Antonio de Ulloa, Noticias americanas (Madrid, 1772)
The book a Spanish naval officer wrote after two decades in the Americas: a comparison of the territories, climates and productions of both hemispheres, a treatise on fossil shells found petrified in the Andean heights, an argument for Andean civility read off ruins and tools, and a flat rejection of the climatic explanation of human skin colour - printed in 1772, and carrying, on the page after that rejection, a racial typology of its own.
Why this wins its question: Ulloa reaches English-language readers as the co-author of the Noticias secretas and as the man who first described platinum; the 1772 volume in which he wrote about American nature and peoples in his own name is mentioned, if at all, as a curiosity of the dispute of the New World, and is quoted from secondary paraphrase. This object opens the Madrid first edition and takes the sentences: the petrified bivalves in the crags above the Huancavelica mercury mine, the test by colour, structure and matrix that tells a fossil from its rock, the Chilean shell banks deliberately excluded as proof, the flat verdict that climatic explanations of human colour are "imaginario" and self-refuting, the argument for Inca civility read off walls, guacas and tools - and, on the page immediately after the best of it, the fixed racial type and the equation of civility with subjection that the same author printed. Achievement and prejudice quoted from adjacent pages, neither inferred nor smoothed.
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 book is "NOTICIAS AMERICANAS: ENTRETENIMIENTOS PHISICOS-HISTORICOS, SOBRE La América Meridional, y la Septentrianal Oriental", announcing on its title page a general comparison "De los Territorios, Climas, y Produciones en las tres especies, Vegetales, Animales, y Minerales", a particular account of the petrifications of marine bodies and of "los Indios naturales de aquellos Paises, sus costumbres, y usos", the antiquities, and a "Discurso sobre la Lengua, y sobre el modo en que pasaron los primeros Pobladores". The imprint reads "EN MADRID: En la Imprenta de Don Francisco Manuel de Mena, Calle de las Carretas. M.DCC.LXXII. Con las Licencias necesarias."
The author is styled on the title page "Don Antonio de Ulloa, Comendador de Ocaña, en el Orden de Santiago, Gefe de Esquadra de la Real Armada, de la Real Sociedad de Londres, y de las Reales Academias de las Ciencias de Stockolmo, Berlín, &c." - a serving Spanish flag officer writing as a fellow of the Royal Society and of the Berlin and Stockholm academies, which is the standing the book's arguments were meant to carry into the European debate.
Entretenimiento XVI opens with a programme for reading physical evidence as history: it has always been one of men's cares to find out the past and "descubrir testimonios visibles que lo convenzan", and this is what has given rise to the study of antiquities, in which the understanding uses its faculties "para descifrar los testimonios de lo pasado desfigurado con el tiempo". The chapter that follows applies that programme to fossils.
He reports marine shells petrified in the Andean heights and names the place: the doubt is dispelled "con las Petrificaciones que hay en la parte alta, en los cerros que se elevan cerca de Guancavelica, y aun en el mismo donde está la Mina de Azogue, donde las hay en abundancia y con diversidad de especies" - at the mercury mine itself - from which he infers that they must occur in many other places of those extensive high countries.
He states how a fossil is told from the stone around it, which is what makes the report evidence rather than anecdote. Where continued rains strip the earth from the crags, whole shells are seen embedded and made one body with the rock, "de tal modo, que la parte que fue Concha siempre se distingue en el color, en la estructura, y en la qualidad de la materia, de la piedra que las rodéa, y de la que maziza el hueco interior entre sus dos tapas"; broken open, each thing is recognised distinctly "sin que pueda padecer engaño, ni equivocacion la vista", and most are of the bivalve kind.
He refuses to use the easier evidence, which is the more telling detail. Shell beds reported near Concepción in Chile are set aside: those hills barely reach a seventh of the height of the high country, "de modo que el encontrarse allí, no concluye que las debiese haber en él", and besides the Chilean shells "no son petrificadas, ni unidas haciendo cuerpo con los peñascos, sino sueltas en Bancos, ó capas enteras de ellas". The distinction between a loose shell bank and a shell petrified into rock is drawn correctly, and the weaker case is dropped rather than pressed.
On human difference he rejects the reigning explanation outright. Attempts to solve the variety of colours in the human lineage have fallen far short, he writes: "ha sido imaginario quanto se ha explicado sobre ello, hallandose falsificado el sistéma con las mismas razones en que se ha fundado", and attributing it to the heat and cold of climates never accounts for the diversity of build and disparity of features. His ground is observational - "lo frio de los temperamentos, ni lo caluroso, no induce en esto variacion sensible", so that the Indians of highland Peru are indistinguishable from those of the lowland valleys, and those beyond 40 degrees north or south from those near the equator.
The counterpoint is on the facing page and is stated at least as firmly. Having dismantled the climatic account, Ulloa erects a fixed racial type in its place: in the Indians "las que son propias de la raza son sensibles en todo" - a very small forehead, small eyes, a thin nose curving toward the upper lip, a broad face, large ears, coarse straight hair, thickset bodies, beardless cheeks - and however individuals differ "conservan siempre el ayre de la raza". The same pages that refuse one determinism supply another, and both belong in any honest account of the book.
Entretenimiento XX, "Dáse noticia de las antiguedades de los Indios, y de las cosas que se conservan de ellos", argues Andean achievement from material remains: the memories of the Indians of Peru before the conquest survive "en las Poblaciones, Edificios, y Muros en las Guacas, ó entierros", and in the tools and small instruments they used for their works and the figures of idols. These remains, he writes, "ministran larga idéa de lo que eran aquellos Pueblos, y del punto de civilidad á que habian llegado" - an argument for pre-conquest civility drawn from archaeology rather than from chronicle, put in print in 1772.
That credit is not offered cleanly, and the qualification is in the same sentence. The culture visible in the subjects of the Inca empire is one that distinguishes them from peoples who were not subject to it "sin apartarlos de las propensiones proprias de la raza", and it makes perceptible the distance between "el hombre abandonado á la barbarie, á la desidia, y al ócio" and the man subordinated to the laws of a superior authority. The praise of Andean civilisation is framed as praise of subjection to an imperial order, which is also an argument for the one he served.