Secret science: Spanish cosmography and the New World

This study explores the efforts of sixteenth-century Spanish cosmographers to create a scientific framework to explain the New World. Cosmography is defined broadly to encompass the modern disciplines of geography, cartography, ethnography, natural history, and certain elements of astronomy and history. By the mid sixteenth century humanistic modes of representation and epistemological methods associated with Renaissance cosmography proved incapable of effectively describing the reality of the New World. The onus on Spanish royal cosmographers working in state-run institutions to describe their nation's vast empire resulted in a series of ambitious large-scale scientific projects aimed at addressing this problem. Spanish cosmographers turned to voyages of scientific exploration, new cartographic methods and an unrelenting questioning of those living in the new lands to formulate an accurate and useful description of the world. During most of the sixteenth century, the Spanish monarchy considered cosmographical information about the New World a valuable strategic and utilitarian asset and thus treated such information as a state secret. Legal measures taken to safeguard this information also increasingly regulated cosmographical practice, forcing royal cosmographers to compromise between the intellectual demands of science and the bureaucratic demands of an expanding empire. For the most part, historians have treated the scientific enterprises that resulted form the work of royal cosmographers as independent projects, springing loosely from administrative needs or the monarch's curiosity. This study forms a more cohesive picture of these scientific enterprises by reconstructing the intellectual heritage of Spanish cosmographers, defining the cosmographical methodology they ascribed to and studying the cosmographer as one of the key agents in a vigorous trans-Atlantic exchange of information. The work of two royal cosmographers of the Council of Indies, Juan López de Velasco (c. 1530--1598) and Andrés García de Céspedes (c. 1555--1611) is used to illustrate the new methods and modes of representation that royal cosmographers devised to guide them in the collection, translation and codification of knowledge about the New World.