Paradise in the New World: An Iberian Vision of Paradise

Paradise in the New World: an Iberian vision of tropicality

Heidi V. ScottInstitute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, UK

AbstractThis article provides an in-depth exploration of early modern ideas of the American tropics in the specific context of colonial Spanish America. Its principal focus is a 17th century treatise entitled Paraso en el Nuevo Mundo (Paradise in the New World). Written in the mid-17th century by a jurist named Antonio de Len Pinelo, the treatise proposes that Eden was once located in the South American tropics. Len Pinelo, although born in Spain, considered himself a criollo or Spanish American due to his long years of residence in Peru. Building on studies of criollo consciousness, as well as on recent work that demonstrates the prominence of ideas about the tropics in Iberian colonial expansion, this article intervenes in a rapidly growing academic literature on the genealogies of tropicality since the early modern era. In doing so, it highlights the importance of recognizing criollo writers as producers of distinctive discourses of tropicality that reflected and responded to their ambivalent subject positions and their political and personal aims. First, the article illustrates how Len Pinelos argument about paradise involved the construction of a comparative tropical geography and the sketching out of a distinctive New World tropicality. Second, it examines Len Pinelos embrace of negative as well as positive elements in his depiction of American tropical nature and suggests that his incorporation of negative phenomena was intended to lend weight to his argument about paradise. Third, the article considers how the authors representations of a tropical New World Eden were inflected by his Spanish American patriotism as well as by his role as an agent of empire situated in Madrid.

Keywordscolonialism, Latin America, nature, paradise, tropicality

IntroductionTowards the end of the 19th century, a Bolivian patriot and linguist named Emeterio Villamil de Rada identified the location of the earthly paradise with unusual precision. The Garden of Eden, he contended, was once situated in the Bolivian valley of Sorata on the edge of the yungas, the sub-tropical zone of forest-clad mountains and valleys that connects the high Andes to the Amazon basin.1 By locating the biblical paradise in the New World, Villamil de Rada was articulating an idea that emerged at the very beginning of Europes encounter with the Americas. Although Columbus never relinquished the notion that he had reached the East Indies, he was nevertheless the first of many individuals who, over the course of the following centuries, associated the American tropics with the Garden of Delights.

Corresponding author:Heidi V. Scott, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Aberystwyth University, UKEmail: [email protected]

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78 Cultural Geographies 17(1)

Images of tropical New World nature as paradise became a commonplace invoked by play-wrights and poets as well as by historians and ecclesiastics on both sides of the Atlantic. Those who regarded America as the site (or former site) of the Garden of Eden in a wholly literal sense were, however, fairly few and far between. A 17th century jurist and scholar who was born in Spain to Portuguese parents, Antonio de Len Pinelo belonged to the select group of individuals who pro-moted this vision, for he argued that the earthly paradise had once been situated in the Amazonian heartlands of South America. Although the work remained unpublished until the 20th century, his thesis was set out in a substantial five-book treatise entitled Paraso en el Nuevo Mundo (Paradise in the New World) that was completed in Madrid around 1650. Despite the impressive scope of this work, it has so far received only limited scholarly attention due in part, perhaps, to the absence of an easily accessible modern edition.2 Nevertheless, it provides a valuable point of departure for exploring the development of ideas about American nature and paradise in the long colonial era that both separates and connects Columbus and Villamil de Rada. Writing in mid-colonial times, Len Pinelo was also situated in-between these two individuals in other ways: although born in Europe, like Columbus, his long years of residence and education in the Viceroyalty of Peru pro-duced in him a strong sense of attachment to the New World that prefigured the independence-era patriotism of the Bolivian scholar.

Existing scholarship situates Len Pinelo within criollo (Spanish American)3 traditions of defending the New World against European criticism and of expressing patriotic sentiment through laudatory descriptions of its nature, climate and riches.4 Building on these studies, as well as on recent work that demonstrates the prominence of ideas about the tropics in early Iberian explora-tion and colonialism in the New World, this article intervenes in a rapidly growing academic lit-erature on the genealogies of tropicality since the early modern era. In particular, the article seeks to convey the importance of recognizing criollo writers (and those of European birth who identi-fied themselves as criollo) as producers of distinctive and internally variegated discourses of trop-icality that reflected and responded to their ambivalent subject positions and their political and personal aims.

First, I illustrate how Len Pinelos argument in favour of an equatorial New World paradise involved the construction of a comparative tropical geography and the sketching out of a distinc-tive New World tropicality that built on existing early modern ideas about American nature. Second, I examine the notable ambivalence of Len Pinelos imaginative connections between tropical nature and paradise an ambivalence that was produced by his embrace of negative as well as positive elements in his depiction of the American tropics. As we will see, however, far from contradicting his theory of a tropical American paradise, the authors incorporation of nega-tive phenomena was intended to lend weight to his argument. Finally, this article considers the ways in which his representations of a tropical New World paradise were inflected by his Spanish American patriotism as well as by his role as an agent of empire situated in Madrid. Although Len Pinelos vision had strong affinities with the political agendas of criollo intellectuals in Lima, I argue that it was shaped in distinctive ways that may be partly attributed to the geographical and professional location from which he wrote. Before focusing on Paraso en el Nuevo Mundo, how-ever, I wish to situate my intervention in the context of recent scholarship on the emergence of ideas of the tropics, above all in relation to the European colonization of the Americas.

Tropicality and the Iberian worldSince the mid-1990s, unquestioned acceptance of the tropics as a self-explanatory category and region has been replaced, in an interdisciplinary literature embracing environmental history,


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geography and postcolonial studies, by recognition that the tropics are no less an idea than a geographical reality. Focusing primarily on imaginative constructions of the tropics that emerged in Europe from the early modern era onwards, the literature critically brings to light pervasive ideas about the tropical world and its inhabitants that have circulated in a host of written accounts and images. In contrasting a supposedly exotic and extraordinary tropical zone with a temperate norm, European expressions of tropicality have persistently identified hot, wet environments as quintessentially tropical and have imagined these environments in ambivalent ways that alter-nate between idealization and denigration.5

In the literature on tropicality, Europeans ambivalent responses to the tropical world have emerged as a central focus of inquiry. Recent studies by Duncan, Livingstone and Stepan, to cite just a few prominent examples, demonstrate that fears of tropical disease and of moral as well as physical degeneration are frequently to be found embedded in European visions of the tropics as spaces of unrivalled natural beauty and abundance.6 As these studies demonstrate, ambivalent dis-courses were deeply intertwined with European colonial ventures in the tropics, and were often deployed as a means of justifying colonialism. On the one hand, European portrayals of the tropical world as remarkably rich in natural resources were commonplace. On the other hand, apologists for colonialism argued that the native inhabitants of the tropics partly due to the influence of the very climate and environment in which they lived had failed to put these resources to good use and required the intervention of vigorous Europeans to bring this about. In the 19th century, dis-courses of environmental determinism were weakened by the rise of biological racism. Rather than being wholly replaced, however, determinism became complexly entangled with notions of intrin-sic racial difference in European representations of tropical peoples. In attending to such themes, critical studies of tropicality investigate the ways in which colonial projects and the construction of European ideas about the tropics were mutually shaped.

Far from constituting a uniform or coherent set of ideas, tropicality is shown to possess varied geographies and genealogies that reflect a diversity of interests, experiences and agencies. The tropics, Driver argues, should be regarded not as a screen onto which European ideas were pro-jected without mediation, but instead as a living space of encounter and exchange.7 Drivers call for scholars to take account of the agency of the tropics and its inhabitants has been heeded, for example, in recent work that examines the role of embodied experience in shaping European trop-ical discourses. It is also reflected in growing concerns for tracing the ways in which the experi-ences of individual travellers, scientists, artists, bureaucrats and explorers shaped their imaginative construction of the tropical world.8

Latin America is by no means absent in these studies. Given the undeniable influence of Alexander von Humboldts prolific writings in shaping 19th and 20th century visions of tropical American nature, it is not surprising that his travels and researches in South America are frequently scrutinized in recent scholarship on the genealogies of tropicality. For Stepan, one of numerous scholars who examines Humboldts opus, modern constructions of the tropical world as a place of fertility and superabundance were derived fundamentally from the work of the German explorer and scientist.9 Research on the idea of the tropics within the specific context of Latin America is by no means restricted, however, to the analysis of Humboldts publications. Critical attention has also been directed towards the impressions and experiences of diverse European and Anglo-American artists, scientists and travellers amongst them Charles Darwin, Alfred Russel Wallace and Frederic Church who visited tropical America in Humboldts wake.10 Predominantly, the majority of recent studies are concerned with outsiders constructions of tropical nature. Nevertheless, scholarly engagements with the artistic, literary and medical expressions of tropical-ity which emerged from within post-independence Latin America, and which frequently involved



the appropriation and subversion of colonial and neo-imperial discourses about the tropics, are also in evidence.11

As the scholarly emphasis on Humboldt suggests, contributions to the recent tropicality litera-ture that focus on Latin America are predominantly concerned with the 19th and 20th centuries. Nevertheless, early colonial encounters with the peoples and environments of the New World have also been subject to critical scrutiny for many decades.12 Moreover, the historical, literary and geographical studies that examine this broad theme have not overlooked early European (and espe-cially Iberian) responses to the tropics. Variously documenting early colonial expressions of won-der at the apparent abundance of New World nature, portrayals of this very same nature as ferocious and alien, and the identification of correspondences as well as differences between European and American environments, this work sheds light on some of the varied ways in which Europeans conceptualized Americas torrid zone in the wake of the Columbian encounter.

In his influential study The Old World and the New, Elliott commented that southern Europeans displayed limited interest in the natural histories and geographies of the continent that they colo-nized. His assertion, however strongly criticized by Butzer in 199213 is now being challenged by a lively field of research on Iberian contributions to early modern science in the context of colo-nial Latin America.14 Here again, the emergence of European and Euroamerican ideas in specific relation to the American tropics has received attention. Amongst numerous examples that could be given, this theme is addressed by contributions to an edited collection on Jesuit studies of nature in the New World.15 As demonstrated by contemporary scholarship on colonial Iberian science, the celebration of American nature, and more specifically of tropical American nature, was frequently a key ingredient in patriotic expressions in Spanish America and Brazil both prior to and after for-mal independence in the 19th century.

Despite the existence of this important body of work, the development and significance of ideas about the tropics is rarely a central or organizing theme in critical studies of American colonial worlds in the early modern era. At least in some studies, this may well reflect prevailing scholarly assumptions that European ideas about the tropics were not of central importance in shaping the trajectories of conquest and colonization in the New World. For some scholars, the principal con-cerns of early European colonizers in America lay above all with the undeniable challenge of mentally assimilating the existence of a hitherto unknown continent.16 For other scholars, the southern European provenance of the earliest explorers rendered the tropical world less alien. The notion of tropical difference, Arnold argues, was not quite as marked in the early modern era as it would come to be in later centuries. Citing Columbus identification of similarities between the Caribbean and Spain, he proposes that a sense of tropical otherness may not have been

very prominent in the minds of the first European travellers and adventurers, most of whom came from southern Europe and for whom the sub-tropical and equatorial regions of the globe did not appear strikingly different from the climate, vegetation and animal life they were famil-iar with in the Mediterranean and North Africa.17

Arnolds observation exemplifies, I suggest, a wider tendency in the tropicality literature to make broad generalizations about early modern visions of the tropics and to pass all too hastily over a vast colonial archive. It is certainly the case that many early European visitors to the New World, Columbus included, displayed an impulse to identify similarities between Americas tropical land-scapes and the European landscapes they had left behind. Yet it is difficult to reconcile Arnolds claim with Columbuss exclamation that the trees of the Caribbean were as different from ours as day from night and so are the fruit and plants and stones, and everything else,18 or with Oviedos


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well-documented struggle to adequately describe tropical Americas fauna and flora for a European readership.19 Even amongst the earliest Spanish accounts of the American tropics it is not difficult to find striking descriptions of profound disorientation and alienation, as well as of physical suffer-ing, experienced by expeditionaries who were exposed to the powerful corporeal impact of the tropical world.20

Early European expressions of tropicality were not restricted, moreover, to the identification of climatic and environmental difference in response to first-hand experience of the New World. In a detailed and attentive analysis of Columbus writings and endeavours, Wey-Gmez compel-lingly argues that his transatlantic explorations were shaped and propelled by a desire to reach, very specifically, those parts of Asia that fall within the tropics.21 Inspired by ancient and medi-eval writings that praised the qualities of tropical nature as well as by Portuguese ventures to the torrid zones of Africa and Asia that proved these areas to be impressively resource-rich as well as inhabitable, Columbus voyages were as much concerned with heading south to the tropics as with reaching the East Indies by sailing westwards. European imperialism was propelled and justified by theories of place, and these theories, Wey-Gmez demonstrates, were primarily founded on notions of latitudinal difference.22 Far from being of limited significance to the beginnings of early Iberian colonialism in the New World, the notion of tropical difference was at its very heart.

Emerging visions of the New World tropicsFar in advance of the Columbian encounter, the emphasis on latitude as an organizing principle in European geography meant that lands within the tropics were believed to possess common climatic and natural characteristics that set them apart from other regions of the world. It may be for this reason, Wey-Gmez suggests, that antique and medieval writings tended to conflate India, Arabia and Ethiopia, and frequently conveyed an expansive understanding of India that included parts of China, Southeast Asia and eastern Africa. For the same reason, he argues, Columbus was sure that the territories he had stumbled across would reveal qualities similar to those known to exist in the India that was already familiar to European scholars. Because of their latitudinal correspondence, opulent wealth, fertility and a richly varied natural world would be discovered in these new lands, just as they had been found in the known Indies.23

Writing in the immediate wake of Columbus voyages, Peter Martyr similarly based his predic-tions about future discoveries in the New World on the nature of the islands of Southeast Asia that were renowned for their wondrous fertility and riches. His anticipatory geography conveys an air of confidence regarding the qualities of the lands that will be found within the New World tropics and envisions the discovery of equatorial lands far more extensive than those of the Darin or the spice-rich islands of the East Indies:

The Moluccas islands, where spices are grown, are in part below the equator, in part next to it they occupy a negligible amount of land, compared with all the rest; and as the equatorial line encircles the whole globe, who would deny that, in other parts, just as here, one may find other lands with equally benign climates; lands which have been imbued by the force of the sun with their aromatic qualities, and which divine Providence has wished to keep hidden until our time, as we see now in the case of these immense oceans and terrestrial regions [the New World]? The coasts that lie to the south of Tenochtitln [later Mexico City] are barely twelve degrees from the equator. Why should it therefore be strange if, just as we now see what once was concealed, the same were to happen again to augment the happiness of our Caesar?24



Both Columbus and Martyr were concerned with predicting and identifying similarities between the new tropics of the West Indies and the tropical regions already known to Europeans. As Wey-Gmez demonstrates, Columbus inevitably recognized that the climatic, natural and human traits of the Caribbean region deviated in significant ways from those he expected to find, for the absence of rich spices and metals and the light skin colour of the native peoples who inhabited the northern coast of South America ran contrary to the logic on which he based his anticipatory geography. However, rather than interpreting these deviations as evidence of an inherently varied tropical world, he viewed them as exceptions to the prevailing characteristics of the equatorial belt.25

If the urge to identify correspondences between the new and the known tropics partly reflects the immense mental challenge that the existence of the Americas posed to Europeans, over the course of the 16th century this challenge was gradually overcome as the continental outlines emerged with growing clarity and detail in cartographic representations. This process was accom-panied by a discursive shift in emphasis from the quest for similarity based on the already known to the identification and explanation of difference. While numerous examples could be cited to illustrate this shift, Jos de Acostas Natural and moral history of the Indies is of particular interest, given that the historians endeavours to explain the natural phenomena of the New World included lengthy reflections on the climatic properties of the American tropics and how these compared to tropical regions in Asia and Africa.26 Although he acknowledged that the climates and environ-ments of the global tropical belt were subject to general rules that set them apart from the worlds temperate and polar regions, he also emphasized the internal diversity of the torrid zone.27 In Acostas eyes, the New World was defined by tropicality but also possessed a distinctively humid tropical nature that stood in marked contrast to the aridity of Ethiopia. The sheer scale of American tropical nature, meanwhile, set it apart from the tropical territories of Asia and Africa. The Nile, Ganges and Euphrates combined, he declared, could not rival the River Paraguay in size, while the magnitude of the Amazon outdid them all.28

Acostas focus on the major rivers of South America reveals another development that took place in European visions of the New World tropics between 1492 and the late 16th century. This involved a geographical shift in focus, away from the Caribbean islands and towards the huge ter-ritorial expanse of the American continent. In the 15th century, Grove observes, European explora-tion in the tropical Atlantic brought about the imaginative association of tropical island environments with paradise.29 Although positive associations between tropical islands and Eden undoubtedly persisted well beyond the era of Columbus voyages to the Caribbean (and arguably persist until the present day), European encounters with the continental interiors of the New World produced a distinctive vision of American tropical nature that was defined by a preoccupation with size and scale. Indeed, the emphasis on what Wey-Gmez terms giganticism is already present in Columbus expressions of wonder at the size of trees and rivers and at the apparently boundless fertility of the Caribbean world.30 It is also contained, as the quotation above illustrates, in Martyrs reflections on future discoveries in the New World. The Moluccas Islands, he argued, could not possibly constitute more than a small fraction of the opulent equatorial lands that still remained to be known and claimed for the Spanish crown.

As we will see, the emerging visions of American tropical nature briefly sketched out above are embraced and developed in Len Pinelos Paraso. While the writings of Columbus, Martyr and Acosta all served as important sources for Len Pinelo, the decades that passed following the pub-lication of Acostas Natural and moral history of the Indies brought new explorations in the tropi-cal interior of South America and the production of important new accounts of these continental regions on which the jurist was able to draw.31 At the end of the 16th century Acosta was already able to conceptualize a global-scale comparative tropical geography. Approximately 60 years on,


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Len Pinelo was in a position to elaborate on Acostas vision of the New World tropics that por-trayed them as integral to a global torrid zone yet also distinctive and internally varied. In con-structing a comparative tropical geography, however, Len Pinelos purpose was notably different to Acostas, for he was primarily concerned with demonstrating that South Americas equatorial regions had once been the location of the biblical paradise.

Locating Eden: Len Pinelos comparative tropical geographyAt first glance, mid-17th century Spain was an unlikely arena for the composition of a treatise that situated the earthly paradise in the Americas. After all, this was an era that brought growing Spanish disillusionment with empire and with the promise of material wealth and power that Spains over-seas possessions could bring. The New World had once been regarded as a treasure trove that would bestow unimaginable riches on Spain and assure her place in the world as an unrivalled imperial power. However, a combination of economic decline, growing poverty, social unrest and the increasing difficulties of defending the empire against the incursions of European rivals ensured that this confidence was rapidly eroded.32 At the same time, European scholars increasingly expressed the view that American nature notwithstanding accounts of exuberant natural wealth and fertility produced by the likes of Columbus and Martyr was in fact inferior to that of the Old World. Although associated most closely with the 18th century, the so-called debate of the New World began to emerge at least a century earlier, reflecting not only disillusionment with empire, but also an inexorable divergence of European and criollo identities.33

Employed by the Council of the Indies in Madrid, where he dedicated his efforts to preparing a new code of laws for the governance of Spains overseas possessions, Len Pinelo was unquestion-ably privy to these political, economic and scientific debates. His assignment, which involved a painstaking process of sifting through the royal edicts contained in the Councils archives, allowed him privileged access to a vast array of published and manuscript documentation relating to explo-ration, colonization and governance in the New World.34 Unlike the majority of his colleagues, he had spent much of his youth and early adulthood in the New World as a result of his fathers deci-sion to begin a new life in the Ro de la Plata region. After being educated in Jesuit colleges, first in Crdoba (in present-day Argentina) and later in Lima, Len Pinelo entered Limas University of San Marcos and graduated as a lawyer in 1618. During these years, he came to regard America especially Peru as his adopted homeland, and he preserved this emotional bond even after return-ing to Spain in 1622 at the age of 32.35 Without doubt, the jurists personal attachment to the New World underpinned his desire to defend it against European criticism and to prove that Spain, despite facing grave economic difficulties, still possessed unrivalled and barely exploited wealth in her American empire.36 In constructing a comparative tropical geography, Len Pinelo sought to demonstrate that the American tropics were superior to any other tropical regions in the world and, crucially, that they were the only ones that could have been the location of paradise.

In western Europe, the locational geography37 of paradise had preoccupied theologians and other scholars since the early era of Christianity. The 16th and 17th centuries, however, witnessed an upsurge of interest in this issue. This was reflected in a remarkable volume of publication on the subject that was produced in numerous languages and by Catholics and Protestants alike.38 Although a growing number of commentators rejected the notion that the terrestrial paradise still existed, they nevertheless sought to identify its former location on earth. These renewed debates, and the belief that paradise could be accurately located, were undoubtedly given momentum by a growing sense of mastery over space that was encouraged by European overseas expansion and, intimately connected with this, by the development of modern cartography.39



The perceived need to preserve religious orthodoxy ensured that the majority of early modern scholars who debated the whereabouts of paradise insisted that it was once situated in the Holy Lands. Nevertheless, some scholars were willing to consider the notion that it might have been located either directly on the equator, or elsewhere within the torrid zone. Reinforced by the writ-ings of late antique and medieval scholars who supported the idea of an equatorial Eden, European encounters with the New World in the late 15th and 16th centuries provided a stimulus for the equatorial thesis being revived as the American thesis the theory that paradise was located in the American tropics.40

Len Pinelo did not regard the equatorial thesis on paradise as the fundamental building block for his own claims. Providing a detailed review of existing theories about the location of Eden, his treatise outlines 18 scholarly opinions on this question and identifies one of these the notion that paradise was situated not in Asia, Africa or Europe but in another continent as the keystone of his New World thesis.41 In order to underpin his claims, however, he deployed a suite of other argu-ments, amongst which his views on the qualities and properties of the tropics featured as a vitally important component.

Like many of his contemporaries, Len Pinelo seemed to delight in pointing out the mistaken belief of antique scholars who suggested that the equatorial regions could not be inhabited on account of their excessive heat. On the contrary, he insisted, they should be considered the most suitable of all for human habitation, thanks to their benign climate and their astonishing beauty and fertility: What place, he demanded, could be more appropriate for paradise, where beauty, pleas-antness, the climate and the seasons are always constant and always good?42 For the jurist, these characteristics were unmistakable signs of a level of natural perfection that was to be expected in Eden, the mirror of the heavenly paradise. It was only natural, he insisted, for paradise to be located on or near the equator, for It is Gods way always to fill the best place with that which is of greatest quality and pre-eminence43. Having proposed, however, that the equatorial regions as a whole possessed the best and gentlest climate on the earth,44 he faced the task of attempting to prove that the tropical lands of the New World, rather than any other part of the tropics, had once been the site of the earthly paradise.

Making reference to the theological writings of Moses Bar-Cephas, a Syrian scholar of late antiquity, he insisted that paradise must have been very extensive:

For if all men were to have inhabited paradise, to which end God created it, by necessity it would have been large and spacious. And so much moderate and pleasant land, abounding in waters and rivers, fertile and delightful, can only be assumed to be in America.45

As well as drawing on the ideas of Bar-Cephas, Len Pinelos reasoning reflects the marginaliza-tion of the Caribbean islands in the mid-colonial world of Spanish America and the powerful asso-ciation of New World tropical nature with scale and grandeur. Although he spoke of their beauty, fertility and delight, he believed that the Caribbean archipelagos were far too insignificant to be considered anything more than tiny fragments of a paradise that was once situated at the heart of a vast tropical interior.46 Faced, therefore, with the decision of placing paradise in either North or South America, he chose the latter: not only did the equator pass through the southern half of the continent, it also contained a far greater proportion of the New Worlds tropical territories. As indi-cated, however, by a sketch-map included in the treatise (see Figure 1), Len Pinelo did not place Eden directly on the equator. Instead, he located it a little further to the south, at the centre of the Amazon basin. Here, at the furthest point from the sea, he reasoned, the climate was at its mildest, the waters most abundant and the land most fertile, and it was at this location that the source of the


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four rivers of paradise was also to be found.47 This Amazonian location may be understood as an expression of Len Pinelos patriotic attachment not only to the New World as a whole but also and more specifically to Peru. For some of his contemporaries, the Amazon lowlands, still predomi-nantly beyond colonial rule, lay outside Perus eastern boundaries. Len Pinelos vision of his adopted homeland, however, was far more expansive, for the name Peru, he insisted, was in fact used to refer to the whole of South America.48

South America, Len Pinelo acknowledged, was not the only part of the world to contain sub-stantial tracts of land that fell within the tropics. Parts of India enjoyed a tropical location, as did

Figure 1.



Indochina, the Malaysian peninsula, Indonesia, the Philippines, and other infinite islands of those archipelagos.49 Although the southernmost point of India was still a full eight degrees distant from the equator, Ceylon one of the most exceptional islands in the world50 was somewhat closer, and had been identified by some as the site of paradise due to its pleasant climate, fertility and wealth. In terms of their physical extent, however, Asias equatorial lands were no rival for those of the New World.

The African continent was a different matter. While South America could boast 40 degrees of tropical territory along the line of the equator, Africa possessed almost as much.51 Indeed, Len Pinelo reasoned, Africa enjoyed a clear advantage over South America in terms of the latitudinal extent of its tropical territories, for these not only extended southwards from the equator to the tropic of Capricorn, but also stretched northwards all the way to the tropic of Cancer. Having turned his attention, however, to Africas natural attributes, he rapidly rejected the continent as a serious candidate on the grounds that its climate and environment were extremely hot, scarce in water and of limited fertility, rather than being oriental, fertile, temperate, gentle and pleasant.52

Far from imagining the tropics as a qualitatively undifferentiated whole, Len Pinelo identified various manifestations of tropicality and like Acosta associated them with particular regions of the world. By the same token, he acknowledged that a diversity of climates and environments existed within the continens paradisi, as he described the New World: far from being uniformly excellent, its territories comprised an immensity of such varied temperatures and climates, with regions that are fertile and sterile, pleasant and harsh, soft and severe, hot and cold, humid and dry, flat and mountainous53

To place this diversity in perspective he turned again to India, a country that had been amply praised by European scholars ever since antiquity and that, he conceded, could reasonably be imagined as the location of paradise, because of its admirable excellent qualities.54 Some parts of India contained endless expanses of dry and sterile sand dunes and were exposed to intolerable heat, and others, he insisted, were excessively wet, and others still contained harsh, snow-covered mountains. Alexander the Great, drawing on the writings of Strabo, had found the heat of southern India so intense that it could be considered a habitation better suited to beasts than to men.55 Those who place paradise in India, Len Pinelo argued, do not search for it in these harsh regions but instead in Indias excellent lands in those that, in addition to being located within the tropics, are green, fertile, pleasant, abundant in water and highly amenable to human life. Consequently, he reasoned, the same principle must be applied when searching for paradise in the New World.56

According to the jurist, the excellent lands of the Americas were far more extensive than those of India, Mesopotamia and even the whole of Asia, as well as superior in quality to any others in the world. Describing at length the remarkable fertility of the American tropics, Len Pinelo drew attention to the abundance of flora and fauna, the frequency of harvests, and the remarkable size attained by many varieties of plants, both cultivated and wild.57 He pondered the enormous height and girth of trees in the forests of the New World and concluded that:

It is sufficient to know that where trees grow all year round in a state of eternal spring without the intermission of any winter to detain them, they will necessarily grow much larger. Forever green, always covered in leaves, with flowers and fruit amongst the new shoots that appear every day and grow every hour, they must attain such size.58

Len Pinelos preoccupation with emphasizing the scale of New World nature is carried over into book five of his treatise. In this lengthy section he tackled the thorny issue of the four rivers of paradise and identified them as the Amazon, the Magdalena, the Orinoco and the Plate.59 These


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South American rivers were the most obvious candidates, he argued, for the regions through which they flowed possessed the natural qualities that are required in terms of climate, gentleness, fertil-ity, and other similar things, and because they were so powerful in size and origin.60 No region could bear comparison with the New World in terms of the grandeur of its rivers, for in their sources, courses, waters, volume and size, they deserve to be given preference over all others that exist in the world.61 Like Acosta, he reserved particular praise for the Amazon. This river, he observed, not only passes along the whole of the torrid zone of South America and flows into the sea directly on the equator, but is also incomparable in its immensity, which neither the first nor the last [person] who ventures onto it can comprehend, for it belongs to the wisdom of God.62

Len Pinelo was not alone in making an imaginative connection between South Americas mightiest rivers and the four rivers of paradise. This connection, as Caizares-Esguerra demon-strates, is manifest in Peter Paul Rubenss design for a triumphal arch that was constructed in Antwerp in order to celebrate the arrival of the Spanish Netherlands new governor in 1634. In the form of four human figures, the Amazon, Magdalena, Plate and Orinoco rivers the very same rivers that feature in Len Pinelos Paraso are represented on one face of the arch and may be interpreted, Caizares-Esguerra argues, as references to the rivers that emerged from Eden.63 Rubens, however, along with a host of other artists and writers in 16th and 17th century Europe, envisioned the New World not as the location (or former location) of Eden but rather as a false paradise that was in the grip of the Devil and his minions.64 Without doubt, Len Pinelos treatise was at odds with notions of the New World as a false paradise, for he sought to demon-strate that America had once been home to the true Eden. As we will see, however, the construc-tion of his thesis involved a subtle redeployment of negative representations rather than their outright rejection.

An ambivalent paradise?Len Pinelos endeavour to prove that Eden had once been located in the New World tropics involved demonstrating that they were filled with extraordinary riches more so than any other region of the world, including the East Indies. A lengthy, almost encyclopaedic account of the wonders and marvels of the New World, the fourth book of his treatise fills with a mass of detail the broad outlines of a superlative American nature that are sketched out in the preceding vol-umes.65 In this book, Ledezma observes, the internal logic of Len Pinelos thesis is founded on his need to establish a clear rhetorical connection between his own depiction of the New World and the medieval texts that enumerated the marvels of an oriental paradise.66 Between the 12th and 14th centuries, an era in which Europeans visited Asia in growing numbers, the notion that the Garden of Delights might be found in India, Ceylon or in other parts of Southeast Asia attained particular prominence. After all, where better to place paradise than in lands that seemed so extravagantly blessed by nature?67

In drawing on yet simultaneously challenging these medieval visions of an oriental Eden, Len Pinelo describes a New World that is graced with a bewildering array of delightful fruits, fine woods, exquisite birds and flowers, gold and silver and precious gems.68 He also documents, how-ever, the existence (or possible existence) of marvellous phenomena that are altogether stranger, even sinister. These include races of dog-headed men, pygmies and giants, mermaids and harpies, as well as individual anomalies such as incidences of bestiality between native people and bears, dogs and monkeys, together with their monstrous and sometimes predatory offspring. The jurists treatise was not at all unusual in describing a New World that was filled with an array of wonders and marvels. Many of the wondrous phenomena documented in early colonial writings were



plucked directly from European sources and implanted in the New World, but others such as the reports of Amazon women were hybrid products of the Euro-American encounter. In these tales, which underwent constant transformation as the conquest progressed, positive and negative ele-ments frequently appeared side by side. In Raleghs account of Guiana, for example, beings who resemble humans but who lack heads and whose faces are in their chests reside in provinces of extraordinary wealth and fertility.69 In similar fashion, the Jesuit Cristbal de Acua expressed confidence that, wherever the fearsome Amazon women were to be found, so too gold and other riches would be present in abundance.70

In representations of the New World, Caizares-Esguerra argues, the juxtaposition of the delightful and the sinister often denoted the identification of the continent as a haven of demonic activity. Satans presence, it was believed, could be detected in reports of demons, monstrous beings such as griffins and dragons, and potently poisonous plants that lurked within Americas beautiful but treacherous landscapes. In Len Pinelos text, however, the presence of negative ele-ments was intended to accentuate the superlative image of American nature that the author sought to convey.

Prior to the 16th century, European thought was characterized less by the identification of dif-ference that resulted in binary categories of self and other than by an interest in similarities amongst things and a willingness to embrace (rather than exclude) variance in the social and natu-ral worlds. The positive and the negative, Dangler argues, were not necessarily separate and divided, but they coexisted equally in the same domain.71 Rather than being discarded as worth-less, monsters and other deformed beings were considered integral parts of Gods creation that offered pathways to knowledge of the divine and as a consequence were often depicted on church buildings and interiors. The coexistence of positive and negative elements may be detected, for example, in medieval writings that identified Asia as an earthly paradise that was also the abode of monstrous beings such as dragons, dog-headed men and griffins.72 In medieval accounts of geo-graphically distant lands that were little known to Europeans, the incorporation of bizarre and monstrous creatures was intended to demonstrate the diversity of nature, Daston and Park argue, rather than to provoke reactions of revulsion, moral indignation or fear.73 The monstrous and unset-tling elements that abound in the fourth book of Len Pinelos treatise perform a similar function namely, to showcase the extraordinary natural wealth and diversity of the New World, and above all of its tropical regions.

Some of the negative elements that appear in Paraso en el Nuevo Mundo are strikingly remi-niscent of the pestilential strains of tropicality that surface in so many European portrayals of the tropical world. Len Pinelo was keen to emphasize that the whole of the Americas, and especially its humid tropical regions, were filled with an abundance of snakes, many of which were venomous or huge in size. These descriptions are once again intended, however, to reinforce the theory of an American paradise rather than to undermine it. Why, the author asked, would one imagine the earthly paradise to be devoid of snakes when it was well known that the Devil communicated with Eve in the form of a serpent? In fact, he declared, no other part of the world is known that produces so many, and so many different species, any one of which may have been used by the Devil as his instrument.74

Len Pinelo was at pains to demonstrate that the snakes of the New World collectively represented an even greater wonder than those of India, first in terms of their variety, and second, due to their astonishing dimensions and other singular qualities that some were said to possess, such as wings, arms or two heads.75 His tropical American paradise abounded not only in snakes but also in a seem-ingly endless array of insects, spiders, scorpions and amphibians. Rather than restricting his compen-dium of imperfect animals to the benign members of this category honey bees, silkworms,


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butterflies and the like he was remarkably eager to emphasize the existence of ant colonies in plague-like proportions that destroy[s] the earth, of horrible and ugly spiders that exceed the size of a human hand, and swarms of locusts so dense that they obscure the sun.76

Walter Ralegh, in his History of the world, pondered the notion that paradise might be located in the American tropics and reasoned that their natural beauty brought to mind the Garden of Eden. Nevertheless, he quickly rejected this idea. The tropical regions of the New World were blessed with an eternal spring and summer, he reasoned, yet were also plagued by fearful and dangerous Thunders and Lightnings, the horrible and frequent Earthquakes dangerous Diseases, [a] multi-tude of venomous Beasts and Worms, with other inconveniences.77 For the Elizabethan explorer, the presence of abundant and noxious invertebrates (amongst other harmful phenomena) clearly negated the idea that Eden could be located there. For Len Pinelo, by contrast, these creatures demonstrated the New Worlds unrivalled fertility and hence its suitability as the location of the earthly paradise. Although poisonous or troublesome, he argued, many insects and other imper-fect creatures such as snakes, amphibians, spiders and scorpions deserved a place in the treatise, for they provide evidence of the notable fertility and vigour of the earth that produces them and reinforce[s] the argument we are making.78

The author associated tropical fertility with decay as well as with healthy exuberance. Grape vines grew very well in the Indies, he remarked, producing fruit two or three times a year, but in such abundance that they are destroyed by their excessive fertility.79 Putrefaction, the constant companion of vigorous fertility, was directly responsible, moreover, for the abundance of imper-fect animals which were engendered from decay.80 Here again, in these portrayals of the New World humid tropics as excessive and sinister, traces of a pestilential strain of tropicality emerge. As Len Pinelos own arguments reveal, however, these negative elements are firmly situated within a framework of logic that allows them to be read as affirmative signs that reinforce the theory of a New World paradise.

Criollo identity, colonialism and the tropical paradiseBy the second half of the 16th century, a small but significant population of American-born Spaniards was beginning to emerge in the youthful viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain. Ambiguously located within the geopolitical order of empire,81 criollos played an active role in colonial governance yet were viewed with increasing suspicion and condescension by European-born Spaniards. At once colonizers and subordinates within the imperial hierarchy, they empha-sized their European lineage while expressing pride in their American birth as well as a sense of injustice in light of the political and social advantages that Spaniards enjoyed in the New World. The legitimacy of the Spanish monarchys claims to the New World was never questioned by crio-llos in the early colonial era. However, many believed that, as the descendants of the first conquis-tadors, they had not been accorded the reward and recognition they deserved from their monarchy. In addition, they felt deep-seated resentment at being barred from the higher levels of colonial government. Such feelings of alienation were further spurred by a growing chorus of Spanish voices which suggested that the criollos intelligence, character and physical attributes were detri-mentally influenced by the climate and environment of the New World and that, eventually, they would become indistinguishable from the Amerindians.82

Criollo consciousness was not only articulated through feelings of resentment and victimhood. In 17th century Lima, Peruvian patriots defended their American homelands by means of celebra-tory portrayals that found expression in varied literary, artistic and scientific works. As Mazzotti observes, it is important to recognize that the ideas and opinions of Spanish Americans were by no



means monolithic.83 Nevertheless, distinctively American visions of nature emerged in Peruvian criollo writings that challenged the European denigration of New World climates and environ-ments by praising the delightful qualities of tropical nature and, more specifically, the natural attributes of Peru. A number of writers, amongst them the friars Buenaventura de Salinas y Crdova and Antonio de la Calancha, offered direct challenges to European disdain by inverting determin-istic arguments about the supposed inferiority of New World nature and its negative influence on American-born Spaniards. In other words, they argued that, far from being inferior, criollos pos-sessed greater intelligence, better character and stronger moral integrity than their European cous-ins thanks to the influence of Perus benign climate, constellations and natural wealth.84 Salinas y Crdova, for instance, suggested that Creoles are extremely intelligent, lively, subtle, and well versed in all genres of science [for] the skies and climate of Peru elevate them and ennoble their spirit.85

The embrace of deterministic arguments was nevertheless limited in some cases by the desire of criollos to maintain a hierarchical distinction between themselves and Amerindian populations. As Caizares-Esguerra demonstrates, this involved the adoption of ideas of intrinsic racial differ-ence.86 Thus, while Calancha proposed that Perus climate beneficially influenced all human popu-lations, he argued that it did so only within the limits of capability of each particular race. According to this logic, Africans born in Peru, for example, were more intelligent that those born in Africa but, due to inherent racial characteristics, could never compete with either Spaniards or Spanish Americans.87 Despite such theoretical manoeuvres, a concern for the effects of New World nature and climate on human attributes was a prominent and persistent feature of criollo texts. These notions logically fed into and supported patriotic depictions of Lima as a centre of unrivalled intel-lectual endeavour and religiosity. Indeed, as Mazzotti argues, the writings of Salinas y Crdova implied that Lima was not only the pinnacle of civilization but also the prime location for the gov-ernance of Spains empire.88

Len Pinelos treatise clearly contributed to the patriotic traditions outlined above, but also reveals arguments and rhetorical emphases that set it apart from the writings of many of his spiri-tual compatriots in Peru. Most obviously, it is distinguished by the authors unusual contention that, before the transgression of Adam and Eve and Gods subsequent destruction of paradise, the South American tropics had quite literally been the location of Eden. I wish to argue, however, that his Paraso and in particular his rhetorical deployment of an Edenic vision of tropical New World nature reveals other, more subtle yet no less significant divergences from the ideas of Lima-based 17th century criollo scholars.

Contrary to what might be expected, Len Pinelos theory of a New World paradise did not lead him to depict Amerindian peoples in more favourable ways than the representations pro-duced by criollo writers in Peru. Although the paradise argument was fundamental to the idealiza-tion of American nature, it also allowed the author to portray Spanish dominion in the New World as natural and justifiable. The author dismissed any suggestions that the Amerindians were not true human beings and conceded that they possessed some positive qualities, but insisted that neither their physical strength nor intellectual capacities were sufficient to have allowed them to construct the pre-colonial buildings of Peru and Mexico. Instead, he argued, these structures must be attributed to more able peoples who inhabited the New World before the arrival of the Amerindians.89

At first sight, his scathing assessment of indigenous peoples appears to resonate with the environ-mental and climatic theories that colonizing Europeans frequently called upon to explain the sup-posed proclivity of tropical peoples toward idleness, effeminacy, aberrant sexuality and stunted intellectual development.90 These theories, however, play a minimal role in Len Pinelos thesis.


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Although he believed that climate and environment could have some bearing on the physical, intel-lectual and moral attributes of human beings,91 he insisted that there was no significant causal con-nection between the natural characteristics of a particular region and those of its inhabitants, who today may be of one type and tomorrow of another.92 For this reason, the jurist argued, the question of the location of paradise would not be answered by seeking the most perfect human beings (who, he declared, were unquestionably Europeans), but by looking for nature in its most excellent form.93

Far from contradicting his argument about the superlative qualities of tropical American nature, Len Pinelos denigration of Americas native populations actually helped to strengthen it. The natural wonders of India, he argued, only seemed to outshine those of the New World because they were far better known, thanks to the industry of Indias native populations. In dramatic contrast to the indigenous peoples of the Americas, who were simple, humble and without arts, science or government, the inhabitants of India had productively put to use the arts of Mankind in order to seek out her riches, drugs, fragrances, stones and metals.94

Even in the absence of substantial knowledge, the wonders of New World nature were so great, Len Pinelo argued, that the thesis of an American paradise could be demonstrated with ease. In his view, the Amerindians had not only failed to produce knowledge about the lands in which they dwelled but also lacked the necessary skills for putting to use the vast natural treasure trove that surrounded them and therefore had no privileged claim to those treasures. These claims, coupled with the identification of the New World tropics as the site of paradise, allowed the author to dis-possess the native populations of their territorial rights. In the wake of humankinds fall from grace and the consequent destruction of paradise, Adam and Eves immediate descendants continued to inhabit the continens paradisi until the time of the Flood. The modern day Amerindians, he con-tended, were relatively recent arrivals, for they had migrated to the New World many centuries after the floodwaters had receded, in all likelihood after the birth of Christ.95 Thus, the identifica-tion of tropical New World nature as paradise provided a vehicle for patriotic expression but equally for the justification of Spanish imperialism.

Nevertheless, Len Pinelo believed that the Spanish were also to blame for the dearth of scien-tific knowledge about the territories they had colonized. In establishing a parallel between the indigenous peoples and the colonizing Spaniards, his treatise presented a biting critique, not of Spanish conquest and colonization per se, but of the Spaniards failure to inquire into the diverse wonders of the New World. Their appetites satiated and their curiosity dulled by the abundance of silver and gold that greeted their arrival in the Americas, the Spaniards like the Amerindians before them left the Indies almost in the state in which they found them.96 He continued:

Natural philosophy has not been brought over [to the Indies] to investigate their secrets. Medicine has barely reached their boundaries. Astronomy has not seen their heavens, nor exam-ined their stars. Nor has geography passed beyond the borders of their continent. Consequently, there is such ignorance regarding these matters that the only ones that are known are those that are so obvious that they cannot be concealed.97

In putting forward these arguments, Len Pinelo was engaged in a critique that differed subtly yet significantly from attacks on the imperial heartland that emanated from the pens of criollo scholars located in Peru. To be sure, these scholars did not fail to condemn what they regarded as Spaniards ignorance vis--vis the qualities and wonders of Peruvian nature,98 and were keen to portray Spanish government of the Indies as ineffectual and unjust.99 However, while many of his Lima-based contemporaries launched a patriotic offensive by insisting on the beneficial effects of the Peruvian climate effects which, they argued, made criollos especially intelligent Len Pinelo



carefully avoided deterministic arguments and emphasized instead what he regarded as the inade-quacies of Spanish efforts to obtain knowledge about New World nature.

In contrast to the intellectuals who wrote from the location of Perus viceregal capital, Len Pinelo was geographically and professionally situated at the heart of empire. Without doubt, it would have been politically inexpedient for him to suggest that, thanks to the influence of the cli-mate in which they lived, Spanish Americans were more intelligent and capable than their European counterparts and hence better equipped to govern the American territories. Rather than invoking the splendour and excellence of American tropical nature to insist on the intellectual superiority of criollos, Len Pinelo used this discourse to argue that the cultivation of science should be central to the governance of the Indies. The blame for Spains economic hardships, his treatise implied, should be attributed not to the American empire and its inhabitants, but rather to the failure of the Spaniards to put to use or even inquire into the vast storehouse of wealth that the New World trop-ics so generously offered.

Despite his attachment to Peru, the jurist portrayed Madrids royal court, and not Lima, as the undisputed centre of imperial governance and the location at which knowledge about the New World could be produced in its most sophisticated form. In a work entitled El Gran Canciller de Indias [Grand Chancellor of the Indies], he argued that those who wish to write about the Indies must reside at the court, for as well as being the home of the people it is a school where everything is brought to perfection.100 Nevertheless, he insisted that extensive first-hand knowledge of the Indies (which he personally possessed) was a vital and indeed a primary requirement for writing authoritatively about Spains American possessions. In addition, he stipulated that those who write about the New World should be well versed in cosmography and the humanities. In El Gran Canciller, Len Pinelo unambiguously indicated that he amply fulfilled these criteria, declaring that:

I spent eighteen years in the Indies; I navigated their seas, crossed many of their provinces both with and without official posts, taking notes and collecting papers, and I still have significant works to publish and to the information that I collected [in the Indies], I have added that which is held in this court, examining all the papers of the Royal Council of the Indies101

This statement must surely be interpreted as an expression of Len Pinelos long-standing desire to be named Chief Chronicler of the Indies, a post he was finally granted two years before his death in 1660.102 Arguably, the treatise on paradise must also be considered within the context of the authors personal and professional ambitions, for it showcased his abilities to assemble informa-tion about the New World from a staggering array of sources as well as to develop a sophisticated scholarly argument. However, the personal motives embedded within the text also dovetailed, I argue, with a broader political agenda. Neither El Gran Canciller nor his treatise on paradise stipu-lated that criollos were inherently more capable than Spaniards in cultivating the sciences that would make the wonders of the New World tropics known and available for exploitation. However, by insisting on the paramount importance of extensive, first-hand experience of the Americas, Len Pinelo silently suggested that American-born Spaniards (and those, like himself, who had spent many years in the Indies), had a vitally important contribution to make to the governance of empire, not only in the viceregal centres of power but at the empires metropolitan heart.

ConclusionsDespite its idiosyncracies, Paraso en el Nuevo Mundo was very far from being the product of a lone individual who stood at a distance from his Spanish and Spanish American contemporaries.


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As this article illustrates, the treatise embraces and develops a vision of the New World tropics that was already beginning to emerge in some of the earliest European descriptions of America. The notion that these regions possessed distinctive characteristics that set them apart from other areas of the global torrid zone was shared by many of Len Pinelos contemporaries.

Len Pinelos vision of the New World tropics as the earthly paradise took shape at the very heart of the imperial administration in Madrid. Indeed, its creation was unquestionably facilitated by the authors privileged access to the Council of the Indies vast repository of papers relating to the histories, geographies and administration of Spains American dominions. It was produced not only by empire but also in the service of a blueprint for empire in which science served the needs of commerce, for it presented tropical America as a repository of natural wonders and riches that could be unlocked for Spains benefit through the cultivation of natural history, geography and astronomy. Ever since the 16th century, as demonstrated by critical studies of colonialism, the sup-posed failure of non-European populations to make effective use of the natural resources available to them was a ubiquitous refrain that was used to justify European imperial ventures throughout the tropics and also beyond.103

Paraso en el Nuevo Mundo, however, was not exclusively a product of the metropolitan cen-tre. The authors representations of American nature were inflected and rendered more complex by his personal attachment to the New World, Peru in particular, and by a desire to celebrate and defend this nature against European criticism. In part, he achieved this aim by adopting a medieval framework that allowed the wonders of American nature to be compared with and shown to outdo nature in the East Indies and thus to be identified as the location of the earthly paradise. This framework, however, did not contradict his imperial vision. Rather, I argue that it resolves the ten-sion between Len Pinelos desire to portray the New World in the most glowing terms possible and the undeniable existence, by the mid-17th century, of abundant descriptions of the American tropics that envisaged them in decidedly pestilential terms.

Without doubt, the jurists treatise suppresses some of the less attractive elements of tropical nature that attain prominence in some of his contemporaries writings. No mention, for example, is made of the presence of disease and its association with hot and humid conditions. In Len Pinelos authorial strategy, however, the affirmative acknowledgement of negative phenomena is of far greater significance than their disavowal. Tropical natures pestilential elements are tamed by means of a medieval epistemology that valorises the negative alongside the positive rather than seeking to exclude it. Thus, the treatise goes against the grain of most early modern writings by arguing that the New World had quite literally been the location of the biblical paradise and, more-over, that the existence of negative phenomena actually contributed to proving this thesis. The affirmative embrace of the pestilential demonstrates that neat distinctions between paradisiacal and pestilential strains of tropicality cannot always be made and that imaginative connections between paradise and the tropics were more complex than recent literature suggests.

In attending to the ways in which views of the tropics took shape between the era of Columbus and that of Len Pinelo, it soon becomes apparent that early modern expressions of tropicality were neither unified nor static. Rather, imaginative constructions of the American tropics were moulded continuously in the light of the unfolding geographies of European exploration and colo-nization and in response to the identities, interests and motivations of individual authors. From the very beginnings of Iberian colonization in the Americas, ideas about and portrayals of the tropical world were diverse and, as Wey-Gmez demonstrates in his study of Columbus, integral to the very process of empire-building.

By the 17th century, ideas about the tropics forged within the Iberian world emerged from mul-tiple and ambivalent subject positions that exceeded and blurred the binary categories of colonizer



and colonized. As we have seen, Len Pinelos account of American tropical nature as the former locus of Eden reaffirmed Spains right to imperial possession, for it constituted a theoretical move that dispossessed Amerindian populations of those territories. At the same time, however, he deployed his theory of the New World as paradise in order to critique Spanish governance and to call for an alternative imperial project that would privilege the pursuit of scientific endeavour and, crucially, the knowledge and expertise that educated criollos had to offer.

This detailed exploration of Len Pinelos treatise illustrates the need for in-depth studies of early modern notions of tropicality and their significance in European colonial ventures in the Americas and beyond. In highlighting the jurists embrace of negative elements in his vision of tropical New World nature as paradise, the article shows that distinctions between paradisiacal and pestilential views of the tropical world are not always clearly defined. It demonstrates, more-over, that the emergence of ideas about the tropics, as Driver argues, was not simply the outcome of the straightforward and unmediated imposition of European ideas onto the tropical world.104 Recent contributions to the literature on tropicality rightly propose that it is vital to consider the role of embodied experience in shaping European ideas about the tropics, as well as the influence of indigenous ideas and knowledges.105 As we have seen, however, the development of Euroamerican identities in the early colonial era also resulted in the emergence of distinctive and internally varied portrayals of the tropics that still remain to be fully explored. Consequently, endeavours to decentre Europe in the study of tropicality should neither overlook populations of European descent nor transplanted Europeans who, like Len Pinelo, developed a strong patriotic attachment to their adopted homelands in the tropics.

Acknowledgements

A Junior Research Fellowship awarded by Newnham College, Cambridge, allowed me to conduct the initial research for this project between 2002 and 2004. Thanks are due to Dydia DeLyser, Mona Domosh and to three anonymous referees for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article. I would like to thank Mara del Pilar Blanco and especially Jason Payton for detailed and valuable comments that helped me to make substantial improvements to this essay. I also wish to express my gratitude to the London Group of Historical Geographers and the Department of Geography at the University of Nottingham for providing me with the opportunity to present and discuss this research.

Notes

1. E. Villamil de Rada, La lengua de Adn y el hombre de Tiahuanaco (La Paz, Imprenta de La Razn, 1888).

2. The manuscript was first published in Lima in 1943 by Ral Porras Barrenechea. A new edition is cur-rently being prepared by Domingo Ledezma. I am very grateful to Domingo Ledezma for allowing me to read and cite his introductory study to the new edition prior to publication. The author may be con-tacted at the following address: Wheaton College, 26 East Main Street, Wheaton College, Norton, MA 027662322, USA.

3. For a detailed discussion of the origins and usage of the term criollo, and its English equivalent creole, see pp. 37 in R. Bauer and J.A. Mazzotti, Introduction: creole subjects in the colonial Americas, in R. Bauer and J.A. Mazzotti, eds, Creole subjects in the colonial Americas: empires, texts, identities (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2009), pp. 160. As Bauer and Mazzotti observe (pp. 56), the term often carried pejorative implications in the 16th and 17th centuries. Although it was used to refer to individuals born in the Americas, it was also applied to those born elsewhere but who were


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long-established in the New World. Prior to the 19th century, it was above all a geocultural designation denoting a place of birth or habitation.

4. For brief discussions of Len Pinelo within the broader context of criollo consciousness in Spanish America see, for example, chapter 6 in J. Caizares-Esguerra, Nature, empire, and nation: explorations of the history of science in the Iberian world (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006); J.A. Mazzotti, Creole agencies and the (post)colonial debate in Spanish America, in M. Moraa, E. Dussel and C. Juregui, eds, Coloniality at large: Latin America and the postcolonial debate (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2008), pp. 77112; J.A. Mazzotti, El Dorado, paradise, and supreme sanctity in 17th-century Peru: a Creole agenda, in Bauer and Mazzotti, Creole subjects in the colonial Americas, pp. 375411. For a more detailed treatment see D. Ledezma, El paraso en el Nuevo Mundo de Antonio de Len Pinelo: apologa e historia natural y peregrina de las Amricas, unpublished manuscript.

5. The term tropicality was first employed by D. Arnold in chapter 8 of his book The problem of nature: environment, culture and European expansion (Oxford, Blackwell, 1996). A good introduction to this literature is provided in three themed issues of the Singapore journal of tropical geography, published in 2000, 2004 and 2005. See especially D. Arnold, Illusory riches: representations of the tropical world, 18401950, 21 (2000), pp. 618; G. Bowd and D. Clayton, French tropical geographies: edi-tors introduction, 26 (2005), pp. 27188; F. Driver, Imagining the tropics: views and visions of the tropical world, 25 (2004), pp. 117. The publication of work on European ideas of the tropics is not restricted to the Anglo-American sphere. See, for example, the essays in M. Flitner, ed., Der deutsche Tropenwald: Bilder, Mythen, Politik (Frankfurt, Campus Verlag, 2000).

6. See J. Duncan, The struggle to be temperate: climate and moral masculinity in mid-19th century Ceylon, Singapore journal of tropical geography 21 (2000), pp. 3447; D. Livingstone, Race, space and moral climatology: notes towards a genealogy, Journal of historical geography 28 (2002), pp. 15980; N. Stepan, Picturing tropical nature (London, Reaktion Books, 2001). See also D. Arnold, The tropics and the traveling gaze: India, landscape and science, 18001856 (Delhi, Permanent Black, 2005).

7. Driver, Imagining the tropics, pp. 1314. See also F. Driver and B. Yeoh, Constructing the tropics: introduction, Singapore journal of tropical geography 21 (2000), pp. 15; p. 3.

8. See for example D. Arnold, Envisioning the tropics: Joseph Hooker in India and the Himalayas, 18481850, in F. Driver and L. Martins, eds, Tropical visions in an age of empire (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 13755; G. Bowd and D. Clayton, Tropicality, Orientalism and French colo-nialism in Indochina: the work of Pierre Gourou, 19271982, French historical studies 28 (2005), pp. 297327; D. Clayton and G. Bowd, Geography, tropicality and postcolonialism: Anglophone and Francophone readings of the work of Pierre Gourou, Lspace gographique 3 (2006), pp. 20821.

9. N.L. Stepan, Picturing tropical nature (London, Reaktion Books, 2001), p. 36. See also N. Badenberg, Ansichten des Tropenwaldes: Alexander von Humboldt und die Inszenierung exotischer Landschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, in Flitner, Der deutsche Tropenwald, pp. 14873; M. Dettelbach, Global physics and aesthetic empire: Humboldts physical portrait of the tropics, in D.P. Miller and P.H. Reill, eds, Visions of empire: voyages, botany and representations of nature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 25892; M. Dettelbach, The stimulations of travel: Humboldts physiological construction of the tropics, in Driver and Martins, Tropical visions, pp. 4358.

10. See e.g. K.E. Manthorne, Tropical renaissance: North American artists exploring Latin America, 18391879 (Washington and London, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989); L. Martins, The art of tropical travel, 17681830, in M. Ogborn and C.W.J. Withers, eds, Georgian geographies (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2004), pp. 7291; L. Martins and F. Driver, The struggle for luxuri-ance: William Burchell collects tropical nature, in Driver and Martins, Tropical visions, pp. 5976; Stepan, Picturing tropical nature.



11. See e.g. M.L. Pratt, Imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation (London and New York, Routledge, 1992); Stepan, Picturing tropical nature; L. Wylie, Colonial tropes and postcolonial tricks: rewriting the tropics in the novela de la selva, Modern language review 101 (2006), pp. 72842.

12. The 1992 quincentenary of Columbus encounter with the New World provided a significant stimulus for the publication of work on early European colonialism in the Americas. Prominent examples include A. Gerbi, Nature in the New World: from Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernndez de Oviedo (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985); S. Greenblatt, Marvelous possessions: the wonder of the New World (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991); B. Pastor, The armature of conquest: Spanish accounts of the discovery of America, 14921589 (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1992); A. Pagden, European encounters with the New World: from Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1993).

13. Butzer describes as inexcusable Elliotts ethnocentric dismissal of South European interest in the natural world. See K.W. Butzer, From Columbus to Acosta: science, geography, and the New World, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 82(3) (1992), pp. 54365, p. 558.

14. See, for example, A. Barrera, Experiencing nature: the Spanish American empire and the early Scientific Revolution (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2006); D. Bleichmar, P.S. de Vos, K. Huffine and K. Sheehan, eds, Science in the Spanish and Portuguese empires, 15001800 (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2009); Caizares-Esguerra, Nature, empire and nation; J. Pimentel, The Iberian vision: science and empire in the framework of a universal monarchy, 15001800, Osiris 15 (2000), pp. 1730.

15. L. Millones Figueroa and D. Ledezma, eds, El saber de los jesuitas, historias naturales y el Nuevo Mundo (Madrid, Iberoamericana, 2005).

16. See e.g. J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1971); Pagden, European encounters.

17. Arnold, The problem of nature, p. 143. See also C. Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian shore: nature and culture in western thought from ancient times to the end of the eighteenth century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1967), p. 437. Glacken suggests, furthermore, that early European visitors to the equatorial regions of the New World appear to have been impressed, above all, by their very inhabitability, and by the realization that climatic conditions did not correspond to antique theories of a territory rendered uninhabitable by infernal heat. See Glacken, Rhodian shore, p. 437.

18. C. Columbus, The four voyages, edited and translated by J.M. Cohen (London, Penguin Books, 1969), p. 66. 19. On Oviedos struggle to represent New World nature to his European readership see e.g. K.A. Myers,

Fernndez de Oviedos chronicle of America: a new history for a new world (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2007); A. Pagden, European encounters with the New World (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1993).

20. D. Cosgrove, Tropical hermeneutics and the climatic imagination, Geographische Zeitschrift 90 (2002), pp. 6588, p. 77.

21. N. Wey-Gmez, The tropics of empire: why Columbus sailed south to the Indies (Cambridge, MA, and London, The MIT Press, 2008).

22. Ibid., pp. 489. 23. Ibid., ch. 3. 24. P. Mrtir de Anglera [Peter Martyr], Dcadas del Nuevo Mundo (Madrid, Ediciones Polifemo, 1989),

pp. 3845. 25. Wey-Gmez, The tropics of empire, p. 433. 26. See book II in J. de Acosta, Natural and moral history of the Indies, edited by J. Mangan and translated

by F. Lpez-Morillas (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2002). 27. Acosta, Natural and moral history, pp. 89 and 92. 28. Ibid., p. 82.


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29. R. Grove, Green imperialism: tropical island Edens and the origins of environmentalism, 16001860 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 323.

30. See Wey-Gmez, The tropics of empire, p. 216. 31. Where accounts of exploration are concerned, Christoval de Acuas account of his 1639 journey along

the length of the Amazon from Quito to Par in the company of Pedro de Texeira is of particular impor-tance and is heavily cited by Len Pinelo. See C. de Acua, Nuevo descubrimiento del gran ro de las Amazonas (Madrid, 1641).

32. See e.g. H. Kamen, Spain 14691714: a society of conflict (London and New York, Longman, 1983); J. Lynch, The Hispanic world in crisis and change, 15981700 (Oxford, UK and Cambridge, MA, Blackwell, 1992); A. Pagden, Heeding Heraclides: empire and its discontents, 16191812, in R. Kagan and G. Parker, eds, Spain, Europe and the Atlantic world: essays in honour of John H. Elliott (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 31633.

33. For a detailed discussion see Caizares-Esguerra, Nature, empire and nation, ch. 4. An earlier version of this chapter was published in article form. See J. Caizares-Esguerra, New world, new stars: patri-otic astrology and the invention of Indian and Creole bodies in colonial Spanish America, 16001650, American historical review 104 (1999), pp. 3368. See also B. Lavall, Las promesas ambiguas: crio-llismo colonial en los Andes (Lima, Pontificia Universidad Catlica del Per, 1993), pp. 509. On 18th and 19th century disputes over the respective qualities of European and American nature, see A. Gerbi, The dispute of the New World: the history of a polemic, 17501900 (Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973). First published in Italian in 1955.

34. The code of laws was completed in 1635 but, due to lack of funding, it was not published until 1681, two decades after Len Pinelos death, under the title Recopilacin de leyes de los reynos de las Indias. In 1644, he was made a judge of Sevilles Casa de la Contratacin (House of Trade), with residence at the royal court in Madrid. Alongside his official employments, Len Pinelo produced numerous schol-arly works, including El Paraso en el Nuevo Mundo, many of which related to the Indies. See J. Toribio Medinas introduction to A. de Len Pinelo, Discurso sobre la importancia, forma, y disposicin de la Recopilacin de leyes de las Indias Occidentales que en su Real Consejo presenta el Licenciado Antonio de Len (Santiago de Chile, Fondo Histrico y Bibliogrfico Jos Toribio Medina, 1956), pp. 617.

35. See Ledezma, El paraso en el Nuevo Mundo, pp. 1114. 36. Ibid., pp. 47. 37. This expression is borrowed from C. Withers, Geography, enlightenment, and the paradise question,

in D. Livingstone and C. Withers, eds, Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 68.

38. Delumeau suggests that, between 1540 and 1700, at least 155 literary works on the subject of the earthly Paradise were produced in Europe. J. Delumeau, History of paradise: the Garden of Eden in myth and tradition (New York, Continuum, 1995), p. 140.

39. For discussions of the history of the idea of paradise in the age of European overseas expansion, see espe-cially Delumeau, History of paradise; Glacken, Rhodian shore, pp. 35574; J. Prest, The Garden of Eden: the botanic garden and the re-creation of paradise (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1981); Withers, Geography, enlightenment, pp. 6792. On the mapping of paradise, see A. Scafi, Mapping paradise: a history of heaven on earth (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2006). Scafi (p. 254) argues that the reasons for the decline of belief in an existing paradise should be sought in long-term changes in theological and philosophical thought since the 1400s rather than in the impact of Renaissance-era explo-rations. Curiously, his detailed study does not consider early modern theories of an American paradise.

40. Delumeau, History of paradise, p. 158. Although Columbus association of South America with para-dise is most widely known, between the 16th and 18th centuries a number of other individuals argued that the New World and above all Brazil either was or had been the location of Eden. One of these



men, a Portuguese-born resident of Brazil named Pedro de Rates Hanequim, was condemned to death in 1744 by the Lisbon Inquisition for his belief that the earthly paradise still existed in his adopted coun-try. See Preface to S. Buarque de Holanda, Visin del paraso: motivos ednicos en el descubrimiento y colonizacin del Brasil (Venezuela, Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1987). The book was first published in Portuguese in 1959. See also C. Ziller Camenietzki, O paraso proibido. A censura Chronica de Simo de Vasconcelos em 1663, in Millones Figueroa and Ledezma, El saber de los jesuitas, pp. 10934. For discussions of Amerindian influences on European notions of a New World paradise see e.g. J.C. Ochoa Abaurre, Mito y chamanismo: el mito de la tierra sin mal en los Tup-Cocama de la Amazona peruana, unpublished doctoral thesis (University of Barcelona, 2002); C. Slater, Entangled Edens: visions of the Amazon (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2002), ch. 2.

41. Len Pinelo, El paraso, vol. I, pp. 11518, traces the origins of this idea to the writings of Moses Bar-Cefas and Saint Ephrem.

42. Ibid., p. 38. 43. Ibid., p. 36. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid., p. 381. 46. Ibid., pp. 3748. 47. Ibid., pp. 1378. 48. Ibid., p. 137. At least on paper, the Viceroyalty of Peru extended as far as the line of demarcation that

separated the Portuguese territories from those of the Spanish crown and therefore incorporated a large portion of the Amazon basin.

49. Ibid., p. 352. 50. Ibid., p. 72. 51. Delumeau, History of paradise, p. 158, observes that, in the early 17th century, the Dominican Luis de

Urreta proposed that paradise was located in Africa, on the equator. This theory established a link between the earthly paradise and the kingdom of Prester John.

52. Len Pinelo, El paraso, vol. I, pp. 333 and 353. Rather than challenge the prevailing view that paradise was located in the orient, Len Pinelo argued that the New World could properly be referred to as ori-ental. In addition to pointing out that any location on the globe could be considered, in relative terms, to be in the east, he argued that the New World was situated in the orient in relation to the longitudinal location at which Moses wrote his history of paradise, namely at around 70 degrees. This was based on the understanding that the globe was divided into two halves, each measuring 180 degrees, and that if a meridian were drawn through the site at which Moses composed his description, the 180 degrees of ter-ritory that lay directly to the east of this point included part of the New World. To account for the fact that large areas of the Americas lay outside this area, he argued that these territories, which included South America, could also be called oriental because they were an unbroken continuation of those that did fall within the 180 degrees. The whole of Africa, by contrast, lay outside this area, and therefore could not be considered oriental. See Pinelo, El paraso, Book III, ch. 3.

53. Ibid., p. 379. 54. Ibid., p. 68. 55. Ibid., p. 380. 56. Len Pinelo regarded Africa as part of the tropics, but only in a strictly latitudinal sense, as he did not

believe it possessed the natural attributes that could make it a candidate for the location of paradise. His assessment of India was clearly far more positive. However, in rejecting dry and arid environments as suitable areas for the location of paradise, the treatise lends weight to Arnolds argument that the green and humid environments of tropical America became most intimately associated by Europeans with the tropics, and also resonates with the view of 19th century British travellers who regarded many areas of


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India as not truly tropical because they failed to find the exuberant tropical nature that they had antic-ipated. As Arnold demonstrates, many 18th and 19th century Europeans consequently regarded India as be

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Paradise in the New World: An Iberian Vision of Paradise