From the moment the Spanish set foot in what would soon be known as the “New World,” they were seeking mineral wealth, neophyte Catholics, free labor, natural resources, and wondrous marvels. But above all, the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic ventured to the other side of the world in search of dreams. They envisioned shining cities of gold and palaces overflowing with jewels and silver. They dreamed of forests where rainbow-hued birds fluttered overhead. They imagined becoming little monarchs with their own kingdoms and vassals. They dreamed of their epic deeds being immortalized in history books. And some of...

By December 1767, twenty-nine-year-old Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón had likely grown tired of waiting to begin the journey to distant Peru and his new life in Spanish America. Earlier that year King Charles III had called him to serve the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church aschantre, or musical director, of Lima’s metropolitan cathedral. In the meantime, he had completed his duties as a consultant to the Inquisition in Madrid and had prepared for departure. By June, his license to cross the Atlantic was in order. Yet almost half a year later, he still found himself waiting. At least...

On May 13, 1779, the new Bishop of Trujillo made his first official entrance into what was now his cathedral city. The journey from Lima would have taken him on the King’s Road, or Camino Real, the thoroughfare that hugged Peru’s Pacific Coast. Coming from the south, he would have entered the city from the New Huaman gate and preceded up what is today Francisco Pizarro Street, named for the conquistador who founded it in 1535. To honor this occasion, he might have chosen some of his most luxurious clothing—perhaps one of his fine Dutch silk shirts and gold...

Three miles outside the city of Trujillo lies what Martínez Compañón called “the ruins of a town of the Chimú kings,” a UNESCO world heritage site today known as Chan Chan. The Chimú people who built it predominated on Peru’s north coast from the tenth century until the arrival of the Inca in the 1460s. At the height of their power, they controlled a vast territory stretching from Peru’s border with Ecuador to the Chillón Valley, north of Lima. Chan Chan was in its day the largest city in all the Andes, with a population thought to have reached 40,000...

Once the Bishop and his team had departed the city of Trujillo to begin theirvisitain June 1782, they began working on the hundreds of watercolor images that would later be compiled into the nine volumes calledTrujillo del Perú.These illustrations recalled the many places that they had visited, intricately portraying the natural and human environments of northern Peru in the eighteenth century. Over the almost three years of travel, they had observed creatures great and small—from the rotundquindehummingbird alighting on a bush with red flowers to a delicate seahorse and spiny sea urchins. The...

Situated at 13,000 feet above sea level, Trujillo’s great silver mines at Cajamarca stood at the same elevation as the distant snowy land of Tibet that Jesuit scientist Athanasius Kircher had written about in his epicChina Ilustrata. But this was no fantastical kingdom—the disheveled mining camp of Micuypampa, the gateway to the Hualgayoc silver mine of Cajamarca, was an inhospitable place about which a visitor once remarked that “water freezes indoors, at night, during a great part of the year.”¹ In addition to the disagreeable climate, the area was not renowned for natural beauty. The terrain was marred...

As the Bishop and his team made the final preparations for their departure to Bogotá, where he would assume his new post, we might imagine him surrounded by twenty-four large wooden crates, each numbered and marked with the lettersMD, signifying their final destination of Madrid. While he prepared their contents to journey to Spain alongside Peru’s outgoing Viceroy Croix, he surveyed the results of six years spent documenting what he called the “productions of nature” of Trujillo. As the largest intendancy and bishopric in Peru, Trujillo encompassed warm, pastel-hued agricultural valleys; steamy Amazonian forests full of the noises of...

The end of this story begins on November 27, 1797, at the San Francisco Church in Bogotá. It was the morning of the final Mass in celebration of the twenty-seventh Bishop of Trujillo and the twenty-eighth Archbishop of Bogotá, Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón. His body had been interred in the cathedral three months earlier, and the city had already held four major ceremonies celebrating his life and works. The suitably impressive San Francisco Church that was the site of his final service was dominated by a dazzling goldretabloaltarpiece that stood behind the presbytery, gleaming from ceiling to floor....

In 1516, an English lawyer named Thomas More penned a canonical literary work that, almost half a millennium later, would be declared by a professor at Paris’s Sorbonne to be one of the most seminal publications in the history of the world. In that 2011 editorial in theNew York Times, Yves Charles Zarka referred toUtopiaas a book that “inaugurated” the modern era, the time in which man was able to assess the world around him, find it lacking, and “look for an elsewhere” by imagining a better situation for humanity. More’s Utopia invented a fantastical island of...

To conclude our story, perhaps we can imagine a chilly afternoon in 1803 made much colder by the granite walls of the Escorial palace nestled in the gently rolling hills outside Madrid. This was the day that the wooden crates from Peru finally arrived at their destination—the palace library.¹ Whoever opened the crates would have found nine books, their pages sewn with red thread into red Moroccan leather covers. Their pages revealed intricate hand-painted watercolors of Indian chiefs lying in state with striking feather headdresses, exquisite orange and black monarch butterflies, and plump shepherdesses tending to puffy white sheep...

One afternoon at the National Archive of Colombia in Bogotá, a fellow researcher asked me what I was working on. “Bishop Martínez Compañón of Trujillo, Peru,” I told him. He thought for a minute and then replied that the biggest challenge I would face in this project would be the problem of too much information. “His documents are everywhere. Here, Trujillo, Lima,” he trailed off. “Pages and pages, thousands,” he cautioned. True to his prediction, I would soon find that there were countlesslegajofiles of documents and that the archivists in Bogotá alone had combined this embarrassment of riches...