{ "id": "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779", "type": "entity", "name": "Gomez Ortega, Instruccion sobre el modo mas seguro y economico de transportar plantas vivas (Madrid, 1779)", "summary": "The printed manual by which the Spanish crown tried to keep a living plant alive across an ocean. Written by the first professor of the Madrid botanical garden and sent out with a royal circular to the officers of the American dominions, it specifies the cases, the seed handling, a want list of American plants under the names used in America, and how to dry a plant for a herbarium - and states in its own words that the aim is to make Spain owner of the vegetable riches of Spanish America.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "americas", "botany", "natural-history", "science", "enlightenment", "eighteenth-century", "spanish-empire", "columbian-exchange", "agriculture", "maritime", "books", "indigenous-knowledge" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "instruccion-para-el-real-gabinete-de-historia-natural" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "real-expedicion-botanica-de-nueva-espana" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "mutis-botanical-expedition" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "flora-peruviana-et-chilensis" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "quina-cascarilla-del-peru" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "correos-de-las-indias" } ], "questions": [ "How did eighteenth-century Spain ship living plants across the Atlantic?", "What was the Instruccion para transportar plantas vivas of 1779?", "Which American plants did the Spanish crown most want to acquire in 1779?", "Why did Spain want live American plants rather than only seeds and specimens?", "How were herbaria made in the Spanish botanical expeditions?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The title page states the whole programme: \"INSTRUCCION sobre el modo mas seguro y económico de TRANSPORTAR PLANTAS VIVAS por mar y tierra á los paises mas distantes. Ilustrada con láminas. Añádese el método de desecar las plantas para formar herbarios. DISPUESTA DE ORDEN DEL REY por el Dr. D. Casimiro Gomez Ortega, primer catedratico del Real Jardin Botanico\", printed at Madrid in 1779 by Joachin Ibarra, printer to the royal chamber. The author's styling on the same page - of the royal academies of medicine and of history, of the Academy of Sciences of Paris and of the Royal Society of London - is itself the claim the crown was making for the piece.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.95 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The book was not published to be bought. Bound in front of the text is a royal circular, in italic, addressed to an unnamed officer: the king is to be sent, through the writer, \"las semillas, arbolitos y plantas nuevas, ó sean tiernas, que se encuentren en los distritos de su mando\", and the recipient is told \"Particípolo á V. de orden de Su Magestad para su inteligencia y cumplimiento en la parte que le toca\", with copies of the Instruccion enclosed and left to his discretion \"el cuidado de distribuirlos entre los sugetos á quienes cometa el correspondiente encargo\". The manual is an administrative instrument distributed down a chain of command, not a treatise offered to the learned public.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "The stated motive is possession, and the document says so without euphemism. The purpose is to secure \"en los diversos temples del benigno clima y terreno Español la posesion de todas las riquezas vegetables esparcidas por los vastos dominios del Rey, y demas paises del mundo, especialmente las de la América Española, que se estan reconociendo de órden y á expensas de S. M. baxo la direccion y auspicios de su Ministro de las Indias el Excelentísimo Sr. D. Josef de Galvez\", to whose zeal the publication of the work is also credited. Any reading of this manual as disinterested science is refuted by its own page 11.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "The economic argument is made in one sentence, and it is a comparison with silver. If each packet boat of the maritime post from the Canaries, Havana, Cartagena and Buenos Aires brought one such case with some of the most valuable plants of those regions, \"nos haríamos dueños en pocos años de la mayor parte de las riquezas vegetables de la América Española, que tienen sobre las minerales la ventaja de poderse propagar y multiplicar al infinito una vez poseidas y connaturalizadas\". A living plant, once naturalised in Spain, is a mine that reproduces itself; that is the whole case for the expense of the boxes.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The technique is credited to a rival, on the page. The case design is one \"que para mayor facilidad y gobierno de los Capitanes de las embarcaciones se publicó originalmente en Inglaterra, con la laminita del caxon, y por su medio se reciben en Londres todos los años las plantas mas exquisitas de la China, y de otros paises remotos\"; and the second article opens by explaining that the whole box was worked out because the English West India trading company had lately published \"un decente premio á favor del primero que traiga á Europa algunos árboles vivos del Mangostán y de la Rima\". Spanish imperial botany is here openly imitative and openly competitive, and the Instruccion prints the acknowledgement rather than hiding it.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "The Introduccion grounds the project in a long history of transfers into Spain rather than out of the Americas. If our forebears had not been diligent \"en apropiarse, y propagar en su patria los vegetales útiles de los paises extrangeros\", it begins, we would perhaps still lack the most delicious fruits and the most valuable plants we now possess, because they took care to naturalise them in Spanish soil and climate, \"á imitacion de otras Naciones, y principalmente de los Romanos\" - Lucullus bringing the cherry from Cerasus among the spoils of his victories over Mithridates, Pompey communicating the camuesa apple to Europe.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The failures are printed with the methods, which is what makes the manual usable. La Condamine could not get cinchona seed sown at Guayaquil and Lima to germinate, \"y que generalmente pasa por constante que de un dia para otro pierde su virtud germinativa, igualmente que la Malagueta, ó Pimienta de Tabasco, y otras semillas oleosas, que sin duda deben de enranciarse, aunque en tan ligero grado que el paladar no lo percibe\"; hence the rule that such seeds be sown at once in the very boxes in which live plants are shipped. Where no case is available, seeds go unhusked into a pitched or lead box, laid on \"una porcion del terreno en que suelen nacer\" and layered alternately with seed and leaf-mould.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "The third article is a want-list of American plants, and it is explicitly written in American vocabulary: \"De algunas plantas, que con preferencia merecen traerse á España de diversos paises, especialmente de America, con expresion de los parages donde se crian naturalmente, y de varios nombres vulgares, ó del pais, y noticia de sus mas apreciables propiedades.\" It opens with cinchona - the tree of \"la Quina, ó Cascarilla\", wanted not only from the Sierra de Cajanuma near Loja and from Ayabaca and Gualcabamba in Peru but from the species newly found in the hills near Santa Fé, capital of the New Kingdom of Granada.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The list records indigenous and local names and the uses attached to them by the people who gave them. It names \"la yerba Espadilla, ó Espadin, que los Indios llaman Issocá por su grande amargura, y es muy eficaz contra el dolor de costado\"; the Caña agria or Titicaná, held very sudorific; the yerba de Santa Maria, much used against cancer; and for the province of Guayana the tree called there Currucay, with Bálsamo de Copayba, Zarzaparrilla, three kinds of Cañafístola, Contrayerba, Tucilla or Raiz de resfriado, Batatilla purgante, and the Orojuri and Cunaurima, trees bearing a very bitter bark \"que corta las calenturas\". The knowledge being shipped to Madrid is American knowledge, and the document does not pretend otherwise.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The same book that harvests those names denies the authority of the people who hold them. The appendix on herbaria opens: plants cannot be known with certainty except by the methodical examination of their flowers and fruits, which distinguishes them \"de un modo libre de las equivocaciones á que estan expuestas las gentes del campo, los herbolarios, y todos los empíricos, que se gobiernan por la semejanza de las hojas, por el color de alguna parte del vegetable, por la traza, ó apariencia en grueso de todo él, ó por otras señales igualmente groseras, accidentales y falibles\". The tension is in the volume itself, four articles apart, and is not resolved anywhere in it.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "The herbarium method is taught as a craft with reasons attached. Plants are to be gathered once the sun has dried the rain or dew and when flowers and leaves are well open, since otherwise the flowers lose their natural colour, the leaves turn black and the plant will not lie well between papers; herbs that do not exceed the size of the herbarium sheet - most of them - are laid down whole and sound with all their parts including the root, especially if the root has anything particular about it.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c12", "text": "The appendix also concedes that the work it wants done cannot be done by a professional corps. The materials of a Flora Española, \"obra sumamente util al Estado, y de la qual no carecen respectivamente otras Naciones\", are declared \"superior á los esfuerzos de qualquier Botánico; pues solo puede resultar de las peregrinaciones succesivas por todas nuestras Provincias, ó del trabajo combinado de varios aficionados, é inteligentes esparcidos por ellas\". The instrument being built is a distributed collecting network, and the book says so.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c13", "text": "What this document does and does not establish is worth stating plainly. It establishes what Madrid asked for in 1779, in what boxes, by which routes, and under which names; it is an order and a technique, not a record of results. It gives no account of what arrived, no survival rate for any consignment, and no acknowledgement by name of any American collector, gardener or informant, although its plant list is built out of their vocabulary. The traffic it organises runs one way, from the districts of the Indies to a garden in Madrid.", "sources": [ "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779" ], "confidence": 0.9 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "primary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "English-language accounts of eighteenth-century plant transfer run through the Wardian case, Banks, Kew and the Bounty; the Spanish manual that predates the Wardian case by half a century and was distributed as a royal order through the American dominions is almost never quoted, and when it is named it is named without its text. Every sentence here is transcribed from the 1779 Ibarra sheets: the circular that made it an order, the four packet routes it hoped to use, the debt to an English design and an English prize stated on its own pages, the American plant list written in American names, and - in the same volume - the appendix that dismisses country people and herbalists as governed by coarse and fallible signs. The sentence that states the motive, that vegetable riches beat mineral ones because they multiply once possessed, is given in full rather than paraphrased away.", "confidence": 0.85, "last_verified": "2026-08-16", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Gomez Ortega, Instruccion sobre el modo mas seguro y economico de transportar plantas vivas (Madrid, 1779)", "description": "The printed manual by which the Spanish crown tried to keep a living plant alive across an ocean. Written by the first professor of the Madrid botanical garden and sent out with a royal circular to the officers of the American dominions, it specifies the cases, the seed handling, a want list of American plants under the names used in America, and how to dry a plant for a herbarium - and states in its own words that the aim is to make Spain owner of the vegetable riches of Spanish America.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-16", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "Instruccion sobre el modo mas seguro y económico de transportar plantas vivas por mar y tierra á los paises mas distantes, ilustrada con láminas. Añádese el método de desecar las plantas para formar herbarios. Dispuesta de orden del Rey por el Dr. D. Casimiro Gomez Ortega", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=2AMDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA11" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Gomez Ortega, Instruccion sobre el modo mas seguro y economico de transportar plantas vivas (Madrid, 1779)" } }