"Orinoco out into the light": A Modern Jesuit's Efforts to Kick the Devil Out of the

Borderlands
Author(s): Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
Source: The Eighteenth Century, Vol. 53, No. 2 (SUMMER 2012), pp. 243-247
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41468182
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 "Orinoco out into the light":
A Modern Jesuit's Efforts to Kick the Devil Out of the
Borderlands

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
University of Texas at Austin

The blazing light of Francisco Xavier, the apostle of Asia, guided many an early
modern Jesuit into voluntary exile and even martyrdom at the hands of utter
cultural strangers. Like many of his brethren, José Gumilla was inspired by
the Navarrese saint to leave Spain in 1705 for missionary work. He devoted
some three decades of his life rounding up the Achagua, Abane, Amaca, Aturi,
Betoye, Caverre, Chiricoya, Guamo, Guajivo, Guayno, Guayquirie, Guarauno,
Maypure, Mapuye, Otomoca, Pao, Quirruba, Quiriquiripa, Sáliva, and Yaruro
Indians into missions located on the banks of the Casanare, Meta, Apure,
Bichada, Guabare, and Orinoco Rivers. The Valencian Gumilla willingly ex-
changed home for the terrors of the tropics: man-eating crocodiles; clouds of
bloodletting insects and skin-drilling parasites; treacherous anacondas whose
breath could mysteriously numb their prey; raiders wielding arrows poisoned
with curare, a substance of occult demonic powers that within seconds could
paralyze the body; and relentlessly hostile cannibal Caribs, whose alliance with
the Dutch in Surinam gave them access to firearms. In a book addressed to
the youth of Europe to join the Jesuits in a crusade against the Devil in the
tropics, Gumilla produced an ethnographic manual for would-be missionar-
ies. Gumilla's Orinoco ilustrado ("Orinoco brought out into the light," as Gu-
milla would have liked the title translated) is poorly known among students of
Spanish- American Enlightenment, for it is too quickly assumed that the book
is a pre-modern, baroque catalogue of wonders rather than a rational, secular
interpretation of natural phenomena. In a provocative analysis of Gumilla as
a figure of the Catholic Enlightenment, Margaret Ewalt does away with these
simplistic generalizations and, in the process, she greatly complicates our ge-
nealogies of scientific modernity in Peripheral Wonders : Nature , Knowledge , and
Enlightenment in the Eighteenth-Century Orinoco (Bucknell, 2008).

The Eighteenth Century, vol. 53, no. 2 Copyright © 2012 University of Pennsylvania Press. All rights reserved.

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244 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

At first glance, Ewalťs interpret

could someone who adamantly belie
sidered a full-fledged figure of th
thoughts encouraged crocodile fan
cluded among the founding fathers
A plausible answer to these questio
Isaac Newton dabbled in alchemy a
bring the occult out "into the light
over the preternatural; or to point
president of the Royal Society and
nous natural history of tropical Ja
answers, however, are more round
ities within traditions of empiricis
Ewalt rightly shows that Gumilla
tion of Spanish natural philosophe
mitted to empiricism and deep sk
systems. Gumilla hailed from Vale
tion. Rhetorically disinclined to ex
nevertheless probing and critical o
including Aristotle's. In Catholic I
Several historians, for example, ha
telian physics played in the defens
that of transubstantiation, which
justified Catholic priests as unique
Attacking the foundations of Aris
in some circles tantamount to heres
early modern Spanish intellectuals
the latter 's appalling errors in ge
was nothing heretical about takin
since the fifteenth century witnes
ered that they had superseded the
The historiography on early moder
has shown that unlike other early
systems with new ones, Iberians, in
to privilege any one of the myria
the market of ideas. The Iberians s
small new knowledge claims that w
If there was a "system" the Iberia
losophy, which is not surprising g
his insights (on empirical inductio
millennium) from sixteenth-centu
went hand in hand with philosophi
small natural phenomenon there w

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CAÑIZARES-ESGUERRA - "ORINOCO OUT INTO THE LIGHT" 245

of the many ancient systems. The novelty of novatores like Gumilla seem
have resided in their willingness to incorporate promiscuously scraps of
modern philosophical systems, including Atomism, Mechanical Philosoph
and Paracelsianism.

Drawing on her knowledge of these traditions of Iberian eclecticism and

empiricism, Ewalt offers a persuasive reading of many chapters of Gumilla's
Orinoco ilustrado. Gumilla's seemingly premodern sensibilities are rendered in-
telligible within a discourse of "modernity/' Ewalt, for example, demonstrates
that Gumilla constantly drew attention to his own empirical authority as well
as the authority of those whose claims he incorporated. Thus Gumilla was will-
ing to sanction as plausible that crocodile fangs were good antidotes for poison
simply because "physicians" in Nueva Granada had claimed that clinical tri-
als demonstrated so. Gumilla's empiricism was radical and therefore called on
the provincialism of Europeans who considered unlikely, wondrous, or curious
any unfamiliar natural phenomena. The world of the Orinoco came across as
strange to many simply because they were used to their narrow, local, parochial
empirical experience. Gumilla denounced such positions and asserted that
nothing should be held to be incredible, a priori. Ewalt also shows that Gumilla
drew promiscuously on such new systems of natural philosophy as Atomism
and Mechanical Philosophy to explain, say, the effect of the anaconda's breath
on its victims.

One place where Gumilla's modernity comes through is in his coupling of

natural history with commerce and empire. Ewalt highlights this dimension
of the Jesuit's project. Gumilla, for example, calculated the wealth of the New
Kingdom of Granada (Colombia-Venezuela) by assessing the value of Dutch
and British smuggling off the coast of Guyana, Cartagena, and Caracas. Gu-
milla considered that the immense mining wealth of Nueva Granada (gold,
pearls, and emeralds) was responsible for the economic prosperity of Jamaica
and Curaçao. And yet such wealth could nevertheless be dwarfed by the un-
tapped botanical riches of the Orinoco. Gumilla therefore constantly called at-
tention to the commercial potential of local spices, oils, gums, woods, produce,
and plant pharmaceuticals. Gumilla, the modern political economist, was also
mindful of the relationship between imperial geopolitics and the commercial
potential of settling the borderlands. Gumilla maintained that the Orinocan
Llanos were key to halting the onward march of both the Portuguese from the
Amazons and the Dutch, along with their terrifying Carib allies, from Surinam.
An empty wilderness ready to be settled, the Llanos could become home to
thousands of landless Spanish peasants.
An important, original contribution in Ewalťs book is to explore how
Gumilla related to non-European knowledges. Despite all his rhetoric about
Amerindian infantile savagery, Gumilla repeatedly and explicitly incorpo-
rated Amerindian knowledges. Ewalt correctly interprets the role of Gumilla
as cultural broker. According to Ewalt, such mediations were a crucial, much

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 246 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

misunderstood dimension of th
lar, northern European travelers
created a narrative that casts Eu
non-European sources. Yet the cru
ing network, connecting "cores"
the Jesuits, although wedded to
a global Christendom with amp
corrects and complicates the his
was constantly drawing attentio
most of his informants.

For all her thoughtful contributions, Ewalt presents Gumilla in splendid iso-
lation. Was Gumilla really any different from his sixteenth-century predecessor,
the Jesuit natural historian Jose de Acosta, as Ewalt suggests? The difference
cannot possibly lie in Gumilla's alleged greater eclectic willingness to embrace
modern systems in order to interpret new empirical evidence, for Acosta was
every bit as much of a self-confessed modern and eclectic empiricist as Gumilla
was. If empiricism and eclecticism are the hallmarks of our modernity, regard-
less of whether one holds any religious beliefs, then Iberia had already brought
us the Enlightenment in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In Ewalťs hands, "the Enlightenment" ceases to be a meaningful analyti-
cal category. Ewalt challenges a historiography that has long been superseded,
namely, that of Peter Gay and Ernest Cassirer who parochially confused moder-
nity with the views of a coterie of French, Scottish, and German philosophers.2
But the Enlightenment is now defined differently: as part of a commercial revo-
lution unleashed by Europe's imperial global expansion. Ewalt ignores that the
term "the Enlightenment" has been bandied about as a euphemism for a new,
more democratic culture of knowledge production that circumvented the tra-
ditional monopoly held by universities, churches, and courts: a culture of acad-
emies, salons, coffee shops, newspapers, and briskly traded books otherwise
referred to as a "public sphere." Was the Orinoco ilustrado the product of a new
vibrant transatlantic public sphere? If the answer is "no," then it should not be
regarded as a "modern" text.
In addition to working with a rather narrow and outmoded definition of
the Enlightenment, Ewalt misses the opportunity to locate Gumilla within a
much larger body of natural histories of the Jesuit global borderlands in the
mid-eighteenth century: New France, Chaco, Paraguay, California, Florida, the
Mariana Islands, and the Philippines. How does Gumilla's work compare to
those of his contemporaries: Joseph-François Lafitau, Moeurs des savages améric-
aines (1724); Pedro de Montenegro, Materia médica misional (1710); José Sánchez
Labrador, Paraguay natural (1750-80); Florian Paucke, Entre los mocovies (1749-
67); Martin Dobrizhoffer, Historia de abiponibus (1 787); Thomas Falkner, Descrip-
tion of Patagonia (1774); and Jose Jolis, Saggio sulla storia naturale della provindo
de gran chaco (1789)? The historiography on the Jesuits in the Enlightenment

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CAÑIZARES-ESGUERRA- "ORINOCO OUT INTO THE LIGHT" 247

has priviliged those whose work reflected life in the Spanish- American c
The massive output of those Jesuits in the American borderlands awaits ca
scrutiny by both historians and literary critics.
Ewalt takes apart the category of the Enlightenment by deploying a m
forgotten and alternative Iberian geneaology of modernity. In the process,
wever, the term loses any meaninful analytical power. Her project is ambi
and rewarding but it is also problematic.

NOTES

1. See for example, Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico (Rome, 1983).

2. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York, 1966-69); Er
Cassirer, Die Philosophie der Aufklaärung (Tübingen, 1932).

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