A Jesuit publishes a natural history of something the Andes did not have

The Jesuit Jose de Acosta published his Historia natural y moral de las Indias in 1590. In Christian European cosmology nature was something to be known, and understanding it meant understanding its creator. The Aymara and the Quechua had no metaphysics of that shape and no concept comparable to the European one, since they did not place human beings outside the world they lived in. Acosta was therefore describing a nature that existed in his own categories and not in theirs. The habit of treating human beings as separate from and above the rest of creation was carried to the Americas as part of the equipment of conquest, and it survives in the scholarship that grew from books like his. Anyone reading Vodou or Andean practice through that separation will find superstition where the practitioners find an ordinary account of how the world is arranged.

Francis Drake sacked Santo Domingo in 1586, and the ease of it announced that Spain could no longer hold what it claimed. The deeper trouble was commercial. Spain required its colonists to buy and sell only through Spanish channels at Spanish prices, and the settlers of Hispaniola were poor, remote and badly served. English and French ships began arriving to trade with them directly, undercutting the licensed merchants, and the colonists dealt with them gladly. In 1599 Samuel de Champlain saw thirteen foreign merchantmen working at Mole Saint Nicolas on the northwest coast, in open defiance of an embargo whose penalty was execution or the galleys. The island had become a cost to the Spanish crown instead of a source of revenue. Then in September 1629 the Spanish admiral Federico Toledo Osorio cleared the French and English out of Saint Kitts. The men he expelled had to land somewhere. They went to the north coast of Hispaniola and the small island lying off it.

Alvaro I wanted a bishopric for his kingdom that Lisbon did not control, and in 1583 he sent a Portuguese resident named Duarte Lopes to Rome to get it, first making him a gentleman of the royal house. The voyage went badly. Lopes's ship was driven across the Atlantic and wrecked in the West Indies. He swam ashore and it took him a year to cross back and travel on through Spain. By the time he arrived his king was dead. In Rome he met a writer named Filippo Pigafetta, who turned his notes into a book called Relatione del reame di Congo. It came out in Italian in 1591 and was soon printed in English, in Dutch and in Latin. Before that book, only the Portuguese knew anything about the kingdom. Afterwards the rest of Europe knew there was a Christian state in central Africa, sometimes called Western Ethiopia, badly short of priests.

Between 1590 and 1634 the workshop of Theodore de Bry issued a long series of illustrated travel volumes that sorted the world into the Indias Occidentales, meaning South America, Mexico and the Caribbean, and the Indias Orientales, meaning the Moluccas and the Philippines. The engravings mapped the new territories in the literal sense and also fixed what readers in Europe expected to find there. Part of the same series covered the stretch of North America the English called Virginia and the Carolinas. The decades on either side brought Jesuits into Asia from 1582 onward, and Europe began assembling a body of knowledge about places whose inhabitants had little corresponding curiosity about Europe. Knowing a region and telling other Europeans what its people were like worked as a second form of possession running alongside the legal claims. The Caribbean islands appear in these books as part of a category invented by treaty and then filled in with pictures.