In 1493 a fourteen-year-old boy serving as a page for the Spanish prince Don Juan stood in awe as Christopher Columbus met with the Catholic Kings, Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus unveiled to the royal court in Barcelona his findings from his first voyage, displaying colorful parrots, enticing bits of gold, and native people. Nearly forty years later this boy, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, would write about this first presence of the New World on European land in hisGeneral and Natural History of the Indies(1535, 1850s). Appointed official royal chronicler of the Indies by the king of Spain and...

Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés was a man between two worlds. He spent nearly equal time on both sides of the Atlantic and endured the dangerous transatlantic crossing between Spain and America eleven times. While in Europe, Oviedo played many roles in the royal courts, from bureaucrat and chronicler to wardrobe keeper and entertainer. In the New World, too, he had a long and varied career that included town councilman and supervisor of the king’s gold, slaveholder and pearl merchant. Oviedo was also a prolific writer who had many talents and played many roles in the tumultuous politics of...

Early in theGeneral and Natural History of the IndiesOviedo proclaims that the route to the Indies and the Indies themselves could not be learned in the great texts of classical antiquity or in the hallowed halls of any of Europe’s best universities. Indeed, the new cosmography that was emerging contradicted the wisdom of the ancients. Information provided by New World explorers raised the thorny issue of how to incorporate “another half of the world” into a philosophical and intellectual framework that was thousands of years old. To deal with this issue Oviedo inscribes his “true and new history”...

Many modern scholars have commented on Oviedo’s emphatic authorial presence: most describe the text as a heterogeneous, multivoiced narrative. But no scholar has thoroughly analyzed how Oviedo’s first-person interventions serve an evolving purpose, one that often matches the author’s complex administrative and legal ambitions. Of all the sixteenth-century chroniclers, Oviedo is the one whose voice and role as author are probably the most multivalent. Individual parts of the history and the circumstances in which they were composed reveal a writer continually reconstructing his persona as author and actor. A detailed chronological analysis of sections of the text and the context...

When Oviedo stopped writing about events he had witnessed in Tierra Firme and devoted himself to natural history, to depicting American flora, fauna, and ethnographic items, he confronted a dilemma. How was he to convey in his natural history the particular novelty of the New World to an audience that had never seen America? In order to accomplish this task, Oviedo made his role as a witness and writer an integral part of a complex argument in which he proposed that through the record of his own experience he would enable the king to know the nature of the Indies....

Caught between two eras—one that would recognize the contribution of empiricism to historiography and one that often viewed history as writing a variation of a primal text—Spanish chroniclers of the New World frequently revised traditional historiography, but they rarely broke completely from it. In his efforts to document all he saw and heard in the Indies, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo conceived of his historiographical project as an open-ended process of recovering new information about a vast area from dozens of informants. Thus theHistorybecame a sort of repository of information that required continual revision—revision of canonical...

As we have seen in the last two chapters, the increased availability of information about the natural world and reports from new expeditions led Oviedo to use multiple strategies for revising his text. I noted, for example, the historian’s evolving theory of illustration and his use of Fray Gaspar de Carvajal’s account of Amazon women to authorize his own beliefs. By the 1540s, Oviedo began to reduce his autobiographical presence in order to emphasize his persona as official historian and substitute an authoritative, even sanctified voice of imperial policy. His self-concealing strategy is most prominent when he receives new testimony...

No discussion of Oviedo’sGeneral and Natural History of the Indieswould be complete without addressing his controversial representation of Native Americans. Oviedo depicts Native American cultures with the same zeal and detail that inform his portraits of nature and the conquest, often including extensive ethnographic information. But his outright condemnation of the Indians often contradicts his more culturally sensitive ethnographic portraits. Oviedo’s strong opinions and extensive ethnographic material made him a key figure in the sixteenth-century controversy among Spaniards about the nature and proper treatment of Native Americans.

From the inaugural moment when Christopher Columbus displayed six Native Americans...

Whether Oviedo was writing about Native Americans, nature, or the conquest and colonization, his personal, political, and methodological concerns were never far from the surface of the narrative. The author’s attempts to maintain the favor of the Crown and establish the truth of his account serve as the underpinnings to his historiographic writing. In the closing chapter of theHistory, he recalls more than fifty years of service to the Crown—from the time of the Catholic Kings and Columbus’s first voyages (bk. 50, chap. 30). The historian records his travels, administrative duties, and writing as acts of service: information...