Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias (Seville, 1535; complete edition Madrid, 1851-1855)
The first natural history of the Americas, and for three centuries the least read of them. Oviedo printed nineteen books at Seville in 1535 and left fifty; the rest stayed in manuscript until the Real Academia de la Historia hunted down the codices and printed the whole between 1851 and 1855. The 1535 books describe American plants from direct observation, organised by what each sense can report, and record the indigenous names first.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of Oviedo runs to a sentence: a Spanish official wrote an early natural history of the Indies and Las Casas disliked it. What is set out here instead is the shape of the thing and how it survived. The publication arithmetic is exact and comes from the editor who did the work: fifty books written, nineteen printed by the author in 1535, one more in 1557, a fragment of the shipwreck book, and the remainder in manuscript until 1851-1855, recovered from the Colombina, the crown's Patrimonial library and a suppressed Jesuit archive after an earlier copy had been lost. Against that stand the author's own pages, in his own preserved spelling: a chapter on the pineapple that records three indigenous names before the Spanish one, sorts its evidence sense by sense, admits that pen, words and plate all fail, and concedes that palates differ as faces do. The counterweight comes from the same chapter rather than from outside it - the languages he counts are counted as an obstacle to conversion, and the people he describes are called barbarous on the page after the fruit. Where the edition's own two prefaces disagree about what was printed in the sixteenth century, this object says so and lowers the confidence instead of choosing.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The edition read here is the one the Real Academia de la Historia made from the author's codices. Its title pages read: Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra-firme del mar Océano, por el capitan Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés, primer cronista del Nuevo Mundo; publícala la Real Academia de la Historia, cotejada con el códice original, enriquecida con las enmiendas y adiciones del autor, é ilustrada con la vida y el juicio de las obras del mismo, por D. José Amador de los Rios. The first volume is the Primera parte, Madrid, Imprenta de la Real Academia de la Historia, 1851; the fourth is Tercera parte, tomo IV, from the same press, 1855.
The edition exists because the Academy held the office of cronista mayor de Indias, and its editor states that publishing the primitive historians was one of the principal obligations that office carried. Three works, he writes, most excited the Academy's zeal: Oviedo's Historia general y natural de Indias, the Historia de las Indias of Bartolomé de las Casas, and the Historia de Nueva España of Bernardino de Sahagún. It was hard to decide which should appear first; the Academy inclined to chronological order and put Oviedo at the head of its Colección de historiadores de Indias.
Of the fifty books Oviedo left written, the author published only the first nineteen, in 1535, and those afterwards received great additions and emendations from his own hand. The editor adds two corrections to what was then generally believed: the first edition of the first part carried part, and not the whole, of the book of the Naufragios, the last of the fifty; and book XX, the first of the second part, was printed in 1557 and was the only book of the second and third parts to see the light. Roughly three fifths of the first natural history of the Americas therefore reached print three centuries after it was written.
The two prefaces of this same edition do not tell the story of the shipwreck book identically, and neither is adjusted here to fit the other. The 1851 volume says part of it went into the first edition of the first part; the 1855 volume says the third part was unpublished until then, only some chapters of libro L having been given to the press in 1547 and 1555, at Salamanca and Seville, to which Oviedo had put the title Infortunios é naufragios. The confidence on this claim is lowered accordingly: what is firm is that a fragment of that book circulated in the sixteenth century and the rest did not.
Getting the manuscripts took decades and the editor records the misses as well as the finds. The four volumes copied for Juan Bautista Muñoz, lodged in a ministry archive, had disappeared. Miguel Salvá then established that eight volumes of the second part survived in the Patrimonial library of the crown and twelve of the third in the Biblioteca Colombina at Seville. Book XXVIII, which Cerdá y Rico had been unable to find, turned up among papers from the suppressed Jesuit archive, in a folio tome of four hundred and thirty leaves detached at some earlier time from the Seville transcript.
For the short gaps that remained the editor preferred the 1547 printing over that of 1555, on the ground that the author himself had seen the earlier one through the press, and the Academy resolved to conserve not only Oviedo's diction but his peculiar orthography. That decision is why the spellings quoted in the claims below are the author's own and not a nineteenth-century normalisation.
Book VII, chapter XIV, on the fruit the Christians called a piña because it looked like a pine cone, records the indigenous names before the Spanish one: the Indians name this fruit yayama, a certain kind of the same fruit boniama, and another generation says yayagua. Oviedo then places it against everything he has seen: not in Spain, France, England, Italy, Sicily, Germany, Burgundy, Flanders, Tyrol, Artois, Holland or Zeeland, nor among the excellent fruits King Ferdinand gathered in his gardens of the Parque, the Paraiso and Pujo Real, nor in the garden of the duke of Ferrara on its island in the Po, where the trees were loaded with fruit and carried in carts to the table and to his chamber.
The chapter's interest is that it is built as a method rather than a marvel. Oviedo sorts the evidence by sense: "assi que de çinco sentidos corporales los tres que se pueden aplicar á las fructas, y aun el quarto, que es el palpar, en excelençia partiçipa destas quatro cosas ó sentidos sobre todas las fructas ó manjares del mundo". He then works through why the fifth sense, hearing, cannot be applied to a fruit, distinguishing the vegetative soul of plants from the sensitive and the rational, and noting that plants do register benefit and harm: watered or pruned they thrive, neglected or scorched or cut they wither and perish.
He is also explicit about the limits of his own evidence, which is rare in the genre. Neither his pen nor his words can paint the fruit; the plate he supplies is, he says, "tan mal debuxada" that it will serve only those who have already seen the thing; for those who never have, he offers his judgement and invites the blame to fall on him rather than on the fruit. He adds that palates differ between men as faces do, "tan diferentes, como los rostros humanos de los hombres unos de otros", so that a verdict on taste is a verdict about a judge as much as about a fruit. Alongside this sits plain horticulture: the fruit grows on a rough wild thistle, is ready in about ten months, and is propagated from the crown.
The cost is in the same chapter and is not imported from a hostile source. Having praised the fruit, Oviedo turns to the languages of the Indies: within twenty or thirty leagues of Tierra Firme there are four or five, and he counts thirty or forty or more in all, which he gives as one of the principal reasons why so few Christians are maintained in those parts among what he calls "estas gentes bárbaras". The first natural history of the Americas is written from inside a project of conquest and conversion by an author who ranks the peoples he describes, and the ranking is on the page next to the observation.
For the Peruvian books the editor describes a documentary method that would not embarrass a modern historian. Oviedo did not rely only, as was his custom, on trustworthy witnesses he knew personally: he obtained a copious number of letters from the principal captains and even from the Pizarros, and kept before him several relations written in sight of the events, which he cites, extracts, or inserts entire. Those named are the veedor Miguel de Astete, Diego de Molina, Alonso Dávila, fray Francisco de Bobadilla, Diego de Almagro, and above all captain Alonso de Montemayor, whose account the editor calls the fullest and most interesting that reached Oviedo's hands.
The same page records two things a triumphalist reading would drop and a hostile one would miss. Oviedo set down the bad treatment that the victor and his people gave the defeated Atahualpa, despite the pain the quarrels of the conquistadors caused him. And he used Francisco de Xerez's Conquista del Perú, printed in 1547 with the first part of his own Historia, but far from following it he contradicts and emends it in several passages, showing himself little satisfied with its truthfulness and historical exactness.
The last book of the fifty, libro L, is a subject in its own right and is described by the editor as a report of every shipwreck that had happened in the western seas from the discovery of the Indies to the year 1548, a repertory of episodes contained nowhere else. Its final chapter, which closes the whole work, sets out the reasons the author had for preferring Castilian to Latin in writing it. This corpus did not open libro L: the digitisation of tomo IV used here stops at page 304, so the claim rests on the editor's description and not on the book's own pages, and the confidence reflects that.
One page of the third part read here shows the register in which the Historia treats an indigenous person who worked for the Spaniards, and it holds both verdicts at once. In book XLVII, chapter IV, an interpreter of Nueva Castilla is credited with speaking and understanding Castilian very well, with knowing how to distinguish the vegetative and sensitive soul from the rational, with being graceful, serving well, and knowing how to win the goodwill of everyone he dealt with. Two paragraphs later the same man is "Este traydor", charged with a false interpretation that turned a conference into deaths. Both judgements are Oviedo's, on one page, about one man.