Privileged Nature: Ornithologists, Hunters, Sportsmen and the Dawn of Environmental Conservation in Spain, 1850 to 1935 Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Hanley, Patrick Michael Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 24/09/2021 15:22:17 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/621576 PRIVILEGED NATURE: ORNITHOLOGISTS, HUNTERS, SPORTSMEN AND THE DAWN OF ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION IN SPAIN, 1850 TO 1935 by Patrick Hanley ________________________________ Copyright © Patrick Hanley 2016 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2016 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Patrick Hanley, titled “Privileged Nature: Ornithologists, Hunters, Sportsmen and the Dawn of Environmental Conservation in Spain, 1850 to 1918,” and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. _______________________________________________________________________ Date: April 13th, 2016 David Ortiz, Jr. _______________________________________________________________________ Date: April 13th, 2016 Susan Crane _______________________________________________________________________ Date: April 13th, 2016 Laura Tabili _______________________________________________________________________ Date: April 13th, 2016 Doug Weiner _______________________________________________________________________ Date: April 13th, 2016 Paul Milliman Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. ________________________________________________ Date: April 13th, 2016 Dissertation Director: Robert Ortiz, Jr. 2 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: Patrick Hanley 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my advisor David Ortiz Jr. and the members of my dissertation committee, Laura Tabili, Susan Crane, Doug Weiner, and Paul Milliman for their support and suggestions without which this work would have been incomplete. I would like to acknowledge the staff of the Biblioteca Nacional de España, especially Roberto, Sonya, and Juan Carlos for making the research process a less difficult one. I felt welcome due to their patience and kindheartedness. I owe many thanks to Sandra Rodríguez Bermejo of the Congreso de los Diputados Departamento de Archivo who saved me a long journey when she sent me electronic copies of the original hunting laws. I want to recognize my grandfather, Robert Hicks, who traveled to Madrid with me and made a solitary endeavor less lonely. I owe an enormous debt to Cory Dale Davis, who took time out his most busy life to proofread early versions of this work and to entertain the intellectual ramblings of the author. Lastly, I would like to thank the people of Spain for their hospitality. 4 DEDICATION Writing is never as solitary an endeavor as it may seem. This work is dedicated to my wife, Veronica Hanley. Over the decade we have been together, she has been my rock, my ballast, and my soulmate. I cannot overstate the efforts she put into me so that I could have completed this project. She sacrificed nights alone, hours of sleep, weekends, and weeks of companionship during my years as a graduate student. She repeatedly put my wellbeing over hers. Over the course of my weightless regiment, she cooked meals and changed her own lifestyle so that I never felt alone or unsupported. As I traveled to Spain, she took care of home entirely on her own while giving up her time to send me video messages of love and caring and called me at the beginning and end of my days there. Over the years she prepared meals, did laundry, tended to my two quadrupedal children, paid bills, worked overtime, attended to the maintenance of everyday life, and drove hundreds of miles when we went out of town all to make certain that I completed this project within four years. All that while, she labored as a Masters student and a full- time manager. Her encouragement and love have pushed me to heights that I could have never achieved alone. More important, though, is her unending patience and her unconditional love. My studies have taught me how to be a historian. She has taught me how to be a better person. Through her strength and character, she has been my role model, teaching me never to quit and how to make right decisions. For all this and more I want to say, babe, I 5 love you with all my heart. May we have a lifetime of joys and journeys together as this chapter of our lives has come to a close and we aspire something more. This work is also dedicated to the loving memory of my grandmother, Judith Hicks. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………....................11 Chapter One “I Did Not Know to Give Them a Name” The New World, The Habsburg Naturalists, and Proto-empiricism 1492-1700………………22 Chapter Two A Swede, a Frenchmen, and the Bourbon Royal Botanical Expeditions Cabinets of Curiosity, Taxonomy, and Spain’s Embrace of Empiricism 1701-1808…………53 Chapter Three Spanish Birds Spanish Ornithology, Bird Enthusiasts, and the Battle to Save Insectivores 1850-1879…80 Chapter Four Greyhounds and Shotguns Noble Hunters, Masculinity, and Species Protection 1772-1879…...............................................104 Chapter Five The Toothless Laws Hunting Laws, Species Conservation, and Bird Protection Treaties 1879-1903……………..127 Chapter Six The Reconquista of Nature Pedro José Pidal and the Establishment of Spain’s First National Park 1903-1918…..........149 7 Conclusion….......................................................................................................................................................183 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….193 8 ILLUSTRATIONS Photograph of Alfonso XIII hunting a wild boar on horseback………………………………122 9 ABSTRACT This dissertation argues the foundation of Spain’s first national park, the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga, was the culmination of a four-century-long historical development in which Spaniards redefined the manner in which they conceived of and interacted with nature. The establishment of the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga resulted from two different historical processes, the formation of empirical science in Spain and the pursuit of noble hunting, which converged in the late nineteenth- century in the form of species protection and the environmental conscience it reflected. This environmental conscience permeated discourses on Spanish reinvigoration including those of nobleman, sportsman, and politician Pedro José Pidal y Bernaldo de Quirós whose own articulation of this environmental consciousness materialized in the form of the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga which legislatively meshed species and landscape protection for the first time in Spain in 1916. 10 Introduction On February 22, 2016, Senator Rosa Dominguez de Posada of the regional Foro Asturias party submitted a motion to the Spanish Senate. The proposal called on Spaniards to celebrate the centennial anniversary of their first national park, now named the Parque Nacional de los Picos de Europa. Dominguez de Posada invoked the words of Pedro José Pidal, who in the very same Senate chamber argued for the establishment of the park nearly a century ago. He pointed out to his fellow senators, “Are there not sanctuaries for art? Must there not be sanctuaries for Nature?”1 She invoked, as Pidal had done a century earlier, the Picos de Europa’s special place in Spanish history. Not only had it been a residence where the Celts lived two centuries before Christ, it also marked the place where in 711CE King Pelayo routed an Arab army and initiated the Reconquista. The park was founded on the 1200th anniversary of the Battle of Covadonga, she mused, and in the year 2018 the Senate should not only commemorate that victory but also the coronation of Christ’s mother as the Virgin of Covadonga and the establishment of Spain’s first national park.2 The foundation of the Parque Nacional de la Montaña de Covadonga, as the Parque Nacional de los Picos de Europa was