Noticia de la California (Madrid, 1757), from the manuscript of Miguel Venegas
The three-volume Madrid printing of 1757 that first put California before a European reading public, edited from a manuscript history written in Mexico in 1739 and from other relations. Its ethnographic pages map the peninsula's languages with unusual care about what a name means, and print, inside quotation marks, the cosmology of the Perícues and of the Loreto nation in their own terms - including a spirit who sends the epidemics.
Why this wins its question: The Noticia de la California is usually met in English through the anonymous London translation of 1759, cited as the book that made California known in Europe, and treated as a mission chronicle. This object opens the Spanish sheets and shows what is actually on them: a title page that admits the work is a compilation from a manuscript of 1739 and other relations, with maps; a language geography that stops to warn its reader that rancherias of other tongues sit inside every nation's territory, that one language carries several names, and that small groups are named for circumstances rather than for speech; the Loreto terms Edu, Monqui and Laymones, which name peoples by where they live relative to the speaker; and, quoted as a fragment and left in the peoples' own words, the doctrine that the stars are shining metals, that there is no word for Heaven but only Notu, meaning above, and that the spirit Gumongo in the north sends the pestilences while the spirit Guyiagui sowed the land with pitahayas and shaped the estuaries as far as the rock at Puerto Escondido. It also prints, from the third volume, the Fonte relation of a northwest passage with its soundings and tides - and says explicitly that the pages read do not establish what the editor made of it, rather than guessing.
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 title page of the first volume states the whole composition of the work: "NOTICIA DE LA CALIFORNIA, Y DE SU CONQUISTA TEMPORAL, Y ESPIRITUAL HASTA EL TIEMPO PRESENTE, SACADA DE LA HISTORIA MANVSCRITA, FORMADA en Mexico año de 1739. por el Padre Miguel Venegas, de la Compañia de Jesus; y de otras Noticias, y Relaciones antiguas, y modernas: AÑADIDA DE ALGVNOS MAPAS PARTICULARES, y uno general de la America Septentrional, Assia Oriental, y Mar del Sur intermedio, formados sobre las Memorias mas recientes, y exactas, que se publican juntamente: DEDICADA AL REY N.tro SEÑOR POR LA PROVINCIA DE NUEVA-ESPAÑA, de la Compañia de Jesus. TOMO PRIMERO." It is printed "CON LICENCIA. En Madrid: En la Imprenta de la Viuda de Manuel Fernandez, y del Supremo Consejo de la Inquisicion. Año de M.DCC.LVII."
The third volume carries the same title and imprint word for word with "TOMO TERCERO" in place of the first volume's numbering, so the work as published in 1757 runs to at least three volumes from the same Madrid press. The two title pages were read from two separate digitised copies.
The book therefore announces on its own title page that it is a compilation: a manuscript history of 1739 by one man, other notices and relations old and new, and maps drawn from recent memoirs, assembled and published in Madrid eighteen years later by a province of the Society. That is why this object treats the volumes as a primary witness to the 1757 printing and to the fragments they transcribe, and not as first-hand observation of California by the author named on the title page.
The language geography of the peninsula is given by nation and by territory. The page read here names the Monquis, whose territory reaches to above the Real Presidio de Loreto, and, as the third, the nation Cochimi or the Cochimies, from the territory of Loreto through everything discovered to the north. The head of the enumeration falls on the preceding page, which has no signed page image in this digitisation and could not be opened, so the first two nations are not read here.
What makes the passage unusual is its warning against its own map. It is to be noted, the text says, that in the territory of one nation and language there are usually some rancherias of other languages and nations; that these general nations subdivide into lesser ones; that one and the same language usually has several names; and that the small rancherias and nations usually take their name not from the language but from other circumstances. An eighteenth-century compiler telling his reader that the ethnonyms he is about to use are unstable is stating the limits of his own evidence.
The same page shows that the names in use were relative to whoever was speaking. In the language of the mission of Loreto Concho, where the royal presidio stands and which is the capital of all the missions, there are particular words by which they name the nations that people the peninsula according to the place where they live: the Indians who fall to the south of their territory they call Edu, or Equu, or Edues; themselves they call by the general word Monqui or Monquis; and those who live to the north of Loreto they call Laymones. The text adds that these three names had become common enough in use.
The volume prints indigenous cosmology with the native terms kept, and marks where it is quoting. Of the doctrines of the Edues or Pericues it reports a group it calls the sect of Wac-Tupuran, which held that the stars are shining metals, that the Moon created Cucunumic, that the stars were made by Purutabui, and other things in that manner; and it closes the passage with the words "Hasta aqui la Relacion de los Dogmas de los Edues, o Pericues", so the reader is told where the transcription ends.
The account of the Loreto nation - made up, the book says, of some Laymones, Monquis, Vehities and Guacuros, inhabiting the middle of the peninsula - is introduced as "el Fragmento siguiente" and set inside quotation marks. They have in their language no word properly meaning Heaven, it says, but understood it by the general word Notu, which means above, or high. They say that in the sky, toward the part of the north, there is a principal Spirit whom they call Gumongo: this one sends the pestilences and diseases, and in times past sent another Spirit, whom they call Guyiagui, to visit the earth; and when this one came, he went sowing the land with pitahayas, the most abundant fruit in California, and forming the esteros of the coast of the Gulf, until he reached a great stone in a very capacious estuary near Loreto, which the Spaniards today call Puerto Escondido.
A spirit in the north who sends the pestilences is worth reading beside what was happening to the peninsula's population in the same decades, and this object states the limit of what it can say about that: the pages read here report the belief and do not give epidemic figures, and no demographic source was opened for this object, so no claim is made here about the scale or the timing of the collapse.
The work extends beyond narrative into a documentary appendix. In the third volume, Part IV, Apendice VII prints inside quotation marks a relation attributed to the Almirante Fonte, with the kind of detail a pilot would note: vessels called Periagos in the local language, made of two thick trees and fifty or sixty feet long; a run of a hundred and forty leagues west and then four hundred and thirty-six east-north-east, to seventy-seven degrees of latitude; a very navigable river named Rio de los Reyes; a channel of four to five brazas at low water; a tide rising twenty-four feet at the conjunction and opposition of the moon; and two Jesuits aboard, one of whom accompanied Captain Bernardo on his discovery.
What the editor concluded about that relation is not established here. Only the title page and one page of the appendix of the third volume were read, and the pages read do not contain the discussion around the quotation, so this object records that the Fonte account was printed in full in a Spanish compilation of 1757 and makes no claim about whether the volume endorses it, doubts it or refutes it.
The purpose of the book is printed on its own title page and is not separable from its ethnography: the subject is the "conquista temporal, y espiritual" of California, the dedication is to the King, and the publisher is the Jesuit province whose missions the volumes describe. The peoples whose cosmology it preserves appear in it as the objects of that enterprise, and the same interest that produced the record shaped it.
What this object rests on and what it does not. It rests on three pages of the first volume and two of the third, read as page images from two full-view digitisations of the 1757 printing. The second volume was not opened. Nothing here rests on the English translation of 1759 or on any later edition, and no claim is made about the book's European reception, its translations or its influence on later voyages, none of which was verified for this object.