cor-
responding data obtained by Delisle in St. Petersburg. The second group men-
tions ten immersions, emersions, and conjunctions of Jovian satellites seen
between 19 December 1729 and 1 April 1730 to which should be added observa-
tions of Saturn’s rings and an eclipse of Jupiter by the Moon. The final data-set
presents twenty observations made by Suárez between 26 January 1729 and
27 March 1730. The paper also gives the longitude of San Ignacio with respect
to St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and San Cosme. Since, as discussed above, the
observations do not fit exactly with the chronology of Suárez’s life, it is likely
that he traveled much among the missions. This style of work is congruent
with his aim of determining the coordinates of the reductions. Indeed, Suárez
told Saraiva in his 1744 letter that in the accompanying report he had omitted
many observations he had made in several towns between 1706 and 1740.145
On 19 January 1749, the Royal Society heard another letter sent by Castro
Sarmento, dated on 22 December 1748 and

accompanying an account which the Dr. had received from father

Bonaventura Suarez in Paraguay of his observations on the comet, which
appeared in the latter end of the year of 1748 [sic] and the beginning of

145 Suárez to Saraiva, 17 April 1744, BL Add. 4438:171r.

242 chapter 4

1744. And on some lunar eclipses, which that father desires may be laid
before this Society.146

The first part of Suárez’s paper, which has not been preserved, probably repro-
duced his observations on the 1743/1744 comet, already communicated by
Castro Sarmento in 1747.147 The second part of Suárez paper was published
in the volume of the Philosophical Transactions for 1749–1750—in the title,
it is erroneously attributed to a non-existent “D. Suárez, MD”.148 This paper
describes two lunar eclipses, which were seen on 24 February 1747 from the
mission town of San Miguel Arcángel; and on 19 August 1747 from Santa
María la Mayor. Both were observed with the aid of a ten and a half-foot tele-
scope, and on each occasion Suárez registered the time to within a second
when the Earth’s shadow reached the different distinctive features on the
Moon’s surface.
On 10 January 1751, Castro Sarmento read still another paper “of astronomi-
cal observations made in Paraguay in the year of 1747”.149 No mention is made
of Suárez, who by that time was dead. Suarez’s obituary in the 1750 Littera
annua for the province of Paraguay mentions that he corresponded with peo-
ple in Lima, Brazil, Ingolstadt, and London, which squares well with what we
have been discussing so far.150 Suárez wrote to Peralta in Lima, to Grammatici
in Ingolstadt, to Saraiva in Brazil and, by implication or perhaps at some point
directly, to Castro Sarmento in London.

2.5 Longitude
As pointed out in the previous chapter, measurement of latitude and longitude
was a decisive milestone in the history of Jesuit cartography in Paraquaria. One
of Suárez’s most significant contributions were his tables with the coordinates
of the all the mission towns of Paraguay. The ad quem of what apparently was
the first version of the table is 1719, for a copy of it was sent to Germany in that
year.151 In his Paraguay Natural Sánchez Labrador included a table with the

146 RS, Journal book 21, 49.

147 The original probably read “1743,” instead of 1748. There was not a comet by the end of
1748; the only two recorded for that year were seen on April, see W. F. Denning, “Comets of
1748,” Astronomical Register 20 (1882), 17.
148 [Castro Sarmento], “Observationes Aliquae.” See the erratum in Philosophical Trasactions,
46 (1749), 402
149 RS, Journal book 21, 486.
150 Annua 1750, Fondo Bib. Nac. 8156, AGN.
151 Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 135. Furlong claimed that the figures in both tables were
different (see ibid., 136).
the heavens 243

coordinates of 32 towns. He affirms that Suárez worked out the longitude of

San Cosme and San Damián using his observations of the Jovian moons dur-
ing five years, then calculated the longitude of Itapúa and in the course of the
years 1746–1747 those of the rest of the towns.152
A table of latitudes and longitudes of the reductions was also published
by Diego de Alvear (1749–1830) and the Portuguese Joaquín Félix da Fonseca,
both of whom participated in the commissions for the setting of boundaries
as a result of the treaty of 1750.153 Alvear affirms that their data “are consistent
with those taken by the famous Jesuit Father Buenaventura Suárez”.154 As we
have seen in the previous chapter, José Quiroga made his own table of longi-
tudes and latitudes of the reductions, which was dutifully copied by Sánchez
Labrador in his work.155 Quiroga provides the coordinates of 13 mission towns
of the Paraná River, 17 of the Uruguay River, two of the Itatines missions, 13 of
the missions among the peoples of the Chaco, ten of the Chiquitos missions
and one of the Mbyás (date of foundation of the town, number of families and
number of souls are also given). The data of Quiroga’s table that correspond to
the 30 towns on the Paraná and Uruguay rivers appear as an inset in his 1749
map of the reductions.156 His figures are different from those of Suárez’s.
When taking the coordinates of the mission villages of Paraguay, Suárez and
Quiroga were serving the interests of the Society of Jesus. A different kind of
endeavor was undertaken by the “mathematical Fathers” at the service of the
Portuguese emperor João V. Just as Peter the Great had done in Russia with the
founding of the Observatory of St. Petersburg by Delisle, João V actively pro-
moted the study of astronomy and cartography in Portugal. What Portuguese
historian Jaime Cortesão has called “the culture of longitude” was obviously at
the service of the consolidation of the kingdom’s overseas expansion.157 When
the king of Portugal asked the Superior General of the Society of Jesus for
experts in astronomy, he was sent two Italian Jesuits who had asked to serve
in the missions: Giovanni Battista Carbone (1694–1750) and Domenico Capassi

152 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 1, bk. 1, Paraquaria 16:262v, ARSI. The longitude
of San Cosme and San Damián with respect to the meridian of Paris was 3h52’20’’ W; for
Itapúa 3h53’0’’ W.
153 Alvear, Relación, 107.
154 Ibid., 107. Furlong considered that this was just the publication of Suárez’s table. See
idem, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 134.
155 Sánchez Labrador, Paraguay Natural, pt. 1, bk. 3, Paraquaria 16:263r–263v, ARSI.
156 Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica, 1:71–75.
157 Jaime Cortesão, “A cultura de longitude e a formaçao dum novo tipo social,” in idem,
Alexandre de Gusmão e a Tratado de Madrid. Parte I. Tomo I (1695–1735) (Rio de Janeiro:
Ministerio das Relações Exteriores, Istituto Rio Branco, 1952), 292–321.
244 chapter 4

(1694–1736).158 The efficient Portuguese ambassador in France, Luis da Cunha

(1662–1749), was able to mobilize the elite of Parisian scientific and technical
expertise in order to acquire the best possible instruments demanded by the
Jesuits. These established two observatories in Lisbon, one at the Jesuit Colégio
de Santo Antão and a smaller one at the Royal Palace.159
Carbone, who became a member of the Royal Society in 1729, was exceed-
ingly active: between 1724 and 1730 he published ten papers in the Philosophical
Transactions with his observations of solar and lunar eclipses and Jovian sat-
ellites, and on the determination of the longitude and latitude of Lisbon. He
also sent to the Philosophical Transactions twelve groups of observations by
other members of the Jesuit astronomical network, among them Francesco
Bianchini (Rome), Eustachio Manfredi (Bologna), Ignaz Kögler, and André
Pereira (Beijing).160 This material was sent to London directly by him or
through the intermediacy of Isaac de Sequeira Samuda (1696–1730) and later of
Castro Sarmento. Sequeira Samuda, a Portuguese Jewish physician who lived
in London, was a member of the College of Physicians and the Royal Society.
When he died, his role as a link between the Jesuit astronomers in Lisbon and
the Royal Society was taken up by Castro Sarmento, who as we know, had an
analogous intellectual and social profile.161 Carbone was nominated Royal
mathematician by the king of Portugal and by 1745 had been appointed as royal
secretary.
From the beginning, João V intended to send Capassi and Carbone to Brazil
in order to determine the coordinates of ports, cities, mines and fortresses, and
to draw up a map of the land. Since the discovery and settlement of the New
World, the question of longitude had been a hotly contested issue in Iberian
power politics. According to the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas the frontier between
the Spanish and Portuguese possessions in South America was not deter-
mined on the basis of geographical accidents, but as the meridian line that
run 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde islands. The lands east of the meridian

158 See DHCJ, s.v. “Carbone, Giovanni Battista” and “Capassi (Capasso), Domenico,” by
M. Zanfredini. For the astronomical activity of the Portuguese Jesuits, see Rodrigues,
Historia da Companhía de Jesús, vol. 4, bk. 1, pp. 400–424; Rómulo de Carvalho, A astrono-
mia em Portugal no século XVIII (Lisboa: Instituto de Cultura e Língua Portuguesa, 1985),
37–55; Leitão, “Jesuit Mathematical Practice in Portugal,” 242–243.
159 Carvalho, Rómulo de, A astronomia em Portugal, 37–55.
160 See the papers sent by Carbone in Rómulo de Carvalho, “Portugal nas ‘Philosophical
Transactions’ nos séculos XVII e XVIII,” Revista Filosófica (Coimbra), 15 (1955): 231–260
and 16 (1956): 94–120.
161 Carvalho, “Portugal nas ‘Philosophical Transactions’ ” (1955), 245 and 254.
the heavens 245

would correspond to Portugal, those to the west to Spain. Henceforward, the

Portuguese would take advantage of the indeterminacy of the line of demarca-
tion of the spheres of imperial influence of both countries and tried to shift it
westward. The more the line was moved to the west, the more territory north of
Río de la Plata (present-day Uruguay) would correspond to Portugal.
As the Portuguese tried to reach the Río de la Plata, the determination of the
longitude of the cities in southern Brazil became a matter of political impor-
tance. This was the case with Colonia de Sacramento, the military outpost
in the northern margin of the River Plate that changed hands several times
between Portugal and Spain. In the times of Suárez, Colonia was held by the
Portuguese. According to the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), which ended the War of
Spanish Succession, Spain had agreed to hand over the city to the Portuguese,
who began to fortify it in 1723. Two years later, João V ordered the occupation of
Rio Grande de San Pedro, on the southernmost Atlantic coast of Brazil.162
Given that in the end Carbone stayed at court as royal secretary, somebody
had to replace him as the companion of Capassi in Brazil. The charge fell
on a young Portuguese Jesuit, Diogo Soares (1684–1748), who had studied in
Coimbra and later taught mathematics in the Colégio de Santo Antão and phi-
losophy at Évora. Once in Brazil, Soares and Capassi carried out an extensive
activity of determination of coordinates and cartography, which extended from
the Captaincy of Goiás to Minas Gerais but was concentrated in the southern
territories, from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo, Rio Grande, and the River Plate.
Convened by the Portuguese governor of Colonia, the two Jesuits arrived in
that stronghold on 14 October 1730 and soon Soares made a map of the Río de
la Plata and drew a topographic chart of Colonia. Capassi died in February 1736
and Soares went on with his mapping of Brazil until his death in 1748.163

162 In 1735, the Prime Minister of Spain ordered the governor of the Río de la Plata to
recapture the stronghold, which led to a siege and blockage of one year. This particular
conflict ended with a treaty signed in Paris (1737), according to which Colonia returned
to Portugal. See Juan Monferini, “La historia militar durante los siglos XVII y XVIII,” in
Levene, Historia de la Nación Argentina, vol. 4, bk. 2, pp. 228–237 for a description of the
conflict between Spain and Portugal over the fortified city of Colonia del Sacramento. It
was during this siege that Brother Pedro Montenegro acted as infirmarius of the Guaraní
militia.
163 See Jaime Cortesão, “A missão dos padres matemáticos no Brasil,” Studia (Lisbon)
1 (1958), 123–150 and Serafim Leite, História da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil, 10 vols. (Rio
de Janeiro: Livraria Portugália, 1938–1950), 8:130–132 (Capassi, Domingo) and 9:130–137
(Soares, Diogo).
246 chapter 4

Soares and Capassi served the territorial interests of the Portuguese crown
with efficiency and, in the case of Soares, with zeal and patriotism. Cortesão
has argued that Soares and Capassi used Rio de Janeiro as the meridian of ref-
erence in their maps in order to keep secret the figures of the longitudes they
took.164 When the procurator Rico, then at Madrid, asked Manuel Campos for
a map of Brazil the latter answered him in a 3 June 1743 letter that he had not
been able to find one. A month later, on 2 July, Campos told Rico that there were
not good maps available at the moment and that the only one he had at hand,
made by a certain “M. de Fer.,” showed only imperfectly the coastal regions and
represented with little detail the interior of the continent.165 Cortesão believed
that since by that time Soares and Capassi had advanced greatly in their carto-
graphical work, Campos was not being entirely truthful.166 But Campos could
not have sent Rico a map that was not yet published or given out information
that was a secret of state. Besides, it is possible that he actually sent a second
map to Rico. In the letter dispatched by Campos to Rico on 10 October 1743,
the sketchy map is mentioned as “the first map of Brazil I sent you on July 4”
(my emphasis).167
While the cartographical efforts of the Portuguese Jesuits were at the ser-
vice of the policy pursued by Lisbon, the determination of the coordinates of
the reductions and the cartographic activities that surrounded the Treaty of
Madrid on the part of Jesuits of Paraguay was an enterprise that had in view
the integrity of the “Jesuit Republic”.168 Spanish and Portuguese Jesuits were
at loggerheads as regards the issue of the frontiers of the South American ter-
ritories of the two Iberian potencies. The question was intimately bound with
the fate of the Paraguay missions, for eventually the seven towns east of the
Uruguay River passed into the hands of the Portuguese in exchange for Colonia
del Sacramento. In the previous chapter, we have seen that while Quiroga

164 Cortesão, “A Missão dos padres matemáticos,” 132–133.

165 Campos to Rico, 3 June and 2 July 1743, s. IX 6.9.7, AGN. Cf. Furlong, Cartografía jesuítica,
1:73. Furlong says that it was Quiroga who asked for the map. The letters from Campos are
addressed to the Father Procurator [of Paraquaria], so it seems that the person who asked
for the chart was Rico—although it might be that the ultimate recipient of it was Quiroga.
166 Cortesão, “A Missão dos padres matemáticos,” 136. In his 2 July letter Campos says “You
will excuse the fault, which is not mine, for I do not deceive anybody; [the fault] is of my
scarce fortune”. Campos’s emphatic declaration of honesty suggests that he might have
been hiding something from Rico.
167 Campos to Rico, 10 October 1743, s. IX 6.9.7, AGN.
168 But as shown by their participation in the 1746 expedition to Patagonia, Spanish Jesuits
were also able to participate as experts in the strategic endeavors of the metropolis.
the heavens 247

acted as chaplain in one of the Spanish parties in charge of establishing the

boundary markers, another Jesuit astronomer, Father Panigay, worked for the
Portuguese. Jesuit historian Serafim Leite has remarked that Jesuits of the
Spanish Assistancy gave allegiance to Madrid, while those in the Portuguese
Assistancy were politically faithful to Lisbon.169 As a general statement, Leite’s
interpretation holds true. In the case of the Treaty of Madrid, Spanish policy
was at odds with the Jesuit missionary and territorial interests so that the
Fathers of the province of Paraguay were pulled and pushed by conflicting
loyalties.

2.6 Teaching of Astronomy in Córdoba

Before discussing Suárez’s involvement with Newtonian theory, it seems nec-
essary to discuss what kind of education in astronomy and natural philoso-
phy was available to Jesuit students at the University of Córdoba, the main
educational center in the country at that time. In the preceding chapter, we
have seen that the formal teaching of mathematics in Córdoba was introduced
in the 1760s, with the naming of Quiroga as occupant of the corresponding
chair. As to natural philosophy, the course was assigned to the second year of
philosophical studies, so that it is unlikely that Suárez, who took only one year
of philosophy, heard this course. It seems then that Suárez trained himself in
astronomy through private study, a practice not uncommon among Jesuits.
Besides the works on elementary arithmetic, Euclidian geometry and the
Renaissance commentaries on Sacrobosco’s Sphere mentioned in the previous
chapter, the library of Córdoba held (at least) Clavius’ Opera, the five volumes
of Christian Wolff’s Elementa Matheseos mathematica, seven mathematical
works of José Zaragoza and the Compendium mathematicum (9 vols.) and
Compendium philosophicum (5 vols.) by Tomás Vicente Tosca.170 Zaragoza and
Tosca were part of the group of the novatores, who contributed to the introduc-
tion of Modern science in Spain.171
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the teaching of philosophy in
Córdoba was based upon the works of the sixteenth-century Jesuit author
Antonio Rubio (1551–1587), who had taught in New Spain and Alcalá and
whose works became popular in Catholic Europe. Rubio’s outlook obeyed the

169 Leite, História da Companhia de Jesus no Brasil, 6:526–527.

170 Fraschini, Index Librorum, 1:192, 194, 310, and 384.
171 For a discussion of both authors in the context of Jesuit scientific activity in Early Modern
Spain, see Navarro, “Tradition and Scientific Change,” 345–348 and 356–357.
248 chapter 4

injunction of the Ratio: it was entirely scholastic and Aristotelian.172 The fol-
lowing decades saw little renovation.173 During the seventeenth century Jesuit
teaching of natural philosophy in Europe was galvanized by the anti-Cartesian
polemic, although there were some Jesuits who defended Cartesian theses
and others who sought a conciliatory path. In 1651 Superior General Francesco
Piccolomini (1582–1651) promulgated an Ordinatio pro studiis superioribus with
a list of propositions that could not be taught, reinforcing Aristotelian natural
philosophy against the Moderns. Subsequent general congregations follow suit
with this defense of traditional philosophy. In answer to the feelings of the 15th
general congregation, which took place in Rome in 1706 and to which Father
Francisco Burgés (1642–1725) assisted as a representative of the Province of
Paraquaria, Superior General Tamburini sent another circular with a list of
prohibited Cartesian propositions.174 Such a letter, sent by the Father General
in June 1706, eventually reached Córdoba.175
This insistence on prohibiting the teaching of Descartes’s theses suggests
that they were taught. As Dainville has shown, during the second half of the
seventeenth century many Jesuit colleges in France were closer to some kind of
Cartesianism and experimentalism than to Aristotle. The “flight to Descartes,”
which began to be condoned by the beginning of the eighteenth century, could
be explained in terms of what was considered as a greater threat: the rise of
Newtonian philosophy.176 In his book on Catholic physics Hellyer has argued
how the process of mathematization, incorporation of experimental physics,
and turning to corpuscular explanations into Jesuit teaching of natural phi-
losophy in the Empire was a development that took one century and a half.

172 The Jesuit professor of philosophy was enjoined to “in rebus alicuis momenti ab
Aristotele non recedat” (Lukács, Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum, 397). Rubio expounded
his Aristotelian commentary on Aristotle’s books on natural philosophy in several
works. See Furlong, Nacimiento y desarrollo de la filosofía, 57–58, José R. Sanabria and
Mauricio Beuchot, Historia de la filosofía cristiana en México (México, D.F.: Universidad
Iberoamericana, 1994), 81–89, and DHCJ, s.v. “Rubio, Antonio,” by L. Martínez Gómez.
173 For a brief but sound panorama of Jesuit teaching of natural philosophy in Early Modern
Europe, see DHCJ, s.v. “Filosofía.III.Cosmología,” by F. Selvaggi.
174 Furlong, Nacimiento y desarrollo de la filosofía, 163–164.
175 The 30 propositions are transcribed in Antonio Astrain, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús
en la Asistencia de España, vol. 7 (Madrid: Administración de Razón y Fe, 1925), 11–14 and
Furlong, Nacimiento y desarrollo de la filosofía, 165–167. The whole of Cartesian natural
philosophy was swept out with this index.
176 Dainville, “L’énseignement de l’histoire et de la géographie,” 355 and 375–376. Gaston
Sortais, “Le cartésianisme chez les jésuites français,” Archives de philosophie 6, no. 3 (1928),
1–109 does not consider Cartesian natural philosophy.
the heavens 249

In the Jesuit universities of German speaking lands, Newton was introduced

by the beginning of the eighteenth century and by the time the Society was
dissolved (1774), it had been already incorporated into the teaching, partly as
a result of the adoption of Boscovich’s natural philosophy.177 In Spain, several
Jesuits joined the effort of scientific renewal prompted by Charles III, like
Andrés Marcos Burriel (1719–1762), Tomás Cerdá (1715–1791), Mateo Aymerich
(1715–1799), and those who came from the Habsburg Empire, such as the math-
ematician from Prague Joannes Wendlingen and the Viennese Christian Rieger
(1714–1780).178
It was the 16th congregation of 1730–1731 which very timidly opened a
creak for the introduction of experimental philosophy into an Aristotelian
matrix—although it continued insisting on the teaching of Peripatetic phi-
losophy.179 Things did not go too far, for on 8 November 1732 Superior General
Retz sent to the Provincial of Paraguay a circular letter with a list of ten prohib-
ited propositions of natural philosophy, all of them concerning atomism and
Cartesianism.180 The 17th general congregation (1751) consecrated the distinc-
tion and the lack of conflict between physica generalis (Aristotelian natural
philosophy) and physica particularis (experimental physics). But it should be
remembered that this conference also confirmed the prescription of the syllo-
gistic way of exposition even for “particular physics,” which obviously took out
much of the sting of novelty.
In broad lines, these developments were mirrored in the Río de la Plata.
Furlong has listed the books used to teach natural philosophy in Córdoba
during the first half of the eighteenth century.181 These were Juan de Ulloa’s
Physica Speculativa (1713), Luis de Losada’s Cursus philosophicus (1724–35), and
José de Aguilar’s Cursus philosophicus dictatus Limae (Seville, 1701). All of them
discussed natural philosophy in thoroughly scholastic fashion and neither was
sympathetic to Cartesianism. Luis de Losada (1681–1748), whose Physica was
published in 1730, accepted a mitigated physical atomism while maintaining
metaphysical hylomorphism, but he rejected the central tenets of modern
philosophy.182 Lértora Mendoza has shown how the incorporation of Newton’s
Opticks and Principia in the courses of natural philosophy in the Río de la Plata

177 Hellyer, Catholic Physics, 227–233,

178 Navarro Brotóns, “Science and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” 393–398.
179 Astrain, Historia de la Compañía de Jesús, 22–23. No representative of the Rio de la Plata
was present in that congregation.
180 Furlong, Nacimiento y desarrollo de la filosofía, 167–170.
181 Ibid., 174–175. But there is no mention of source.
182 See DHCJ, s.v. “Losada, Luis de,” by L. Martínez Gómez.
250 chapter 4

consisted basically in an assimilation of fragments of experimental science to a

basically scholastic discourse, without acknowledgement of the basic notions
of Newtonian natural philosophy and the mathematical worldview it implied.183
A manuscript with a student’s notes from a course of physics (general and
particular) dictated by Benito Riva (also spelled Riba, 1727–1800) in Córdoba
in the 1760s has been conserved.184 The course consists essentially in an expo-
sition of the different systems of natural philosophy (Aristotelian, Cartesian,
Newtonian, and atomistic) disaggregated into theses and list of pros and cons,
which are approved or refuted in scholastic fashion. Riva shows himself at
times harshly critical of the Peripatetic natural philosophy and inclined to
defend Cartesian and atomistic positions—for example, he identifies prime
matter with indivisible atoms or corpuscles and defends that heat is the result
of the movement of the particles of which the bodies are composed. At the end
of the course, there is a short treatise, De mundo et caelo, in which he discusses
the cosmological systems and favors Copernicanism, claiming that “almost all
modern physicists are Copernicans”.185 With frequent mentions of Feijóo, Riva
argues in favor of the Copernican system, with the proviso that it be defended
hypothetically—“quod semper in hypothesi esse permissum”—according to
the teachings of the Inquisition.186 But he rejects such basic Newtonian postu-
lates as the mutual attraction of the bodies and the force of gravity, on account
of it being an “occult force,” which cannot explain anything: “Displicet quod
hec virtus attractiva occultior est qualitatibus occultis”.187 It must be noticed

183 Celina Lértora Mendoza, “Los estudios superiores rioplatenses y su función en la dinámica
cultural,” in Ciencia, vida y espacio en Iberoamérica, ed. José L. Peset, 3 vols. (Madrid,
CSIC, 1989), 1:398; idem, “Introducción de las teorías newtonianas en el Río de la Plata,”
in Mundialización de la ciencia y cultura nacional, ed. Antonio Lafuente et al. (Madrid,
Universidad Autónoma-Doce Calles, 1993), 307–323; idem, “Nollet y la difusión de Newton
en el Río de la Plata,” in The Spread of the Scientific Revolution in the European Periphery,
ed. Celina Lértora Mendoza, Efthymios Nicolaïdis and Jan Vandersmissen (Turnhout,
Brepols, 2000), 123–136; Carlos D. Galles, “La enseñanza de las ideas newtonianas sobre
la luz en la Universidad de Córdoba,” in Celina Lértora et al., The Spread of the Scientific
Revolution in the European Periphery, Latin America and East Asia, 110–122.
184 For Riva, see Furlong, Nacimiento y desarrollo de la filosofía, 187–192, who comments
on the course. The table of contents of the manuscript has been transcribed in Celina
Lértora Mendoza, La enseñanza de la filosofía en tiempos de la colonia. Análisis de cursos
manuscritos (Buenos Aires. FECIC, 1979), 215–240.
185 Benito Riva, [Cursus physicae], De mundo et caelo, 310v, FACJA. In Spanish in the original:
“Los Phisicos [sic] modernos quasi todos son Copernicanos.”
186 Riva, [Cursus], De mundo et caelo, 314v–315r, FACJA.
187 Riva, [Cursus], Liber I, disputatio 1ª, sectio 6ª, 13r, FACJA.
the heavens 251

that in the 1740s and 1750s Newton’s theories of light and gravitation were
beginning to be accepted in Jesuit textbooks and lectures.188
The index of the library of the University of Córdoba compiled in 1757 men-
tions Descartes’ Opera omnia and works by Jesuit Cartesians, like an Italian ver-
sion of Noël Regnault’s Entretiens physiques d’Arioste et d’Eudoxe and Jacques
Rohault’s Physica.189 There was also Jean Seguens’ Atomismus demonstratus et
vindicatus, four volumes of Tosca’s Philosophia neoterica, and all the works on
natural and mechanical philosophy by Gaspar Schott, with the exception of his
Mechanica hydraulico-pneumatica (1657), the most technical of them.190 This
selection seems enough to show that, as most Jesuit libraries, the one in Córdoba
was eclectic and well-stocked. Those of the smaller colleges were poorer in this
kind of books. For example, the index of the library of the college in Asunción
lists not much beyond basic mathematical texts by Jesuit authors like Ignatius
Staffort and Johannes Wendlingen and two sets of Bernardo Feijóo’s Teatro
crítico.191 With respect to Newtonian bibliography, the University of Córdoba
had only John Keill’s Introductio ad veram physicam (Oxford, 1701), although
it is possible that other Newtonian books circulated in Jesuit libraries of the
province, like James Ferguson’s Astronomy Explained Upon Sir Isaac Newton’s
Principles, second edition (London, 1757).192

2.7 Theory
The Littera annua of 1750 attributes to Suárez a now lost translation to Spanish
of Castro Sarmento’s treatise on the Newtonian theory of the tides, Theorica
verdadeira das marés, conforme à philosophia do incomparavel cavalhero Isaac
Newton . . . (London, 1737).193 Castro Sarmento, who has been counted among
the lesser Newtonians of the first part of the eighteenth century, was one of the
first to introduce Newton’s theories in Portugal. Within its 135 pages, the Theorica

188 Steven J. Harris, “Boscovich, the ‘Boscovich Circle’ and the Revival of Jesuit Science,” in R. J.
Boscovich: Vita e attivita scientifica, ed. Piers Bursill-Hall (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia
Italiana, 1993), 540.
189 Fraschini, Index librorum, 1:367 and 269.
190 Ibid., 303, 302, and 250. The Minim Jean Saguens was a follower of Gassendi and a disciple
of Emmanuel Maignan, a pioneer in the incorporation of experimental physics into scho-
lastic texts. Jacques Rohault was a Cartesian.
191 Marisa A. Gorzalczany and Alejandro Olmos Gaona, eds., La biblioteca jesuítica de
Asunción (Buenos Aires: edition by the authors, 2006), 181, 306, and 143. This brief list is
a representative selection of the kind of books on mathematics and natural philosophy
held in Jesuit libraries in Río de la Plata and Paraguay.
192 Fraschini, Index librorum, 1:303. Ferguson’s Astronomy is held in the FACJA.
193 Annua 1750, Fondo Bib. Nac. 8156, AGN.
252 chapter 4

contains more than its title suggest, for it includes a compact introduction to
the philosophy of Newton.194 The work, dedicated to Manuel José de Castro,
Count of Monsanto (1666–1742), was obviously conceived for Portuguese audi-
ences.195 Its didactic purpose is evident in the supple style and the appen-
dix with a glossary. Its author affirms that, whereas Halley intended to make
Newton’s theory of tides accessible, he would make it still more comprehensi-
ble for the general public.196 Castro Sarmento took opportunity to publicize his
relationships with Portuguese Jesuit mathematicians. In the Prologue, when
urging the shift from the teaching of Aristotelian and Cartesian natural philos-
ophy to that of Newton, Sarmento praised “the great talent and excellent keen
of Rev. Father Manuel de Campos, a worthy member of the Society [of Jesus],
who established the first foundations of this change . . . with his Elements of
Geometry, which he published in Portuguese”.197 (This is the same Campos
that bought the astronomical instruments for Father Rico and sent him a map
of Brazil.)
Suárez could have been in direct contact with Castro Sarmento or, more
likely, he could have got hold of Sarmento’s book through the intermediacy
of Saraiva, his correspondent in Brazil (it was the latter who mediated Castro
Sarmento’s request of Suárez’s data). In any case, Suarez’s translation reveals
that his intellectual range transcended purely observational astronomy. We
have discussed in the preceding section how Newtonian ideas were resisted
in the teaching of natural philosophy in Córdoba, which by the middle of
the eighteenth century was, in the best of cases, sympathetic to a moderate
Cartesianism or atomism. Compared with what was taught at the University of
Córdoba, the translation of a full-fledged Newtonian work of divulgation was
a daring enterprise.
As has been pointed out, Grammatici contributed to the introduction in
China of the Newtonian theory of the tides. In a purely speculative vein it is
possible to think that perhaps Suárez’s interest in Newton might have been
stimulated by his correspondent. There are reasons to suppose that while in

194 See Ildeu Castro Moreira et al., “ ‘Theorica Verdadeira das Marés’ (1737): O primeiro
texto newtoniano em português,” Revista de Ensino de Física 9 (1987): 55–67; Joaquim de
Carvalho, “Jacob de Castro Sarmento et l’introduction des conceptions de Newton en
Portugal,” in III Congrès international d’Histoire des sciences. Actes, conférences et commu-
nications (Lisbon: Seara Nova, 1936), 95–98.
195 Goldish, “Newtonian, Converso, and Deist,” 662–666.
196 Castro Sarmento, Theorica, 37. Sarmento drew on Edmond Halley, “The true Theory on the
Tides, extracted from that admired Treatise of Mr. Isaac Newton, Intituled, Philosophiae
Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” Philosophical Transactions, 19 (1696): 445–457.
197 Castro Sarmento, Theorica, “Prologo ao leytor,” not paginated. For the Elements of
Geometry written by Campos, see note 48 on p. 178.
the heavens 253

Ingolstadt Grammatici acted as a Copernican. In 1725 he published an engraving

of a heliocentric planetolabium (an instrument purported to measure the
course of the planets), with a manual of instructions published a year later.198
But there are testimonies that Grammatici was not a Crypto-Copernican and
utilized the heliocentric system just as a hypothesis.199 No traces have been left
of what Suárez’s opinions were with respect to heliocentrism.

2.8 The Guaraní as Instrument Makers

We have already seen the kind of long negotiations necessary for the buying
of scientific instruments for the province of Paraguay. The alternative left for
missionaries like Suárez was to make their own instruments in the workshops
of the missions. Although the Jesuit astronomer does not say it expressly, it
is highly likely that the Guaraní fabricated some of these instruments or at
least collaborated with him in their making. In an account of 1714, Anton Sepp
recalls that “his musicians” knew how to fabricate cannons and gun locks and
how to make nuts. Not only that, they also built striking clocks that stroke the
hours, half hours, and quarters. Sepp also tells that “a Father taught them to
bevel the crystals for the eyeglasses, so that they give them the form of the
surface which corresponds to each particular case.” This unnamed Jesuit well
could have been Father Suárez and, in any case, it is evident that the Guaraní
were familiar with the technique of polishing lenses with abrasives found in
the vicinity. Sepp adds that they could also smelt metal for making bells, made
chiming clocks similar to those fabricated in Augsburg, and musical instru-
ments like fagots, oboes, violins, harps, organs, lutes, and flutes.200
Clocks were obviously very important for the mission towns for they regu-
lated the round of daily chores and religious observances. In a description of
the reductions by Father Jaime Oliver (1733–1813), it is said that “in each town
there is one or more clocks for the arrangement of the religious schedule (dis-
tribución religiosa).” By the time Oliver wrote, there was only one clock in a
tower, which had been made “by a skilful Father for the town of Trinidad”.201 In
a 1747 letter describing the reductions, Father Cardiel said that “in each mis-
sion town there are one or two wheel clocks, some made by the Indians, others

198 Nicasius Grammatici, Planetolabium novum, pro solis reliquorumque planetarum positu
accurate designando (Ingolstadt, 1725) and idem, Explicatio et usus planetolabii novi
(Ingolstadt, 1726). Cf. Bernhard Duhr, Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher
Zunge im 18. Jahrhundert, in 2 bks. (Munich and Regensburg: G. J. Manz, 1928), 2:49.
199 Hellyer, Catholic Physics, 234.
200 Sepp, Jardín de flores paracuario, 179.
201 Cited in Sustersic, Templos jesuítico-guaraníes, 169.
254 chapter 4

bought in Buenos Aires, by which we are governed in our religious schedule”

(my emphasis).202
Sundials were a fixture in the urban landscape of the reductions. A letter
of Father Noyelle from 1684 to the provincial of Paraguay tells that “it was
usual to toll a bell to give the hours of the day, according as they were indi-
cated by the sundials of the hourglasses, so that it was possible to live in order
and measure”.203 The sundial was usually situated in the middle of the central
square of the reduction. In a description of the ruins of San Cosme from the
beginning of the twentieth century, a “horizontal solar quadrant” of 74cm is
mentioned. This sundial still stands in that town, but it is not likely that it is
the one Suárez used.204 In the 1860’s De Moussy recorded that in the patio
of the reduction of La Cruz, he saw a sundial resting on an elegant column
of red sandstone and bearing the year 1730, which still exists.205 In his books
as a result of his 1903 tour of the Jesuit missions, Argentine writer Leopoldo
Lugones mentions several sundials in the ruins of the reductions. Two of them
were in San Javier; another, rather shattered, in Concepción; and there was one
on a wall of the unroofed church in the town of Jesús.206 A vertical sundial in
the patio behind the church in the Jesuit estancia of Alta Gracia (Córdoba) has
also been conserved and there are sundials in several Chiquitos missions.
In his Continuatio laborum apostolicorum (1693–1701) Sepp says that he saw
“armillary spheres with metal circles that represent the orbit of the Sun and
the movement of the stars, the degrees of the celestial sphere, and even the
minutes engraved visibly with a steel burin, so perfectly that it was difficult
to know whether they had been made in Europe or in Paraquaria”.207 These
instruments had been fabricated by native artisans. He goes on to tell about
a Guaraní called Ignacio Paica, who lived in the town of San Miguel and
was a musician, made trumpets and all kinds of metalwork and silverware
of exquisite facture. Paica made shotguns, spheres, and other astronomical

202 Cardiel, “Carta y relación,” 134. Paralellism between Oliver’s and Cardiel’s statements sug-
gest that one of them is the copy of the other.
203 Cited in Furlong, Misiones, 255–256.
204 See Pablo Hernández, “Una visita a las antiguas doctrinas de indios guaranís dirigidas por
los padres de la Compañía de Jesús,” Razón y Fe 3, no. 7 (1903), 236. This sundial is in the
“new” town of San Cosme, north of the Paraná, whereas Suárez had worked on that mission
before its relocation. See a photograph in Troche-Boggino, “Buenaventura Suárez SJ,” 163.
205 Martin de Moussy, Mémoire historique sur la decadence et la ruine des missions des Jésuites
dans le basin de La Plata (Paris: Librairie de Charles Douniol, 1864), 49. The ruins of the
reduction of La Cruz are situated in the province of Corrientes, Argentina.
206 Leopoldo Lugones, El imperio jesuítico (Buenos Aires: Hyspamérica, 1985), 148 and
225–226.
207 Sepp, Continuación de las labores, 270.
the heavens 255

instruments. He built a bell of 500 pounds and a sundial that could not be dis-
tinguished from those made in Europe.208
A sundial kept in the small museum of the reduction of San Ignacio and
obviously made by the Guaraní presents particular interest, for its gnomon is
a representation of a viper (fig. 4.2). This incorporation of a zoomorphic ele-
ment into a Western astronomical instrument—the gnomon could be taken
as an emblem of Greek scientific rationality—is suggestive of the borrowings
and exchanges between native and European culture. Vipers were associated
to the heavenly realm in Guaraní mythology. The Guayakí believed that the
rainbow is formed out of two serpents: Membó Ruchú (Big Serpent) and Krijú
Braá (Black Boa). The Apokakuva sustained that the guardians of the cre-
ator Ñanderuvusú are an eternal bat, an eternal jaguar, and an eternal boa.
For the Mbyá, Hembó-kwá (Serpent’s cavern) means perhaps a nebula.209 The
Guaraní used the same word, ñandú, to name the South American ostrich and
the Milky Way. A Guaraní mythical narrative says that this giant bird appears
nightly in the firmament and were it not for the prevision of Tupá (supreme
being in Guaraní creation myths) it would have already eaten the members of
the human race. Tupá made available for the ñandú three deposits of food in
the heavenly fields. The bird, whose head is the Southern Cross, has already
eaten two of them and will fall upon the human beings once it devours the
third. Anthropologist Lehmann Nitsche interpreted this myth in the following
way. The Coal Sack is the deposit that the galaxy-bird has already eaten. The
other two correspond to the Magellan clouds (the smaller to the half-eaten
deposit).210 According to Ruiz de Montoya, the Guaraní in the Jesuit missions
interpreted the Milky Way as a way to Heaven.211 Cadogan has claimed that in
Guaraní dialects the Milky Way is considered to be the Tapir’s path and that
the Mbyá identified the constellation of the Ostrich (Gwyra Ñandú or Ñandú
guasú) and the Pleiades (Eichú, the name of a small bee).212
This mythical world is very far from the observations made by Suárez. The
Guaraní gave to the eclipses of Sun and Moon different mythical interpreta-
tions, obviously alien to Western science.213 The main interactions between

208 Ibid., 270–271.

209 Cadogan, “Some plants and animals,” 98.
210 Robert Lehmann-Nitsche, “El avestruz galaxial de los guaraní,” in Obra del Cincuentenario
del Museo de la Plata, vol. 2 (Buenos Aires: Coni, 1936), 201–205.
211 Ibid., 203.
212 Cadogan, “Some plants and animals,” 99.
213 See the myth of the cultural hero Pa’i Rete Kuaray, “the Lord with a body glowing as the
Sun” (i.e., the Sun) and his brother Moon. Charia, an evil spirit, devours Moon, who is
resuscitated by his elder brother. See Cadogan, Ayvu Rapyta, 131. As to Sun eclipses, Pa’i
goes to the river with his son, who with his feet makes all the fish die. Charia captures the
 256 chapter 4

FIGURE 4.2 Sundial from the Missions, Museum of San Ignacio Miní ( formerly in Museo Histórico
Nacional, Buenos Aires). The zoomorphic gnomon is a plastic expression of Guaraní
interpretation of a classic astronomical instrument.

the aboriginal worldview and eighteenth-century astronomy seem to have

been mediated by the exceptional ability of the Guaraní in the crafts.

child and takes him away. Pa’i fights with the evil spirit and both of them fall to the river,
but triumphant Sun rises again. Ibid., 135.
the heavens 257

3 Missionary Astronomy

Suárez carried out the kind of observational work that was usual for Jesuit
astronomers all over the world by the first half of the eighteenth century, like
observation and prediction of eclipses, observations of the Jovian satellites,
and the determination of the coordinates of a given locality. Many astrono-
mers at that time built their own instruments and it seems that Suárez had
enough workshop facilities and the ability to do that. As discussed in the pre-
ceding section, it is likely that the Guaraní collaborated with him in this task.
His observations were made from the various Jesuit missions scattered
throughout the region. Suárez took the coordinates of all the reductions,
which means that he toured them all. As revealed by his translation of
Castro Sarmento’s treatise, he seems to have been the first Jesuit in the Rio
de la Plata to take a serious interest in Newton’s theory. What his opinions on
Copernicanism and Newtonianism were we can only guess.
The correspondence Suárez maintained with Grammatici, with Saraiva in
Brazil, with Peralta in Lima, and perhaps with Castro Sarmento in London,
allowed him to become acquainted with recent publications in the field as well
as to make known his own observations. He carried out a sustained effort to
publicize his results to the wider world. These were published by Wargentin
in the proceedings of the Swedish Academy of Science and also in the
Philosophical Transactions. The Royal Society eagerly sought to publish stra-
tegic information about Iberian America. It was Castro Sarmento who asked
Suárez, through the intermediacy of Saraiva, about the coordinates of the
mission towns. Saraiva, Sachetti Barbosa, and Castro Sarmento propped their
prestige among the members of the Royal Society by communicating informa-
tion on Brazil and Paraguay, which no one else could have obtained.
We should recall that Suárez’s Lunario went through at least two European
editions during the eighteenth century, besides those published in Iberian
America. The myth of the “isolated scientist” in the midst of the Paraguayan
jungle has been criticized when applied to the eighteenth-century naturalist
Félix de Azara.214 Neither was the Jesuit Suárez in an absolutely marginal posi-
tion with respect to the astronomical community of his time. On the contrary,
as happened with most missionary astronomers in “exotic” lands, he managed
to interact with his European colleagues through a complex network of sci-
entific correspondence of the kind studied by Harris.215 This network was the
condition of possibility for Suárez’s production.

214 See Glick and Quinlan, “Félix de Azara.”

215 Harris, “Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks.”
258 chapter 4

Unlike the Portuguese Jesuits, it seems that Suárez was not involved in inter-
national politics. His only interest was the administration and government
of the towns and astronomy. In this sense, his vital horizon was very much
identified with the apostolic mission of the Society. It seems that his Lunario
was used as an ecclesiastical calendar and the observation of the satellites of
Jupiter was aimed at the calculation of longitude of the mission towns. The
rest of the astronomical writings that have reached us are of practical import:
the letter to the Father Provincial on the epact, a table of the hours and min-
utes when the sun rises and sets in Santa Fe, and a table to find the hours a
sundial should indicate at midday.216
Many of Suárez’s correspondents were Portuguese. He did not write to any
Spanish Jesuit. This situation was characteristic of the culture of science in the
Jesuit missions of Paraguay. No matter if Creole, Spanish, Italian, British, or
Centro-European, Jesuits did not have a privileged connection with the figures
of Spanish science.
Perhaps the more interesting issue about Suárez, who lived for most of his
life among the Guaraní people, is the question of the articulation of his work
as an astronomer with his apostolic missions as a Jesuit. He carried out his
lifelong passion for astronomy while attending to his duties in the missions
and his observations and writings were technical pieces aimed at improving
the life in the reductions. Suárez’s double reference—on the one hand to the
universal organization to which he belonged, on the other to the land where he
had his roots and where he served as a missionary—was a system of beneficial
interactions.

216 Furlong, “Buenaventura Suárez,” 133–135.

 chapter 5

Science in the Italian Exile

In compliance with the 1767 decree of Charles III that ordered the expulsion of
the members of the Society of Jesus from Spain and its domains, on the night
of 2 July of that year the governor of Buenos Aires, Francisco de Paula Bucareli
(also spelled Bucarelli, 1708–1775), sent two companies of grenadiers to storm
into the two Jesuit Colleges of the city (Colegio Grande and Belén). He had the
royal decree read before each of the religious communities and imprisoned
the 44 Jesuits that lived in a house next to the College of Belén.1 In no time, the
governor issued an order prohibiting anybody in the city to talk to the prison-
ers. Similar episodes took place in the cities of Córdoba and Santa Fe. In April
of the following year, Bucareli himself led an army strong of 1500 men to the
Guaraní mission towns, seized the reductions which were handed down qui-
etly by the missionaries, and by September he had dispatched the priests and
lay brothers down the Paraná and Uruguay rivers toward Buenos Aires.2
Thus began the story of the eviction of the Society of Jesus from Paraguay
and Río de la Plata, a process that took little less than a year and a half to
complete. In all, 456 Jesuits were expelled from the gobernaciones of Buenos
Aires, Tucumán, and Paraguay. Of these, 85 had been born in the country, 293
were Spanish, and 47 were from European countries other than Spain (most
of these from Italy, Germany, and other lands of the Habsburg Empire). The
totality of the 31 lay brothers were also foreigner.3 The first contingent, con-
stituted mainly by Jesuits from the colleges, was embarked in five ships on 29
September 1767. The second group, less numerous and formed by priests from
the Guaraní reductions, was put aboard one ship on 6 May of the next year.
The Jesuits from the Chaco missions, such as Dobrizhoffer, Paucke, or Sánchez
Labrador, were the last to leave, on 24 May 1768.4 All the Jesuits banished from
Spanish America (around 2200) arrived in the Spanish port of Santa María
and were eventually deported to the Pontifical States. Spanish and Creoles
from Paraquaria ended up in Faenza; the “foreigners” were sent to their home

1 Hernández, El extrañamiento de los jesuitas, 58–61.

2 Caraman, The Lost Paradise, 276–281.
3 See a summary of the expulsion in Magnus Mörner, “Introduction,” in idem, ed., The
Expulsion of the Jesuits from Latin America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 3–30 and DHCJ,
s.v. “Expulsión de Hispanoamérica y Filipinas (1767–1770),” by João Baptista.
4 Caraman, The Lost Paradise, 281.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004256774_��7

260 chapter 5

c­ ountries. Few years after these events, in 1773, the Society of Jesus was sup-
pressed by Pope Clement XIV.
The expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and its territories, engineered by
the ministers of Charles III Manuel de Roda (1708–1782) and Pedro Rodríguez
Campomanes (1723–1802), followed their expulsion from Portugal (1759) and
from France (1764). This momentous event in the history of Iberian America
has been subjected to many and conflicting historical interpretations, for its
causes were anything but simple.5 The Jesuits from Spanish America, Creoles as
well as Spanish, went on as they could, living on the modest pension assigned
to them by the crown, which was very irregularly paid.6 Many of them, dis-
persed in the cities of northern Italy, eventually took to scholarly pursuits. A
rich and multifarious cultural production came out of those expatriates.7 We
have mentioned in our first chapter the works of Spanish American Jesuits who
wrote in defense of their lost homelands against those authors who argued
for the inferiority of the New World, such as Buffon, the Dutch philosopher
and diplomat de Pauw, the French former Jesuit Guillaume Raynal (1713–1796),

5 Magnus Mörner underscores as the main cause the policy of “regalism”—the assertion of
royal rights in ecclesiastical affairs at the expense of the Pope—. See idem, “The Expulsion
of the Jesuits from Spain and Spanish America.” But the climate of opinion fostered in the
European courts by those aligned with the Enlightenment and other anti-Jesuitical parties
also played a critical role in the expulsion. See Jeffrey Klaiber, Los jesuitas en América Latina,
1549–2000 (Lima: Universidad Antonio Ruiz de Montoya, 2007), 156–159.
6 The money came from the produce of the confiscated possessions of the Jesuits. A royal
decree of 12 December 1786 established the amount of 550 reales de vellón (two gold dou-
bloons) as an annual maximum. Between that year and 1790, the number of Jesuits who
received additional extraordinary support was 2240. See Niccolò Guasti, L’esilio italiano dei
gesuiti spagnoli. Identità, controllo sociale e pratiche culturali (1767–1798) (Roma: Edizioni di
storia e letteratura, 2006), 13–26.
7 Jesuit historian Miguel Batllori contributed many articles to this topic (Batllori, La cultura
hispano-italiana), which tend to overrate the role of the Jesuits from Catalunya. See Guasti,
L’esilio italiano dei gesuiti spagnoli, 245–246. For a more balanced account see the book by
Guasti and idem, “I gesuiti espagnoli espulsi (1767–1815): politica, economia, cultura,” in
Paolo Bianchini, ed., Morte e resurrezione di un Ordine religioso. Le strategie culturali ed edu-
cative della Compagnia di Gesù durante la soppressione (1759–1814) (Milano: Vita e Pensiero,
2006), 15–52. Also, two recent collections of articles: Tietz and Briesemeister, Los jesuitas
españoles expulsos, and Ugo Baldini and G. P. Brizzi, eds., La presenza in Italia dei gesuiti ibe-
rici espulsi. Aspetti religiosi, politici, culturali (Bologna: Clueb, 2010). For the cultural activities
of the Jesuits during the suppression, see the various essays in Bianchini, Morte e resurrezione
di un Ordine religioso.
Science in the Italian Exile 261

and the Scottish Episcopalian William Robertson (1721–1793).8 Creoles like the
Mexican Clavigero, the Chilean Molina, and the Ecuatorian Juan de Velasco,
gave vent to a proto-nationalistic sentiment of a regional kind, in which his-
torical considerations were associated to accounts of local nature.9 The natu-
ral histories of Sánchez Labrador, Jolís and Termeyer considered in chapter 1
show that the Jesuits from Paraquaria also did their share to contribute to this
upsurge of Spanish American conscience.
In what follows, we will consider three episodes of Jesuits expelled from
Paraguay and Río de la Plata who pursued scientific activities in Italy: Juárez’s
cutivation of a garden of plants from the Indies, Termeyer’s publication of his
experiments on the electric eel carried out in his Chaco mission, and the astro-
nomical researches of Alonso Frías. The dynamic of inquiry that had begun in
the Jesuit missions of Paraquaria continued to unfold itself for a pair of decades
after 1767. The scientific achievements of the exiled Jesuits should be seen as
the continuation of what had been a consistent tradition of research. Much of
these projects were likely undertaken as a way of obtaining patronage or the
double pension awarded by the crown to those ex-Jesuits deemed meritorious.
Former Jesuits from the New World organized an informal network of mutual
support, but the mutual critiques that crop here and there in their works show
that this community was not free from internal conflicts.10

1 Juárez’s Vatican Garden of the Indies

Gáspar Juárez (also spelled Xuárez) was born on 11 November 1731 in Santiago
del Estero, province of Tucumán (present-day Argentina).11 He entered the
Colegio de Montserrat (Córdoba) at some point between 1743 and 1745 and
joined the Society of Jesus in 1748. Juárez was ordained before 1764, when he

8 For the dispute of the New World, see pp. 34–35 and 38, and references in notes 34, 37, and
47, chap. 1.
9 Batllori, La cultura hispano-italiana, 575–627; Klaiber, Los jesuitas en América Latina,
161–193; Silvia Navia Méndez-Bonito, “Las historias naturales de Francisco Javier Clavijero,
Juan Ignacio de Molina y Juan de Velasco,” in Millones and Ledezma, El saber de los
jesuitas, 225–250; Baldini, “La storia naturale dei continenti extraeuropei negli scritti degli
esiliati,” in Baldini and Brizzi, La presenza in Italia dei gesuiti iberici espulsi, 247–279.
10 We have already discussed Camaño’s harsh critique of Quiroga, see p. 174.
11 The following account is based on Guillermo Furlong, Gaspar Juárez y sus ‘Noticias
fitológicas’ (1789) (Buenos Aires: Librería del Plata, 1954), first published as idem, “El
naturalista santiagueño Gaspar Juárez,” Revista del Archivo de Santiago del Estero 5, no. 9
(1926): 41–70 and no. 10 (1926): 33–82.
262 chapter 5

was in a mission in Catamarca. Upon his return to Córdoba, he taught humani-

ties, philosophy, and moral theology. In 1767 he began teaching law, which
was his preferred and proper subject. In those years he built close bonds with
the Funes, a politically influent patrician family. Juárez was the teacher of
Gregorio Funes (the future reformer of the University of Córdoba) and once
in Italy he kept frequent correspondence with Ambrosio, the latter’s brother.
Father Juárez had been confessor of their mother and in turn the Funes helped
to organize a network of material support for him and other Jesuits. Juárez
lived in Faenza until the suppression of the Society in 1773, when he moved
out to Rome. The French invasion to Italy, which resulted in the expulsion of
the foreigners from the Gallo-Roman Republic, caused him to try to return to
the Río de la Plata together with another former Jesuit, Diego León de Villafañe
(1741–1830), born in Tucumán. The attempt failed but thanks to his Roman citi-
zenship Juárez was able to continue residing in the Papal city.12 During the
Roman period of his exile Juárez developed an interest in botany, to which we
now turn.
In 1786 there appeared in Rome a translation into Italian of John Hill’s
folio volume A Decade of Curious and Elegant Trees and Plants, Drawn After
Specimens Received from the East Indies and America (London, 1773). It was
published with the title Decade di alberi curiosi ed eleganti piante dell’Indie e
dell’America.13 Furlong claimed that the footnotes of the Decade were the work
of Juárez, which seems not to be the case.14 The book is dedicated to Filippo
Luigi Gilii (1756–1821) by the Roman priest Father Cesare Majoli (1746–1823),
who drew the ten pictures that illustrate the work.15 As the dedication makes

12 Furlong, Gaspar Juárez, 11–15.

13 The complete title is Decade di alberi curiosi ed eleganti piante dell’Indie Orientali e
dell’America. Ultimamente date già note dal celebre Sig. Dottore Giovanni Hill. Dall’Idioma
Inglese, ridotta all’Italiana Favella, col lasciare intatta la descrizione Latina, e corredata di
alquante note (Rome: Stamperia Salomoni, 1786).
14 Furlong, Gaspar Juárez, 30. Furlong handled a copy which had a second front page with
the title: Raccolta di Alberi curiosiad [sic] eleganti piante dell’Indie orientali e dell’America.
Fatte già note nell’anno 1786 dal Sig. Gio.: Hill./Osservazioni fitologiche degli Abati Filippo
Luigi Gilii e Gaspare Xuarez nell’anno 1789. Altre osservazioni sopra alcune piante esotiche.
Date alla luce doi medesimi Signori Abati Gilii e Xuarez l’anno 1789. It is evident that the
second part of this long title refers to the work we will discuss below (the Osservazioni)
which was probably bound in one volume with the Italian translation of Hill’s Decades.
Perhaps it was on this account that Furlong inferred that the notes in Hills’s work should
be attributed to Juárez.
15 Hill, Decade di alberi curiosi, dedication page. Filippo Luigi Gilii should not to be confused
with the Jesuit missionary in Orinoco Filippo Salvatore Gilii.
Science in the Italian Exile 263

clear, it is likely that it was Majoli who translated the book and it was certainly
he who added the notes.16
Majoli was a priest of the Congregation of San Girolamo, active in Rome
as a botanist and natural philosopher.17 His printed production was not large,
but according to one of his biographers he left around 70 volumes of manu-
script works, the most ambitious of which was the Plantarum collectio iuxta
Linneanum systema, in 27 folio volumes. To this should be added no less than
5000 drawings of natural history.18 Gilii, a Roman cleric patronized by Pope Pius
VI who had studied in the Jesuit Collegium Romanum, enjoyed a benefit at the
Basilica of Saint Peter. This scientific polymath was eventually put in charge
of the Vatican Observatory and in 1817 transformed Saint Peter’s square into a
gigantic sundial. Besides his activities as astronomer in charge of La Specola
Vaticana and his work as assiduous meteorologist—he installed lightning rods
in the dome of the Basilica of St. Peter and other Roman churches—Gilii was
interested in botany and natural history.19 He had organized a small museum
of natural history, collected an herbal of more than 1200 plants, and published
ten books on physics, natural history, instrumentation, and horology. Father
Giuseppe Lais claimed that Gilii left 31 manuscript volumes among which were
14 botanical memories and short works.20 In 1783 Gilii founded in Corneto the
Societas Georgica Tarquiniensis under the auspices of Pius VI.21 This was one of
the many agrarian academies that flourished in Italy in the last decades of the
eighteenth century in the wake of the movement of a­ grarian modernization

16 In his dedication, Majoli says: “la quale [the work] se non avrà merito per la Traduzione, e
le poche note, che vi aggiungo, serbarà sempre el pregio dell’Autore.” I was not able to find
any indication in the notes themselves that they were written by Juárez.
17 Majoli had studied at the Jesuit College of Forlì before entering religious life. He then
studied philosophy in Venice and theology in Ferrara. For much of his life, he was
established in Rome. See Gaetano Rosetti, Vite degli uomini illustri forlivesi (Forlì: Matteo
Casali, 1858), 505–533. The congregation to which Majoli belonged was suppressed in 1933.
18 P. Zangheri, “Il naturalista forlivese P. Cesare Majoli e la sua opera Plantarum collectio,”
Nuovo Giornale Botanico Italiano, n. s. 32 (1925), 115. When described by Zangheri, the
manuscripts were held in the Biblioteca comunale di Forlì.
19 See Giuseppe Lais, “Memorie e scritti di Mons. Filippo Luigi Gilii,” Memorie della Pontificia
Accademia dei Nuovi Lincei 6 (1890): 49–62.
20 Ibid., 58.
21 See C. Mariani, Società Georgica Tarquiniese fondata in Corneto il 17 ottobre 1784 da Mons.
Filippo Luigi Gilii cornetano (Roma: Tipografia della Pace, 1891) and Lilia Grazia Tiberi, “La
‘Societas Georgica Tarquiniensis’ ed il suo fondatore, Filippo Luigi Gilii,” Bolletino della
Società Tarquiniense D’Arte e Storia, no. 22 (1993), 361–394.
264 chapter 5

and reform, and the debate among different currents of economic thought.22
In the dedication of the Decade di alberi curiosi to Gilii, Majoli shows his pride
for having been elected a correspondent member of Gilii’s academy.
In all likelihood, it was in connection with the botanical pursuits that
derived from his association with Gilii and Majoli that by the end of 1788 Juárez
thought of composing a history in Italian of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la
Plata, a political unit severed from the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1766 correspond-
ing to the Jesuit province of Paraquaria. Juárez’s book would comprehend the
three canonical sections of this kind of work: natural, civil, and ecclesiasti-
cal history. To begin with, he had at his disposal the printed histories of del
Techo, Charlevoix and Lozano, and the manuscript of Sánchez Labrador in
eight volumes.23 According to the testimony of Hervás, he managed to finish
the volume on natural history, while Francico Javier Iturri (1738–1822), another
exiled Jesuit, wrote a single volume on the civil and political history. In the
end, the work was not published and the manuscript seems to be lost.24 But
Juárez had taken his work seriously. It was with this project in mind that in
1787 he sent Funes a series of instructions to collect material to help him write
his natural history. This guide amounts to a brief summary of the entire work,
which should consist of the following ten sections: (a) geographical situation,
population and climate of Río de la Plata; (b) meteors; (c) analogies, i.e., which
climate is healthier, which favors diseases and so on; (d) waters; (e) the lands,
the quality of their soil, and their products; (f) the physical organization of the
territory (plains, hills, woods); (g) the mineral kingdom; (h) the animal king-
dom; (i) the plant kingdom, (j) the kingdom of things petrified (i.e., fossils).25
Ambrosio found it difficult to comply with the requests of his Jesuit friend.
The latter demanded the sending not only of geographical data, figures of pop-
ulation and commerce of the cities, and information about missions and native
towns, but also cosas raras americanas (“American curiosities”), like seeds and

22 Michele Simonetto, “Accademie agrarie italiane del XVIII secolo. Profile storico
dimensione sociale,” Società e storia no. 124 (2009): 261–302 and no. 125 (2009): 445–463.
23 Juárez to Ambrosio Funes, 8 May 1788, cited in Juan Pedro Grenón, Los Funes y el padre
Gaspar Juárez, 2 vols. (Córdoba: Tipografía La Guttenberg, 1920), 1:78–80.
24 See Furlong, Gaspar Juárez, 67–70 and Diosdado Caballero, Bibliothecae scriptorum
Societatis Iesu suplementa, 2 vols. (Rome: F. Bourliè, 1814–1816), 1:186. Furlong tells that the
Argentine playwright Enrique García Velloso (1881–1938) told him that he had seen the
manuscript of Juárez’s work in a convent in Pisa. Furlong’s efforts to find it were fruitless.
25 Gaspar Juárez, “Instrucción para compilar materiales para la Historia Natural del Nuevo
Virreynato de Buenos Aires,” in Grenon, Los Funes, 1:50–72. This document follows Juárez’s
letter to Ambrosio Funes of 13 November 1787.
Science in the Italian Exile 265

dissected birds. It seems that the seeds were required in Rome “by some gentle-
men interested in natural history.” Juárez specifically asked for peanut seeds,
and for seeds of other plants, like black and white algarrobo from Santiago
del Estero, piquillín, payco, yerba mate, and those species of tea discovered by
Father Falkner in the hills of Córdoba. In exchange for his requests, he kept
Ambrosio informed about the literary news of the exiled Jesuits. For instance,
he told him about the publication of Dobrizhoffer’s Historia de abiponibus “in
elegant Latin” and of Jolís’s History of the Great Chaco, in Italian.26 When Juárez
died in 1804, a small box containing papers and seeds mailed from Córdoba
arrived in Rome; it was addressed to him and, in his absence, to Iturri. The ship
was captured by the British, who sent the package to Algeciras.27
The seeds Juárez asked from Funes were in all likelihood to be planted in the
garden that around 1789 he was organizing in association with Gilii and Majoli:
the Orto Vaticano Indico. Gilii and Juárez collected New World plants from
Roman gardens and had them transferred to a patch of soil they had cleared on
the Janiculum hill. Afterwards, the Orto Vaticano Indico was moved to the east-
ern slope of the Vatican hill, on grounds that belonged to the Fabbrica di San
Pietro and had been handed over to Gilii by Mons. Giovanni Bufalini (1709–
1782), at that time in charge of that administrative Vatican unit concerned
with the maintenance of the Basilica.28 It was there that Juárez grew the seeds
he received from Funes and other correspondents like the Spanish botanist
Hipólito Ruiz.29 Among the manuscripts left by Gilii, Lais has found three lists
from 1794 that enumerate the plants that grew in the Vatican Garden of the
Indies, one in the hand of Gilli and another two written in different hands. The
number of the plants amount to around 600, which testifies to the magnitude
of the project in which Juárez was involved.30

26 Juárez to Funes, 3 November 1787, 8 April and 9 July 1789, in Grenón, Los Funes, 1:47–48,
134–135, and 163–165.
27 Furlong, Gaspar Juárez, 138.
28 F. Gilii and Gaspar Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche sopra alcune piante esotiche introdotte
in Roma fate nell’anno 1789 (Roma: Arcangelo Casaletti, 1790), vii–viii.
29 In his Conspectus Juárez (1795) mentions that Ruiz and Pavón had sent him “Peruvian
plants and seeds for the improvement of our Vatican Indian Garden.” See idem,
“Conspectus novae editionis Florae Peruvianae et Chilensis, quam Romae parat Gaspar
Xuarez- Romae, 11 septembris 1795,” in José Cavanilles, Colección de papeles sobre
controversias botánicas (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1796), 267.
30 Giuseppe Lais, “I due orti botanici vaticani,” Atti della Academia Pontifica de’ Nuovi Lincei
32 (1879), 63–78.
266 chapter 5

In connection with this endeavor, Gilii stimulated Juárez to write descrip-

tions of the plants from the Americas that grew in Roman gardens and
orchards.31 The latter obliged and his accounts were collected in a book of
Observations (Osservazioni) published in 1789, with drawings by Majoli. The
Pope liked and applauded the book and urged Gilii and Juárez to continue
publishing more of them, so that the first book was followed by two others,
which came out of the press in 1790 and 1792. It seems that, rather naturally,
Juárez conceived these brief botanical books as preliminary essays for the nat-
ural history of the River Plate he had in mind.32 But he did not see them as
his main intellectual task. In 1790 he sent Ambrosio a copy of the first volume
of the Observations, telling him that his botanical work did not constitute “an
occupation or great work, but only a divertissement or a change from other
more serious and fruitful studies on Natural and International Law”, which he
was conducting against “the libertines and impious philosophers”.33
Juárez might have looked down on his botanical books, but they won him
the doubling of his royal pension, with the proviso that he should send to
the Spanish crown a dozen of each of the publications. Iturri, Juárez’s friend
in Rome, had sent copies of the work to the Ecuadorian Antonio Alcedo
(1735–1812), the author of the Diccionario geográfico-histórico de las Indias
Occidentales o América (1786–1789), who was enthusiastic about it. With this
encouragement, Juárez sent further copies to Antonio Porlier (1722–1813), at
that time Minister of Grace and Justice and of the Indies, and to Francisco Montes,
the Spanish General Treasurer, who wrote to the king in behalf of Juárez.34 The
second volume of the Osservazioni was adequately dedicated to Porlier.35
As Juárez became proficient in botany and won recognition for his work,
he envisaged more ambitious projects. By the middle of the decade of 1790 he
began to prepare a Roman edition of the Prodromus of the Flora Peruviana et
Chilensis by Hipólito Ruiz (1754–1816) and José Antonio Pavón (1754–1840), the

31 Juárez to Funes, 11 November 1789, in Grenón, Los Funes, 1:182–185.

32 Ibid.
33 Juárez to Funes, 6 July 1790, in Grenón, Los Funes, 1:222–223. In a previous letter, Juárez
had already told Funes that the observations were “the fruit of my lonely life in the
country, and through these gardens or orchards, where I go to refresh my mind from the
more serious tasks I have at home and in the libraries” (Juárez to Funes, 11 May 1790,
in Grenón, Los Funes, 1:216–218). In a January 1791 letter Juárez claims that “This subject
[Natural and International Law] because of its usefulness and for being so necessary
not only as a Jesuit, but also after the expulsion, has been my continuous and particular
study” (Grenón, Los Funes, 1: 258).
34 Juárez to Funes, 11 May 1790, in Grenón, Los Funes, 1:217–219.
35 Gilii and Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche (1790), dedication page.
Science in the Italian Exile 267

protagonists of the Botanical Expedition to Peru and Chile (1777–1788).36 The

Flora was one of the most important botanical works edited so far in Spain.
Between 1794 and 1802 Ruiz and Pavón published a Prodromus of the work
and three volumes out of the five originally planned.37 The Prodromus, which
describes 149 genres of plants in Latin and Spanish and includes 37 plates, was
expected to be released in 1794. The work did not reach the great public until
1796, but by February 1795 some preliminary copies had reached Rome.38 As
soon as Juárez knew about the book, he thought of reissuing it. The motives
are expounded in the prologue of his edition of the Prodromus (1797): the work,
not yet released, would be difficult to get in Italy because of the war; it would
be too expensive; and, finally, there was the chance that it would never be pub-
lished at all.39
In the Conspectus novae editionis Florae Peruvianae et Chilensis quam
Romae parat Gaspar Xuárez (11 September 1795)—the pamphlet Juárez pub-
lished to raise a subscription—he explains that the Madrid edition, which was
“undoubtedly splendid and most magnificent,” was also very expensive. Since
he planned to publish only the Latin text, his would be cheaper: instead of the
six Roman scudi that cost the Madrid edition of the Prodromus, his Roman edi-
tion would cost only two.40
Meanwhile, Ruiz and Pavón suffered the attack of the Spanish botanist
Joseph Cavanilles, who had felt injured by many critiques of the authors. In
1796 Cavanilles launched his querulous Collection of papers on botanical contro-
versies, which among much litigious material reproduced Juárez’s Conspectus.41
Ruiz’s answer to this challenge was a one hundred-page volume published that
same year with the title Answer for the Public Realization of the Truth, which
also included Juárez’s Conspectus.42 While Juárez’s pamphlet was carried back

36 For the expedition see Arthur Robert Steele, Flowers for the King. The Expedition of Ruiz
and Pavon and the Flora of Peru (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1964).
37 Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón, Florae Peruvianae et Chilensis Prodromus (Madrid: Imprenta
de Sancha, 1794); idem, Florae Peruvianae et Chilensis, 3 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de
Sancha, 1798–1802).
38 Steele, Flowers for the King, 225–233.
39 Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón, Florae Peruvianae et Chilensis Prodromus . . . Editio secunda
auctior et emendatior, ed. Gaspar Juárez (Roma: Pagliarini, 1797), iv. Cf. Steele, Flowers for
the King, 232 and Furlong, Gaspar Juárez, 43–48.
40 Juárez, “Conspectus,” 265.
41 José Cavanilles, Colección de papeles sobre controversias botánicas (Madrid: Imprenta
Real, 1796). Juárez’s Conspectus is in pp. 261–267.
42 Hipólito Ruiz, Respuesta para desengaño del público a la impugnación que ha publicado
prematuramente el presbítero Josef Antonio Cavanilles, contra el pródromo de la Flora del
268 chapter 5

and forth in the confrontation between Ruiz and Cavanilles, its author sought
to keep clear of the quarrel between these two prominent Spanish botanists.
In his 1797 edition of the Prodromus Juárez equitably added in his footnotes
Cavanilles’s critiques as well as the arguments raised by Ruiz and Pavón in their
defense. Actually, Juárez’s Roman edition of the Prodromus was richer than the
Spanish one, for it also included some corrections of the original edition made
by the authors themselves.
Juárez’s situation was not easy. He had to obtain permission for publica-
tion from Ruiz, who gracefully granted it. He also managed to obtain funding
from Gilii and the lawyer Carlos Fea in order to defray the expenses of the
copper engravings. The Jesuit had also to obtain official acquiescence from
the Spanish Plenipotentiary Minister to the Roman court, Nicolás de Azara.43
Hipólito Ruiz had praised Azara’s “enlightened protection” of Juárez.44 In his
private correspondence, the Jesuit talked of Azara as “an industrious person,”
who passed “for a literary man with a discerning taste and an interest in the
natural sciences and the beaux arts”.45 Certainly, Nicolás de Azara lived for
30 years as a diplomat in Rome, gathered a library of 20,000 volumes, and led
an active life as editor, patron of the arts, author, and antique collector. Despite
his involvement in the suppression of the Society of Jesus, he fostered the liter-
ary production of Spanish Jesuits in Italy.46
Juárez remained faithful to his original religious vocation. By 1794 he enter-
tained the possibility of emigrating to the United States and joining the Jesuits
who worked there without limitations of any kind. Nothing came out of this
project. But then he wrote to Funes telling that he had been able to enter again
the Society of Jesus, which survived in Russia. He had been received in Italy by
a Jesuit who acted as Vicar General and was Provincial “in these parts”.47 Juárez
died in Rome on 3 January 1804.

Perú (Madrid: Viuda e Hijo de Marín, 1796) (Juárez’s Conpectus is in pp. 97–100). Cf. Steele,
Flowers for the King, 225–240. The incidences of the protracted and harsh confrontation
among Cavanilles, Hipólito Ruíz, and Casimiro Gómez Ortega (the third luminary of
Spanish botany at that time) can be also followed in Antonio González Bueno, Antonio
José Cavanilles (1745–1804). La pasión por la ciencia (Madrid: Fundación Jorge Juan, 2002),
233–239.
43 Ruiz and Pavón, Florae Peruvianae et Chilensis Prodromus, ed. Juárez, v.
44 Ruiz, Respuesta para desengaño del público, 96.
45 Juárez to Funes, 6 November 1792, in Grenón, Los Funes, 2:18–19.
46 See Javier Jordán de Urríes y de la Colina, “José Nicolás de Azara, protector de las bellas
artes,” in Spanien und Portugal im Zeitalter der Aufklärung, ed. Christoph Frank (Frankfurt
a. M.: Vervuert, 2002), 81–97.
47 Furlong, Gaspar Juárez, 22–23.
Science in the Italian Exile 269

1.1 The Osservazioni

The Osservazioni were published under the authorship of Gilii and Juárez.48
The drawings—ten in each volume—were by Cesare Majoli. In the Conspectus,
Juárez mentions four volumes of Osservazioni, but only three were actu-
ally published.49 The volumes follow a uniform pattern modeled upon Hill’s
work. Each small book contains the description of ten plants. The chapters are
headed by the Linnaean name of the plant, and in notes the authors added the
name according to Tournefort’s Institutiones rei herbariae. Juárez also indicates
the name of each plant in Spanish (with its variants in the different regions
of Spanish America) and in the native tongues of Paraquaria (Guaraní, Mbyá,
Chiquitos). The Latin botanical description is followed by a text in Italian,
informing about the general characteristics of the plant, its uses, and how it
was introduced in Europe. The objective of the books was to “be profitable to
society and our fellow human beings” and indeed, the chapters are concerned
with the cultivation of the plants, their medicinal and industrial uses, and
their value as food, which was in line with Gilii’s promotion of agricultural
botany.50 Piso is much cited for the medical uses, but Juárez also drew upon
other authors. He shows himself reasonably acquainted with Linnaeus. In con-
sonance with the spirit of the title, these books exhibit a rhetoric of observa-
tion and experiment.
Each volume is introduced by an essay. The one in the first book is a
“Dissertation on the Plants in General,” which begins quoting the first chapter
of Genesis (“Geminet terra herbam virentem”) as a testimony of the creator’s
goodness, and follows with Cicero’s celebration of agriculture in De officis and
the well known quotation from Virgil’s Georgica “O fortunatos nimiun”.51 There
is a strong insistence on the utility of the study of plants “for medicine, arts and
commerce,” a usefulness which is grounded in the Creator’s plan for the world.52
This dissertation discusses the basic topics of plant life. The authors argue
against spontaneous generation and call upon the authority of Bartholin and
Redi’s Esperienze intorno alla Generazione degli Insetti (1687) before embarking

48 Furlong has already insisted on this point (idem, Gaspar Juárez, 34–35). For the first (1789)
issue of the work, I will use Furlong’s translation. The two other issues (1790 and 1792) are
cited from the original Italian edition. In each case, the year of publication is included
between parentheses.
49 “Quatuor jam excusis voluminis” (Juárez, Conspectus, 266). Furlong was not able to find
the fourth (see idem, Gaspar Juárez, 41); neither did I.
50 Gilii and Juárez, Observaciones fitológicas sobre algunas plantas exóticas introducidas en
Roma. Hechas en el año 1788 [Roma, 1789], trans. G. Furlong, in Furlong, Gaspar Juárez, 81.
51 Ibid., 83–84.
52 Ibid., 84–85.
270 chapter 5

on an account of the process of fecundation in plants, and a short discussion

of the “generative faculty” of pollen.53 They then go on to discuss nutrition and
the economy of the nutritive vegetal humor. The essay ends with a theme that
constitutes the main subject of the dissertation in volume three: the analogy
between plants and animals. Juárez and Gilii review plant functions like sleep
and sensitivity, and discourse about diseases which affect animals and plants
alike and the variety in size and span of life in plants as well as in animals.54
The introduction to the second volume of the series is devoted to the gen-
eral anatomy of plants. Again the authors discuss the analogy of plants and ani-
mals. They compare the vegetal epidermis to the periosteum (the tissue that
wraps animals bones) and the animal humors to the humors in plants, which
are called succi proprii by the reason that they have a specific color and taste:
green in the periwinkle, white in the lettuce, resinous in the pine, of a gummy
consistence in the almond tree, and so on.55 When touching on flowers, Gilli
and Juárez reveal themselves eclectic and non-committal regarding the deli-
cate issue of taxonomy. They state that in order to understand the diversity of
flowers it is possible to use the systems of Tournefort, Adamson, or Linnaeus.56
In the dissertation of the third volume of the Osservazioni, the ground
theme announced in the two previous essays makes itself explicit: the analogy
between plants and animals. In its strongest formulation the sexual parts of
plants and animals are compared:

the anthers play in plants the same function as the testicles play in ani-
mals, the nets of the anthers those of the spermatic vases, the pistil that
of the uterus, the stylus that of the vagina, the stigma that of the foramen
of the uterus.57

We learn from this essay that Juárez and Gilli carried out simple experiments
with plants and kept specimens nel nostro gabinetto di Storia Naturale (“in our
cabinet of natural history”). They began with the notion that animal humors
and vegetal juices were incorporated into the tissues in like manner. Following
experiments conducted by the Geneva naturalist Charles Bonnet (1720–1793),
they imbibed flower stems in colored water and “contemplated the p ­ leasant

53 Ibid., 86–88.
54 Ibid., 88–90.
55 Gilii and Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche (1790), 7.
56 Ibid., 11.
57 Gilii and Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche (1792), 7.
Science in the Italian Exile 271

results”.58 Juárez and Gilii also used the microscope to demonstrate that
the seminal matter is analogous in plants and animals. Leeuwenhoek had
shown that if the spermatic animalculi were put into water they opened up
and released a gelatinous matter. The Roman botanists had “the pleasure of
displaying a similar experience to some learned friends,” with grains of pol-
len in a watch glass containing pure water under the microscope. When the
system was heated by the Sun, the “small seminal globes” (globetti seminali)
covered the water with a milky fluid. Juárez compares this fluid to the aura
seminalis, that is the principle of fecundation in the animal kingdom which
communicates form and movement to that which is unformed.59 Juárez
and Gilii also repeated a piacevole esperimento with chia (Salvia hispanica),
a plant well-known among Mexican women (it was cultivated by the Aztecs
in pre-Columbian times). On the surface of a terracotta vase filled with water
they put chia seeds. These, on account of their viscosity, attached themselves
to the wall of the vase and grew absorbing the humidity which transpired
through the porous wall of the container. Once the seeds germinated, the vase
was covered with a green carpet.60
Many of the plants described in the Osservazioni are edible, like peanut,
sweet potato, papaya, cohombro (Cucumis angurea), tomato, sugar-apple or
chirimoya (Annona squamosa), banana, chia (Salvia hispanica), two species of
chili pepper (Capsicum frutescens and Capsicum baccatum), and guava (guay-
aba, Psidium pyriferum).61 The great majority of the plants described by Juárez
were natives of Mexico, the Caribbean or northern South America—Psoralea
americana (culén) is from the southern cone (fig. 5.1). There are some from
North America, like the tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera), the wax myrtle
(Myrica cerifera), and the river maple or silver leaf maple (Acer saccharinum).
In some cases he describes plants of the Old World, like paper mulberry (Morus
papyrifera) from eastern Asia or the banyan (Ficus benghalensis) from India—
of course, in these cases they do not provide the Spanish and aboriginal names,
thus indicating that these plants do not grow in the New World.

58 Ibid., 4–5.
59 Ibid., 8. For the relationship of Leeuwenhoek’s experiments to the notion of the aura
seminalis, an Aristotelian notion rehearsed in Modern times by Harvey, see Jacques Roger,
The Life Sciences in Eighteenth-Century French Thought, ed. Keith R. Benson, trans. Robert
Ellrich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 236–240.
60 Gilii and Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche (1792), 21.
61 I transcribe the Linnaean names just as they appear in the text, without any attempt at
normalizing to standard botanical nomenclature.
272 chapter 5

FIGURE 5.1 Psoralea americana (culén). Drawing by Father Cesare Majoli in Filippo L. Gilii and
Gaspar Juárez S.J., Osservazioni Fitologiche sopra alcune piante esotiche introdotte
in Roma fate nell’anno 1788 (Roma: Arcangelo Casaletti, 1789).

Just like Pliny in his Naturalis historia indicated the year when a beast from
Africa or Asia had been seen for the first time by the Romans, Juárez took pains
to annotate how and when the plants he describes had been brought into the
Papal city. For example, the tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) had been intro-
duced by Cardinal Giuseppe Doria (1751–1816).62 When he was nuncio in Paris,

62 Giuseppe Doria was nuncio in Paris from 1773 to 1785, when he was made a Cardinal
by Pius VI. He should not be confused with his brother Antonio Maria Doria Pamphili
Science in the Italian Exile 273

he sent a sample of plants and seeds to his elder brother, the prince Andrea
Doria Pamphili (1747–1820). The first and largest tulip tree in Rome grew in the
gardens of Villa Doria Pamphili, on the summit of the Janiculum.63 Cardinal
Doria had also sent from Paris to Rome Mora papirifera and Myrica cerifera and
had cultivated Kalmia angustifolia, but it died after two years.64
Urtica nivea was introduced by Cardinal Antonio Casali (1715–1787) and
planted in the orchard of the Conservatorio Pio, a bakery and factory for the
poor founded by him in 1782.65 Hibiscus suculentus was brought to Rome by
the Basilian Monks and it seems that by the time Juárez wrote his books, it
was popular in many gardens—he tells how the Amerindians prepared with
it an expectorant for asthma and loss of voice.66 With respect to peanut, sili-
quae of this plant arrived from Brazil to Lisbon in 1784, sent to a certain don
José Campos, who remitted them to abate Salazar de Figueredo.67 The seeds
did not grow, so Juárez and Gilii had others brought in 1787. This second trial
succeeded and they were able to study the plant in Rome in 1788.68 Psoralea
americana was also taken to Italy by the Jesuits; it spread quickly and could be
seen in many Italian cities and botanic gardens.69 Cirimoya was introduced
by Nicolás de Azara in Rome, who planted the seeds he had got from Spain.
After he made his own observations as befits a “true philosopher and an expert
naturalist,” Azara gave it to Marcantonio Borghese (1730–1800), who planted it
in the gardens of the famous Villa Borghese.70 In their Orto Vaticano Indico,
Gilii and Juárez had a smaller plant of cirimoya.71 They also grew pineapple
from seeds, but these did not survive the rigorous winter of 1788.72 The garden

(1749–1821), who was also a cardinal. For the biography of Cardinal Giuseppe Doria, see
DBI, s.v. “Doria Pamphili Landi, Giuseppe,” by Marina Formica.
63 Gilii and Juárez, Observaciones fitológicas (1789), 95–97.
64 Ibid., 121 and 28; Gilii and Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche (1790), 47.
65 Gilii and Juárez, Observaciones fitológicas (1789), 117. For the biography of this personage
see DBI, s.v. “Casali, Antonio.”
66 Gilii and Juárez, Observaciones fitológicas (1789), 98–101.
67 Antonio Salazar de Figueredo (Figueiredo) was a former Jesuit from Portugal. See Miguel
Maria Santos Corrêa Monteiro, Inácio Monteiro (1724–1812), um jesuíta portugués na
dispersão (Lisbon: Centro de História da Universidade de Lisboa, 2004), 437 and 471. He
cultivated papaya. Gilii and Juárez, Observaciones fitológicas (1789), 128.
68 Gilii and Juárez, Observaciones fitológicas (1789), 102–103.
69 Ibid., 113.
70 Gilii and Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche (1790), 31–32.
71 Ibid., 35.
72 Ibid., 20–21.
274 chapter 5

of the Villa Borghese held interesting exotica: there were pineapples, as well as
banana trees and banyan trees, all of them described by Juárez.73
Juárez’s claim that by the time the Osservazioni were published there was
“a rage for exotic plants” in Rome is borne out by the many gardens he men-
tions in which he found the plants he describes.74 Pigeon pea (Cytisus cajan)
could be found in the garden of the Collegium Romanum since the times of
the Jesuit Father Bonanni, in the Botanic Garden of the Janiculum, and in the
house of abate Figueredo. Despite their efforts, Gilii and Juárez did not succeed
in cultivating it in their garden.75 Signore Ignazio Cappuccini cultivated chia in
Tivoli.76 Capsicum frutescens grew in the garden of the former Jesuit Seminary
on the Quirinal Hill, at that moment in the care of Pompeo Barberi, “a diligent
observer of natural things”.77
The network of former Jesuits provided Gilii and Juárez with seeds and
plants for their own Orto Vaticano Indico. In 1788 the Mexican Jesuit José
Lino Fábrega (1746–1797), “a lover of natural things and in particular of those
that contribute to the common good,” gave them a plant of sweet potato.78
The next year Fábrega supplied them with seeds of pineapple from Havana.79
Seeds of the variety of tomato that Juárez and Gilii cultivated in their garden
were donated by abate Juan Clímaco Salazar, a Jesuit collaborator of Hervás
and author of the tragedy Mardoqueo.80 The above mentioned Figueredo pre-
sented them with seeds of Spilanthes oleracea, a plant transported from Brazil
to the Royal Botanical Garden of the queen of Portugal.81
Many of the authors mentioned by Juárez in his books are Jesuits, like
Sánchez Labrador, Dobrizhoffer, Clavigero, and Filippo Salvattore Gilii. In the
chapter on Psoralea americana, he enumerates the writers that had described
the plant as Chilean (Ovalle, Frézier, Feuillée, and Molina). But he adds that
Falkner, “a celebrated physician and botanist of the province of Paraguay,”
affirmed that it could also be found in Córdoba, Tucumán, and Salta. Juárez

73 Ibid., 20, 52, and 62.

74 Gilii and Juárez, Observaciones fitológicas (1789), 121.
75 Ibid., 109–110.
76 Gilii and Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche (1792), 21.
77 Ibid., 23. Barberi was chief apothecary in the Arciospedale di S. Maria della Consolazione.
See Luigi Pepe, “L’Istituto Nazionale della Republica Romana,” Mélanges de l’École
française de Rome, Italie et Méditerranée 198, no. 2 (1996), 716.
78 Gilii and Juárez, Observaciones fitológicas (1789), 91. For the ethnographic and historical
works of Fábrega see Batllori, La cultura hispano-italiana, 635–636.
79 Gilii and Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche (1790), 20–21.
80 Ibid., 16. Josep Maria Sala Valldaura, “Los jesuitas expulsos y la tragedia entre España e
Italia,” Bulletin Hispanique 96, no. 1 (1994), 165.
81 Gilii and Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche (1790), 39.
Science in the Italian Exile 275

thinks that the two species of Psoralea described by Linnaeus (glandulosa and
americana) constitute a single species.82 This is not the only passage in which
he criticizes Linnaeus. In the chapter on the peanut, he censures him—and
also Dobrizhoffer—on the grounds that the Swedish botanist had affirmed that
the plant had three leaves in each twig, instead of four, “as we have constantly
observed”.83 Juárez also contradicts Linnaeus’ claim that the papaya had sepa-
rated sexes, on account that “the two plants studied by us had both sexes and
a different number of stamens; some of them had ten and others eight, so that
they should rather be called hermaphrodites”.84 Following Dillenius, Linnaeus
wrote that quinoa (a species of Chenopodium, goosefoot) was indigenous of
Buenos Aires. Juárez points out that even if it is true that the plant can be
found in that city—in 1789 he had received its seeds from there—it could also
be found in many parts of America and of a far better quality.85

1.2 Juárez’s Botanical Outlook

Jesuit missionaries in non European lands became interested in native plants.
Those in China and the Far East wrote extensively about botany. The case of
João de Loureiro’s Flora cochinchinensis (Lisbon, 1790, 2 vols.), dealing with the
flora of present day southern Vietnam, China, and south-east Asia, is with its
1257 plants the most outstanding example of this kind of literature. But there
were other Jesuit works in that field, such as the earlier Flora Sinensis (Vienna,
1656) by Michal Boym (1612–1689) and the several chapters of Jean-Baptiste
Du Halde’s Description de l’empire de la Chine (Paris, 1735), which gathered
material from the Lettres édifiantes.86 Georg Joseph Kamel (1661–1706) was
among the first to study the flora of the Philippines; his herbaria and botani-
cal drawings eventually reached the hands of John Ray (1627–1705) and James
Petiver (1665–1718), who published a series of articles on this material in the
Philosophical Transactions.87
The case of Juárez is different. As he himself tells in his letters, the study
of plants was for him a distraction from more serious studies, an instructive
pastime at which he excelled. The series of Osservazioni were written at the
urging of Gilii, who was also the driving force in the organization of the Orto
Vaticano Indico. Gilii, very well connected in the Roman court, was one of the

82 Gilii and Juárez, Observaciones fitológicas (1789), 115–116. Actually, they are distinct
species. See p. 156, notes 341 and 342.
83 Ibid., 108.
84 Ibid., 130. The papaya is dioecious.
85 Gilii and Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche (1792), 37.
86 See Bretschneider, “Early European Researches in the Flora of China.”
87 Gicklhorn, Missionsapotheker, 57–64.
276 chapter 5

leading animators of things scientific in the city. Shortly before the invasion of
Rome by Napoleon’s army in 1798, he had been put in charge of the re-estab-
lished Vatican Observatory in the Tower of the Winds. This project had been
fostered by Cardinal Zelada, at that time Secretary of State and in charge of the
Vatican Library. Francisco Saverio de Zelada (1717–1801) had been one of the
main instigators of the suppression of the Society of Jesus and the composer of
the bulla Dominus ac Redemptor (26 April 1773) which made it effective. Thus,
while Nicolás de Azara busied himself as diplomatic mediator between the
French and the Pope, Gilii took possession of the tower from which he would
carry on his meteorological observations.88 It seems that neither minded too
much Juárez’s firm devotion to the Society of Jesus.
Pius VI did his share as a patron of Roman science. He tried to restore the
Augustan obelisk of the Piazza San Pietro as a gnomon, but did not succeed.
Gilii would later build the strip of granite that acts as a meridian on the square.89
Pius also improved medical educational facilities, museums, and hospitals.90
During his pontificate, there were many proposals and much debate about
agrarian economic policy, which resulted in the above mentioned creation of
provincial academies and the publication of many agrarian journals.91 In 1772
Giorgio Bonelli published the first volume of the Hortus Romanus with a cata-
logue of the plants of the Botanical Garden of Rome catalogued by the system
of Tournefort. The publication of the other seven volumes was in charge of
Nicola Martelli, professor of botany at La Sapienza (the Roman university).
The work, completed in 1793, testifies to an intellectual and scientific atmo-
sphere that favored initiatives like those of Gilii, Juárez, and Majoli.92

88 For Azara’s role in the negotiations preceding the establishment of the Roman Republic
and the expulsion of the Pope, see Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes, vol. 40,
trans. E. F. Peeler (St. Louis: Herder, 1953), 294–297.
89 Heilbron, The Sun in the Church, 274; Jeffrey Collins, Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth-
Century Rome. Pius VI and the Arts (Cambridge, Engl.: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
216–218.
90 Vittorio E. Giuntella, Roma nel settecento (Bologna: Cappelli, 1971), 110–111; Collins, Papacy
and Politics, 224–227.
91 Marina Caffiero, “Pius VI,” in The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, ed. Philippe Levillain (New
York and London: Routledge, 2002), 1178–1182; Simonetto, “Accademie agrarie italiane del
XVIII secolo.”
92 See DBI, s.v. “Bonelli, Giorgio,” by Paolo Casini. For the organization of the teaching of
botany in the university see Ugo Baldini, “The Sciences at the University of Rome in
the 18th Century.” In Universities and Science in the Early Modern Period, ed. Mordechai
Feingold and Victor Navarro Brotons (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), 214–215.
Science in the Italian Exile 277

The list of botanical manuscripts left by Gilii suggests that he took the mat-
ter seriously.93 Among them, there were two notebooks entitled Osservazioni
botaniche dell’anno 1787-due quaderni (“Observations for 1787, two notebooks”).
Could this mean that Gilii wrote the first book of the Observations? I do not
think this is the case. A cursory reading of the text evidences that the accounts
of the plants were written by someone well acquainted with things of Paraguay
and Río de la Plata and the uniformity of style makes a shared authorship
unlikely. Gilii might have written the introductory essays, which are of a gen-
eral and abstract character. According to Zangheri, in a copy of the first volume
of the Osservazioni held in the public library of Forlì, there was a manuscript
note by Majoli declaring that all the plants in the book had been “described” by
him.94 Majoli was probably referring to the technical botanical descriptions of
the plants in Latin that open each of the chapters.
The style of the Osservazioni is crisp and clear, reflecting something of
the atmosphere surrounding Juárez’s rambles through the dreamlike gar-
dens of Rome. Those of Villa Pamphili-Doria and Villa Borghese were going
through some significant transformations at the time when Gilii and Juárez
were engaged in creating their own garden of exotica. While a nuncio in Paris,
Cardinal Giuseppe Doria had hired Francesco Bettini (1735?–1805), who intro-
duced English landscaping in Rome and who turned the Cardinals’s Vigna
Civelli and Vigna Olgiati into Anglo-Chinese gardens. These changes stimu-
lated Marcantonio Borghese, whose villa was close to the Cardinal’s vigne,
to redesign his garden in the English style in imitation of his neighbor’s.95 It
is likely that Gilii’s ecclesiastical and social connections facilitated Juárez’s
access to these princely gardens, and we have discussed how the latter drew
upon the network of Jesuits in order to obtain plants and seeds from South
America. The Spanish officials understood that the Osservazioni could add
something to the long standing tradition of Spanish royal patronage of bot-
any and rewarded the former Jesuit with a double pension. Thus, the books
of Juárez and Gilii were turned into a piece of the vast material and symbolic

93 Lais, “Memorie e scritti,” 59–60.

94 “Sono tutte descritte da me, e perciò non si deve far caso se le vede descrite sotto diversi
nomi, poichè propenso io sempre per gli Amici ho volute nascondere il mio nome, e nello
stesso tempo liberarmi dalle stampe” (cited in Zangheri, “Il naturalista forlivese P. Cesare
Majoli,” 133, n. 2).
95 David R. Coffin, Gardens and Gardening in Papal Rome (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1991), 258–259; Carole Paul, “Making a Prince’s Museum,” in idem,
Making a Prince’s Museum. Drawings for the Late Eighteenth-Century Redecoration of the
Villa Borghese (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2000), 1–109.
278 chapter 5

apparatus of ­imperial prospecting and exploitation of the natural resources of

Spanish America.96 But the aims of Gilii and Juárez seem to have been far from
this sphere of concerns and interests. As Juárez himself claimed, the whole
project of the Orto Vaticano Indico and the Osservazioni was linked to the idea
of writing a natural history of the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata. Juárez was
not a fervent promoter of the independence of the Spanish colonies from the
metropolis, but his letters have an atmosphere of sympathy with patriotic ide-
als and the vague melancholic patina of the expatriate.
Sure enough, he enumerates the different uses of the plants he describes
and their value for medicine. But his approach is markedly different from
that of the Jesuits who wrote on natural history. Sánchez Labrador devoted
one third of his encyclopedia to agriculture (Paraguay cultivado) and a good
deal of the book on botany of Paraguay Natural treats about materia medica.
Juárez wrote in terms of post-Linnaean botany and his focus was primarily
botanical, not medical. The contents of these books answer to their title: a
series of “observations” of plants from the Americas cultivated in Rome. These
productions were more akin to the literature on the flora of Spanish America
by European botanists than to the discourse on the plants and animals of
Paraguay by Jesuit missionaries. Unlike Jolís, he did not write as botanophilus,
but as botanicus, deploying his mastery of the tools of the trade.
While in each of the introductory chapters to his books on fish and birds
Sánchez Labrador strove to cast a general discussion of the corresponding ani-
mal group using as a paradigm species from Paraguay, the “dissertations” that
precede each of the volumes of Gilii and Juárez are devoid of any reference to
American plants. The only traces of aboriginal plant lore in the Osservazioni
are the plant names in different native languages that appear in footnotes at
the beginning of each chapter. There are here and there indirect reflections
of the Guaraní world, as when in the chapter on rhubarb Juárez cites Sánchez
Labrador, who had written that “an Indian of the Guaraní missions, which was
an expert physician and botanist”, took to him several specimens of the plant.97
But for the most, the Osservazioni lack those deep traces of aboriginal culture

96 See Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire. Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World
(Cambridge, Mass., London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 5–11 as a general introduction
to botanic surveying in the view of the imperial expansion of Europe. For the Spanish
Atlantic world, Barrera, “Local Herbs, Global Medicines” deals with the period after the
conquest; Lafuente and Valverde, “Linnaean Botany and Spanish Imperial Biopolitics” is
focused on the eighteenth century.
97 Gilii and Juárez, Osservazioni Fitologiche (1792), 55.
Science in the Italian Exile 279

that characterize the literature on the natural world by Jesuit missionaries who
had spent most of his life in Paraquaria.

2 Spiders and Electric Fish

Ramón María Termeyer (1737–1814) was a Jesuit naturalist of Dutch descent

who spent around three years in the Río de la Plata (the original family name
was Wittermeyer). He was born in Cádiz, entered the Society in Andalusia in
1755, was ordained in Seville in 1763 and a few months later, on 21 June 1764,
he arrived in Buenos Aires in the expedition of Father Escandón.98 From
Buenos Aires he journeyed to the Jesuit College of Córdoba. While in the Old
Continent, some years before embarking to the Río de la Plata, he had begun
experiments with silkworms. When he set sail he took with him a few ampoules
with silkworm eggs and seeds of mulberry trees, with the purpose of introduc-
ing sericulture in Paraguay. While he was in Córdoba the eggs were hatched
into larvae, but since Termeyer had not been able to grow the seeds of the
mulberry tree, they soon died.99 Florian Paucke, at that time in the process of
founding the reduction of San Pedro, had Termeyer transferred from Córdoba
to the reduction of San Javier. In 1765 Paucke left San Pedro and returned to San
Javier, close to the Paraná River, where Termeyer was already installed.100
It seems that life in San Javier run smoothly under the experienced leader-
ship of Paucke, for Termeyer found enough time to indulge in his experiments
with electric eels and spiders. He narrates that during an excursion on horse-
back into the deep woods of the Great Chaco, far north from the reduction,
he stumbled upon a spider web so strong that he was not able to go ahead.
It was then that he hit upon the idea of experimenting with spider silk as a
substitute for the product obtained from silkworms. He returned to the spot
with some companions and servants and spent five days collecting around

98 These dates are taken from DHCJ, s.v. “Termeyer, Ramón María,” by João Baptista and
Philip Caraman. Termeyer himself tells that he “passed to America” in 1762. See idem,
“Osservazioni sull’utile che può ricavarsi dalla Seta dei Ragni paragonado col vantaggio
che ricavasi dalla Seta de’ Filugelli” [three opuscoli with the same cover title], in idem,
Opuscoli scientifici d’entomologia, di fisica e d’agricoltura, 1:52.
99 He claims that this happened in September 1763, at the beginning of the southern spring.
Ibid., 1:52.
100 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, vol. 3, bk. 1, 67 and 76. Paucke tells that Ramón was the son
of a Dutch recently converted to Catholicism, who had some kind of business in Cádiz.
280 chapter 5

2500 spiders.101 Upon his return to the mission, he set the spiders free in some
pomegranate trees in the orchard of the reduction and eventually was able to
collect 2013 cocoons, from which he extracted about one ounce of spider silk.
He repeated the experiment in larger scale, with 4155 spiders, from which he
got three ounces and one drachma of silk.102 It seems that in the days in which
the expulsion was being enforced in the missions, the Mocoví had planned to
flee into the jungle with the Jesuits. Paucke later ascribed Termeyer’s participa-
tion in this reckless scheme to his extreme youth.103
Upon his returning to Europe, Termeyer ended up in Faenza but around 1779
he had moved out to Milan.104 A chronicler writing in 1777 described his house
in Faenza as something very much resembling a virtuoso’s cabinet, containing
a microscope, telescopes and other optical instruments, pneumatic and elec-
tric machines, a camera obscura, and like things.105 In a letter from 1779 Cardiel
tells that Termeyer had written in Faenza some booklets, which found favor
with influential persons in Milan, so that with the acquiescence of the Duke of
Grimaldi, diplomatic envoy of Charles III, he moved to Lombardy.106 In Milan
Termeyer spent the rest of his long life as an amateur naturalist and person
of letters—among other literary pursuits, he contributed the section on the
language of the Mocoví to the linguistic work of Lorenzo Hervás.107 More than
anything, he concentrated on spiders and entomology. He published a series
of memories in Milanese journals such as Opuscoli scelte sulle scienze e sulle
arti and Scelta d’opuscoli interessanti, later collected in the five thick volumes
of his Opuscoli scientifici (Milan, 1807–1810). The essays reunited in this large
work include, among other contributions, a few papers on spiders and spider
silk (fig. 5.2), several more on entomology, a very long essay on yerba mate,

101 Termeyer, “Osservazioni sull’utile che può ricavarsi dalla Seta dei Ragni (Opuscolo I),”
69–70. Termeyer identifies these spiders as Aranea latro L. There is a species of Aranea
latro Fabricius, but the description he gives seems to correspond better to some kind of
Theraphosidae, locally known as “araña pollito.”
102 Ibid., 70.
103 Paucke, Hacia allá y para acá, vol. 3, bk. 1, 76.
104 Ramón de Santa María, based on Spanish diplomatic correspondence, found that
he moved to Milan at the beginning of 1779. See idem, “El naturalista Termeyer,” in
Sociedad Aragonesa de Historia Natural, Linneo en España. Homenaje a Linneo en segundo
centenario, 1707–1907 (Zaragoza: Mariano Escar, 1907), 204.
105 Furlong, Naturalistas argentinos, 291.
106 José Cardiel to the Duke of Grimaldi, Faenza, 9 December 1779, cited in Guillermo Furlong,
“El Rev. Padre José Cardiel, S.J. (1704–1781),” in Cardiel, Diario del viaje y misión al Río del
Sauce, 65–66.
107 DHCJ, s.v. “Termeyer, Ramón María.”
Science in the Italian Exile 281

the treatise on the natural history discussed in chapter 1, another about an

universal antidote against the viper’s venom, and other on how to keep eggs
fresh during long journeys. As a reward for his fatigues, he was elected into the
Reale Società Agraria di Torino and was awarded a golden medal by the Società
Patriottica di Milano.108
Termeyer managed to gather an important collection of insects from
Lombardy, which amounted to 28 exhibition cases (“cuadros”) of insects “con-
served as natural.” It seems that the Imperial Museum of Pavia had offered him
some kind of position in exchange for his collection, but for personal motives
he denied the offer. Termeyer attempted to present this entomological collec-
tion (or perhaps sell it) to Charles III, and for that purpose in September 1786
he elevated a formal memorial to that effect to Minister Azara; for one reason
or another the transaction did not succeed.109 In October 1791 Juan Andrés
(1740–1817), one of the brilliant literati of the Jesuit Italian exile and author of
the erudite Origen, progresos y estado actual de toda la literatura (1782–1789,
7 vols.), wrote to his brother Carlos from Mantua telling him about his visit to
Termeyer’s cabinet. The latter displayed before the admiring eyes of his visitor
32 small exhibition cases (“quadritos”) with “an infinite number of butterflies
of different species, which he has prepared and carefully set under crystal to
keep them unharmed and without detriment of their colors.” He had also pic-
tures of many of them.110
In Milan, Termeyer reassumed his work on spider silk and was able to
obtain a fair quantity of it from a species of Diadema, so that his relative
Lucrezia Raspanti knitted with it a pair of stockings which weighed two
ounces and a quarter. On 30 May 1788 Termeyer sent the stockings to Charles
III, with a copy of one of his works and a letter addressed to the monarch. The
present was handed to Nicolás de Azara, who apparently sent it to the Count
of Floridablanca (1728–1808), but in the event it was lost. Termeyer com-
plained bitterly about that loss, for he could have offered it to other poten-
tates, like Catherine the Great or the King of Naples.111 He generously taught
his method to Carlo Someschi, who made a shawl of spider silk for Josephine
Beauharnais, a pair of gloves for Augusta Amalia of Bavaria (the spouse of

108 Santa María, “El naturalista Termeyer,” 205.

109 Ibid., 206–214.
110 Juan Andrés, Cartas familiares del Abate D. Juan Andrés a su hermano D. Carlos Andrés
dándole noticia del viaje que hizo a varias ciudades de Italia en el año 1791, vol. 4 (Madrid:
Imprenta de Sancha, 1793), 205.
111 Termeyer, “Osservazioni sull’utile che può ricavarsi dalla Seta dei Ragni (Opuscolo III,
articolo V),” 292–295.
282 chapter 5

FIGURE 5.2 Drawing by Termeyer in idem, Opuscoli scientifici d’entomologia, di fisica e

d’agricoltura. Vol 1. Milan: Stamperia del giornale italico di Carlo Dova, 1807.

Eugène de Beauharnais, Josephine’s son and since 1805 viceroy of Italy) and
a pair of stockings for Napoleon himself.112 Someschi was not alone in his

112 Ibid., 302–304. Furlong and other biographers affirm (erroneously) that these presents
were made by Termeyer. Carlo Someschi later tried to spin the threads from the pappi
of the poplar. See “Invenzioni, perfezionamenti, miglioramenti principali portati
nell’industria manifatturiera e nelle arti dagli Italiani nel periodo di circa venti anni
decorsi dal 1805 al 1826,” Annali Universali di Agricultura, Economia Rurale e Domestica, 6,
no. 3 (1828), 302.
Science in the Italian Exile 283

courting of Napoleon’s patronage. In one of his essays, Termeyer rehearses

the legendary story of His-Ling-Shi (Leizu), the wife of emperor Huang-Ti
(Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor), who was credited with the discovery of silk
weaving. Termeyer urges the imperial couple (“¡Oh grande Napoleone, oh
inclita Giuseffina!”) to imitate their oriental illustrious counterparts and
patronize the production of spider silk.113 The irony of it all is that Termeyer’s
house had been blown to pieces during the Napoleonic invasion of 1796,
a domestic disaster that resulted in the loss of all his spiders.114

2.1 Jesuits and Electric Fish

Since the seventeenth century and through the end of the eighteenth century
Jesuit scholars developed an interest in magnetism and electricity, a branch of
experimental science to which they contributed steadily during the modern
period.115 Even Jesuit missionaries in the Far East pursued these activities. In
1750 Joseph Amiot and his colleagues in Beijing received an electrical machine
with which they performed experiments eventually communicated to the
Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.116
Missionaries of the Society of Jesus in Ethiopia were among the first
who communicated to Europe reports about the African electrical catfish
(Malapterurus electricus). Pedro Páez (1564–1622), in his Historia Aethiopiae
(a manuscript not published until the twentieth century), provides an account
of the fish. Father António Fernandes (1570–1642) describes the fish in a letter
reproduced in Nicolau Godhino’s De Abassinorum rebus (Lyon, 1615).117 Also,
in his Historia Geral da Ethiópia-a-Alta ou Preste João (Coimbra, 1660), Manoel
Trelles (1596–1675) included a text on the fish by Father Manoel de Almeida
(1580–1646).118

113 Termeyer, “Osservazioni sull’utile che può ricavarsi dalla Seta dei Ragni (Opuscolo III,
articolo V),” 306.
114 Furlong, Naturalistas argentinos, 294. There is no indication of the source of this story.
115 Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 180–192.
116 Ibid., 405; Gwynne Lewis, “Henri-Léonard Bertin and the Fate of the Bourbon Monarchy:
the ‘Chinese Connection’,” in Enlightenment and Revolution. Essays in honour of Norman
Hampson, ed. Malcolm Crook et al. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 76–80; Elman, On Their
Own Terms, 243–244.
117 Nicolau Godhino, De abassinorum rebus (Lyon: Horace Cardon, 1615), 67–68.
118 For these authors see Stanley Finger and Marco Piccolino, The Shocking History of Electric
Fishes. From Ancient Epochs to the Birth of Modern Neurophysiology (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2011), 112–120.
284 chapter 5

Jesuits also wrote about the South American electric “eel”.119 The
sixteenth-century Portuguese Jesuit Fernão Cardim devoted a paragraph of
his Treatise on Brazil to describe its benumbing properties.120 His colleague
Bernabé Cobo (1580–1657), who taught at the Jesuit College of San Marcos in
Lima, mentions in his History of the New World a fish in the rivers of Venezuela,
which he calls “torpedo of the Indies”.121 Actually, the first written reference to
the electric eel occurs in Fernández de Oviedo’s Natural and General History
of the New World.122 Oviedo speaks about the shock caused by a fish of Paria
(present-day Venezuela), which he calls “torpedine”. He emphasizes the power
of the electric eel to deliver a shock to those who touch it from afar with a
wooden pole or a spear, an observation which had been made by Greek authors
in connection with the torpedo of the Mediterranean.123 In their Historia natu-
ralis Brasiliae Markgraf and Piso give an account of the fish poraquê (the local
name of the electric eel) and mention its property of causing a rattling in the
joints of hand and arm when touched.124 In El Orinoco Ilustrado (1741) the
Jesuit Joseph Gumilla also deals with the electric eel (“temblador”) and its way
of shocking other fish.125
In the European continent, Francesco Redi was among the first to conduct
anatomical research on the torpedo. The report of his dissection of the fish,
performed on 14 May 1666, was published in his Esperienze intorno a diverse
cose naturali.126 Redi recognized the muscular nature of the electrical organs
of the fish and on the grounds of their form called them “musculi falcati”

119 The electric “eel” is not really an eel but a fresh-water fish of the Gymnotidae family. It
was named Gymnotus electricus by Linnaeus and Electrophorus electricus after 1864.
Eighteenth-century authors usually referred to it as “gymnotus”.
120 Cardim, Tratados da terra e gente do Brasil, 68.
121 Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, 1:307.
122 Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural, 1:193–194. For torpedoes in the Greco-
Roman world, see Finger and Piccolino, The shocking History, 29–63.
123 The eel and its power of shocking people also features in the Histoire de la mission des
pères Capucins en l’isle de Maragnan (Paris, 1614), a chronicle written by the Franciscan
missionary Claude d’Abbeville about the Isle of Maranhão in northeastern Brazil. Claude
de Abbeville, Histoire de la mission de pères Capucins en l’isle Maragnan (Paris: François
Huby, 1614; reprint, Graz: Akademische Druck- und Verlagsanstalt, 1963), 256v.
124 Markgraf, Historia rerum naturalium Brasiliae, 151–152. The illustration of the fish and its
morphological description, based upon the picture, are those of a kind of ray. See M. H. K.
Lichtenstein, “Die Werke von Marcgrave und Piso über die Naturgeschichte Braziliens. IV.
Fische,” Abhandlungen der physikalische Klasse der königlich-preussischen Akademie der
Wissenschaften 1822: 283–284.
125 Gumilla, El Orinoco Ilustrado y defendido, 446–447.
126 Redi, Esperienze, 47–54.
Science in the Italian Exile 285

(scythe-shaped muscles). We have seen that Redi’s Esperienze purported to

explain natural phenomena in terms of experiments and observations, which
should be read as an attack on Kircher’s explanations based on “occult powers.”
Although Redi suggested that the “virtù dolorifica” of the torpedo was caused
by the mechanical action of the muscle, he avoided any clear statement on
the subject. As mentioned in the previous chapter, during many years Kircher
acted as a centre of an extensive network of missionaries who sent him data
and objects for his museum at the Collegium Romanum. Among these was
Alexander Favian, a Mexican priest and dilettante interested in the marvels of
nature who sent Kircher two “sea shells” (actually two sea urchins) claiming
that they could display a narcotic effect caused by their “magnetic virtue.” In
his Magneticum naturae regnum (Rome, 1667)—one of the several books he
wrote on magnetism—Kircher speculated that the so-called “shells” had been
in the stomach of a torpedo fish, where they had been invested with some kind
of “magnetic” power.127 By the third decade of the eighteenth century Kircher’s
magnetic explanation of the shock was considered obscurantist and advanced
opinion favored the mechanical interpretation suggested by Redi and elabo-
rated by other authors such as Stefano Lorenzini and Réaumur.128 This climate
of opinion is manifest, for instance, in the books of Benito Feijóo, the Spanish
Benedictine and outspoken champion of enlightened ideas.129
As this brief survey shows, naturalists, explorers, and missionaries had been
writing about the South American electric eel of the Orinoco and Amazon
basins since the beginning of the sixteenth century. Since more than a few of
these were Jesuits, Termeyer’s work can be seen as one more instance of this
tradition of research.

2.2 The Immediate Background of Termeyer’s Experiments

Once established in Italy after the expulsion, in 1781 Termeyer published an
article in the Raccolta Ferrarese about the electrical properties of a species
of anguilla tremante (trembling eel), which he claimed to have found in the
Saladillo River, a small course of water in the vicinity of the reduction of San

127 Findlen, “A Jesuit’s Books in the New World,” 337–342; Asúa and French, A New World of
Animals, 176–177.
128 Stefano Lorenzini, Osservazioni intorno alle torpedini (Florence: Onofri, 1678); René
Antoine Ferchauld de Réaumur, “Des effets que produit le Poisson appellé en François
Torpille, ou Tremble, sur ceux qui le touchent,” Histoire et Mémoires de la Académie Royale
des sciences 1714, 344–360.
129 Feijóo, Teatro crítico universal, 2:52; idem, Ilustración apologética al primero y segundo
tomo del Teatro critico (Madrid: Francisco del Hierro, 1729), 83–85.
286 chapter 5

Javier.130 The fifth volume of his Opuscoli scientifici, published almost three
decades later, included an enlarged version of that old article on the South
American electric eel, now called by its Italian name of ginnoto americano.131
We will begin by looking at the 1781 article and then make some comments on
its 1810 sequel.
Termeyer begins his essay with a brief account of previous work. He men-
tions Michel Adanson’s description of the African catfish and two letters of
authors associated with the University of Leyden about the electric eels of
Surinam, published in the Transactions of the Dutch Society of Sciences and
frequently cited in the contemporary literature on the subject.132
The years that elapsed between Termeyer’s experiments in South America
and the publication of his first paper were those in which the notion of the
electrical nature of the shock delivered by the electric eel and the torpedo
gained strong empirical support. The main line of research on electric fish
was conducted by several Englishmen and Americans, members of the
Royal Society or somehow related to it. Quite influential in this respect was
Edward Bancroft´s Essay on the Natural History of Guiana, which is said to have
prompted Walsh’s experiments with the torpedo in La Rochelle.133 In 1773 John
Walsh (1726–1795) communicated the results of his work to the Royal Society
in the form of a letter written to Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) in 1772. In this

130 Ramón Termeyer, “Esperienze e riflessioni sulla Torpedine,” Raccolta Ferrarese di opuscoli
scientifici et letterati 8 (1781): 23–70.
131 Ramón Termeyer, “Intorno ad un’ Anguilla, ossia Ginnoto Americano. Conghieture della
cagione dei mirabili effetti risultanti dal mediato, ed inmediato contatto del medesimo,”
in idem, Opuscoli scientifici, 5:105–173. It might be that the enlarged version was published
in some local journal before its appearance in the fifth volume of the Opuscoli, but I have
not found any trace of it.
132 Termeyer, “Esperienze e riflessioni sulla Torpedine,” 24. Adanson stumbled upon
Malapterurus electricus during his travels through West Africa, the narrative of which was
published as idem, Histoire naturelle du Sénégal (Paris: Bauche, 1757). Termeyer mentions
the letter written on 22 November 1754 by Storm van ‘s Gravesande, governor of Essequibo
(1742–1750), as an answer to an inquiry of the physician J. N. S. Allamand, professor of
natural philosophy at Leyden, and he also mentions the letter sent from Essequibo
on 22 June 1761 by Frans van der Lott, with an account of the supposedly therapeutic
properties of the shocks delivered by the fish. See Peter J. Koehler, Stanley Finger and
Marco Piccolino, “The ‘Eels’ of South America: Mid-18th-Century Dutch Contributions to
the Theory of Animal Electricity,” Journal of the History of Biology 42 (2009): 235–251.
133 Edward Bancroft, An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana, in South America (London:
T. Becket and P. A. de Hondt, 1769), 190–201. For a detailed discussion see Stanley Finger,
“Edward Bancroft’s ‘Torporific Eels’,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 52 no. 1 (2009):
61–79.
Science in the Italian Exile 287

paper Walsh p ­ ostulates the electrical nature of the torpedo on the basis of the
analogies between the effects of a Leyden jar and the shock produced by the
fish; he attributes the puzzling differences, such as the absence of spark and
crackling sound (i.e., the lack of electrostatic effects) to the particular kind of
electricity generated in living beings.134 When in his 1781 paper Termeyer cited
Walsh’s 1772 experiments, he took care to remark that his own experiments
with Gymnotus electricus preceded those of the English author with the ray.
Hugh Williamson (1735–1819), the American patriot and military physician,
carried out a series of experiments on an electric eel brought from Guiana to
Philadelphia during the winter of 1773. A year later he repeated them for Walsh
in London. Williamson was able to get a shock even if the circuit included
a device with two brass wires separated “less than a hundredth of a part of
an inch,” but he saw no spark.135 In the same volume of the Philosophical
Transactions that brought Williamson’s paper, the reader could also read a let-
ter from the Scot Alexander Garden (1730–1791), a physician and noted botanist
of Charleston graduated from Aberdeen and Fellow of the Royal Society. The
shock of the eel, says Garden, “seems to be wholly electrical; and all the phe-
nomena or properties of it exactly resemble those of the electric aura of our
atmosphere when collected”.136
As has been pointed out, the crux of the matter with the torpedo was that
although the shock was considered electric, it lacked those signs that amateurs
were used to see, to smell, and to hear accompanying the electric discharges
obtained from electrostatic machines and the Leyden jar. For instance, in a let-
ter to John Pringle (1707–1782) published in the 1775 volume of the Philosophical
Transactions describing experiments made at Leghorn (Livorno) in the spring
of 1773, Jan Ingenhousz (1730–1799) underscored three features: the shock did
not cause any effect on the electrometer, the discharge was not ­transmitted

134 John Walsh, “Of the Electric Property of the Torpedo,” Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society 63 (1773–1774): 461–480. For Walsh see Marco Piccolino, The Taming of
the Ray. Electric Fish Research in the Enlightenment from John Walsh to Alessandro Volta
(Florence: Olschki, 2003), 1–129.
135 Hugh Williamson, “Experiments and Observations on the Gymnotus electricus, or
Electrical Eel,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 65 (1775), 100.
136 Alexander Garden, “An Account of the Gymnotus Electricus, or Electrical Eel,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 65 (1775), 109. For detailed commentary
on the work of Garden see Stanley Finger, “Dr. Alexander Garden, a Linnean in Colonial
America, and the Saga of Five ‘Electric Eels’,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 53, no. 3
(2010): 388–406.
288 chapter 5

by the intermediary of a brass chain, and there was no spark.137 The next year
Henry Cavendish (1731–1810) published an important paper in the Philosophical
Transactions about an “artificial torpedo,” in which he intended to explain the
lack of spark and electroscopic effects accompanying the shock caused by the
fish. He argued that the charge is great (thence the magnitude of the shock),
but the “force” is weak (thence the absence of spark).138 It was only when
Walsh began experimenting with the electric eel that he succeeded in obtain-
ing a spark. His success was communicated in the issue of Rozier’s Journal de
physique for that same year by Jean-Baptiste Le Roy (1720–1800), a member of
the French Academy of Sciences. This result circulated widely and was trans-
lated into Italian.139 Termeyer could have written his 1781 paper as a conten-
tious answer to this result.

2.3 A Fishy Anatomy

Termeyer described what he thought were two species of “trembling eel,” one
of them was large and with a white belly while the other was smaller, with a
yellowish belly and capable of giving a stronger shock. He pointed out that
the eel presented two structures behind the eyes similar to human ears and
endowed with a continuous peristaltic movement. Termeyer identified them
with the “muscoli falcati” (scythed-shaped muscles) described by Redi and
Lorenzini and the electric organs of the torpedo described by Hunter.140 It is
difficult to figure out what Termeyer actually was talking about. He could have
meant the pectoral fins, which the French surgeon of Guyanne Bertrand Bajon
(fl. 1751–1778) had compared to long ears and indeed look like such.141 The
problem with this interpretation is that Termeyer explicitly mentioned the fins

137 Jan Ingenhousz, “Extract of a letter from Dr. John Ingenhousz, F. R. S. to Sir John Pringle,
Bart. P. R. S., Containing Some Experiments on the Torpedo,” Philosophical Transactions of
the Royal Society 65 (1775): 1–4.
138 Henry Cavendish, “An Account of Some Attempts to Imitate the Effects of the Torpedo
by Electricity”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 66 (1776): 196–225. See
Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 487–489 for a commentary on Cavendish
experiment.
139 Jean-Baptiste Le Roy, “Lettre sur l’étincelle électrique que donne l’anguille de Surinam,”
Observations sur la physique, sur l’histoire naturelle et sur les arts [Journal de physique de
l’abbé Rozier] 8 (1776): 331–335. Cf. Marco Piccolino and Marco Bresadola, Rane, torpedini
e scintille. Galvani, Volta e l’elettricità animale (Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2003), 178–181.
140 Termeyer, “Esperienze e riflessioni sulla Torpedine,” 67.
141 Bernard Bajon, “Sur un poisson à commotion éléctrique, connu à Cayenne sous le nom
d’anguille tremblante,” in idem, Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de Cayenne et de la Guiane
française, 2 vols, (Paris: Chez Grangé, 1778), 2:318.
Science in the Italian Exile 289

(“due alette”) and recognized them for what they are.142 There is a significant
antecedent of Termeyer’s confusion. In his chronicle on the Orinoco published
in 1745, Gumilla had said that these fish had two structures “like pink ears”
instead of gills, which he took as the seat of the eel’s power of delivering a
shock.143 Illustrations of electric fish were not wanting in the literature by the
time Termeyer wrote his paper. Walsh’s article in volume 65 of the Philosophical
Transactions included pictures with dorsal and ventral views of a female tor-
pedo with the skin pull out so that it is possible to see the surface of the electric
organ. This volume also brought the contribution by the anatomist and surgeon
John Hunter (1728–1793) mentioned by Termeyer. It contains an anatomical
description of the fish and wonderful pictures of dissected specimens.144 More
to the point, in 1775 Hunter published a paper on the anatomy of the electric
eel with fine illustrations.145 Although Termeyer alludes to Hunter’s papers, he
does not seem to have had more than a superficial knowledge of them.146

142 Termeyer, “Esperienze e riflessioni sulla Torpedine,” 28. The only way left out of this
conundrum is to admit that what he took for electrical organs were the crescent-shaped
portions of the gills visible behind the opercula.
143 “No tiene agallas, y en su lugar tiene dos como orejas, de color rosado” (Gumilla, El Orinoco
ilustrado, 447).
144 John Hunter, “Anatomical Observations on the Torpedo,” Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society 63 (1773–1774): 481–489.
145 John Hunter, “An Account of the Gymnotus Electricus,” Philosophical Transactions of the
Royal Society 65 (1775): 395–407.
146 The greatest problem concerning the identification of Termeyer’s fish is that the
geographical range of Electrophorus electricus reaches no further south than the lower
Amazon basin. The electric eel is not found in the Paraná River or any of its tributaries.
For the freshwater fish fauna in the region see R. A. Ringuelet et al., Los peces argentinos de
agua dulce (La Plata: Comision de Investigaciones Científicas de la Provincia de Buenos
Aires, 1967) and R. C. Menni, Peces y ambientes en la Argentina continental (Buenos Aires:
Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales, 2004). Termeyer could not have meant any of the
several species of gymnotiform fish, locally called “knife-fish,” which produce weak electric
fields for electrolocation and communication. See, for example, Oscar Trujillo-Cenóz, “El
enigma de los peces eléctricos,” Ciencia Hoy 2 (1990): 36–42. Electrophorus electricus is
the only South American freshwater fish capable of delivering shocks of the magnitude
recorded by Termeyer. Dr. Tyson Roberts, an American ichthyologist conversant with
the River Plate basin, raised this point in a November 2008 message. Thus began what
was to me an enlightening discussion—for which I remain much obliged—but could
not agree on a solution (if I take it correctly, he believed that Termeyer could have built
his paper on the basis of the then current literature on the subject). Upon consultation,
Dr. Hugo López (an ichthyologist at the Museo de La Plata and a colleague of Conicet),
suggested that Termeyer could have got his Electrophorus from the Amazon basin.
Drs. Leandro Tamini, Ricard Ferriz, and Francisco Firpo (Museo Argentino de Ciencias
290 chapter 5

2.4 Experiments among the Mocoví

Termeyer tells us that one day, when he was at San Javier, he entered into a
dark room in which there was a vessel containing several “eels”.147 Upon touch-
ing one of them he received a strong shock but was unable to see any spark.
This accident made him dubious about the effect of the fish being electrical,
an assumption that he had so far taken for granted. His first paper, written in
Italy many years after the event, describes 16 experiments designed to inves-
tigate whether the shock produced by the fish is an electrical phenomenon.
Termeyer’s electrical equipment was standard for the times: an electroscope
made of two small balls of elderberry’s pith, an electrostatic generator (a spin-
ning glass globe), a Leyden jar, Franklin squares, different kinds of conductors,
and an isolating stand.148
Termeyer’s overall strategy consisted in trying to obtain from the fish the
usual effects of static electricity. Firstly, he observed that the eel was unable to
cause either attraction or repulsion between the small pith balls of the electro-
scope or to induce any movement in small pieces of gold leaf and bran. Kept
out of the water and hanging from silk threads, the fish could not generate a
spark in the presence of a conductor (a piece of copper or iron) situated in its
immediate vicinity. A second group of experiments were aimed at comparing
the effects of the shock produced by the Leyden jar with those provoked by the
fish in a person or a chain of several Mocoví holding hands—the Jesuit Niccolò
Cabeo (1586–1650) had also electrified chains of persons.149
Termeyer also tried to investigate whether the discharge of the fish could
be conveyed to humans through a fishing rod or an Indian arrow—objects he
had ready at hand—. A few experiments dealt with a particular case. A young
Mocoví was able to touch several of these fish contained in a water tank with-
out experiencing any kind of shock, but he was susceptible to the discharge
produced by the Leyden jar. The explorer and physician Engelbert Kaempfer
(1651–1716) had reported the case of an individual similarly resistant to the dis-
charge of the torpedo of the Persian Gulf, and claimed that the reason was that

Naturales) kindly identified Termeyer’s “eel” as E. electricus. As a historian, I decided that

the best course was to take at face value Termeyer’s account. In his second paper, he
underlined that he made his experiments in front of many witnesses, at times more than
one hundred. See “Intorno ad un’ Anguilla, ossia Ginnoto Americano,” 171.
147 Termeyer, “Esperienze e riflessioni sulla Torpedine,” 29–30.
148 Termeyer, “Esperienze e riflessioni sulla Torpedine,” 31–56. I did not find any indication as
to how he was able to obtain this equipment. It is likely that he brought it with him from
Europe, like the ampoules with the silkworm eggs.
149 Heilbron, Electricity in the 17th and 18th Centuries, 318–321.
Science in the Italian Exile 291

the person had held his breath while receiving the shock.150 Termeyer claims
that he tried a similar experience with the eels but found that it did not work.
His last series of trials consisted in applying the fish to different animals (a cat,
a chain of four dogs, other fish, hens), always comparing the effects of the eel
with those of the Leyden jar, Franklin squares, or the electrostatic machine.
Overall, the experiments conformed to the contemporary pattern as deployed
by other experimenters such as those we have already discussed. When in
13 January 1766 Termeyer found in Santa Fe an enormous spider that horri-
fied everybody and was told that its sting was mortal, he tried it on a lamb, a
chicken, a cat, and a dog, without any other result than a superficial inflamma-
tion of the skin.151
Termeyer’s first article concludes with a series of speculative arguments.152
Did Termeyer think of electricity as an effluvium, like the Abbé Jean-Antoine
Nollet (1700–1770), or, like Franklin, as an “atmosphere”?153 He conceived it as
a subtle and elastic fluid (fluido sottile, ed elastico) creating an atmosphere or
vortex around an electrified body, and yet he also talked about effluent matter
(materia effluente, ed affluente).154 As far as his ideas about the nature of elec-
tricity can be spelled out, it seems that he thought in terms of some kind of
effluvial theory—a rather old-fashioned approach for the time he wrote this
paper. The development of the air condenser by Franz Aepinus (1724–1802) and
his student Johan C. Wilcke (1732–1796) in 1756 had made obsolete semi-efflu-
vial theories like that of Giambattista Beccaria (1716–1781) and also Franklin’s
theory of static interactions between electrical atmospheres.155 However, the
key issue is that on the grounds of the absence of spark and the lack of any
effect upon the electroscope caused by the fish, Termeyer argued that the dis-
charges of the “eel” could not be attributed to the electrical fluid. Moreover,
he believed that it was possible to distinguish between the tolerable effects on
the organism caused by the Leyden jar and those more severe provoked by the
fish. Termeyer interpreted the different reactions of the body assuming that

150 Engelbert Kaempfer, Amoenitatum exoticarum politico-physico-medicarum fasciculi V

(Lemgo: Meyer, 1712), 509–515. Cf. R. W. Carruba and J. Z. Bowers, “Engelbert Kaempfer’s
First Report of the Torpedo Fish on the Persian Gulf in the Late Seventeenth Century,”
Journal of the History of Biology 15 (1982): 263–274.
151 Furlong, Naturalistas argentinos, 294.
152 Termeyer, “Esperienze e riflessioni sulla Torpedine,” 56–70.
153 See John L. Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1982), 175–204 for electrical theory in this period.
154 Termeyer, “Esperienze e riflessioni sulla Torpedine,” 56–58.
155 R. W. Home, “Electricity and the Nervous Fluid,” Journal of the History of Biology 3 (1970),
248 and Heilbron, Elements of Early Modern Physics, 204–207.
292 chapter 5

the fluid of the fish was “unfavorable” to the “electrical fluid” of living organ-
isms, while the electrical fluid generated by the electrostatic machine or the
condenser was “favorable” to it.156 He discussed and rejected the hypothesis
according to which the difference between the effects of the fish and those
of the electrical machine upon the body could be explained in terms of dif-
ferent degrees of intensity of the same kind of fluid, arguing that the fish did
not produce sparks nor caused attraction-repulsion on the electroscope. The
case of the young Mocoví susceptible to the electric discharge but resistant to
the shock of the gymnotus was another reason that Termeyer called upon in
defense of his idea of different fluids.

2.5 A Fluid Discussion

It should be born in mind that the expanded version of Termeyer’s essay on
the electric eel was written while the controversy on animal electricity that
followed the work of Luigi Galvani (1737–1798) and Alessandro Volta (1745–
1827) was still active among the fisici elettrizanti in the cities and universities
of northern Italy.157 Termeyer distinguished between three kinds of fluids:
elettrico, galvanico, and ginnotico.158 The first of these was produced by elec-
trostatic machines and Leyden jars, the second was the result of the Voltaic
pile, and the third was the fluid postulated by him to explain the effects of
the gymnotus. Termeyer’s 1810 essay can be seen as an attempt to cope with
the new notions of animal electricity and the invention of the Voltaic battery.
Convinced that his experiments had demonstrated that the “gymnotic fluid”
was something different from the “electrical fluid,” Termeyer set himself the
task of discussing whether the effects of the electric fish could be attributed to
galvanismo. Galvanism was used as a name for the effects of the Voltaic pile, for
it became evident that the effects of the battery were more similar to Galvani’s
“animal electricity” than to those of the Leyden jar or static machines.
Termeyer was aware of Volta’s famous invention of the pile and extolled
the latter’s experiment in front of Napoleon and the Institut de France on
7 November 1801. On the basis of what he interpreted (correctly, as it turned
out) as Volta’s identification of electricity with galvanism, and of his own

156 Termeyer, “Esperienze e riflessioni sulla Torpedine,” 62.

157 N. Kipnis, “Luigi Galvani and the Debate on Animal Electricity, 1791–1800,” Annals
of Science 44 (1987): 107–142; W. Bernardi, “The Controversy on Animal Electricity in
Eighteenth-Century Italy: Galvany, Volta and Others,” in Nova Voltiana. Studies on Volta
and His Times, ed. F. Bevilacqua and L. Fragonese (Milan: Hoepli, 2000), 101–114; Piccolino
and Bresadola, Rane, torpedini e scintille, 298–526.
158 Termeyer, “Intorno ad un’ Anguilla, ossia Ginnoto Americano,” 146–52.
Science in the Italian Exile 293

e­ xperimental demonstration in the Río de la Plata that “gymnotic fluid” was

not electrical, he inferred that fluido ginnotico was also different from galvanic
fluid.159 To further support this conclusion, Termeyer goes through an enumer-
ation of 16 effects of galvanism, such as those experienced by Volta himself,
for instance, the acid taste felt when the electrodes of the battery are applied
to the tongue, the pungent odor perceived and the light seen during the dis-
charge, its power of contracting the pupil of the eye, and so on.160 Termeyer
argues that the “gymnotic fluid” does not produce any of these effects: it does
not generate light, the shock is greater than the discharge provoked by the
most powerful battery, and so on.
In this second paper on the electric eel, Termeyer comments critically
some literature on the burgeoning field of animal electricity. To begin with, he
rehearses the famous observations done by Humboldt and Bonpland between
February–March 1800 on the electric eels of the Orinoco basin. Humboldt had
published a paper in 1806 comparing the effects of the electric ray and the
electric eel, in which he discussed whether the effects of these fish were gal-
vanic as Giovanni Aldini (1762–1834) believed.161 In a paper published the fol-
lowing year describing the combat between horses and electric eels that so
impressed him in South America, Humboldt talked of “galvanic electricity”
and “the galvanic-electric phenomena of these fish”.162 Termeyer contends
that the German savant should have known that plants increase the rate of
circulation of their fluids and consequently flourish and fructify earlier when
they are “electrified,” while the circulation of the sap diminishes when they
are “galvanized.” Thus, he goes on, Humboldt should have had to assess the
effect of the electric eels on the vegetation growing on the margins of the river.163
The idea that electricity favors the growth of plants could be read in works

159 Termeyer, “Intorno ad un’ Anguilla, ossia Ginnoto Americano,” 146–147. Cf. Alessandro
Volta, “On the Electricity Excited by the Mere Contact of Conducting Substances of
Different Kinds,” Philosophical Transanctions of the Royal Society 90 (1800): 403–431. See
also Kipnis, “Luigi Galvani,” 136.
160 Termeyer, “Intorno ad un’ Anguilla, ossia Ginnoto Americano,” 149–150.
161 Alexander von Humboldt, “Versuch über die electrischen Fische,” Annalen der Physik
22 (1806), 10. Giovanni Aldini, Galvani’s nephew and scientific advocate, also identified
“animal electricity” with the discharge of electric fish (torpedo, electric eel, and Nile
catfish). See Giovanni Aldini, “Sur les organs des poissons électriques rapports à la théorie
du galvanisme,” in idem, Essai théorique et expérimental sur le galvanisme, 2 vols. (Paris,
Fournier et Fils, 1804), 2:84.
162 Alexander von Humboldt, “Jagd und Kampf des electrischen Aale mit Pferden,” Annalen
der Physik 25 (1807): 42.
163 Termeyer, “Intorno ad un’ Anguilla, ossia Ginnoto Americano,” 152–153.
294 chapter 5

of well-known authors of books on electricity, like those of the abbé Pierre

Bertholon (1741–1800) and Francesco Giuseppe Gardini (1740–1816).164
Termeyer also commented on Cavendish’s 1776 paper claiming that he
could not understand the latter’s affirmation that the gymnotic battery has
small charge—thus showing he had not understood properly Cavendish’s
reasoning.165 This is the more significant if we take into account that these
ideas were not recondite. After 1800 and in several of his published papers,
Volta distinguished between tension and quantity of charge in the context of
his discussion of the properties of the shock produced by the fish and with
arguments similar to those put forward by Cavendish, namely that the shock
was the result of a great quantity of electricity (high current) at low tension.166
Since Termeyer’s papers received no citations, we can consider him a lesser
actor in the story of research on electric fish. Interestingly, he made much of
his epistolary interchange with his Jesuit colleague Éder. In both of his papers
Termeyer mentions that he had been exchanging correspondence during 1770
with another Jesuit missionary, the Slovakian Ferenc Xáver Éder (1727–1772),
who lived in San Martín, one of the mission towns of the Moxos, in the savan-
nas and forests of present-day Bolivia. If we are to believe Termeyer’s account,
Éder had experimented with the electric eel found in the Baures river and
had tried its shock in hundreds of persons, all of them susceptible except for
one.167 He adds that Éder found another fish with a structure similar to that
described by him, but lacking the power to deliver a shock.168 In his second
paper Termeyer affirms that the gymnotus found by him in the Saladillo river
and by Éder in the Baures river belonged to a species different from the tor-
pedo, the electric eel, the African catfish and any other electric fish described
since 1750, claiming that they “had not been so far observed by any naturalist,
at least accurately”.169 Furthermore, Termeyer lists and discusses five reasons
to support his contention about the uniqueness of the species he describes,
among them the existence of “ears” in the fish, the characteristics of the shock,
and the lack of spark.170

164 See Marco Bresadola, “Medicine and Science in the Life of Luigi Galvani (1737–1798),”
Brain Research Bulletin 46 (1998): 373; G. Sutton, “Electric Medicine and Mesmerism,” Isis
72 (1982): 381–382.
165 Termeyer, “Intorno ad un’ Anguilla, ossia Ginnoto Americano,” 154–155.
166 Piccolino, The Taming of the Ray, 177–183.
167 Termeyer, “Esperienze e riflessioni sulla Torpedine,” 34–35.
168 Ibid., 68–69.
169 “Intorno ad un’ Anguilla, ossia Ginnoto Americano,” 169.
170 Ibid., 169–172. In a previous passage in his paper Termeyer repeats his description of
an organ “like a human ear” with countless small muscles endowed with continuous
Science in the Italian Exile 295

Éder’s Description of the reductions of Moxos (1791), whose Latin version was
based on posthumous papers heavily edited, begins with a brief natural history
of the land, which consists of a series of short accounts of plants and animals.
Certainly, in the chapter on fish Éder describes the electric eel, which is identi-
fied by the editor with Linnaeus’s gymnotus. The Jesuit missionary tells a few
stories of shocks delivered by the “eel” on native fishers in different circum-
stances, insisting on the fact that the discharge can affect persons through a
fishing rod, an arrow, and so on (the kind of objects with which Termeyer car-
ried out his experiments). But the text shows no inkling of Éder doing purpose-
ful experiences—he talks rather of experientia, when he describes the shocks
delivered to horses and dogs.171
Termeyer’s contention in his first article that the effect of the eel was not
electrical, although in the long run it proved to be wrong, was at least reason-
ably argued. The shortcomings of the 1781 paper should be sought in the ana-
tomical description of the eel and the mistaken identification of its electrical
organs. While in his first paper Termeyer could be said to have been in touch
with the contemporary literature on the subject, his second paper argued
unconvincingly in favor of what was becoming an increasingly marginal
hypothesis (the distinction between galvanic, electric, and “gymnotic” fluid),
while trying to grapple with the advances made in electrical research during
the decades that separated both publications. Termeyer had personally made
his experiments on the electric eel in the Río de la Plata while he was in his late
twenties; he wrote his first report when he was 43 years old and published the
second paper as an old man of 73.

2.6 An American Postscript

We have seen that in 1791 Juan Andrés wrote to his brother from Mantua and
told him that Termeyer had become famous for a new way he had found to
keep the eggs fresh during travels and for his experiments on spiders, which
allowed him to fabricate a pair of stockings that ended up in Spain—or so
he believed.172 Spiders bestowed upon Termeyer what little fame he enjoyed.
Almost a century after he died, the anatomist, neurologist, and Cornell profes-
sor Burt G. Wilder (1841–1925), who had been working in the 1860s on obtain-
ing silk from the Silk Spider of South Carolina (Nephila plumipes) stumbled

trembling movement, and wonders why in his account of the eels of Surinam and
Cayenne Hunter had not mentioned this structure. Ibid., 158–160.
171 Ferenc Xáver Éder, Descriptio provinciae Moxitarum in Regno Peruano, ed. by Pál Mako
(Budapest: Typis universitatis, 1791), 166–170.
172 Andrés, Cartas familiares, 205.
296 chapter 5

upon one of Termeyer’s essays. He had it translated in English and published

in the Communications to the Essex Institute of Salem, Massachusetts, while
graciously recognizing in the preface Termeyer’s priority in the invention of an
apparatus for the spining of spider silk he had registered in the Patent Office
in Washington.173 The next year Wilder published an article in Harper’s New
Monthly Magazine, in which he makes reference to Termeyer´s work.174

3 Looking at the Heavens through Someone Else’s Eyes

While Termeyer was compiling the five ponderous volumes of his Opuscoli sci-
entifici that were eventually published in Milan, Alonso Frías, a Jesuit born in
the Río de la Plata, joined the observatory of that city. It was at the Specola
of Brera where he learned the techniques that would allow him to calculate
the corrections of the astronomical observations made with the quadrant
of the Naval Observatory of Cádiz, at that time the sole institution of its type
in the whole of Spain. Alonso Frías was born on 13 October 1745 in Santiago del
Estero, the natal city of Gaspar Juárez, who was fourteen years his senior. He
joined the Society of Jesus on 16 March 1764 and at the time of the expulsion
was still a seminarian in Córdoba. Frías was forcefully embarked on the ship
Venus with his companions on 18 August 1767 and arrived in Cádiz on 7 January
1768. By March of that year he was in Faenza and in the event was ordained
as a priest.175 It might be that at some point Frías lived in Bolonia with José
Quiroga.176 If this was the case, he could have got his first scientific training
from the former professor of mathematics at Córdoba.
In a letter of 8 May 1788, Juárez told his friend Ambrosio Funes that Frías
had marched to Milan to study in the Observatory of Brera “where he obtained
the direction of Father Boscovich, one of the most famous [astronomers] of
this century.” He adds that they had parted ten years ago (i.e., in 1778), and by
that time Frías was well advanced “in arithmetic and geometric progressions,
ratios, compounds, fractions, and all that concerns integral calculus; and his

173 Ramón Termeyer, “Researches and Experiments upon Silk from Spiders and upon Their
Reproduction,” Communications read Before the Essex Institute 5, no. 2–3 (1866): 51–79.
174 Burt G. Wilder, “Two Hundred Thousand Spiders,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 34
(1867): 450–466.
175 See DHCJ, s.v. “Frías Alfaro, Alonso de,” by Hugo Storni.
176 Furlong. El Padre José Quiroga, 41. But Furlong does not mention this in his biography of
Frías. See idem, “El astrónomo santiagueño Alonso Frías y Alfaro, 1745–1824,” Revista del
Archivo de Santiago del Estero 5, no. 8 (1926), 67–80.
Science in the Italian Exile 297

entrepreneurship will benefit our province [the Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata]

if the Lord be pleased to take us hither”.177
The Observatory of Brera had its beginnings around 1760, when Giuseppe
Bovio and Domenico Gerra, from the Jesuit College Santa Maria di Brera,
began making astronomical observations. This foundation was part of the vast
network of Jesuit observatories that were created during the eighteenth cen-
tury throughout Catholic Europe.178 In 1762 Father Luigi Lagrange (1711–1783)
came from Marseilles to assume the direction of the operation.179 This original
nucleus was engrossed by two disciples of Gerra: Francesco Reggio (1743–1804)
and Angelo De Cesaris (1749–1832). But the driving force of the observatory
during that period was the Jesuit mathematician, astronomer, and natural
philosopher Roger Boscovich (1711–1787), then professor of Mathematics at
the nearby university of Pavia. Boscovich was perhaps the most renowned
Jesuit scientist of the eighteenth century.180 Between 1764 and 1765 he drew
the plans for the new observatory and supervised its construction in the
upper rooms of the south-east wing of the Palazzo Brera, where the College
was located.181 Boscovich attempted to create a model observatory endowed
with the best available instruments. His meticulous work on instrumentation
derived from his conviction that a new celestial mechanics could only be built
upon the foundation of an advanced instrumental optics.182 Relevant to our
story is that Boscovich wrote a series of papers (collected in the fourth vol-
ume of his collected works) on rectification and verification of instrumental
errors, for which he might have used the 6-foot mural quadrant in Brera made
by Canivet.183 But Boscovich was not an easy-going person and despite his real
merits and the prestige that could accrue to the institution by having him as
director, in the event he was removed from the conduction of the Observatory.

177 Juárez to Ambrosio Funes, 8 May 1788, in Grenón, Los Funes, 1:87.
178 Harris, “Boscovich, the ‘Boscovich Circle’ and the Revival of Jesuit Science,” 535–536.
179 Not to be confused with the well-known Joseph-Louis Lagrange, whose baptism name
was Luigi Lagrangio or Lagrange.
180 For Boscovich’s biography, see Elizabeth Hill, “Biographical Essay,” in Roger Joseph
Boscovich S. J., F. R. S., 1711–1787. Studies in His Life and Work on the 250th Anniversary of His
Birth, ed. Lancelot Law Whyte (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1961), 17–101.
181 Francesco Zagar, “L’Osservatorio Astronomico di Milano nella storia,” Contributi
dell’Osservatorio Astronomico di Milano-Merate, n.s. no. 201 (1963), 31–32.
182 For Boscovich’s astronomical program, see Juan Casanovas, “Boscovich as an Astronomer,”
in Bicentennial commemoration of R. G. Boscovich. Milano, September 15–18, 1987.
Proceedings, ed. M. Bossi and P. Tucci (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 1987), 65–66.
183 Edoardo Proverbio, “La strumentazione astronomica all’Osservatorio di Brera-Milano e
l’attività di R. G. Boscovich dal 1765 al 1772,” Giornale di Astronomia 3 (1986), 25–26.
298 chapter 5

In 1772 the Prince of Kaunitz (1711–1794), the powerful chancellor of Empress

Maria Theresa, just let him go (Lombardy and the city of Milan were at that
moment under Austrian rule). With the suppression of the Society of Jesus in
1773, Boscovich left for good towards Paris, where he was nominated Director
of Naval Optics of the French Navy and adopted the French citizenship. The
observatory, no longer a Jesuit establishment, was left in the hands of De
Cesaris (1776), who with Reggio and under imperial patronage began publish-
ing the Effemeridi di Milano, the first volume of which came out in 1774. Two
years later Father Barnaba Oriani (1752–1832) arrived in Brera, by then a state
institution. In July 1782 Boscovich returned to Italy with a two-year leave of
absence. Due to ill health he stayed with a friend in Pescia until 1783 and after
visiting several Italian cities he settled in Bassano at the house of the editor and
printer of his Opera, working at a hectic pace on the correction of the proofs of
the dense five volumes until May 1785. After more traveling, by 1786 he moved
to rooms in Brera, allegedly to help in the making of a map of Lombardy. But by
then he could scarcely work and in September of that year he was transferred
to the former Jesuit College in Monza, where he died in February of 1787.184
Summing up, Boscovich was in the Observatory between 1766 and 1772 and
afterwards went to France, where he stayed for ten years. But Frías arrived in
Milan much later than that. Certainly, among his manuscripts there is an undated
note in a slip of paper without any heading, granting him—who is described as
having been born in the city of “San Ferdinando” of Spanish America—a license
to minister as a priest in the archdiocese of Milan. According to this document,
Frías arrived in Milan by the beginning of 1779 and lived upon his pension of
former Jesuit (which fits with what Juárez said to his correspondent).185 Since he
came to Brera seven years after Boscovich had left, it is not possible that he could
have worked under his direction in the observatory.186 In a recent catalogue of
Boscovich’s correspondence, the name of Alonso Frías does not occur anywhere.187

184 I have followed Hill, “Biographical Essay,” for the incidences in this period of Boscovich’s
life. For the history of the Observatory of Brera, see Zagar, “L’Osservatorio Astronomico
di Milano;” Pasquale Tucci and Renato Valota, “La lunga storia di Brera e la ‘questioni’
dei marziani,” in Da Brera a Marte. Storia dell’osservatoio di Milano (Milan: Nuevo Banco
Ambrosiano, 1983), 77–147; Enrico Miotto et al., “La storia della Specola di Brera dal 1762
al 2000,” in I cieli di Brera. Astronomia da Tolomeo a Balla, ed. Pasquale Tucci and Graciela
Buccellati (Milan: Franco Maria Ricci-Università degli Studi di Milano, 2000), 43–66.
185 BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:33v.
186 The only way to “save” Juárez’s statement that Frías worked under Boscovich’s direction,
would be to accept that they kept some kind of contact during the few months that the
famous mathematician spent in Milan in 1786, but by then Boscovich was an ailing old man.
187 Edoardo Proverbio and Letizia Buffoni, Nuovo catalogo della corrispondenza di Ruggiero
Giuseppe Boscovich. Documenti Boscovichiani, 7 (Roma: Accademia Nazionale delle
Science in the Italian Exile 299

In his Biblioteca jesuitico-española, Hervás y Panduro wrote that he met

Frías in Milan, where the latter was assisting the former Jesuits Angelo
De Cesaris and Francisco Reggio “in their observations and calculations”.188
Unfortunately, there is no mention of date in Hervás’s account. It seems likely
that Frías worked in Brera during the 1780s, but we do not know exactly what
he did there and for how long he was associated with the Observatory. In 1791
he spent some time in Rome (see below). Among Frías papers there is a set of
meteorological observations made in Milan from July to August of 1796 (see
below), so he could have extended his permanence in the Lombard city until
1796. Furlong has claimed that Frías wrote some of the articles that appeared
in the Effemeridi published by De Cesaris and Reggio. But none of the many
drafts kept in the Frías papers coincide with any of the anonymous contribu-
tions that appeared in the volumes of the Effemeridi (1774–1783). It is possible
that, as Hervás said, Frías just helped with the observations and computations
of the tables, got trained in the routine of the observatory, and became familiar
with Boscovich’s work.189
Just like his countryman Juárez, in 1798 Frías traveled to Spain in an attempt
to travel back to his country, upon the decree of the government that allowed
the return of the former Jesuits.190 He got a letter of recommendation from
the Archbishop of Milan attesting to his honorable priestly conduct and the
regular fulfillment of his duties while he was in Milan. Frías sailed from Genoa
but the ship was captured by the Turks and he barely escaped being sent as a
slave to Argel. Eventually he arrived in Barcelona, but the Spanish authorities
impeded his embarking to South America.191 It is safe to assume that he stayed
in Barcelona at least from October 1798 to September 1799, for he left thermo-
metric observations carried out during that period.192
Having been sent off from Spain, by 1801 Frías was back in Rome. On 13 July
of that year he wrote from that city a letter to Barnaba Oriani, then director
of the observatory, informing him of his arrival in the Papal city and asking

Scienze, 2004). The catalogue contains an index of 3,308 letters and is an update of
previous catalogues.
188 Cited in Guillermo Furlong, “El astrónomo santiagueño Alonso Frías,” 72.
189 Some of the articles and memorias written by Frías might be lost, as can be seen from a
comparison of those in the papers of the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma (BNCR)
with the list provided by Hervás and Panduro and reproduced in Furlong, “El astrónomo
santiagueño Alonso Frías,” 77–80.
190 DHCJ, s.v. “Frías Alfaro, Alonso de,” by Hugo Storni.
191 Furlong, “El astrónomo santiagueño Alonso Frías,” 74–75.
192 BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:331r–335v, Rome.
300 chapter 5

for news about Reggio, De Cesaris, and other colleagues.193 Frías had written
to Oriani a letter from Barcelona and evidently wished to reestablish contact
upon his return to Italy. While in Rome, he lived in the Gesù—the former Jesuit
headquarters—with other former Jesuits from Spanish America.194 There is a
testimony that in 1803 he fell from a window while doing astronomical observa-
tions, but there is no indication as to where he was at that moment. In 1814 we
find him in Rome, attending the ceremony of reestablishment of the Society
of Jesus by Pius VII in 1824. He pronounced again his votes on 10 October 1824,
when he was 79 years old, and died soon after, on Christmas day of that year.195

3.1 The Cádiz Quadrant

Quadrants are instruments used to measure the altitude of stars and other
astronomical objects as they cross the meridian. Large mural quadrants were
among the most important instruments of observatories and became a fixture
of the many institutions of that kind that sprouted in all the cities of Europe
during the eighteenth century. The construction and installation of a quadrant
involved many questions of precision engineering. The British soon became
the leaders in the design and construction of quadrants and exported them to
more than 20 observatories in the Continent.196
In 1717, José Patiño (1666–1736), Secretary of State of the Bourbon Spanish
king Philip V, created an Academy for the instruction of a new Company of
Midshipmen (Compañía de Guardias Marinas) in the harbor city of Cádiz. In
view of the growing irrelevancy of Spain in the European scenario of power
politics, the Marquis of Ensenada (1707–1781), minister of the Bourbon Spanish
king Ferdinand VI, deployed an ambitious program of modernization of the
military, aimed at reforming the Spanish Navy and Army on a more scientific
and technical basis.197 The creation of the Royal Observatory of Cádiz as an

193 Frías to Oriani, Rome, 13 June 1801, Corrispondenza scientifica, cart. 91, Archivio storico
dell’Osservatorio astronomico di Brera, Milan. See Guido Tagliaferri and Pasquale Tucci,
eds., 1800–1809. Catalogo della corrispondenza degli astronomi di Brera. Vol. 2 (Milan:
Università degli Studi, 1991), 612. I used the digital copy of the document kindly sent to
me by Ms. Agnese Mandrino, the archivist of the Osservatorio di Brera.
194 Furlong, “El astrónomo santiagueño Alonso Frías,” 76.
195 Ibid., 76–77.
196 Robert Bud and Deborah J. Warner, Instruments of Science. An Historical Encyclopedia
(New York and London: Garland, 1998), 501–502; J. A. Bennett, The Divided Circle. A History
of Instruments for Astronomy, Navigation and Surveying (Oxford: Phaidon-Christie’s, 1987),
114–117.
197 Antonio Lafuente and José Luis Peset, “Las Academias militares y la inversión en ciencia
en la España ilustrada (1759–1760),” Dynamis 2 (1982): 193–194.
Science in the Italian Exile 301

integral part of the existing Naval Academy was part of this impulse. It was
established in 1753 and had been conceived by Jorge Juan, Captain of the
Company of Midshipmen.198 Jorge Juan and his companion Antonio de Ulloa
were the two young graduates from the Academy of Midshipmen that the
Spanish crown had required to join the 1735 expedition to Quito organized by
the French Academy of Science.199 Led by Louis Godin (1704–1760), Charles-
Marie de La Condamine (1701–1774), and Pierre Bouger (1698–1758), the expe-
dition was launched with the purpose of measuring an arc of meridian in the
equator so that it could be compared with another measured in polar latitudes.
It was hoped that from this comparison the problem of the true form of the
Earth could be resolved.200 The expedition ended in 1744, but Juan and Ulloa
returned to Spain two years later by different routes and after many adven-
tures. In a political climate favorable to scientific-military endeavors, it was
possible for them to publish their two works (actually, one in two parts): Jorge
Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, Relación histórica del viage a la América Meridional
[. . .] para medir algunos grados de meridiano terrestre, 4 vols. (Madrid: Antonio
Marín, 1748) and Observaciones astronómicas y phisicas [. . .] en los Reynos
del Perú (Madrid: J. de Zuñiga, 1748).201 Presently Juan and Ulloa were sent
as secret agents to England and France with the aim of learning about new
methods of naval construction.202 By 1740 Juan drafted his proposal of con-
struction of the observatory.203 The first director of the Cádiz Observatory was
Louis Godin, who had been beset by difficulties after his return of the famous
expedition. But the productive period of the institution began when Vicente

198 Francisco José González González, “Una institución ilustrada para las ciudades de la
Bahía: Cádiz, la isla de León y el Observatorio de la Marina,” Cuadernos de Ilustración y
Romanticismo, no. 3 (1993), 89–90.
199 Louis XIV had asked Philip V for permission to explore the Spanish possessions in South
America and was granted it under the condition that two Spanish naval officers should
accompany the expedition.
200 See Neil Safier, Measuring the World. Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2008).
201 The Relación histórica was written by Antonio de Ulloa, whereas the Observaciones were
the work of Jorge Juan. The participation of Juan and Ulloa in La Condamine’s expedition
has been analyzed extensively in Antonio Lafuente and Antonio Mazuecos, Los caballeros
del punto fijo. Ciencia, política y aventura en la expedición geodésica hispanofrancesa al
virreinato del Perú en el siglo XVIII (Madrid: Serbal-SCIC, 1987).
202 José Luis Peset and Antonio Lafuente, “Política científica y espionaje industrial en los
viajes de Jorge Juan y Antonio de Ulloa,” Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 17 (1981):
233–262.
203 González González, “Una institución ilustrada,” 90.
302 chapter 5

Tofiño (1732–1795) took charge of it in 1768. Tofiño, a native of Cádiz, began his
career as a cadet of the Academy, but since his widowed mother could not sup-
port him, he was forced to leave it for the Regiment of Murcia. His education
in the exact sciences was largely autodidactic.204 In the mid 1770s and in col-
laboration with José Varela (1739–1794), he deployed an ambitious program of
observations for the Observatory, a large part of which depended on the mural
quadrant. At the time of securing a quadrant to install in Cádiz, Jorge Juan had
bought it from John Bird (1709–1776), perhaps the foremost quadrant maker
of his time. A twin quadrant was installed in Göttingen for the use of Tobias
Mayer (1723–1762).205
Tofiño and Varela’s efforts were crowned with success. In 1776 they were able
to publish the first volume of the Observaciones, a technical summary of the
work carried out in two periods, from 21 June to 27 March 1775 and between 6
and 30 December 1776. This was followed by a second volume published the
next year. They used the mural quadrant for observations of the transit of the
Sun, the Moon, the planets, and for the determination of the position of stars
using the equatorial coordinates; besides, they recorded eclipses of the satel-
lites of Jupiter, the position of the planets, and other measurements.206 Before
embarking in this ambitious project, the first of its kind in modern Spain,
Tofiño and Varela had to adjust and correct the six-foot quadrant, which was
not an easy business.207 The first volume of Tofiño and Varela’s Observaciones
(1776) arrived in Frías’s hands by chance. It would prompt him into a produc-
tive and consistent program of work which amounted to the working out of
the data collected by the Cádiz astronomers.
The first fruit of Frías’s encounter with the publications of the Cádiz
Observatory was an article entitled “On the geographical position of Cádiz”.208
For the calculation of the latitude Frías used two methods. The first was the
zenith distance of the Sun in the solstice. The other, which occupies most of

204 Nicolás María Cambiaso y Verdes, Memorias para la biografía y la bibliografía de la isla de
Cádiz, 2 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de León Amarita, 1829), 2:237–242.
205 Allan Chapman, Dividing the Circle. The Development of Critical Angular Measurement in
Astronomy, 1500–1850 (New York: Ellis Horwood, 1990), 71–76.
206 Vicente Tofiño and José Varela, Observaciones astronómicas hechas en Cádiz en el
Observatorio Real de la Compañia de Caballeros Guardias Marinas, 2 vols. (Cádiz: Imprenta
de la Compañía de Caballeros Guardias Marinas, 1776–1777). Cf. Antonio Lafuente and
Manuel Sellés, El Observatorio de Cádiz (1753–1831) (Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa-
Instituto de Historia y Cultura Naval, 1988), 180–196.
207 Tofiño and Varela, Observaciones astronómicas, vol. 1, “Introducción a las observaciones”
(without pagination); cf. Lafuente y Sellés, El Observatorio de Cádiz, 169–174.
208 [Frías, Alonso], “De la posición geográfica de Cádiz,” BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:1r–18r, Rome.
Science in the Italian Exile 303

the paper, consisted in correcting for errors the observed declination of 102
stars. He arrives at a figure of 36°31’59.3’’N.209 From a 1770 communication to
the Paris Academy of Sciences, Frías rehearses the latitude value determined
by Feuillée in 1724 as 36°31’07”N, which coincided with a value obtained by
Jorge Juan and Louis Godin.210 In his unpublished paper, Frías attributes the
discrepancy between this value and the one obtained by him to the tables used
by Feuillée, which he considered were not exact.211 He admits that his own
error could be that of refraction, although this could amount to no more than
2 or 3 seconds.
For the more risky determination of the longitude Frías uses the method
of immersion and emersion of the satellites of Jupiter and of the immer-
sion of lunar surface accidents in the eclipse of 30 July 1776. He gives the
longitude of Cádiz with respect to different meridians: Greenwich, Paris,
Milan, Pisa, Vienna, Tirnau, Berlin, Cresmunster, Uppsala, Stockholm, and St.
Petersburg. Frías saw fit to use a paper by Daniel Bernoulli, published in the
Proceedings of the Imperial Academy of Science of St. Petersburg, in which the
latter deals with the theory of errors in terms of probability theory.212 With
this method for error correction, the South American astronomer assigns a
value of 1h18’40.5’’ to the difference of longitude between Cádiz and Berlin.
Frías’s paper ends with a table indicating the time difference between Cádiz
and 12 other observatories. In an appendix, he copied Lacaille’s communica-
tion of the determination of the coordinates of Cádiz by Feuillée published
in the Memoirs of the Paris Academy of sciences for 1746.213 Frías, who seems

209 Ibid., 9v.

210 Alexandre Pingré, “Précis d’un voyage en Amérique ou essai géographique sur la position
de plusiers Isles, et autres lieux de l’océan atlantique,” Histoire de l’Académie royale
des sciences . . . Année 1770 (1773), 491. Louis Feuillée was a mathematician and natural
philosopher member of the Order of the Minims, who between 1707 and 1711 had joined
an expedition to South America.
211 Feuillée had used La Hire’s tables for the Sun and those of Flamsteed and Hevelius for the
fixed stars.
212 Daniel Bernoulli, “Diiudicatio maxime probabilis plurium observationum discrepantium
atque verisimillima inductio inde formanda,” Acta Academiae Scientiarum Imperialis
Petropolitanae 1777, pt. 1 (1778), 3–23. Bernoulli considered any observational error as the
sum of a large sum of very small errors. See Hans Fischer, A History of the Central Limit
Theorem. From Classical to Modern Probability Theory (New York and Dordrecht: Springer,
2011), 80.
213 BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:18v–20v. See Nicolas Louis Lacaille, “Extrait de la Relation du
voyage fait en 1724, aux isles Canaries, par le P. Feuillée Minime, pour déterminer la vraie
304 chapter 5

to have been somewhat obsessed with Feuillée’s results, sent an (undated)

letter to Prince Doria on Feuillée’s observations of the coordinates of Cádiz.214
On 2 March 1791, Frías wrote to Tofiño and Varela.215 This was the first time
that he corresponded with the Cádiz astronomers. The purpose of the letter
was to establish contact and to volunteer a copy of his article on the coordi-
nates of Cádiz—he had already sent another to the Count of Floridablanca.
He added that he had almost finished another paper on the position of the
fixed stars, in which he had determined their right ascension and declination,
comparing them with those in the main catalogues. He had also made some
progress “in what concerns the Sun, and after this what rests is a [memory] on
the planets and another on the Moon”. At the time of writing this letter, Frías
had left Milan and was living in Rome on account of some health problems.
Tofiño answered Frías in a letter of 29 April 1791, thanking him for his con-
tribution without much enthusiasm and telling him that he was no longer
director of the observatory.216 He expressed his wish of sending his correspon-
dent the second volume of the Observaciones, but since dispatching a package
from Cádiz to Rome by mail would be too expensive, he would try to send it
through the intermediacy of some businessmen, who traveled frequently to
Naples. Tofiño’s tepid interest in Frías’s work might be explained by the fact
that in October 1789 he had ceased in his functions as director of the three
Midshipmen Academies in Spain (Cádiz, Ferrol, and Cartagena) on account
of his promotion in the naval ranks to Chief of Squadron. His replacement at
the Academy and Observatory of Cádiz was Cipriano Vimercati (c. 1736–1800).217
Eventually, Frías resolved himself to resent his article to Vimercati by hand of
the Jesuit mathematician Antonio Eximeno (1729–1808), adding a new intro-
ductory paragraph to the letter he had formerly sent to Tofiño.218

position du premier Méridien,” Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences . . . Année 1746

(1751), 129–150.
214 Frías, “Reflexions sur les observations du P. F.,” BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:281r and 282v, Rome.
215 Frías to Tofiño, Rome, 2 March 1791, Biblioteca Nazionale 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170: 390r–390v,
Rome.
216 Tofiño to Frías, 29 April 1791, BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:233r, Rome.
217 Martín Fernández de Navarrete, Biblioteca marítima española, vol. 1 (Madrid: Viuda de
Calero, 1851), 277–279.
218 Frías to Vimercati, n.d., BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:391r, Rome. This is a draft of a letter to
Vimercati. For bibliography on Eximeno, mostly known as a music theorist, see Batllori La
cultura hispano-italiana, 505–507.
Science in the Italian Exile 305

Among the papers Frías left unpublished there are two drafts of an article on
the fixed stars.219 Each of them begins with a section which discusses the error
corrections of the observations of the right ascension of stars made by Tofiño
and Varela with the mural quadrant of Cádiz. The second part contains tables
with corrections of the declinations. After dozens of pages of calculations,
Frías ends by advancing some of his cosmological views. He “conjectures” that
the fixed stars are

. . . so many suns and centers of separate systems of planets and comets,
and in the end they are bodies annexed to a larger unique system, so that
situated at different distances from a center, they revolve around it.220

Astronomers would face an immense field of research, he goes on, if they

would be willing to calculate the workings of the whole system in terms of
central forces. At this point Frías doubts whether “human ingenuity will ever
be able to reach the sound knowledge of the mechanical system of nature.”
He concludes with a reflection on “that more sublime and noble system of
spiritual beings, who endowed with understanding are capable of knowing the
Supreme Good, and endowed with free will are capable of loving it”.221 In the
first version of the paper Frías also indulged in a similar contemplative mood
with respect to the limits of human knowledge when he wondered whether
[William] Herschel himself had ever been able to see with the best of his
instruments the boundaries of the firmament. “The safest attitude is to declare
that the human being, with all his industry, will never be able to measure the
limits [of the universe],” concluded Frías.222
The only extant document concerning the determination of errors of the
mural quadrant is an undated and unsigned manuscript attributed so far to
the Spanish Navy officer José de Mazarredo (1745–1812).223 A comparison with

219 The first draft has 71 pages and the second 76. See Alonso Frías, “De las estrellas fixas,”
BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:153r–189r and “Memoria II sobre las fixas, observadas en el
Real Observatorio de Cádiz por los Sres. Vicente Tofiño y San Miguel y D. Josef Varela y
calculadas por D. Alonso Frías,” ibid., 190r–229r. There are other fragmentary drafts of this
paper: “Ascensiones rectas y declinaciones de las fixas observadas en Cádiz, calculadas y
reducidas al principio de 1774 . . .” (ibid., 77r–78r), “Ascensión rectas de las fijas observadas
en Cádiz . . .” (ibid., 95r–97v), and “De la declinación de las fixas” (ibid., 138v–151r).
220 Frias, “Memoria II sobre las fixas,” BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:229r.
221 Ibid., 229r.
222 Frías, “De las estrellas fixas,” BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:153r.
223 Lafuente and Sellés, El Observatorio de Cádiz, 174–180.
306 chapter 5

the various versions of that work held in the papers left by Frías shows that
its author was the South American Jesuit.224 He probably wrote it after 1791,
for there is no mention of it in his letter to Tofiño and Varela. The mémoire is
entitled “Opúsculo Segundo. Sobre el quadrante mural de Cádiz”.225 It is sig-
nificant that Frías used for the corrections the methods designed by Boscovich.
Of course, he was acquainted with the use of quadrants as a basic skill. It is
likely that he learned how to use the six-foot mural quadrant installed in Brera
and became proficient in Boscovich´s tradition of calculating corrections for
instrumental errors in transit instruments.226 Frías mentions two articles of
Boscovich on the calculation of the necessary corrections to reduce observa-
tion of instants of transit of a star on the instrumental meridian to the true
astronomical meridian: “De erroribus collocationis quadrantis muralis dep-
rehendendis, et corrigendis” and “De refractione telescopii meridiani Gallice
instrument des passages”.227 Each of them proposes two methods, using dif-
ferential formulas in spherical geometry, to calculate instrumental errors of
azimuth, inclination, and collimation of a transit instrument upon the obser-
vation of the instant of transit of three stars.228 Frías preferred to use the
­second method of the second paper, which he rehearsed for the benefit of the
reader.229 Although there are no traces of epistolary contact between Frías and
Boscovich and the possibility of personal encounter are slim, this paper indi-
cates that the astronomer from Río de la Plata had acquired competence in the

224 The fragments of text copied by Lafuente and Sellés (idem, El Observatorio de Cádiz, 174
and 177) coincide literally with the text in BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:23r and 30r.
225 Frías, “Opúsculo Segundo sobre el Quadrante mural de Cádiz,” BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges.
1170:22r–23v, copied again in fols. 24r–26r and fols. 28r–30r. The article continues in fols.
30r–31r (there is another version of this second part in fols. 32r–32v) and includes a table
in fols. 35r–35v. It is rehearsed in fols. 98r–103r.
226 See Proverbio, “La strumentazione astronomica all’Osservatorio di Brera,” and Mario
Carpino, “Breve storia dell’Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera attraverso i suoi strumenti”
(2010), in http://www.brera.mi.astro.it/~carpino/didattica/index.html.
227 Roger Boscovich, “De erroribus collocationis quadrantis muralis deprehendendis, et
corrigendis,” in idem, Opera pertinentia ad opticam et astronomiam, 5 vols. (Venice:
Bassano del Grappa, 1785), 4: 39–57; idem, “De refractione telescopii meridiani Gallice
instrument des passages,” in idem, Opera pertinentia, 4:184–221.
228 Edoardo Proverbio has discussed the importance of Boscovich’s work on the correction of
observational errors and provided an analysis of his methods. See idem, “R. G. Boscovich’s
Determination of Instrumental Errors in Observation,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences
38, no. 2 (1988): 135–152. For the description of the method used by Frías, see ibid., 149.
229 Frías, Alonso, “Opúsculo Segundo sobre el Quadrante mural de Cádiz,” BNCR 3299, Ms.
Ges. 1170:23r–23v, Rome.
Science in the Italian Exile 307

handling of Boscovich’s methods for determining the instrumental errors of a

quadrant or a similar transit instrument.
Frías wrote a few more short articles and he also kept registers of thermo-
metric and barometric observations made in May and August 1795, July to
August 1796 (these were made in Milan), and from October 1798 to September
1799, in Barcelona.230 He was a professional astronomer, trained at a presti-
gious observatory and in full command of the instruments and conceptual
tools of his discipline.231 As happened with many of the exiled Jesuits, his
whole production remained unpublished. His work on the observations made
in Cádiz might be related to a search for patronage, since Cádiz was at that
time the only observatory in Spain and obviously concentrated any official
interest there could be in astronomical matters. But it also seems that he had
a genuine interest in questions of observational errors, for much of his work
consists in the reduction of data and he enjoys expounding the mathematical
methods he uses to that purpose. Perhaps not much should be made of his
vague reflections on cosmological issues, but they are interesting as one of the
rare cases in which a Jesuit of Paraguay and Río de la Plata lets himself go and
transgresses the barriers of the purely observational. And it is evident that, just
like Juárez and Jolís, he took pride in his homeland. His letter to prince Doria is
signed “Alonso Frías, sacerdote Americano”.232

4 The Cultural Transplant

A number of studies have shown the depth, extent, and faded glory of the his-
torical and literary culture forged by the exiled Jesuits of the Spanish empire
in Italian cities.233 In previous chapters, we have commented on the share
that South American Jesuit writers had in this movement and underlined the

230 Frías, [Metereological observations], BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:310r–327v.

231 Among Frías’s unpublished short papers we should mention: “Determinación del paralelo
en que el Sol se halla cotejado con la estrella en su ida y vuelta del solsticio de invierno,”
BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:389r–389v. In a fragment of a letter Frias sent to a certain
D. Silvestre, he copied letters dated on 9 November 1789 sent to De Cesaris and Reggio and
containing observations made in Montevideo by the officers of the Malaspina expedition
Juan Gutiérrez de la Concha, Dionisio Alcalá Galiano, and Juan Vernacci. Ibid., 301r–302r.
Furlong’s affirmation that Frías corresponded with the Malaspina astronomers is not
supported by documentary evidence (see Furlong, “El astrónomo santiagueño Alonso
Frías,” 74), inasmuch as what Frías did was to relay the data sent to Brera.
232 Frías to Prince Doria, n.d., BNCR 3299, Ms. Ges. 1170:282v.
233 See bibliography at the beginning of this chapter.
308 chapter 5

contributions to natural history and cartography of the group of former

missionaries from Paraquaria, such as Jolís, Cardiel, Camaño, and Sánchez
Labrador. But as demonstrated by the activities of Juárez, Termeyer, and Frías,
this phenomenon had also a more defined “scientific” side. The topics they
dealt with cover much of what was characteristic of eighteenth-century sci-
ence: botany, experimental electricity, and observational astronomy. These
former Jesuits were at a pace with the current developments in their fields:
Juárez’s small books were clearly aligned with Linnaean botany, Termeyer’s
researches dealt on the trendy subject of animal electricity, and Frías was well
aware of the new mathematical methods for correcting observational errors
in astronomy. Looking at things from the point of view of the grand European
scenario, all of them were rather shadowy figures. But even so, Juárez obtained
some credit in Spanish botanic circles and Termeyer got a few accolades from
the scientific and literary world of Lombardy and Piedmont.
Juárez and Frías had been born and bred in the city of Santiago del Estero
and it is natural that they continued in contact as exiles. It would seem that
the Spanish Termeyer was shunned by his former fellow Jesuits; at least he was
harshly criticized by his compatriot Sánchez Labrador on the grounds of his
writings. If the Jesuits from Paraquaria did not constitute properly an intel-
lectual circle, at least they kept abreast of each other’s activities. Some way
or another, all of them belonged to Milanese or Roman scientific institutions
and, with the exception of Frías, published their works in Italian or Latin. But
despite being rooted in Italian soil, they gravitated toward the scientific cen-
ters of Spain—Frías’s papers are an elaboration of work done in Cádiz and
Juárez was intended on republishing the whole of Ruíz and Pavón’s Flora
Peruviana et Chilensis. This could be explained in terms of their origin—all
of them were subjects of the Spanish crown—but there is also the question
of patronage. Leading precarious lives, they tried to improve their situation
and seized on the opportunity of getting the double pension awarded to those
whose intellectual achievements were judged valuable to the state. In doing
so, they saw themselves in the ironical situation of looking for protection from
persons like Nicolás de Azara and the Count of Floridablanca, the very same
who had e­ ngineered the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and its domains
and promoted the suppression of the Society of Jesus.
The group of works considered in this chapter is a purely European prod-
uct. The only traces of aboriginal cultures left in them are the footnotes with
the local names of plants in Gilii and Juárez’s Osservazioni and the passing
mention of the Mocoví who were subjects of Termeyer’s experiments in San
Javier. But even if Juárez wrote on South American plants, his approach can-
Science in the Italian Exile 309

not be distinguished from that of any contemporary botanist in Italy or Spain.

Contrarily to the natural histories written in Italy by Jesuits who had lived in
Paraquaria, which still bear the marks of the mixed culture that flourished
in the missions and are justified as testimonies of that experience, the writ-
ings of Juárez, Temeyer and Frías are devoid of any reference to an aboriginal
world vision.
 chapter 6

A Last Word

After our long survey of Jesuit science in the missions of Paraquaria, we are bet-
ter situated to look at some epistemological questions. This discussion will also
serve as a guiding topic to retake two argumentative threads that cut across our
history: the relation of Jesuit science as practiced in historical Paraguay and
Río de la Plata to the missionary goals of the Society of Jesus and its articula-
tion with native lore on nature.

1 Empirical Reference

Knowledge of nature in the missions of Paraguay and Río de la Plata was crys-
tallized in writings on nature. Jesuit missionaries built what was primarily a
textual tradition (texts of materia medica and medical compendia, natural his-
tories, maps, astronomical papers) which can be seen as a streaming discourse
on the natural world of Paraquaria. The Jesuit missionaries who wrote about
their natural environment—in particular the authors of the natural histo-
ries—underscored once and again the empirical grounding of their accounts.
But this unflagging adherence to empirical reference was put to serve differ-
ent explanatory and rhetorical functions over time. In a history that spanned
a century and a half, any synchronic and focal analysis would inevitably be
reductive and misleading. A proper historical understanding seems to demand
a temporally extended survey and an elucidation of the shifts in the concep-
tions and practices of Jesuit missionaries engaged in representing nature.
The Jesuit writers’ exaltation of experience as a criterion of epistemological
warrant was congruent with a philosophy based on Aristotle, who placed in
empeiria (experience) the ultimate source of all knowledge. It was also in line
with the frequent claims of autopsia that pervade the Early Modern corpus
of writings on the natural world of Iberian America. The notion of “seeing by
oneself” adds to the claim about the empirical foundation of a given state-
ment the added value that we are dealing with a personal, non-mediated testi-
mony. Declarations about a phenomenon or event came thus to be warranted
by the ocular witnessing of their occurrence. The early Jesuit natural histories
recurred to claims of autopsia when narrating fantastic or prodigious events.
In the case in which the author had not seen things by himself, he resorted

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A Last Word 311

to the testimony of what he considered qualified and reliable witnesses, i.e.,

other Jesuit Fathers.
As expected, this rhetoric of evidence is also present in the writers of auto-
biographical memories, like Paucke and Dobrizhoffer. Park has broadly char-
acterized the medieval notion of experimentum as knowledge of a certain
phenomenon that is not arrived at by deduction (in other words, some kind
of experiential, immediate knowledge not mediated by reason). In the Middle
Ages, the terms experientia and experimenta would usually mean empirical
inquiries carried out by an author, either involving manipulations (something
akin to our present notion of experiment) or just sensory recordings of natu-
ral phenomena.1 As remarked in chapter one, Paucke’s empirical approach to
intriguing natural phenomena seems coextensive with this notion of experi-
entia or experimentum, in the general sense of a testing or trial. The case is
different with Termeyer, who carried out experiments with the electric eel in
the sense of performing a series of planned operations upon a creature with an
aim at seeing and registering the results of the intervention.
We have already discussed how in the course of time the Jesuit natural
histories suffered suggestive transformations. The early ones, like those of
Montoya and Lozano, tell about marvels and prodigies of nature in a climate
of frequent miracles, supernatural interventions, and an easy communication
between the celestial and earthly spheres. Although on occasion the authors
show themselves critical, for the most they move at ease within the frame-
work of a natural philosophy congenial to marvelous phenomena explained in
terms of occult forces, action at a distance, sympathies and antipathies. This
mental world had been furnished by the works of Kirchner and Nieremberg. It
was a scene peopled by New World marvels and prodigies, whose operations in
terms of occult virtues had come under the literary attack of the Galilean physi-
cian Francesco Redi. The publication of Redi’s Esperienze intorno a diverse cose

1 Katharine Park, “Observation in the Margins, 500–1500,” in Histories of Scientific Observation,

ed. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lundbeck (Chicago and London: The University of
Chicago Press, 2011), 17. See also Gianna Pomata, “Observation Rising: Birth of an Epistemic
Genre, 1500–1650,” in Daston and Lunbeck, Histories of Scientific Observation, 45–80, as a
guide for the scholarly literature (mostly Italian) on the subject. Cf. the discussion by Tullio
Gregory, A. I. Sabra, Charles Schmitt, and Brian Stock on the difficulty of distinguishing the
meanings of experimentum and experimenta in John E. Murdoch, ed., The Cultural Context of
Medieval Learning. Proceedings of the First International Colloquium on Philosophy, Science,
and Theology in the Middle Ages. September 1973 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1973), 265–268. For med-
ical context see Walter J. Daly and D. Craig Brater, “Medieval Contributions to the Search for
Truth in Clinical Medicine,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 43, no. 4 (2000): 530–540.
312 chapter 6

naturali, e particolarmente quelle, chi son portate dall’Indie (Firenze, 1671) is a

significant episode in the history of Jesuit interpretation of the natural world
of Spanish America. The book was intended as an experimentally grounded
and critically oriented argument against Kircher’s explanations of the alleg-
edly marvelous curative effects of exotic natural products (from the East Indies
and the New World) in terms of sympathies and hidden powers.2
But a century after Redi carried out his experiments in Firenze, it was the
Jesuit Termeyer who was performing esperienze on the electric eel and as a
result postulating a “gymnotic fluid”—one of the many fluids that populated
the natural philosophy of the Enlightenment. By that time, the Jesuit authors
engrossed in describing the natural world of Paraquaria had adopted a point of
view distrustful of accounts about natural marvels and prodigies. This attitude
was most clearly expressed in the writings of Sánchez Labrador, whose censure
of Kircher’s and Nieremberg’s appeal to occult virtues and forces was almost
as violent as Redi’s.
Whereas in the early natural histories the appeal to autopsia served as a war-
rant for the truth of a prodigy or a wonder, in those written in the Italian exile
the author’s recourse to claims of having been witness to a given state of affairs
was functional to a discourse bent on underscoring the truthful character of
the Jesuit reports against the speculations of European philosophers. Now the
question was not one of underpinning a doubtful declaration about an unusual
phenomenon. Experience and ocular inspection were used to legitimatize the
epistemological authority of the Jesuit author and unmask the claims of the
enlightened philosophers about the inferiority of the New World as groundless
theories. Unlike de Pauw, Buffon, and the rest of the philosophes, the Jesuits
“had been there” and had seen with their own eyes what things were like. The
force of this argument derived from the shared belief in ocular inspection as
the ultimate criterion of truth. At the same time, the insistence on knowledge
based on experience contributed to dispel the accusations of those who, like
Azara, pictured the Jesuits as little less than professional liars.
Daston has argued that “observation” as an epistemic notion was used
on a par with “experiment” during the early seventeenth century and came
gradually to be distinguished from the latter in the course of the eighteenth
century.3 This “observational turn” can also be seen in the titles of works writ-
ten by Jesuit missionaries in Paraquaria and the Italian exile, like Termeyer’s

2 See the bibliography in chapter 2, note 1 and also Martha Baldwin, “The Snakestone
Experiments: An Early Modern Medical Debate,” Isis 86, no. 3 (1995): 394–418.
3 Lorraine Daston, “The Empire of Observation, 1600–1800,” in Daston and Lundbeck, Histories
of Scientific Observation, 81–113.
A Last Word 313

Osservazioni di Storia naturale Americana, Juárez Osservazioni Fitologiche, or

Suárez’s “Observationes astronomicae.” Certainly, this can be seen as a bow
to what came to be common usage. At a deeper level, the proliferation of
“observations” by eighteenth-century Jesuit missionaries in Paraquaria could
be interpreted as a late stage in an epistemological tradition that had since long
relied on experience and ocular witnessing as truth warrants of statements
about phenomena that challenged the criteria of belief of the reader and, hav-
ing occurred in the New World, were inaccessible for inspection. While in the
University of Córdoba the attempt at modernization in the teaching of natu-
ral philosophy found its limit in the scholastic format of the courses, much of
the science cultivated in the missions during the eighteenth century—and its
sequel in the Italian exile—was of a very different character: it was built upon
“observations.”
When talking about the method used in his Osservazioni, Termeyer tells that
he drew upon “old notebooks” in which he had jotted down his observations
while in the missions of Río de la Plata. These were crude field descriptions, he
claims, done without instruments or books; he reproduced them without any
attempt at updating them with the ultimate discoveries.4 Similarly, Juárez and
Gilii purported to describe the plants from the New World they cultivated in
their Orto Vaticano Indico and those that were already growing in the princely
gardens of Rome.5 The communications Suárez sent to the Royal Society were
the kind of astronomical observations made by Jesuits all over the world, that
is lunar and solar eclipses and immersions and emersions of the satellites of
Jupiter.6 As we have discussed in chapter 3, Camaño criticized Quiroga’s diary
of the expedition to the Mato Grosso on the grounds that expressions like “I
observed” or “we observed” in reference to measurements of latitude and lon-
gitude never occurred in it.
Observation and experiments were the epistemologically legitimatized
practices that characterized Early Modern natural philosophy. In his book on
Jesuit natural philosophy in Early Modern Germany, Hellyer showed how by
the 1760’s the teaching of physics in Jesuit colleges was almost indistinguish-
able from that taught in non-Jesuit European universities.7 As we have seen,
the same could not be said of the teaching of natural philosophy in the Río
de la Plata. But the missions were a more fertile ground for the cultivation of
the New Science. Besides the minute, patient registering of appearances that

4 Termeyer, “Intorno ad alcune osservazioni,” 248.

5 Gilii and Juárez, Observaciones fitológicas (1789), 5–7.
6 Clossey, Salvation and Globalization, 207–212.
7 Hellyer, Catholic Physics, 242.
314 chapter 6

built the body of Jesuit observations on the nature of the New World, there
were experiments. The electrical esperienze Termeyer carried out in the Río
de la Plata, were performed with an instrumental and conceptual apparatus
comparable to those used by contemporary electricians in their attempts
to elicit sparks from torpedoes and electric eels in La Rochelle, Guiana, and
Philadelphia. It is useless to speculate on what could have come out of these
experiments, had not they been cut short by the expulsion. But at least they
suggest an inchoate trend of things to come.

2 Science and Religion

Feingold has taken exception to the view that the scientific activity of the
Jesuits was exclusively motivated by religious concerns, arguing that at least
some of the Jesuit savants followed their scientific pursuits in a field of relative
autonomy.8 In the cases we have considered, the articulation between pure
scientific and apostolic service in an individual Jesuit is difficult to fathom.
How much curiositas was there in Suárez’s lifelong devotion to the observa-
tion of the Jovian moons or in Montenegro’s exploration of the properties of
herbs? What we know is that the mainstream of the scientific activity carried
out in the region—astronomy, cartography, medical botany, natural history—
was for the most oriented toward the religious goals of the Society (the case of
Termeyer’s experiments could count against this generalization, for he declares
that he carried out his observations “in the moments I was free from the more
serious pursuits of the Society”).9 Romano has also pointed out the existence
of a “tension” between scientific knowledge pursued for its own sake (curiosité)
and knowledge at the service of evangelization in the Jesuit missions, stimu-
lated by the demands for expertise from quarters external to the Society of
Jesus, like the secular colonial administrations.10 As we have seen above, Jesuit
cartographers were demanded by the imperial powers on account of their pro-
ficiency, and so much so that there was a moment when it was possible to
find Jesuit experts serving on both sides of the territorial conflict between the
competing Iberian crowns. The disciplines practiced by the Jesuits were at the
service of the territorial expansion of the reductions, their growth and main-

8 Mordechai Feingold, “Jesuits: Savants,” in idem, Jesuit science and the Republic of Letters,
6–7.
9 Termeyer, “Intorno ad alcune osservazioni di Storia natural Americana,” 248.
10 Romano, “Les Jésuites entre apostolat missionaire et activité scientifique,” 234.
A Last Word 315

tenance. Nevertheless, the intellectual products of Jesuit science could “spill

over” to the secular sphere, particularly in the fields of astronomy and medical
botany. The claim that Jesuit science in Paraquaria can be best understood as
a tradition internal to the Society of Jesus, while valid as a general rule, should
be somewhat qualified.
If the telos, the ultimate why of the scientific careers of the Jesuits was
informed by the urge to contribute to the evangelization of the native peoples,
the methods and styles of science, the how, were homologous to those used
by non-Jesuits authors. Plodding through hundreds of pages of Jesuit writing
about Paraquaria leaves the reader with the impression that the procedures
employed by the Jesuits were entirely aligned with those of their contempo-
raries. The monotonous—at times even boring—register of their prose shows
no evidence of any disruptive theological intrusion or manipulation of either
materials or approach. (The whole situation could be liked—with excuses for
the strong anachronism—to Max Weber’s claim about the possibility of dis-
tinguishing between the value relevant choice of subject and the scientific,
value-free conduction of research.) It goes without saying that these writings
were informed by the religious views of their authors and expressed the cast of
mind resulting from the Jesuit education they had received. But they are faith-
ful to the guiding principles of experience, autopsia, and later, “observation.”
The empirical reference that characterized Jesuit science in Paraquaria was
at least congruous with that side of Jesuit spirituality embedded in Ignatius’
notion of the “Application of the Senses,” as found in the Spiritual Exercises.11

3 Science and Native Lore on Nature

While emphasis on empeiria was a mark of the rhetoric of Jesuit science in the
missions of Paraquaria, the role of theory was tied to the transactions between
native lore on nature and Jesuit science. The balance that regulated the negoti-
ations between these two bodies of knowledge experienced some fluctuations

11 In the Fifth contemplation of the First day. See Ignatius of Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises,
307–308 [§§ 121–126]. There is a long and complicated history of interpretation of what
Ignatius understood in this pasage for “senses.” Suffice it here to say that Juan de Polanco’s
contribution to the Directory of the Ignatian Exercises (1599) took it that one way of
interpreting the Application of the Senses was that it referred to the “imaginative senses,”
in particular when the Exercises were given to the uninstructed. See Philip Endean, “The
Ignatian Prayer of the Senses,” The Heythrop Journal 31, no. 4 (1990), 395.
316 chapter 6

over the years. The early chroniclers that impelled by an urge to assimilate
the local tongues incorporated long lists of native terms were unintention-
ally encumbering their discourse with the folk taxonomies that those names
of insects, birds, and trees implied. But with the advent of more specialized
authors the actual products of Jesuit science in the missions eventually came
to be impregnated by theory and sought to reproduce the genres of current
scientific writing. Montenegro “Galenized” the native recipes of plants rem-
edies. Falkner formatted the data he gathered from the Tehuelches into maps
to be seen and interpreted by the British educated public. Sánchez Labrador
incorporated much of what he had learned from the Eyiguayeguis about the
creatures of the land to the structure of an encyclopedia of natural history.
This process of embedding segments of native lore on nature into the theo-
retical schemata of Jesuit Baroque learning operated at two levels. Firstly, it
functioned as a safeguard against any magical or “diabolical” contents that the
symbolic representations and practices of the aborigines could harbor. From
the missionaries’ point of view, Western theories served as a sieve to separate
the kind of innocuous empirical knowledge that those theories could accom-
modate (i.e., data about the natural world) from their mythical, non-Christian,
and thus dangerous meanings.
In the second place, theory referred to universality. The universalizing
impulse that characterized the Jesuit missionary enterprise as a whole was also
manifest in Paraquaria. Buenaventura Suárez calculated a lunar calendar that
could be used in any large city of the globe, Sánchez Labrador discussed the
properties of fish in genere using the species of the Chaco, Termeyer aspired
to formulate a theory of the fluid of the electric eel based on his experiences
in San Javier. The Jesuit missionary strategy of inculturation consisted in the
embodiment of the Christian message and way of life into a particular cul-
tural area.12 Inculturation is a twentieth-century theological notion, but the
practice of adapting the Christian teaching to non-Western cultures was a
hallmark of Early Modern Jesuit missionary activity. The practice of Jesuit sci-
ence in Paraguay and Rio de la Plata was part and parcel of this approach that
sought to express the Christian message through the material and symbolic
elements of a given culture. It is not wonder that Jesuit science in Paraquaria

12 Pedro Arrupe S.J., “Carta del P. General sobre la inculturación” (Rome, May 14, 1978),
cited in Klaiber, Los jesuitas en América Latina, 3. For the Jesuit theological notion of
inculturation see the bibliography mentioned by this author and cf. J. W. Olson, Jesuit
Inculturation in the New World. Experiments in Missions of 16th, 17th, and 18th Centuries
(Denver: Outskirts Press, 2008).
A Last Word 317

was marked by the absorption of some elements of aboriginal lore on nature

into the universal current of Early Modern natural philosophy.
But there was a counterpart to this trend. It the course of our inquiry, it
has been remarked once and again that the exchanges between Jesuits and
aboriginal peoples run along a two-way avenue. In particular, the Guaraní
appropriated Western theoretical and technical skills which they used in their
own benefit, as the making of maps which would be used in litigations or the
adoption of medicinal recipes and ways of curing the sick.
The rich and vital Jesuit tradition of research into nature was an integral part
of the broader historical experience of the missions in historical Paraguay. As
such, it expressed the peculiar character that distinguished the cultural experi-
ment that took place in the reductions of Paraquaria. With its aura of Baroque
grandeur against the lush South American scenery, the links of this particular
kind of Jesuit science to the intellectual projects of the Enlightenment proved
unstable. After a late attempt at European acclimatization, it vanished into leg-
end and oblivion.
Appendix
List of Manuscripts Containing Montenegro’s Materia medica
misionera

I Manuscripts with Text and Images

· Madrid, Bib. Nac. MS. 10,314, untitled, 346 pp. and 137 drawings of plants, text divided
in two books (edited by Martín Martín y Valverde in 1995).
· Buenos Aires, AGN, Fondo Biblioteca Nacional number 94, untitled, 458 pp. and 148

drawings of plants (edited by Biblioteca Nacional in 1945 and now lost).
· “Tratado de las plantas del Paraguay y sus virtudes medicinales” (1750?), codex men-
tioned by Demersay (1864, 2:134) (lost).

II Manuscripts with Shortened Versions of the Text and

without Pictures

1 Anonymous

· Rio de Janeiro, Bib. Nac. MS. 1311710, “Curiosidad. Un libro de medicina escrito por
los jesuitas en las Misiones del Paraguay en el año 1580.” Text divided in two books,
230 pp.
· São Leopoldo (Rio Grande do Sul), Instituto Anchietano de Pesquisas, H IV, 528.
Untitled, text divided in two books, 132 fols., 1790.
· Asunción, Biblioteca Nacional de Paraguay, Biblioteca de Solano López, E.S.L. 616.24
M467, “En el tratado de este volumen se refieren las virtudes medicinales de varios
árboles, yerbas y plantas de esta provincia del Paraguay.” Text divided in two books,
xxxvi + 382 pp., copied in Asunción, 1808.
· Montevideo, Biblioteca de la Facultad de Medicina, Universidad de la República.
Untitled, text divided in two books, 195 pp., copied in 1832.
· Providence (Rhode Island), John Carter Brown Library, Codex/Sp/ 36. Untitled, text
divided in two books, 436 pp., 1790.
· London, Wellcome Manuscript Library, MS. Amer. 41, “Noticias de las especies
medicinales recogidas en éste Departamento de San Miguel de la Rivera Oriental
del Uruguay de la Rivera Oriental del Uruguay: explícase sus virtudes, uso para los
efectos de ellas, y modo de composición, y demás que contiene a la inteligencia de
ello,” 11 fols., undated.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004256774_��9

320 appendix

2 Attributed to Sigismund Aperger

· Buenos Aires, AGN, Fondo Biblioteca Nacional, number 28, “Apuntes de varias cosas
pertenecientes a esta provincia (del Paraguay), sacadas del P. S. Asperger, famoso
medico ex-jesuita de estas Misiones del Uruguay y de D. Félix de Azara.” Text
divided in two books, the chapters abstracted from Montenegro’s materia medica
in pp. 1–185, copied 1805.
· “Tratado de las yerbas y sus raices . . . Misiones, por el P. Sigismundo Gur . . . r,” codex
D in Arata’s list, 63 pp. (lost).
· Codex C in Arata’s list, copied in 1872 from an undated copy in possession of José M.
Gutierrez, 63 plants (lost).
· Codex mentioned by Rafael Schiaffino as belonging to Dr. Luis E. Mignone from
Paraguay (lost).
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Index

Abbeville, Claude de, O.F.M. 284n123 agrarian academies, in 18th century

Abbeville, Nicolas Sanson de 170 Italy 263–264, 276. See also Societas
Abipones 9, 18, 26, 61–63, 65–67, 101, 103, 112, Georgica Tarquiniensis
140–41, 176n42, 185–86 aguaribay, balm of 97, 152, 156
aboriginal Aguilar, José de 249
artists 74n219, 76 Alcalá Galiano, Dionisio 307n231
astronomy (see astronomy: aboriginal) Alcedo, Antonio 266
herbal and plant lore 134–138; 142; Aldini, Giovanni 293
159 (see also herbal remedies; herbs; Aldrovandi, Ulisse 39n50,41, 83n251, 84n255,
ethnobotany) 86
languages Alfaro, Diego de, S.J. 16
Jesuit treatises on 48–50 Alfaro, Francisco de 14, 15
pronunciation of native names  Allamand, J. N. S. 286n132
53–54 Allentiak 49
use of native names of plants and Almeida, Manoel de, S.J. 283
animals by Jesuits 48, 53–55, Altamirano, Cristóbal de, S.J. 109, 147
79 Altamirano, Diego Francisco de, S.J. 42
legends 56, 59, 60, 62, 63, 71, 72n204, Altamirano, Lope Luis, S.J. 19, 185, 197
78–79, 129–130 Altamirano, Pedro Ignacio de, S.J. 178
medicine (see medicine: aboriginal) Alvear, Diego de 224n58, 243
music (see music: native musicians and Alzate, José Antonio 90
orchestras) Ameridians. See aboriginal peoples
peoples. See under individual names of Amiot, Joseph, S.J. 283
people Anchieta, José de, S.J. 48
Jesuit views on 47, 56 Andrés, Juan, S.J. 281
lists of 41 angels 69, 87–88
peopling of the American continent animals. See under individual names of
68–69 arrival into the New World 68–69
skin, color of 69 aquatic
See also Chaco: native peoples definition 76
See also reductions fantastic and legendary 58–59
Academy of sciences aò 63
Paris 2n3, 228, 288, 301, 303 caruguá 63
St. Petersburg 283, 303 jaguará 63
Swedish 257 mermaids 37, 72n204
Acosta, José de 1, 41 micurén 58
Natural and Moral History of the New sú (succarath) 58
World 30–31, 41, 48n90, 84 quadrupeds 26, 27, 44, 46, 54, 87
Acquaviva, Claudio, S.J. 13, 81n242 in Clavigero 92
Adam 46, 54, 69. See also Bible: Book of in Jolís 78
Genesis in Sánchez Labrador 76–77
Adamo, Enrique, S.J. 106–107 See also Aristotle: books on animals; bees;
Adanson, Michel 286 birds; encyclopedias: on animals; fish;
Aepinus, Franz 291 insects; serpents; species
366
Anson, George 176
anta. See tapir
antidotaria. See antidotes
antidotes 45, 62, 72, 102n27, 112, 137, 143, 157,
159, 281
Anville, Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon de 164,
173, 181–83, 192, 208–209
Aperger, Sigismund, S.J. 3, 99, 113, 151, 160
life 107n63, 115–117
critique of manuscript attribution 97,
117–119, 123–126, 320
Tratado breve de medicina 118, 141–147,
158, 159, 163
Apóstoles, reduction of 16, 107n63, 109, 114,
116, 150, 224
Arapizandú (cacique) 15n32
Arata, Pedro 117–118, 122, 124, 131, 145,
151–152
Araucanos 49, 212, 218n27, 219
Arce, José de, S.J. 189, 191, 205
Aretaeus 141
Aristotle 31, 83, 215, 248, 310
works on animals 27, 39
See also natural philosophy: Aristotelian
Arnau de Vilanova 141, 143
art. See aboriginal: artists; Baroque: art and
architecture; Guaraní: artists and artisans
assistancy, Jesuit
German 163
Portuguese 14, 247
Spanish 14, 247
astrolabe 178, 188
astrology 188, 216, 231, 232n101
medical 146n281, 159
astronomers
European. See under individual names of
Jesuits in Iberian America 214–219 (see
also Capassi; Mascardi; Panigay; Soares;
Suárez)
astronomy
aboriginal 211, 255–256 (see also eclipses:
Guaraní interpretation; stars: in
aboriginal astronomy)
as missionary practice 166, 211
Jesuit 6, 187, 188, 230–231, 243–244
teaching in Córdoba of 247–250
See also astrolabe; astronomers; comets;
eclipses; instruments; observatories;
quadrants; stars; sundials; telescopes
Astudillo, José Ignacio, S.J. 224
index
Asunción 12, 14, 15, 16, 53, 68, 108, 116, 121, 126,
147, 167, 186–187, 191n100, 204, 225n30, 227
Jesuit College of 14, 68, 102, 107n63, 225,
251
Audiencia of Charcas 14
Augustine 41
Aula da Esfera, in Colégio de Santo Antão
177, 215
autopsia 62, 66, 90, 192, 310
autos, in the reductions 47, See also theater.
Aveiro y Arcos, Countess of 217
aymara 49
Aymerich, Mateo, S.J. 249
Azara, Félix de 97, 124, 146, 257
criticism of Jesuits 226n76, 227n84, 312
Essai sur l’histoire naturelle des
quadrupèdes 40n53, 53–54
maps 190–191
Voyages dans l’Amérique méridionale
26–27, 190
See also Buffon: Azara’s criticism of
Azara, Nicolás de 26n6, 27, 189, 268, 273,
276, 281, 308
Azevedo Coutinho, António de 198
Bacon, Francis 82
Bajon, Bertrand 288
Bancroft, Edward 286
bandeirantes 13n21, 15, 16, 18, 19
Barberi, Pompeo 274
Barco Centenera, Martín del 58, 59
Baroque 47, 317
art and architecture in the reductions 21,
23
and Jesuit culture 27, 90, 316
music and theater 2, 4, 87
natural histories of Paraquaria 1–2, 80, 94
science 4, 57, 58n134
Barreda, José, S.J. 19, 197
Barzana, Alonso de, S.J. 49
Basauri, Diego, S.J. 147
Bauhin, Gaspard 127
Bay of Camarones 181, 208
Bay of San Julián 180, 181, 182, 183
Beauharnais, Eugène de 282
Beauharnais, Josephine de 281
Beccaria, Giambattista 291
bees, native names of 25, 27n10, 41
Belén, Nuestra Señora de, reduction of 68,
190
index 367

Bellin, Jacques-Nicolas iv, 183, 184, 189, 192, in Jesuit pharmacies 110–111

198 in the libraries of the reductions 3n4
Berger, Louis, S.J. 24 of mathematics and astronomy in
Bernoulli, Daniel 303 Paraquaria 188n87, 247
Bertholon, Pierre 294 of physics and natural philosophy in
Bertoni, Ludovico, S.J. 49 Córdoba 249, 251
Bertonio, Giovanni Luigi. See Bertoni, Borbón, Felipe 158
Ludovico Borghese, Marcantonio 273
bestiaries 41 Boroa, Diego de, S.J. 105
Betschon, Anton, S.J. 116 Boscovich, Roger, S.J. 249
Bettini, Francesco 277 and Alonso Frías 296, 298, 299, 306–307
bezoar stone 157 in Brera 297–298
Bianchini, Francesco, S.J. 244 Botanical garden
Bible Mexico 91
Book of Genesis 25, 36n41, 39–40, 46, 54, of the Queen of Portugal 274
78, 269 Rome 276
narrative of the Flood 36, 69 botany
Biondo, Flavio 82n247 analogy between plants and animals 270
Bird, John 302 botanici and botanophili 44, 52, 79, 278
birds classification 38
Azara’s book on 26, 53 identification of plants in
ethnoclassification 93 Dobrizhoffer 91
herons 74 medical (see drugs; herbal remedies;
in Dobrizhoffer 44, 46 herbs; materia medica)
in Jolís 44 in eighteenth-century Rome 262–266,
in Paucke 37, 43, 64, 65, 67 276–278
in Sánchez Labrador 70–71, 73–74 in eighteenth-century Spain 266–268
Lozano’s lists of 43 in the Renaissance 94
macaguá 94, 129–130 works on exotic flora by Jesuit
muitú 74 missionaries 275
parrots 37, 42, 43, 66, 171 See also Cavanilles; ethnobotany; Gilli;
partridges 74 herbs; herbal remedies; Juárez;
woodpecker (apecu) 73 Linnaeus; Majoli; Montenegro; plants;
See also hummingbird; ñandú; penguin trees
Blaeu, Willem J. 169 boticas. See pharmacies
bloodletting 128, 139, 143, 146n281, 159, 235 Bougainville, Louis Antoine de 209
Bodin, Jean 82 Bouger, Pierre 301
Bolaños, Luis de, O.F.M. 9 Bovio, Giuseppe, S.J. 297
Bolivia 8, 9, 14, 17, 40n53, 167, 184, 190, 218, Boyle, Robert 70
294, Boym, Michal, S.J. 275
Bologna 52, 189, 219, 244 Bradley, James 239
Bonaparte, Napoleon 276, 282, 283, 292 Brera, observatory of 296–300, 306, 307n231.
Bonelli, Giorgio 276 Bressanelli, Giuseppe, S.J. 21, 114
Bonnet, Charles 270 Brigniel, Joseph, S.J. 49
Bonpland, Aimé 202, 203, 293 Brisson, Mathurin-Jacques 78
Bontius, Jacobus 51, 125, 127, 132 Brown, Thomas, S.J. 107n63
books Bucalemu 213, 214, 219
edited in the reductions 24, 48, 116n116, Buenos Aires
232 bishopric of 16
in Guaraní 24, 48, 148–150 cartography 196, 207, 208
368
city of 14, 17, 18, 113, 117, 119, 146n277, 154,
167, 171, 176, 254
chart by Quiroga 183
coordinates 184
Jesuit College of 14, 72, 109, 237, 259
port of 86n263, 179, 180, 190
province of 184, 194, 275
reductions 154, 176
Buffon, comte de (George-Louis Leclerc) 8,
29, 40n53, 52
Azara’s criticism of 54
classification of animals 78, 79
Histoire naturelle and natural history  expeditions to Patagonia by land
26–28, 36, 38, 41, 55, 88, 90
inferiority of the New World and polemics
with Jesuits 34, 38, 44, 52, 91–92, 260,
312
species, notion of 76, 78, 80n238
See also dispute of the New World; Jolís:
criticism of Buffon
Burgés, Francisco, S.J. 248
Burriel, Andrés Marcos, S.J. 249
Caazapá-miní, battle of 16
Cabeo, Niccolò, S.J. 290
Cabral, Gregorio, S.J. 131
Cabrera de Córdoba, Luis 84
Cádiz 279
Observatory and quadrant of 296,
300–307
Cadogan, León 161, 255
California 41, 192, 217
Calvo, Juan 159
Camaño, Joaquín, S.J. 49, 308, 313
criticism of Quiroga 174, 186, 192, 261n10,
313
map of the Chaco 167, 169
Campanella, Tommaso, O.P. 8
Campos, Manuel de, S.J.
buying of astronomical instruments  Theorica das marés 251–252, 257
177–179, 228, 232, 239n134
éloge by Castro Sarmento 252
life and works 178
sending of a map of Brazil 246
Candelaria, reduction of 16, 109, 147, 223n51,
224n58, 225, 227,
Cangapol (cacique) 176, 207–209
Capassi, Domenico, S.J. 198, 243–246
Caraffa, Vincenzo, S.J. 1, 169, 174, 181
index
Carbone, Giovanni Battista, S. J. 198,
243–245
Cárdenas, Bernardino de, O.F.M. (bishop of
Paraguay) 11, 12n20
Cardiel, José, S.J. 167, 253, 254, 280, 308
and medicine in the missions 100,
104–105, 138–139
attitudes in face of the treaty of 1750 185,
196–197
cartography 169, 195–196, 197, 199, 200,
203, 204n134, 207
expedition of 1746 176, 179–181,
 
194–195, 207
foundation of a reduction in Buenos
Aires 154
Cardim, Fernão, S.J. 81, 284
Cartesianism, in Jesuit schools 3, 248–249,
251, 252
in Riva’s course 250
cartographers 3
Dutch 169–170; 189
French (see Anville, Bellin)
Jesuit 164–165 (see also Camaño; Cardiel;
Charlevoix; Chomé; Dávila; Du Halde;
Falkner; Kino; Panigay; Quiroga;
Rechberg; Suárez)
See also Kitchin
cartography. See cartographers; maps
Carvajal y Lancaster, José de 19, 184
Carvalho e Melho, Sebastião de. See Pombal,
Marquis of
Casali, Antonio (Cardinal) 273
Castañares, Agustín, S.J. 191
Castro, Manuel José de (Count of
Monsanto) 252
Castro Sarmento, Jacob de
communication of Suárez’s papers to the
Royal Society 238–242, 244
Cataldini, Giuseppe, S.J. 15
Catherine the Great (Empress) 281
Cattaneo, Gaetano, S.J. 116
Cavanilles, José de 124, 267–268
Cavendish, Henry 288, 294
Caybaté, battle of 197
Celsius, Anders 229
Cerdá, Tomás, S.J. 249
Cervantes, Vicente 91
index 369

Cesena 50 College of Santo Antão (Lisbon) 177, 215,

Chaco 2, 66 244–245
flora and fauna 25, 36, 41, 79, 95, 129, College of San Pablo (Lima) 81, 157
279, 316 Collegium Romanum 57, 86, 96, 212, 263,
Jesuit exploration of 68, 166, 167, 285, 274
169n21 Colonia del Sacramento 18, 115, 245n162, 246
maps of 167, 168, 172, 204, Colorado River 207, 208
native peoples of the 9, 26, 36, 41–42,78, comets 1, 166, 211, 305
92, 161 controversy between Kino and Sigüenza y
reductions in the 17, 18, 32, 33, 61, 243, Góngora 216–218
259, 261 Early Modern meaning and
chain of being 38, 76, 78 interpretation 215–216
Charles III (king of Spain) 10, 19, 26n6, 197, observed by Mascardi 213–214, 216, 218,
249, 259, 260, 280, 281 220, 222
Charlevoix, Pierre-François-Xavier, observed by Suárez 225n72, 237–238,
S.J. 31n25, 183, 184n74, 264 241–242
Charrúas 17, 138, 185 of 1664–1665 214–215
chicha 155 of 1743–1744 238, 242
Chifflet, Jean-Jacques 97 comuneros, revolt of 11, 12n20, 104n46, 116
Chiloé 212, 213, 216, 220, 221 Concepción, reduction of 16, 111n85, 117, 137,
Chiquitos 138, 202, 205, 254
people and language 38, 150, 171, 269 Concepción, Nuestra Señora de la, reduction
reductions 9, 17, 24, 68, 73, 107, 158, 166, of, 176
197, 243, 254 “Conquest of the Desert” 85
route to the 190–191, 206 Congregations, Jesuit 187, 248
Chomé, Ignace, S.J. 166, 191, 197 Fifth General (1593–1594) 48
chorography 36, 38, 68, 69–70, 82, 167, 172 15th General (1706) 248
Christianization 61, 176, 201. See also 16th General (1730–1731) 249
evangelization 17th General (1751) 249
cinchona. See quina 16th Provincial of Paraquaria (1763) 187,
City of the Caesars 194, 207, 212, 220 188
classification, of living beings. See taxonomy Congregation of the Virgin (Guaraní
Clavigero, Francisco Xavier, S.J. 34, 51–52, 53, sodality) 105
92, 261, 274 Copernicanism
Clavius, Christopher, S.J. 188n87, 219, 247 in Grammatici 253
Clement XIV (Pope) 10, 26n6, 155, 260 in Riva’s course 250
Clemente 137, 138, 160 in Suárez 257
clocks 115, 166, 177, 178, 179, 188, 226, 228n85, Córdoba 10, 13, 17, 18, 23, 55, 65, 72, 110, 111,
236, 241, 253. See also sundials. 114, 116, 147, 150, 154, 156, 190, 209, 235, 254,
Clossey, Luke 259, 261, 265, 274, 279, 296
Cobo, Bernabé, S.J. 81, 284 Jesuit College of (see University of
Coco, José, S.J. See Tolo, José 202 Córdoba)
Colegio Imperial (Madrid) 57, 178, 188, library of (see books: of physics and
230n92, natural philosophy in Córdoba)
Colegio Máximo (Córdoba). See University of pharmacy (see pharmacies: in Córdoba)
Córdoba Corrientes 14n28, 18, 65, 120, 184, 205, 233,
Coleridge, Sara 84 254n205
Colleges, Jesuit (in Paraquaria). See under Jesuit College of 223, 225, 241
name of city Cortés, Gerónimo 232
370 index

cotiguazú 20, 22 dysentery 156
crocodile. See yacaré empeyne (tinea/lichen planus) 144, 145
Cruz, António da 158 morbus Gallicus (syphilis) 136, 159
Cruz, Sor Juana Inés de la 217 rosa 145
Cueva, Hernando de la 15n32 See also epidemics
Cunha, Luis da 244 dispute of the New World 34–35, 38, 44,
curiositas 314 53–55, 260
curuzuya 137, 138, 139, 149, 160, 163. See also Dobrizhoffer, Martin, S.J. 35, 48, 49, 50, 52,
epidemics 72, 274–275
Cunninghame Graham, Robert 46 as seen by Southey 46–47
Cuzco 41 cartography 190–192
De abiponibus 26, 32, 37, 87, 85, 265
da Cruz, Antonio 159 ethnography 30n20
D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond 5 his natural history 43–44, 62–67, 87,
Daléchamp, Jacques 83 90–91, 311
Dalhammer, Rupert, S.J. 107n63, 108 life 61–62, 259
Darwin, Charles 85 medicine and medical botany 45n78,
Dattilo, Hipólito, S.J. 205 99–100, 102, 112, 139–140, 152
Dávila, Juan Francisco, S.J. 171, 174, 196, 201, Doppelmayr, Johann 229
204n134 Doria, Giuseppe (Cardinal) 272, 273, 277
Daza, Antonio, O.F.M. 41n60 Doria Pamphili, Andrea (Prince) 273, 304,
Daza Chacón, Diniosio 158 307
de Blende, Bartolomé, S.J. 191 Doria Pamphili, Antonio Maria
Dechales, Claude Francois Milliet, S.J. 188 (Cardinal) 272n62
De Cesaris, Angelo 297–300, 307n231 drugs, medicinal
de Coninck, Juan Ramon, S.J. 218, 222, 231 from the New World used in
de Laet, Johannes 51 Europe 96–98,
Delisle, Joseph-Nicolas 229, 230, 231, 241, 243 from the New World in Jesuit pharmacies
della Porta, Giambattista 79 97, 110–112,
Demersay, Alfred 119 and home-remedies used in the
De Pauw, Cornelius reductions 99, 101, 112–113
Recherches philosophiques sur les See also herbal remedies; herbs, medicinal;
Américains 34, 52, 91, 260, 312 materia medica; trees: medicinal
Desamparados, Nuestra Señora de los, Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste, S.J. 174, 275
reduction of 176 Du Toict, Nicolas. See Techo, Nicolás del
Díaz de Guzmán, Ruy 59
Dictionnaire de Trévoux 82, 83 eclipses, of Sun and Moon 211, 213, 257
Diderot, Denis 8n12, 150 Guaraní interpretation 255
Dillenius, Johann Jacob 275 observed by Frías 303
Dioscorides 144 observed by Mascardi 218–219, 220, 222
Laguna’s commentary on 126, 129–132, observed by Suárez 223– 225, 226n73,
134, 159, 160 227, 229n92, 234, 236, 237, 240–242,
discourse 313
articulation of medical and natural prediction of 230, 232n104, 233
historical 45, 45n78 used by Riccioli to calculate
on nature in Paraquaria 27, 45, 80, 83, 95, longitude 219
278, 310, 316 Eden 43, 46, 47, 54. See also Adam; Bible:
diseases Book of Genesis
ahítos (indigestion) 144 Éder, Ferenc Xáver, S.J. 294–295
index
electric fish
described by Jesuits 283–285
electric eel, eighteenth-century
experiments on 287–288
torpedo 286–287
See also Termeyer
electricity
electrical fluids 292
electrostatic
discharge and electric fish 286–288
theories of 291
galvanism 292–294
See also Cavendish; Termeyer; Volta
Elke, Unger 49
encomienda 14, 15, 19, 48
encyclopedias
and medical dictionaries used as
sources 66n181, 70, 124n157, 150–151
medieval 27n13, 41
on animals 31, 39n50, 41, 83n251, 84n255
used as sources by Sánchez Labrador
See also Sánchez Labrador; Pliny
encyclopedic writing, Jesuit 30, 33, 50
Encyclopédie 5, 50
Enlightenment
Catholic 30n20, 60, 89n278,
critique of Jesuit legends in
Paraquaria 60, 102, 129
science and thought 1, 2, 27–28, 90, 94,
191, 217, 240, 260n5, 312
sympathetic view of (by individual Jesuits
in Paraquaria) 71, 88–89, 102
versus Baroque in Paraquaria 90, 94, 317
See also Feijóo; Sánchez Labrador:
critique and Enlightenement;
philosophes; reductions: as seen in the
Enlightenement; skepticism
Ensenada, Marquis of the 188, 300
Ephemerides 178, 179, 231, 232n104
epidemics, in the reductions 10, 163
administration of sacraments in 101,
103, 104
and Guaraní acceptation of reduction
life 20, 103
death toll in Guaraní reductions  See also City of the Caesars; missionary
103–104
Jesuit causal theories of 100n18, 102
Guaraní curuzuya 104, 139
measles 103, 104, 105
371
remedies and healing measures used by
Jesuits 101–105, 139–140
smallpox 101–105, 112, 115, 139, 225
Escandón, Juan de, S.J. 186
estancias, Jesuit 163, 192,196
as units of economic production 10, 17,
19, 202
maps of 192, 202–203, 205–206
in the reductions 22
Santa Catalina (Córdoba) 55, 110
See also vaquerías
Esteyneffer, Juan. See Steinhöffer
ethnobotany 92n286, 93n287, 148, 156n338,
159–160, 356n357, 161–162
Euclid 187–188, 247
evangelization 3, 192, 201, 314–315. See also
Christianization
exiled Jesuits from Spanish America
cultural and scientific production
of 2–3, 13, 29–34, 52, 68, 84, 91,
152–153, 174, 259–261, 264–265, 281,
307–309
pensions and patronage 61, 260, 261, 266,
277, 283, 298, 307, 308
tensions in the community 175, 261
See also Frías; Juárez; Termeyer
Eximeno, Antonio, S.J. 304
expeditions 209
British (see Anson)
French (see Bougainville; Feuillée; Frézier;
La Condamine)
Jesuit
Chaco (see Chaco: Jesuit exploration
of)
Chiquitos (see Chiquitos: route to the;
Sánchez Labrador: cartography and
exploration)
coastal exploration of
Patagonia 179–185
Pampas and Patagonia (inland) 154,
194–196, 207–210, 212
Paraguay River and Mato Grosso 185–
187 189–194, 197–198
Pilcomayo River 167
expeditions to Buenos Aires
Spanish
botanical 90–91, 267, 301
Pizarro 176
372
sent by Vértiz 85
See also Malaspina
experience
as warrant of an empirical claim
in Dobrizhoffer 72
in Jolís 78–79
in Lozano 57
in Montenegro 127, 129, 130, 136
in Sánchez Labrador 71, 73–74
epistemological value of 310–314
See also autopsia; experiments
experiments
and trials by Paucke 43, 62–63, 66, 67
carried out by Mascardi in Chile 221
medieval and Early Modern notion of 311
on botany carried out by Juárez and
Gilii 271
performed by Termeyer on electric
eels 290–292
See also experience; Redi; Termeyer
exploration, Jesuit 1, 10, 154, 164–165, 183,
206, 209. See also expeditions
expulsion of Jesuits from Paraquaria 10, 13,
26n6, 117, 259–260, 280
inventories of state left 110, 227
See also Azara, Nicolás; Charles III;
Floridablanca; Pombal
Eyiguayeguis. See Mbayás
Fábrega, José Lino, S.J. 274
Fabri, Honoré, S.J. 96, 97n4
Faenza 13, 33, 260, 262, 280, 296,
Falkner, Thomas, S.J. 99
as explorer and cartographer of
Patagonia 167, 176n41, 207–210, 316
Description of Patagonia and natural
history 33, 37–38, 49, 274
reception of the work 85–86
life before entering the Society 153–155,
236
medical practice and materia medica  Fuchs, Leonhart 27
105, 107n63, 147, 150–157
missions in the Pampas 194
paleontological findings 85n260
Farfán, Agustín, O.S.A. 125, 142, 143, 158, 159,
161
Favian, Alexander 285
Febrés, Andrés, S.J. 49
index
Feijóo, Benito, O.S.B. 60, 68, 71, 89, 250–51,
285
Ferdinand VI (king of Spain) 19, 184, 300
Ferguson, James 251
Fernandes, António, S.J. 283
Fernández de Oviedo, Gonzalo 30–31, 41,
84, 284
Feuillée, Louis, O.M. 44n77
Fields, Thomas, S.J. 13
fish
in Dobrizhoffer 44, 45, 66
in Guevara 37
in Lozano 36n41, 41–42, 56
in Paucke 63, 65, 67
in Quiroga 186
in Sánchez Labrador 72–74, 316
lists of 41–42
mbuzú 66
See also electric fish
Flora Peruviana et Chilensis 308, 266,
Prodromus 267–268
See also Juárez; Pavón; Ruiz
Flores, Manuel de 185
Floridablanca, Count of 281, 304, 308
Fonseca, Joaquín Félix da 243
Font, Esteban, S.J. 107n63, 108
Franceschelli, Ferdinando 184
Franklin, Benjamin 286, 290, 291
Frazer, James G. 85
Frézier, Amédée-François 175, 176n40, 179, 274
Frías, Alonso, S.J. 3, 261
astronomical papers 299
determination of the errors of the Cádiz
quadrant 305–306
determination of the longitude and
latitude of Cádiz 302–303
life in Italy 189, 296–297, 298, 299–300
mémoires on the fixed stars 305
See also Boscovich; Brera
Fritz, Samuel, S.J. 164, 201n127
Funes, Ambrosio 262, 264, 265, 266, 296,
Funes, Gregorio 262
Furlong, Guillermo, S.J.
his approach to Jesuit history in
Paraquaria 6
Jesuit cartography in the Río de la Plata 
165, 166, 169, 171, 173, 184, 202, 205, 246n165
index
attribution to Juárez of notes in the
Raccolta di alberi 262n14
on the manuscripts attributed to Aperger
117
on the articles of the Effemeridi 299
on the author of the Libro de cirugía 158
Galen 140, 141. See also humoral theory
Galenization of native medicine 134,
136–137
Galvani, Luigi 292, 293n161. See also
electricity
García, Francisco, S.J. 18n43
Garden, Alexander 287
gardens, Roman 265, 266, 313.
Villa Borghese 273, 274, 277
Villa Pamphili-Doria 273, 277
See also Orto Vaticano Indico
Gardini, Francesco Giuseppe 294
Garriga, Antonio, S.J. 131
Garvía, Diego de, S.J. 175n38
Garzón Maceda, Félix 116n112, 158
Geoffroy, Étienne François 150
Gerra, Domenico, S.J. 297
Gesner, Conrad 27, 39n50, 41
Ghisleri, Antonio 231
Gilii, Filippo Luigi 268
and Roman science 263–264, 276–278
collaboration with Juárez 265–266
Osservazioni 268, 269–275
Gilii, Filippo Salvatore, S.J.
Saggio di storia Americana 35, 262n15
Gobernación of Paraguay and Río de la
Plata 13n24, 14, 38, 42, 259
Gobernación of Tucumán 13n23, 38, 259
Godhino, Nicolau, S.J. 283
Godin, Louis 301, 303,
Gómez de Vidaurre, Felipe, S.J. 34
Gómez Ortega, Casimiro 268n42
González, Diego, S.J. 204n134
González, Silvestre, S.J. 189
González, Tirso, S.J. 177
González de Santa Cruz, Roque, S.J. 15n33,
16, 139
González Holguín, Diego, S.J. 49
Grammatici, Nicasius, S.J. 228, 229, 230, 231,
236, 242, 252, 253, 257,
Gregory XIII (Pope) 105
373
Grimaldi, Duke of 280
Grimaldi, Franceso, S.J. 219
Groussac, Paul 32n27
guaiacum 98, 114n101, 129, 156,
Guaraní
artists and artisans 23, 94, 95, 134
cartography 202, 204–206
healers 138–141
language 48
makers of astronomical instruments
253–256
militias 12, 13n21, 16, 18, 104n46, 114, 116,
129, 245
myths 59–60, 211, 255, 316
native and Western herbal lore 134–138;
148–150
women 19, 22, 101
See also aboriginal; books: in Guaraní;
Congregation of the Virgin; cotiguazú;
curuzuya; eclipses: Guaraní
interpretation; ethnobotany; opygua;
Pojha ñaña; reductions; shamans; Tupí
Guarayos 17
Guayanás 17n42
Guayaquí 38
Guaycurú 9, 16, 18, 32, 68, 92n286, 94, 95,
114, 129, 206. See also Abipones; Mbyás;
Mocoví; Tobas
Guayrá 14, 15, 191
Guerriero, Adán Enrique, S.J. See Adamo,
Enrique
Guevara, José, S.J. 27, 31, 32n27, 35, 37, 38,
46, 80, 151, 235n114
Gumilla, José, S.J. 30n20, 35, 86
map in El Orinoco Ilustrado 171n26,
201n27
electric eels 284, 289
Gusmão, Alexandre de 19, 198
Gutiérrez, Blas, S.J. 106, 109
Gutiérrez, José María 124
Gutiérrez de la Concha, Juan 307n231
Haenke, Thaddaeus 40n53, 146
Harris, John 83
herbal remedies
ajenjo póntico 151
altócigo 137
anguay (ibirá-payé) 120n136, 136, 147n284
374 index

aristoloquia 136, 144 See also drugs; Guaraní: native and

artemisa 132 western herbal lore; herbal remedies;
arrayán (myrtle) 134, 147n284 trees: medicinal
batatilla de Don Antonio 123n152, 137 Hernandarias 14
bledos 131 Hernández, Francisco 50, 57, 64n164, 71
caá-isí (balm of) 155, 156n340 Herrán, Jerónimo, S.J. 166, 173, 176n42
calaminta menor 138 Herrera, Antonio de 189
calamus aromaticus 156 Herschel, William 305
camalea (achicoria) 138 Hervás, Francisco, S.J. 189, 191n100
cañafistola (cassia fistula) 98, 129, 186 Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo, S.J. 50, 264, 274,
contrayerba 123n152, 156 280, 299
culén 150, 156–157, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275 Hevelius, Johannes 213n8, 215, 303n211
dragon’s blood 156, 186, Heyrle, Thomas, S.J. 107n63, 108
énula 132, 133 Hidalgo de Agüero, Bartolomé 143
esquinanto (schynant) 121, 126, 156 Hill, John 262
estoraque (storax) 136 Hippocrates 140, 141
eupatorio 132 historia (genre of writing) 40, 81–84
galanga 111, 129 Historia naturalis Brasiliae. See Markgraf;
guayabas 129, 271 Piso
gum elemi 131, 136 Horsky, Wenceslas, S.J. 107n63, 108
gum isica 111, 147n284, 156 horticulture, in Guaraní reductions 33n31,
ipecacuanha (ipecac) 98, 110, 151 43, 64, 145, 280
lepidio 130 hospital
macaguá caá (yerba del charrúa) 129 in the reductions 104–105
mastuerzo 137–138 Madrid 107, 113
orozú (licorice) 111, 129, 130 of the Holy Ghost (Lima) 214
pepper 101, 113, 131, 132 St. Thomas (London) 153
raíz de la China 123n152, 132 Huarpes 49
senna 151 Huennee 209
tusílago 129 Humboldt, Alexander von 164, 293
virga aurea 138 hummingbird 46, 59–60, 71
virreina salvaje 138 humoral theory 102, 126, 136, 160, 270
yerba de la víbora 123n152, 137 Hunter, John 288, 289, 295n170
yerba del palo 111 hunting 58, 64, 67, 73, 93n286, 235
See also aguaribay; drugs; guaiacum;
Guaraní: native and western herbal Ignatius of Loyola, St. 57
lore; herbs; palo santo; quina; sassafrás; Spiritual Exercises 39, 87, 315
tobacco; trees: medicinal Illustration, Catholic. See under
herbals, Jesuit Enlightenment
manuscripts in Paraquaria 117–126, Ingenhousz, Jan 287
319–320 Ingolstadt 231, 242, 253
See also Aperger; Montenegro; Pojha Inquisition, Spanish 232, 238, 250
ñaña insects
herbs, medicinal and Termeyer 44, 52, 281, 316
in Guevara’s natural history 37, 151 cochineal insect 62
in Sánchez Labrador’s Paraguay wasps 41, 72
Natural 150–151 See also bees; metamorphosis
list by Buenaventura Suárez 151, 235 instruments, astronomical and cartographic
used by Falkner 155–157 244, 253, 263, 305
index
bought in Spain by Rico 177–179, 228,
232, 252
built and used by Mascardi 212, 221
constructed by Suárez 226–228
in Brera 297
in Termeyer´s cabinet
used by Jesuits in Paraquaria 166–167,
192, 209, 224, 226
See also astrolabe; Cádiz; Campos:
buying of astronomical instruments;
Frías; quadrants; Guaraní: makers of
astronomical instruments; Suárez;
sundials; telescopes;
Isistines 18n45
Itapúa, reduction of 16, 116, 131, 205, 223n51,
224, 225, 237, 243
Itatín 16, 243
Iturri, Francico Javier, S.J. 264, 265, 266
Jesuit colleges in Paraquaria. See under name
of city
jaguar 46, 63, 94, 113,171, 255
James, Robert 150
Jaurú River 185
Jenig, Joseph, S.J. 107n63, 108
Jesuit missionaries in Paraquaria. See under
individual name of
daily activities of the Fathers in a
reduction 23
proportion of non-Spanish 7
See also martyrs; mission
Jesuit science 2, 5
historiographic approaches to 4
in China 6, 71, 230, 252, 275
in the Far East compared to
Paraguay 157, 192, 204, 211
Jesús, reduction of 17, 202–203, 205, 254
Jiménez, Bartolomé, S.J. 115, 189
João V (king of Portugal) 19, 19 8, 240, 243,
244
Johnson, Samuel 153
Jolís, José, S.J. 80, 230, 261, 307, 308
classification of plants 39, 52n109, 91,
278
criticism of Buffon 44, 51–52, 53, 79–80
Saggio and natural history 33–35, 38, 88,
167–168, 265
Jonston, John 83n251
Juan, Jorge 188, 301, 302, 303
375
Juárez, Gaspar, S.J. 3, 261
botanical activity in Rome 265, 275–279
his edition of Flora Peruviana 266–268
his natural history 264–266
life 261–262, 268
Osservazioni Fitologiche 269–275
See also Orto Vaticano Indico
Juli 9, 218
Kaempfer, Engelbert 290–291
Kamel, Georg Joseph, S.J. 275
Kaunitz, Prince of 298
Keill, John 251
Kino, Eusebio Francisco, S.J. 164, 201n127
polemic with Sigüenza 216–218
Kirch, Christfried 229
Kircher, Athanasius, S.J. 57–58, 71, 96,
212–224, 285, 312
museum in Rome 86
Kitchin, Thomas 209
Knogler, Julian, S.J. 17n41
Kögler, Ignaz, S.J. 229, 230–231, 244
Kornmayr, Peter, S.J. 107n63, 108
Kramer, Carolus, S.J. 108
Kraus, Johann, S.J. 106
Kühn, Eusebius Franz, S.J. See Kino
La Condamine, Charles Marie de 44n77, 91,
260, 312
La Cruz, reduction of 16, 206, 254
La Hire, Philippe de 179, 230, 231, 234,
303n211
Lacaille, Nicolas Louis 303
Lafone Quevedo, Samuel A. 49
Lagrange, Luigi 297
Laguna, Andrés. See Dioscorides
Lamas, Andrés 32n26
Lana de Terzi, Francesco, S.J. 63
Larrañaga, Dámaso 40n53, 118, 124n154
Leeuwenhoek, Anton van 271
legends 73–74, 283. See also aboriginal:
legends; animals: fantastic and legendary;
Enlightenment: critique of Jesuit legends;
races; serpents: monstrous and fabulous;
trees: fabulous
Leite, Serafim, S.J. 247
Lenguas 186
Leonicenus, Niccolò 127n172
Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, Archduke 97
376
Le Roy, Jean-Baptiste 288
Lettres édifiantes 104, 173, 199, 275
libraries, in Paraquaria 3, 187–188, 251. See
also books
Libro de cirugía 157–159
Lima 81, 106, 111, 157, 175, 214, 218, 219, 230,
231, 242, 257, 284
Linnaeus 25, 28, 29, 40n53, 44, 51–52, 54–55,
78–79, 88–90, 118, 269, 270, 275, 284n119,
295
resistance to his nomenclature in New
Spain 90
Lisbon 169, 177, 178, 179, 196, 215, 228, 232,
244, 246, 247, 273,
lists
alphabetical 46
as a principle of textual
organization 40–41
“lexical” 46
used by Jesuit missionaries in
Paraquaria 41, 45
See also aboriginal peoples: lists; birds:
Lozano’s lists of; fish: lists of, herbs:
list by Buenaventura Suárez; trees:
lists of
Litterae annuae of Paraquaria 55, 102, 109
Lizardi, Julián de, S.J. 115
London 153, 178, 209, 230, 235, 237, 238, 241,
242, 244, 257, 287
Longitude, measurement of 166, 174, 181, 182,
183, 186, 197, 199, 203, 204, 205, 209
measurements in Brazil by the
“mathematical Fathers” 243–246
of the reductions 165, 184, 230, 233, 238,
241, 242–243, 246–247, 258
using eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites 228
See also eclipses: used to calculate
longitude; Frías: determination of
longitude; meridian; Quiroga: tables
of longitude; Suárez: determination of
longitudes
Lorenzini, Stefano 285, 288
Loreto, reduction of 16, 116, 205, 224
Losada, Luis de 249
Loureiro, João de, S.J. 275
Lozano, Pedro, S.J. 27, 35, 38, 55, 63, 80, 90,
130n186, 180, 182, 184, 264, 311
Chorographic Description 25, 36, 41–42,
56–57, 84, 172, 173
index
History of the Conquest 31, 36–37, 42, 44,
58–61, 87, 94, 167, 201, 239
Lugo, Juan de, S.J. (cardinal) 96
Lules 9, 18n45, 25, 41, 48
Lunario de un siglo. See Suárez: Lunario
MacCormack, Sabine 48
Machoni, Antonio, S.J. 172, 173
Arte y vocabulario de la lengua Lule y
Tonocoté 25, 48
Macioni. See Machoni
Madrid 25, 48, 50, 57, 97, 107, 110, 113, 119, 128,
160, 169, 175, 177, 178, 209, 229, 230, 233, 246,
247, 267
Treaty of. See Treaty of 1750
Maendi, Marcelo 139
Magg, Franciscus, S.J. 115
Majoli, Cesare 262–264, 265, 266, 269, 272,
276, 277
Malaspina, Alessandro, expedition of 
40n53, 307n231
mamelucos. See bandeirantes
Manfredi, Eustachio 178, 229, 244
“Mapa das Cortes” 196
maps
of Brazil 245–246, 252
of Buenos Aires and the River Plate 183,
184n74, 245
of individual reductions and
estancias 202–203, 205–207
of the Paraguay River 186–194
of Paraquaria and the missions 165–174,
199–202, 203, 243
of Patagonia 181–185, 194–196, 207–208
related to the Treaty of 1750 185, 191n106,
196–198, 203, 243
See also Azara: maps; Cardiel: cartography;
cartographers; Chaco: maps of;
Dobrizhoffer: cartography; estancias:
maps of; Furlong: Jesuit cartography;
Guaraní: cartography; Gumilla: map;
longitude; martyrs: map of Jesuit;
meridian; Paraná River: cartography;
Quiroga: cartography; Sánchez
Labrador: cartography; Uruguay River:
cartography
Mapuches 48
Maria Theresa (empress) 32, 62, 298
Markgraf, Georg 50–51, 67, 73, 150, 284
index
Marquette, Jacques, S.J. 164
Martelli, Nicola 276
Mártires, reduction of 16, 114, 116, 226
Martyr, Peter 41, 95
martyrs, map of Jesuit 199–201
marvels of nature 42, 46, 56–60, 79, 83, 90,
220–222, 285, 311–312. See also aboriginal:
legends; animals: fantastic and legendary;
races; serpents: monstrous and fabulous
trees: fabulous
Mascardi, Nicolò, S.J. 208
astronomical observations 213–219
expeditions to Patagonia 212
life and mission 212–213
wonders of the southern
hemisphere 220–221
See also comets: observed by Mascardi;
eclipses: observed by Mascardi;
experiments: carried out by Mascardi;
instruments: built and used by
Mascardi
Mascetta, Simone, S.J. 15
materia medica 2, 39, 96–99, 110n79, 112,
141n250, 159–163, 278
codices of 45–46, 117–126, 319–320
See also Aperger; Dioscorides; drugs;
Falkner: medical practice and materia
medica; Guaraní: native and western
herbal lore; herbal remedies; herbs;
Montenegro; pharmacies; Pojha ñaña;
Sánchez Labrador; trees: medicinal;
Villodas
Materia medica misionera. See Montenegro
mathematics 81n242, 166, 214, 215, 217, 219,
222, 231, 245, 247
books of, in Córdoba and Asunción 247,
251
chair in the University of Córdoba  304, 308
187–189, 223, 247
Quiroga 174–175
See also Boscovich; Euclid; Quiroga
Mato Grosso 185–187, 189, 313
Mattioli, Pietro Andrea 126
Maurits of Nassau, Johan 76
Mayer, Tobias 302
Mayr, Johann Christian, S.J. 107n63, 108
Mazarredo, José de 305
Mbyás 17, 18, 32, 49, 68–72, 150, 186, 187,
243
377
Mbororé, battle of 16, 88
McCulloch, John Ramsay 146
Mead, Richard 153
medicine
aboriginal 45n78, 93n286, 135–141, 150,
159–163 (see also curuzuyas; shamans)
practiced by Jesuit missionaries 23,
99–106, 141–147, 235 (see also Aperger:
Tratado breve; Cardiel: and medicine;
Dobrizhoffer: medicine; Falkner:
medical practice; Montenegro; Paucke:
medicine; Sánchez Labrador: medicine)
Galenic (see Galen; humoral theory)
its regulation by Canon Law 105–106
shamanic 140, 161–162
tropical 51 (see also Bontius; Piso)
See also bloodletting; Libro de cirugía;
materia medica
medicine men. See shamans
Mémoires de Trévoux 28
Ménestrier, Claude-François, S.J. 82
Mercado, Luis 158
meridian of
Ferro 230
Greenwich 183, 303
Lima 231
Paris 183, 228, 237, 241, 243n152, 303
Rio de Janeiro 246
See also longitude
Merton, Robert K. 4
Messner, Johann, S.J. 24
metamorphosis 79
of insects 43, 60, 62
plant-animal 56, 71
See also hummingbird
Métraux, Alfred 19
Milan 34, 107, 280, 281, 296, 298, 299, 303,
Millkayak 49
miracles 1, 42, 69, 311
absence of bedbugs in Jesuit College 
72
mission, Jesuit style of 1–2, 316. See also
Jesuit missionaries; reductions
missionary expeditions to Buenos Aires 61,
107, 108, 115, 279
mita 14
Mocoví 9, 18, 32, 48, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68,
140, 185, 280, 290, 292, 308
378
Molina, Juan Ignacio, S.J. 34–35, 44n77, 52,
261, 274,
Monardes, Nicolás 97, 98n8, 127
Montanus, Arnoldus 169
Montealegre, Juan de la Cruz, S.J. 107n63
Montenegro, Pedro, S.J. 42, 45, 51, 74, 151, 156,
163, 314
and aboriginal plants lore 126–130,
134–138, 160, 162, 316
criticism of manuscript attribution  See also Cartesianism; Newtonianism
117–126, 143–144, 147, 149, 158, 319–320
identification of plants 130–131
life 106, 107, 113–114, 152, 245n162
Materia medica misionera 99, 113, 118
pharmaceutical praxis 97, 101, 112n85
pictures 131–134
Montesquieu, Baron de La Brède et de
(Charles-Louis de Secondat) 8
Moreau de Saint-Méry, M. L. E. 53
Moro, Thomas 8
Moxos 72, 131, 294
Muratori, Ludovico 47
Muriel, Domingo, S.J. 186, 188
music
Jesuit authors in the reductions  83, 90, 101, 311–312
23–24
native musicians and orchestras 61, 88,
101, 139, 253, 254
myths. See Guaraní: myths
Nahuatl 50, 90, 141
natural history
as a genre of writing 27–29, 40, 93–94
Boyle’s general heads for 70
Jesuit writing on 29
in Paraquaria 81–84, 86, 88–92, 94–95
“philological approach” to 83
See also Baroque: natural histories of
Paraquaria; Buffon: Histoire naturelle;
Dobrizhoffer: his natural history;
Falkner: Description of Patagonia and
natural history; Juárez: his natural
history; Linnaeus; Paucke: Hin und Her
and natural history; Sánchez Labrador:
natural history and Paraguay Natural;
taxonomy, of plants and animals;
Termeyer: natural history
natural philosophy 5, 71, 82, 312
Aristotelian 29, 81, 89, 249, 252
index
books in the colleges of Paraquaria 249,
251
of Kircher and Nieremberg 57–58, 63,
311
renounced by Jesuits in Paraquaria 66,
88, 128
teaching in Córdoba 3, 247–250, 252,
313–314, 317
Riva’s course on 250–251
Nebrija, Antonio de 49
Neenguirú, Nicolás (cacique) 16
Negro River (Río Negro, Patagonia) 177n44,
Neue Welt-Bott 199
Neumann, Johann B., S.J. 24
New Spain (Mexico) 50, 58n134, 92, 102, 125,
141, 142, 159, 160, 167n17, 216, 217, 247
Newton, Isaac 153, 179, 230, 249, 251
Newtonianism 3, 153, 238, 248, 249
in the Río de la Plata 249–253
Nheçu (cacique) 15
Nicander 95
Niebla, Bartolomé de, S.J. 167
Nieremberg, Juan Eusebio, S.J. 57–59, 64, 71,
Nieto, Hakham 238
Nollet, Jean-Antoine 291
Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar 189
Nusdorffer, Bernard, S.J. 197, 203, 151,
Ñamandú 59
ñandú 63, 255
observations
as epistemological notion 311–314
made by individual Jesuits 66, 151,
183, 184n74, 186, 195, 209, 211, 212, 213,
214–218, 220, 222, 224–230, 234–244,
255, 257–258, 266, 269, 273, 277, 278,
299, 300, 307
See also Paucke: observation;
observational errors
observatory, astronomical 224, 229, 300
of Lisbon 244
of Paris 234
of St. Petersburg 231, 243
of Uppsala 229n89
Vatican 263, 276
See also Brera; Cádiz; San Cosme
index
observational errors, correction of 303, 306,
307
occult virtues 57–58, 71, 90, 96, 250, 285,
311, 312. See also natural philosophy: of
Kircher and Nieremberg; sympathies and
antipathies
Ogilby, John 169
Oliver, Jaime, S.J. 153n322, 253, 254n202
Omoampas 18n45
opygua 162
Orbigny, Alcide de 85,
Orejones, Island of the 189–190
Oriani, Barnaba 298, 299, 300
Orosz, Ladislaus, S.J. 61
Orta, Garcia de 127n171
Ortega, Manuel, S.J. 13
Ortiz, Isidro 128
Ortiz de Ocampo, Juan Francisco, S.J. 174
Orto Vaticano Indico 265, 273, 274, 275, 278,
313. See also gardens; Gilii; Juárez; Majoli
Osorio, Gaspar, S.J. 42
Ouseley, Sir William Gore 145n277, 146
Ovalle, Alonso de, S.J. 35n36, 81, 182, 212, 274
Ovando, Juan de 83
Ovid 56
Páez, Pedro, S.J. 283
Paica, Ignacio 254
palo santo 114, 129, 156
Pampas (region) 33, 157, 167, 179, 220
Pampas (originary people) 9, 154, 176,
177n44, 194, 196,
Panigay, Bartolomeo, S.J. 183–184, 197–198
Paradise, Garden of. See Adam; Eden
Paraná River 36, 63, 65, 72, 85n260, 131, 149,
190, 259, 289
cartography 166, 171, 184, 199,
missions 15, 16–17, 106, 114, 223–224, 243,
254n204, 279
petrifying properties of its water. See
petrifaction of wood
Paraquaria
geographical extension 1n18–9
map 11
Paris 28, 53, 183, 209, 228, 239n92, 234, 244,
245n162, 272, 273, 277, 298, 303. See also
meridian of
Patagonia. See under Cardiel: expeditions to
Patagonia; expeditions: Jesuit; Falkner:
379
as explorer and cartographer; maps:
of Patagonia; Mascardi: expeditions to
Patagonia; Quiroga: 1746 expedition
Patiño, Gabriel, S.J. 191
Patiño, José 300
Paucke, Florian, S. J. 35, 48, 80, 166, 280
ethnography 30n20, 101, 140
life 61, 259, 279
Hin und Her and natural history 32, 37,
43, 62–67
medicine 102–103, 112
observation and experimenta 90, 192,
311
pictures 67–68
Paula Bucareli, Francisco de 259
Pavón, José Antonio 265n29, 266–268, 308
Payaguás 186, 191
peccary 76, 79, 94
Pehuenches 207
penguins 181
Peralta y Barnuevo, Pedro de 231, 232, 242
Peramás, José Manuel, S.J. 103, 153
Pereira, André, S.J. 230, 244
Pereira de Lacerda, José (cardinal) 177
Pérez Fontana, Velarde 122
Peru 5n5, 9, 13, 14, 48, 49, 72, 92, 96, 129, 170,
175, 181, 212, 219, 232n104, 267. See also Juli;
Viceroyalty of Peru
Peruvian balm 98, 110
Peschke, Heinrich, S.J. 106–108, 109, 111, 115
Peter the Great (tsar) 231
Peter of Spain 143
Petiver, James 275
petrifaction of wood 37, 65
Petroschi, Joannes 171
pharmacies, Jesuit 105
in Buenos Aires 107n63, 109, 111, 163
in Collegium Romanum 96
in Córdoba 107–108, 109–112
in Madrid 97, 111
in the reductions 109, 112–113
in Santiago de Chile 110
pharmacists, Jesuit 105–112
pharmacy. See materia medica
Philip IV (king of Spain) 48, 188,
Philip V (king of Spain) 300, 301n199
philosophes 8n12, 312
Piccolomini, Francesco, S.J. 248
Piccolominius, Aeneas Sylvius 82n247
380 index

pictures 51 1746 expedition 175–176, 177n46, 179–181,

by Paucke 43, 67 207, 228n85,
in Sánchez Labrador’s Paraguay See also Camaño: criticism of Quiroga
natural 74–76 quirquincho 59, 80, 181
in Montenegro’s herbal 74 Quito 34, 92, 301
Pietragrassa, Angelo Camilo, S.J. 21
Pilar, Nuestra Señora de, reduction of 154, races, of monstrous humans in
176 Paraquaria 41–42
Pilcomayo River 167, 174 Ramírez de Velasco, Juan 83
Piso, Willem 44, 50–51, 60n144, 74, 101, 111, Raspanti, Lucrezia 281,
125, 127, 131, 150, 177, 269, 284 Ratio studiorum 81n242, 187
Pius VI (pope) 263, 272n62, 276 Ravenna 33, 68, 76
Pius VII (pope) 300 Ray, John 78, 275
Pizarro, José Alfonso 176 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas 8, 260
plants, from the New World in Rome 265, Réaumur, René Antoine Ferchauld de 285
269–275. See also Orto Vaticano Indico; receptaria 102, 113, 119, 121–122, 141–149, 159,
gardens 160–161. See also Aperger; drugs; herbals;
Plato 8 Libro de cirugía; Montenegro; Pojha ñaña
Pliny 27, 29, 31, 36, 41, 82, 83, 94, 127, 131, 144, Rechberg, Karl, S.J. 166, 169
272 recipes, medicinal. See receptaria
Plowden, Charles, S.J. 152, 155 Redi, Francesco 96, 110, 269, 284–285, 288,
Plowden Hall 155 311–312
Pluche, Noël-Antoine 150 reductions 7 (see under individual names
Pojha ñaña (“Medicinal plants”) 148–150 of )
Pombal, Marquis of 196 architecture and layout of buildings 20,
Porcel, Jerónimo, S.J. 105 21
Porlier, Antonio 266 art and music (see music)
Port Desire 180, 181, 182, 183 as seen in the Enlightenment 8
Poyas 207, 212, 220n35, 221 books and printing press (see books:
Primoli, Giovanni Baptista, S.J. 21 edited in the reductions)
Pringle, John 287 crops and cattle raising 21, 22
prodigies. See marvels of nature economy, production and commerce 10,
Ptolemy 82n247 12, 14, 21, 22, 23
Puelches 9, 177 education of the Guaraní 22
feasts and pageants
quadrants, astronomical 179, 226, 227, 236, government of 14, 20
254, 297, 300. See also Cádiz: observatory of the Paraná 16
Quechua 49, 92 of the Uruguay 16
quina 79, 96–98, 124n157 other than Guaraní 9
Quiroga, José, S.J. 165, 169, 198, 246n165 peoples who lived in
cartography 167, 181–185, 189, 192, 197, their creation in Paraquaria 9
208, 209–210, the “seven towns” 19, 116, 169, 196, 197,
chair of mathematics (see mathematics: 246
chair in the University of Córdoba) the “thirty towns” 17
expedition up the Paraguay population 9, 17, 19
River 185–187 women in 20, 22
life and education 174–175, 189, 194, 247, See also Buenos Aires: province of:
296 reductions; Chaco: reductions;
tables of longitude 204, 243 Chiquitos: reductions; epidemics;
index
estancias; Guaraní; Jesuit missionaries;
pharmacies: in the reductions;
sundials, in the reductions
Reggio, Francesco 297–300, 307n231
Regnault, Noël, S.J. 251
relaciones de Indias 41n58, 84
Restivo, Paulo, S.J. 24, 48
Retz, Franz, S.J. 106, 116, 249
Ribeiro Sanches, António Nunes 240
Riccioli, Giovanni Battista, S.J. 219, 221, 222,
228
Rico, Juan José, S.J. 110n77, 175, 177–179, 227,
232, 246, 252,
Rieger, Christian, S.J. 249
Rio de Janeiro 121, 145n277, 223n50, 237,
245, 246
Río Gallegos 180, 183
Rio Grande do Sul 16, 17, 18, 120,
Riva, Benito, S.J. 250
Robertson, William 260
Robledo, Diego Antonio 158
Roda y Arrieta, Manuel de 26n6, 260
Rodríguez, Diego, O. de M. 214, 217
Rodriguez, Lucas, S.J. 191
Rodríguez Campomanes, Pedro 260
Rohault, Jacques, S.J. 251
Rome 1, 2, 25, 26n6, 50, 96, 152, 171, 177, 184,
189, 212, 213, 215, 221, 222, 244, 248, 262, 263,
263n17, 265, 266, 267, 268, 268, 273, 274,
276, 277, 278, 299, 300, 304, 313
Romero, Juan, S.J. 219
Rosales, Diego de, S.J. 212n4
Royal Society 3, 229, 235–242, 244, 257, 286,
313. See also Suárez: relationships with the
Royal Society; Termeyer: experiments with
the electric eel
Rubio, Antonio, S.J. 49
Ruiz, Hipólito 265, 266–268, 308
Ruiz de Montoya, Antonio, S.J. 15, 16, 42–43,
46–48, 49, 59–60, 90, 94n293, 129, 140, 255,
311
Ruiz Lozano, Francisco 214, 218, 222
Sachetti Barbosa, João Mendes 240, 257
Sacrobosco, Johannes de 188, 247
Saeta, Saverio, S.J. 201n127
Sahagún, Bernardino de, O.F.M. 50
Salado River 176, 194
Salas, Juan de, S.J. 99
381
Salazar, Juan Clímaco, S.J. 274
Salazar de Figueredo, Antonio, S.J. 273
Saloni, Juan, S. J. 13
Salta 18n45, 128, 134, 156, 274
College of 14n28, 107n63
San Ángel, reduction of 122, 137, 138
San Carlos, reduction of 16, 226
Sánchez Labrador, José, S.J. 3, 80, 87, 114, 125,
149, 163, 177n45, 227, 230, 259, 274, 308
cartography and exploration 167,
190–191, 206
critique and Enlightenment 30n20, 35,
60, 89, 90, 312
encyclopedia on Paraguay 33, 88, 264,
278
medicine and materia medica 102–103,
147, 150–151, 160
native names of plants and animals 47,
49, 312
natural history and Paraguay
Natural 38–39, 51, 60, 65, 68–74, 78,
261, 278, 312
pictures 74–77
quotations from the classics 95
tables of coordinates of
reductions 242–243
See also birds: in Sánchez Labrador; fish:
in Sánchez Labrador, herbs: in Sánchez
Labrador
San Cosme and San Damián, reduction of 3,
107n63, 223n51, 224, 225, 226, 227, 228–235,
236, 237, 241, 243, 254
San Ignacio Guazú, reduction of 15, 16, 99,
224, 237, 241, 255–256
San Ignacio Miní, reduction of 16, 224,
255–256
San Javier, reduction of 61–62, 64, 65, 67,
202, 205, 254, 279, 290, 308, 316
San José, reduction of 16, 107n63, 224, 241
San Martín, Sebastián de, S.J. 154n327
San Miguel, reduction of 16, 138, 224, 241,
242, 254
San Nicolás, reduction of 16, 107n63, 109,
116
Santa Cruz de la Sierra 9, 15, 17, 38, 184, 190
Santa Cruz River 180
Santa Fe 18, 21, 32, 65, 109, 154, 176, 184, 209,
222, 235, 258, 259, 291
Jesuit College of 14, 150
382
Santa María la Mayor, reduction of 16, 24,
48, 61, 101, 116, 225, 226, 237, 242, 259
Santiago de Chile 111, 129, 199, 219
Santiago del Estero 18n45, 154, 190, 233, 261,
265, 296, 308
Jesuit College of 14
Santo Tomé 16, 22, 205
São Paulo 15, 88, 238n130, 245
Saraiva, Mateus 222n46, 237, 238, 239, 241,
242, 252, 257
Sá y Faria, José Custodio de 185, 197n117
Schiaffino, Rafael 125
Schmid, Martin, S.J. 17n41, 24, 166
Schmidl, Ulrich 22, 189
Schott, Gaspar, S.J. 57
Schuller, Rodolfo 191
science
and religion in Paraquaria 314–315
compared with the meaning of
ciencia 2n3
See also Baroque: science; Enlightenment:
science and thought; experiment;
Jesuit science; observation
Seguens, Jean, O.M. 251
Segurola, Saturnino 118, 124n154
Sephardi. See Nieto; Castro Sarmento;
Sequeira Samuda
Sepi, Giorgio de 219
Sepp, Anton, S.J. 23, 24, 100, 102, 105, 111,
139–140, 232, 253, 254
Sequeira Samuda, Isaac de 244
serpents 39, 47, 94, 112, 220, 255, 281
in Dobrizhoffer 44, 45n78
in Lozano 42, 59
in Paucke 67
in Sánchez Labrador 74n219, 95
lampalagua 64, 71
monstruous and fabulous 42–43, 46, 59,
79, 130
rattlesnake 65
Serrano, José, S.J. 24
Serranos 9, 176, 177n44, 194
Sessé, Martín 91
Seutter, Matthaeus 171
Seven towns. See reductions: seven towns
shamans 19, 103, 140, 161–162
Sierra del Volcán 154
Sigüenza y Góngora, Carlos de
index
Simón, Pedro, O.F.M. 41n60
silk
introduction to the Río de la Plata 279,
290n148
from spiders 279–280, 281, 283, 295–296
See also Termeyer
Sirena, Francesco, O.S.A. 127
skepticism 96,
in Jesuits 41, 60, 62–63, 139
See also Enlightenment: critique of Jesuit
legends; Feijóo; Redi
slaves, black
owned by Jesuits in Paraquaria 10, 17
See also South Sea Company
Soares, Diogo, S.J. 245–246
Societas Georgica Tarquiniensis 263
Society of Jesus
its suppression 3, 26n26, 33, 61, 155, 169,
260n7, 262, 268, 276, 298, 308 (see also
Azara, Nicolás de; Clement XIV)
Superior Generals. See under individual
name of
See also congregations; Ignatius of Loyola;
Jesuit missionaries in Paraquaria; Jesuit
science; mission, Jesuit style of:
Solano, Francisco, O.F.M. 9
Someschi, Carlo 281
Sonnini de Manoncourt, Charles 26n6
Soriano, Jerónimo 158
South Sea Company 17, 154, 235, 236
Southey, Robert 47, 85
species (animal), of the Old and New
World 38, 60, 70
spiders, in Chaco 52, 279–280, 283,
295–296
Staffort, Ignatius, S.J. 251
Stansel, Velentin, S.J. 214–215, 216n18,
stars 179, 228, 302
in aboriginal astronomy 211, 254,
Frías’s papers 303–306
of the southern hemisphere observed by
Mascardi 214, 220, 222
Steinhöffer, Jan, S.J. 102, 125, 141–142, 159, 161
Strabo 82n247
Strait of Magellan 36, 175, 176n40, 194, 207,
209, 212, 219, 220
Strobel, Matías. See Strobl
Strobl, Matthias, S.J. 166, 176, 177n45, 179, 180
index
St. Thomas’ Hospital 153–154
Suárez, Buenaventura, S.J. 3, 151–152, 166,
174, 175, 177n46, 253, 254, 257–258, 313, 314,
316
astronomical network 229–231, 235–240,
242
determination of longitudes 165,
204n134, 228, 242–247
life and scientific education 222–226
Lunario de un siglo 232–235
making of telescopes and astronomical
instruments 226–228
Newtonian theory of tides 251–253
observations of the satellites of
Jupiter 228–231, 235–237, 240–241
papers in the Philosophical Transactions
238–242
relationships with the Royal
Society 235–242
See also under herbs; instruments
sundials, in the reductions 166, 254
sympathies and antipathies 57–58, 63–64,
311. See also natural philosophy: of Kircher
and Nieremberg; occult virtues
systematics. See taxonomy
Tabares, Raposo 16
Talhammer, Rupert, S.J. See Dalhammer
Tamburini, Michelangelo, S.J. 171, 174, 201,
248
Tape region 16, 18, 191
tapir 66, 67n182, 157, 255
Tarija 134, 137, 190
Jesuit College of 14n28, 17, 166
taxonomy, of plants and animals 52–54,
79–80
Early Modern 39, 93–94
eighteenth-century 28, 52, 90
folk 25, 39, 46, 52n109, 88, 93–94, 135
in Jesuit natural histories 39, 51–52, 78,
88, 270
See also Buffon: classification of animals;
Linnaeus
Tebicuary River 16
Techo, Nicolás del, S.J. 31n25, 139, 264
Tehuelches 155, 194, 207, 208, 316
Tehuelhet 49
Telégrafo Mercantil 113
383
telescopes 177–179, 226–228, 236, 241, 242,
280 (see also Suárez; Guaraní: makers of
astronomical instruments)
Termeyer, Ramón María, S.J. 80, 88, 285, 314
and eighteenth-century science 308,
311–314
experiments with electric eel 285, 287,
290–292
entomology 44, 281
Intorno ad alcuni osservazioni di Storia
naturale Americana 34, 38, 52–54, 84
life 279–280
natural history 39, 91, 261
research on spiders 279–283, 295–296
theory of electricity 292–295, 316
views on the anatomy of the electric
eel 288–290
See also electric fish
theater, Jesuit 47, 87
Theatrum naturae 57, 86–87
Theophrastus 83
Thevet, André 58
Thirty towns. See under reductions: thirty
towns
Thomas, St. 36
Thorpe, John, S.J. 152
Tierra del Fuego 50, 176n40, 181, 209
tiger. See jaguar
tobacco 21, 66, 98, 112, 128
Tobas 18n45, 41, 48, 93n286, 186
Tobatines 17n42, 62, 185, 186
Tofiño, Vicente 302, 304–306
Tolo, José, S.J. 202
Tonocoté 25n3, 48
Toquistines 18n45
torpedo (fish) 284–290, 293n161, 294, 314
Torre y Valcárcel, Juan de la 158
Torres, Diego de, S.J. 9, 14
Torres, Domingo de, S.J. 111n85, 147
Torres Rubio, Diego de, S.J. 49
Torsellini, Orazio 81
Tosca, Tomás Vicente 174–175, 179, 247, 251
Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de 269, 270, 276
Trapiella y Montemayor, Domingo 158
Tratado breve de medicina. See Aperger
Treaty
of 1750 (of Madrid) 10, 18–19, 26, 116, 169,
185, 191n106, 196–198, 202, 243, 246–247
384 index

(see also Cardiel: attitudes in face of reductions 15, 16–17, 21, 105, 106, 114, 124,
the treaty of 1750) 149, 224n53, 243
of Pardo 19 See also reductions: seven towns
of Tordesillas 18, 197, 244
of Utrecht 236, 245 Vaisseau, Jean, S.J. 23
trees 37, 262, 270, 271–274 Valdelirios, Marquis of 185, 197
algarrobo Valdivia, Luis de, S.J. 48
animé 131 Valmont de Bomare, Jacques-Christoph 72,
caaycobé 56 74, 150
ceibo 63 Valverde, José Luis
copaiba 98, 110, 132 van der Lott, Frans 286n132
fabulous 56–57 van Riebeeck, Jan 213
fruit 37, 38, 43, 64, 67, 152, 186, 203, 279, van ‘s Gravesande, Storm 286n132
280 van Suerck, Josse, S.J. 16
guayacán 56 vaquerías 17, 18
in Jolís 52n109 Varela, José 302
in Lozano 42, 44–45, 51, 60 Vasconcelos, Simão de, S.J. 60, 71
in maps 171, 203–204 Vatican Observatory. See observatory: Vatican
in Paucke 43, 64 Vega, Luis de 41
in Sánchez Labrador 74 Velasco, Juan de, S.J. 34, 91–92
lists of 43, 46 Vernacci, Juan 307n231
medicinal 96, 97, 113, 114n101, 119, Viceroyalty of Peru 1323n, 214, 218, 231, 264
130–132, 136, 151, 186, Viceroyalty of Río de la Plata 187, 278, 297
molle Vidos y Miró, Juan de 146n281
ombú 63 Vieira, Inácio, S.J. 177
palms and their environment 70 Vitelleschi, Muscio, S.J. 106, 109
See also plants Vilelas 18n45, 48
Trelles, Manoel, S.J. 283 Villafañe, Diego León de, S.J. 262
Trinidad, reduction of 205, 225, 253 Villodas, Marcos, S.J. 99, 105, 147–150, 158,
Tucumán 9, 13, 18, 38, 119, 130, 135, 156, 167, 160
190, 259, 261, 262, 274 Vimercati, Cipriano 304
Jesuit College of 14, 114 Vincent de Beauvais 27n13
Tupí 15, 51, 93n287, 123, 138 vipers. See serpents
Visconti, Ignazio, S.J. 185, 196,
Ulloa, Antonio de 44n77, 301 Vitoria, Francisco de, O. P. 13
Ulloa, Juan de 249 Volta, Alessandro 292–294
University (College) of Córdoba 3, 10, Voltaire 8n12
14, 25n4, 61, 68, 101n21, 106–110, 114, 115,
149, 154, 187–189, 222–223, 228, 247–252, Walckenaer, Charles A. 26
261–262, 279, 296, 313 Walsh, John 286–289
University of Mexico 142, 214, 217 Wargentin, Pehr Wilhelm 229–230, 236,
University of St. Andrews 155 257
Upper Peru. See Bolivia war of Jenkins’ Ear 175
Urban VIII (pope) 105 Wendlingen, Joannes, S.J. 249
Uruguay River 18, 19, 120, 123, Wilcke, Johan C. 291
cartography 36, 166, 171, 191, 199, Wilder, Burt G. 295–296
202 Williamson, Hugh 287
petrifying properties of its water (see Winkler, Johann Cristoph 166
petrifaction of wood) Wolff, Christian 166, 247
index
women. See Guaraní: women; reductions:
women in
wonders of nature. See marvels of nature
Woyt, Johann Joachim 66, 90
Xarayes, Lake of 186, 189–191
yacaré 59
in magic and medicine 62, 72, 112
Yapeyú, reduction of 16, 22, 100, 107n63, 131
Yapuguay, Nicolás 24
Yapuy, Vicente 139
Yaricá, Ignacio 139
yerba mate (Ilex Paraguariensis, “Paraguayan
tea”) 12, 19, 36, 135, 265, 280
385
cultivated in the reductions 21, 202,
domesticated by Jesuits 21
yerbales 192, 202, 203, 204, 205
yerbales. See under yerba mate
Zacutus Lusitanus 141
Zamucos 17, 166, 171
Zaragoza, José 247
Zea, Juan Bautista, S.J. 189
Zeitler, Joseph, S.J. 110
Zelada, Francisco Saverio de (cardinal) 276
Zipoli, Domenico, S.J. 23, 24n72
Ziulak, Norbert, S.J. 107n63, 108, 150
Zubeldía, Joaquín de, S.J. 106, 114, 158