Juan Ignacio Molina, the natural and civil history of Chile (Bologna, 1782 and 1787)
Two essays by a Chilean-born Jesuit expelled with his order and writing in Italy: a natural history that carried Chilean species into the Linnaean system, and a civil history whose second book treats the Araucanians as a constituted state with tetrarchates, provinces and counties, and devotes chapters to their rhetoric, astronomy and medicine. Read here in the 1808 American translation, whose reviewer showed the translator had worked from the French.
Why this wins its question: Molina reaches English readers as a taxonomic footnote - a name attached to Chilean species - or not at all, and the Mapuche polity he described is usually reached through Ercilla's poem instead. This entry works from the printed sheets in both directions: the four uthal-mapus, the aillaregues and regues and the ten institutional chapters on one side, and on the other the 1809 Edinburgh notice that fixes the Bologna imprints of 1782 and 1787, records the expulsion that produced the books, quotes Pinkerton's judgement, and catches the American translator working from the French. It also declines the easy version of the story by quoting Molina's own condescension in the same breath as his praise.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Two separate essays, not one book. The Edinburgh Review, noticing the American translation in July 1809, names the originals and their imprints: the Saggio sulla Storia Naturale del Chili, printed at Bologna in 1782, and the Saggio sulla Storia Civile del Chili, printed at Bologna in 1787. The reviewer adds that the first "is well known, even in this country, and is highly esteemed by all the naturalists of Europe", while the second "is rarely to be met with in England".
The volumes read here are the American issue: "THE GEOGRAPHICAL, NATURAL AND CIVIL HISTORY OF CHILI. BY ABBE DON J. IGNATIUS MOLINA. ILLUSTRATED BY A HALF-SHEET MAP OF THE COUNTRY. WITH NOTES FROM THE SPANISH AND FRENCH VERSIONS, AND AN APPENDIX, CONTAINING COPIOUS EXTRACTS FROM THE ARAUCANA OF DON ALONZO DE ERCILLA. TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL ITALIAN, BY AN AMERICAN GENTLEMAN. IN TWO VOLUMES. MIDDLETOWN, (CONN.) PRINTED FOR I. RILEY. 1808."
The naturalist's method is stated in his own preface and it is Linnaean with reservations. He followed the Swedish naturalist's system, and gives at the foot of the page the Linnaean characters in Latin both of the known species and "of those that are new, which I have discovered", inventing new ones where he could not reduce a species to those already described. He adds that he adopted the system not from conviction of its superiority but because it had of late been so generally adopted, that he cannot always approve its nomenclature, and that he would have preferred Wallerius and Bomare in mineralogy, Tournefort in botany and Brisson in zoology as simpler and better known.
Book II of the civil history is an ethnography of the Araucanians that describes them as a state rather than as a tribe. Molina writes that although their settlements want regularity, this "is by no means the case in the political division of their state, which is regulated with much intelligence": divided from north to south into four uthal-mapus or parallel tetrarchates that are nearly equal - lauquen-mapu the maritime country, lelbun-mapu the plain, inapire-mapu the country at the foot of the Andes, and pire-mapu that of the Andes - each uthalmapu divided into five aillaregues or provinces, and each aillaregue into nine regues or counties, with the constituent provinces named one by one.
The chapter list of that book is the argument. After the local situation and dress come the political form and civil institutions, the military system and mode of making war, the division of the spoil and the congress of peace, the system of religion and funeral ceremonies, the division of time and astronomical ideas and measures, then rhetoric, poetry, medical skill and commerce, then pride and kindness and charity towards each other and the mode of salutation and proper names, then matrimony and domestic employments, and finally food, music and other diversions. A people denied a history is here given ten chapters of institutions.
He was writing about a polity that still existed and still negotiated: a footnote to the chapter on political division cites the second and third articles of the regulations of Lonquilmo, made in 1784, as expressly defining the limits of each uthalmapu and marking out its districts.
The admiration is condescending and the pages say so themselves, which is the reason to quote them rather than summarise. The military government, Molina writes, "is not only more rational and better systematized than the civil, but in some respects appears to be superior to the genius of an uncultivated nation". Private quarrels called malocas are likened to the feuds of the ancient Germans, and the concession that follows is careful rather than warm: they are generally unaccompanied with the effusion of blood and confined to pillage alone.
The books exist because the Spanish crown expelled their author. The Edinburgh Review records that Molina was a native of the country he described and one of the Jesuits "so cruelly driven from their country, when the court of Spain embraced the resolution of extinguishing the order within all its dominions", who took refuge in the dominions of the Pope in Italy. The reviewer groups him with Clavigero, historian of his native Mexico, and Viscardo of Peru, as three natives of Spanish America among a handful of persecuted ecclesiastics whom, in an equal number of any order of men, "it will not be easy to parallel". The achievement and the injury are the same event.
Contemporary standing outside Spain was high and was measured against the author's birth rather than in spite of it. The same 1809 notice quotes Pinkerton's Modern Geography, at volume iii page 701, that "Molina does honour to the Creol race; for, a more clear, scientific, and intelligent account of any country was never written by any author, of any age or climate", and at page 665 that his works "may be regarded as excellent models of chorography; and scarcely of any distant region a description exists so exact and complete".
The English text is not a transparent window on the Italian, and two independent warnings say so. The translator's own footnote in the preface, signed "Amer. Trans.", states that the technical descriptions have been moved to the end of the volume and arranged under their respective heads. The Edinburgh reviewer goes further, recommending that the translation "be carefully compared with the original" because the American translator "has evidently leaned too much to the French version", and proving it with a passage on the Chilean language from Storia Naturale book iv page 334, where Molina's "ma anche le cose morali e astratte" survives in the French as "metaphysiques" and the American transcribes the French rather than the Italian.
What was read for this entry is the 1808 Middletown translation in two volumes, pages opened as scans - the title pages of both volumes, the preface of the natural history, and the contents and pages 49, 55 and 61 of the civil history. No full-view copy of either Bologna original could be reached from here, so the entry is tiered at secondary and every quotation is an English translator's wording, with the fidelity of that wording itself in question on the evidence of the previous claim.