Seemann on Safier, 'Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America.'

H-HistGeog Seemann on Safier, 'Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America.'

Review published on Monday, October 19, 2009

Neil Safier. Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. 428 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-73355-5.

Reviewed by Jorn Seemann (Louisiana State University) Published on H-HistGeog (October, 2009) Commissioned by Robert J. Mayhew

Indigenes, Enlightenment, and Exploration

I have always wondered how travelers from the Enlightenment period organized and executed their voyages to South America and how they (re)presented their findings after their return to Europe. The official travel accounts, reports, and expensive portfolio books contained detailed and polished descriptions of land and life, and painstakingly accurate measurements of distances, coordinates, and river depths, but left out more explicit reference to the explorers themselves--what they did when they were not busy calculating angles or writing down their musings, and how they proceeded to publish their results. For me, it is difficult to imagine how French, Spanish, and British gentlemen in appropriate attire, the mandatory wigs on their heads, penetrated the humid Amazon lowlands or climbed the ragged Andes, accompanied by heavy and bulky wooden trunks that contained sophisticated instruments and indispensable literature.

Measuring the New World offers a refreshing perspective on some of the hidden layers of knowledge production and truth-making in mid-eighteenth-century France and Spain. Neil Safier’s study is a tour de force through a large number of archives and libraries in Europe and the New World where he was able to dig up forgotten maps, personal correspondences, notebooks, and other unpublished material that shed light on how ideas, concepts, and myths crossed the Atlantic in both directions. The book is a successful attempt to reveal how explorers, scientists, and editors described, inscribed, and even un(sub)scribed South American landscapes through their own social and material practices that “served to efface a far wider range of actors than has previously been recognized” (p. 9).[1] Whereas the erudite audience in eighteenth-century Paris or Madrid may have deemed these travel accounts as edifying objective narratives, the present-day historian of science will find evidence of selective and partial observations that suppressed and silenced other voices and “scraped away the record of how such knowledge was derived” (p. 9).

Reading between the lines of the smooth and impeccable surface of written texts and searching for the deeper meanings and impacts of material culture and its ephemeral by-products, Safier points out that Enlightenment science entailed not only the mapping of the world and the showcasing and cataloguing of knowledge, but also the imposition of European values and thoughts.[2] However, travelers did not simply pass the “sacred fire” of Old World science to the South American nations, but also actively manipulated their findings for the European audience and for the sake of their own self-promotion.

The starting point for Safier’s scanning of scientific practices and truth-making is Charles-Marie de la Condamine’s voyage to South America between 1735 and 1744 whose principal mission was to calculate the length of the meridian at the equator in order to determine the true shape of the terrestrial globe. In the seven chapters of the book, the reader is taken “from man-made markers on a plain in Quito to a raft on the Amazon River, from copperplates in a cartographic printing house to the hothouses of European gardens” (p. 8). Material records, such as manuscripts, maps, and monuments, serve as hangers for each chapter of Safier’s thick description of Enlightenment science.

Four chapters of the book deal with written accounts from different national and ethnic viewpoints that present aspects and ideas of South American cultures and landscapes. Chapter 3 presents the reception history of La Condamine’s Relation abrégée d’un voyage fait dans l’intérieur de l’Amérique méridionale (1745) in which he registered his journey from the Andes to the South American coast and represented himself as a “triumphant conquistador of geographic and intellectual territory” (p. 96). Safier discusses the reactions and rejoinders to this report throughout Europe and raises the question about who had the legitimization to discourse about the New World--apparently not Creoles and mestizos, but European intellectuals, like La Condamine, who disguised their own ethnocentrism by accusing South American scholars of a “high degree of prejudice” in favor of their own country (p. 108).

In a later section of the book (chapter 5), Safier deals with the Spanish version of the South American expedition, the Relación histórica del viage a la America Meridional (1748) by Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, the two representatives of the Spanish Crown who accompanied La Condamine on his voyage to Ecuador. Similar to La Condamine’s Relation abrégée, the authors were confronted with a wide variety of reactions, from praising the book as a “triumph of Spanish empiricism” to challenging the taken-for-granted idea of the Spanish rulers as natural (and better) successors of the Incas (p. 168).

Safier does not forget the native voices, either, although some may complain about the relatively meager yield of indigenous testimonies. Suffice to remember that the author’s point of departure (which is far from ethnocentric) is European Enlightenment science and not the “native’s point of view.”[3] Within this perspective, chapter 6 is dedicated to the “History of the Incas” written in the early 1600s by Garcilaso de la Vega, a mestizo and descendant of the defeated Inca rulers. The French translation of de la Vega's account was published in 1744 with abundant corrective footnotes and “adapted” to the social and political needs in prerevolution France. The seeds, fruits, and flowers that La Condamine brought from the New World to the botanical garden of Paris were literally transfigured into textual descriptions, a “virtual hothouse in print” that highlighted the potential of South American species for French stomachs (p. 222).

The last chapter of the book describes how the knowledge of South America underwent an even more radical process of abridgement on the pages of Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie (1751-72) that reduced complex topics to shorter more generalized entries in alphabetical order. As a philosopher and sedentary man, Diderot conceived of the explorers and travelers as “ignorant liars,” though he still needed their contributions for the publication of his Dictionnaire Raisonné (1751-72). Once again, La Condamine enters the stage, this time not as a protagonist, but as the contributor of four minor keywords and as the potential author of a longer article on the plains of Quito that he never happened to write.

Besides the interpretation of textual testimonies, Safier includes two chapters that deal with maps and their production processes. Chapter 2 describes how La Condamine elaborated his own map of the Amazon River basin after his descend from the lofty Andes to the treacherous waters of the Amazon lowlands. A closer look at La Condamine’s correspondence shows that he compiled his Carte du course du Marangnon (1745) from a “latticed assortment of diverse sources” rather than from accurate data (p. 59). He smoothed out his travel account by omitting sources and creating an imaginary system of geographic facts that were perfectly acceptable for his highbrow audience in Paris. La Condamine transformed his map into an enactment of unbiased and objective scientific discourse that he presented as the “first graphic representation of the entire navigable length of the Amazon based upon measurements drawn from astronomical instruments and celestial observations” (p. 59). In addition to this, he astutely discredited the previous mapping attempts by the French cartographer Nicholas Sanson and the Jesuit father Samuel Fritz to promote his own scientific capacities.

Chapter 4 presents insights into the different stages of the production process of theCarta de la Provincia de Quito (1750) at a French printing house. The author of the map, the Spanish-American Creole scientist Pedro Vicente Maldonado and personal acquaintance of La Condamine, scribbled innumerable comments and corrections on the margins of the proof sheets. However, the engravers and editors disregarded many of these suggestions, probably due to their own arbitrariness or even laziness, to Maldonado’s bad handwriting, and to a lack of communication skills. TheCarta de la Provincia de Quito is both a filtered representation of “information that successfully traversed the Atlantic from Andean peaks” and a battlefield for personal conflicts and territorial and intellectual appropriation (p. 126). La Condamine supervised the map production and even published his own version of the map after Maldonado’s untimely death in 1748.

The most bizarre episode of this Enlightenment adventure is described in the first chapter of the book. Safier narrates La Condamine’s attempt to inscribe his successful measurement of the meridian into the Ecuadorean landscape. To honor this accomplishment and eternalize his work, the Frenchman gave the order to erect two stone pyramids in the plains of Yaruquí where the commission had conducted the crucial calculations. Each monument was adorned with a heavy commemorative plate in Latin that mentioned the Frenchman’s name, but left out the names of his Spanish collaborators (we must not forget that La Condamine executed his work in a Spanish colony). In a long juridical battle, judges in the colonies and in Europe failed to reach an agreement with regard to the future of the pyramids. While one court ruled the fleur-de-lis, the symbol of the French monarchy, as offensive and ordered its erasure, another suggested the inclusion of Ulloa’s and Jorge Juan’s names. However, the verdict by the Spanish court finally decreed the destruction of the monuments in 1747. Safier cleverly points out that La Condamine’s more powerful and everlasting accomplishments were not his pyramids erected on the Quito plain, but his “monuments in print” (p. 158).

Measuring the New World offers interesting and intriguing insights into the power relations between written words and real places and into what David Turnbull defines as knowledge spaces or assemblages “made up of linked sites, people and activities ... that acquire their taken-for-granted air and seemingly unchallengeable naturalness through the suppression and denial of work involved in their construction.”[4] Over more than four hundred pages, Safier shares his enthusiasm (at times in a rather too chatty style) and his impressive ability to exhume details that did not make it to the

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Seemann on Safier, 'Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America.'. H-HistGeog. 12-18-2013. https://networks.h-net.org/node/5280/reviews/6479/seemann-safier-measuring-new-world-enlightenment-science-and-south Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 3 H-HistGeog polished final versions of scientific tracts, official maps, or travel accounts. These micro-histories in macro-settings show us that the truth-making and consolidation of facts in science can be multilayered, controversial, and extremely subjective. Behind the façade of unbiased scientific description almost always looms a complex universe of facts and fiction, ambitions, and treachery.

Safier successfully brings to light details of personal and professional histories and biographies that are responsible for the production of historical “facts” and images of the world. Enlightenment science appears in flesh and blood through unofficial statements and forgotten records of explorers, such as La Condamine, who is portrayed as an arrogant and opportunistic megalomaniac. As a result, the book is a complex psychogram of the irrationality and inflated egos in Enlightenment science.

Despite its restriction to the Franco-Hispanic world,Measuring the New World opens space for comparative studies and interdisciplinary research. How did other European nations, such as England, Portugal, or Germany, produce and consolidate their knowledge of the New World? What histories of manuscripts, maps, and monuments are still waiting to be (re)discovered?

This highly readable and good-humored collection of “enlightening” histories is a valuable contribution to the understanding of Enlightenment science in a broader, but intimate sense and the geographies of reading and writing in particular, not only within a historical dimension, but also in allusion to our own present-day world of scientific controversies and academic publishing and perishing.[5]

Notes

[1]. For another recent example of these “geographies of text,” see Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

[2]. David Livingstone and Charles Withers, Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). See also Charles Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

[3]. This is, of course, an allusion to Clifford Geertz, “From the Native’s Point of View: On the Nature of Anthropological Understanding,” Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 28 (1974): 26-45.

[4]. David Turnbull, Masons, Tricksters and Cartographers: Comparative Studies in the Sociology of Scientific and Indigenous Knowledge (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 2000), 19.

[5]. See David Livingstone, “Science, Text and Space: Thoughts on the Geography of Reading,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35 (2005): 391-401; and Miles Ogborn, “ Geographia’s Pen: Writing, Geography and the Arts of Commerce, 1660-1760,” Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004): 294-315.

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Citation: Jorn Seemann. Review of Safier, Neil, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America.. H-HistGeog, H-Net Reviews. October, 2009.URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25687

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.