| In the dissertation, set in the early phases of the Scientific Revolution, I use a series of sixteenth-century legal disputes over the practice of navigation to probe the construction of the idea of the utility of science and the growth of state patronage of science. I show how territorial conflicts stimulated the Spanish government's desire to find the exact coordinate location of disputed places, and so helped to convince the king and his Council of the Indies that science was worth supporting. After the treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 specified a line of longitude as the boundary between Spanish and Portuguese overseas territories, cosmographers, as experts in astronomy and geography, came to be essential in determining the precise location of the boundary and in portraying it on charts. At the Casa de Contratación in Seville, a small group of cosmographers (primarily Alonso de Chaves, Francisco Faleiro, Pedro de Medina, Pedro Mexia, and Alonso de Santa Cruz) used the government's preoccupation with territorial disputes to convince the royal officials that navigation was fundamentally applied cosmography. Not only should cosmographers control navigation, but the pilots doing the navigating should also be literate, numerate, and educated in basic astronomy—capable not only of reaching the desired port, but also of reporting its exact coordinates. Since piloting had heretofore been a practice-oriented craft, the pilots objected vociferously, supported by the pilot major Sebastian Cabot and the cosmographer Diego Gutiérrez. The theory proponents among the cosmographers nevertheless convinced royal officials not only to increase the education required of the pilots, but also to compel them to use the types of chart preferred by the theory proponents. They thus created an institutional space for the cosmographers in the bureaucracy associated with lucrative industry of travel to the New World. Pulling together testimony from lawsuits, corruption investigations, petitions, disputes about charts, and pilots' licensing exams, I show how Spanish diplomatic concerns in the Indies were essential to convincing the government of the utility of science, and the king to create one of the first state-sponsored institutions to apply theoretical knowledge to practical ends. |
