This book is the illustrated catalog of an exhibit commemorating the life of Francisco José de Caldas (1768–1816) that opened in December 2018 at the Museo Nacional de Colombia to mark the 250th anniversary of Caldas's birth. This beautifully produced volume features high-quality images of more than 100 maps, objects, and documents related to Caldas's scientific activities, drawn from museums, archives, and libraries in Colombia, Spain, and Germany. An accompanying essay by José Antonio Amaya, curator at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, and Ivàn Felipe Suàrez Lozano, curator at the Casa Museo Francisco José de Caldas, provides a biographical portrait of Caldas, while also explaining the historical significance of various items featured in the exhibit catalog. A shorter essay by Esther Garcìa Guillén provides a review of a small but rich collection of Caldas's correspondence, sketches, drawings, reports, maps, and other documents at the Archivo del Real Jardìn Botànico in Madrid, where she is a curator.
The biographical essay by Amaya and Suàrez Lozano focuses primarily on Caldas's scientific activities during the periods that he worked as a merchant in Timanà, as a collaborator of Alexander von Humboldt and Aimee Bonpland, as director of the observatory in Santafé, and as a military engineer and newspaper editor during the war for independence. Although Caldas engaged in a range of scientific enterprises including botany and astronomy, his interest in geography and cartography provides the unifying thread, from his early efforts to make a map of Timanà to his 1811 Atlas de una parte de la Améryca Merydyonal and his 1813 Plano militar de las fronteras del sur del estado soberano de Antioquia.
Yet, in spite of his best efforts, for much of his career, geography remained a secondary occupation. The main reason was that Caldas's vision of geography as a patriotic enterprise, rooted in the local knowledge of creole elites and geared towards improving New Granada, was at variance with the vision of the viceroys of New Granada and the Spanish crown, which saw geographical knowledge of Spain's colonies as state secrets to be produced, managed, and carefully guarded by military institutions. To this end, Amaya and Suàrez Lozano's essay provides several examples of how tensions between military and civilian scientific enterprises and between the divergent interests of peninsulares and criollos, as well as those between urban and provincial elites, undermined Caldas's vision of establishing “civil geography” in New Granada.
For instance, upon joining the Royal Botanical Expedition in Santafé after the departure of Francisco Antonio Zea in 1803, Caldas sought to implement a program to map New Granada under the auspices of the expedition. His efforts soon drew a sharp rebuke from viceroy Amar, who reminded director José Celestino Mutis that mapmaking was the province of the army and the navy. Indeed, the presence of a collection of materials from Caldas at the Archivo del Real Jardìn Botànico in Madrid is a reminder that the Spanish empire and its agents often claimed a right to take possession of any and all knowledge produced in the colonies.
The biographical essay is also commendable for its emphasis on Caldas's ingenuity and resilience. In the wake of the viceroy's termination of the cartographic efforts of the botanical expedition, Caldas produced some of his most important and breathtaking scientific images—his various Perfiles de los Andes (1807-08), images of which feature prominently in the catalog. Similarly, the authors are careful to note, even though Caldas did not live in a “technological desert” (29), he was very adept at constructing his own scientific instruments—including a chronometer of his own design and a quadrant—and at learning and developing new cartographic techniques through copying maps such as Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville's map of South America from 1748. Such qualities served him well in his apparently relentless quest for employment as a mapmaker, a goal which he finally realized in the wake of the uprising of July 20, 1810, when he became director of the observatory in Santafé in April and quickly established the observatory as the depository of maps of New Granada.
Although the essay is strong on the details of Caldas's exciting life, it does little to explain the broader significance of his scientific work. With the recent efforts by Lina del Castillo, Mauricio Nieto, and others to show the significance of creole intellectuals in the history of science, not just in colonial Latin America but in the early modern Atlantic World, it is unfortunate that this catalog and presumably the accompanying exhibit do not do more to establish Caldas as not only a national hero, but also a scientific figure of global significance. Recent studies have suggested that Humboldt and Bonpland benefitted significantly from their interactions with Caldas and myriad other creole intellectuals they met during a whirlwind scientific tour of Spanish America. Such narratives of the significant role of Latin America's creole intellectuals are vital to challenging the lingering Eurocentrism of the history of science, and this catalog would seem an ideal vehicle for disseminating the insights of more recent scholarship.
Ultimately, one can only expect so much from an exhibit catalog and, within the limits of the genre, this one does a fine job. Specialists will find little that is surprising here, while readers looking for a brief introduction to Caldas and his life in science and politics will find this volume quite useful. Moreover, the selection of the maps, objects, and documents, which provide delightful visual accents to the biographical essay, is comprehensive and very well done. And it is through the images of these items that this volume provides any reader—novice or specialist—with a more visceral understanding of what it meant to do science in New Granada on the cusp of independence.
