1. The Limits of Language

The excess of the visible world with regard to language is one of the central topoi in the rhetoric of autoptic description, as both François Hartog (1980) and Mary Campbell (1988) described, and one particularly ubiquitous in the accounts given of either “the other” or “the exceptional” that are so common in travel literature. Stephanie Merrim (1984), Anthony Pagden (1993), and Katheleen A. Myers (1993) have noted the special significance of this rhetorical device in the earliest European writings on the New World by Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bernal Díaz del Castillo and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo. In the first part of the Historia general y natural, Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo described the Spaniards' initial position towards the immense new space. In this he was highlighting the impossibility of naming most of the things their eyes were seeing. The most obvious feature of the newly discovered lands was the insurmountable illegibility of the landscape: “Since, although it is visible, we ignore most of it, since we do not yet know either the names nor the properties of such trees” (Fernández de Oviedo 1957, intro. to book 9, vol. 117, 278). The vertiginous image of the tropical forest that Fernandez de Oviedo so vividly described was, in his own words, “mare magno y oculto,” an entangled and opaque accumulation of herbs, plants, trees, and animals only embraceable in aesthetic terms: “The greatness and beauty – to the eyes – of these forests is out of question; but their virtues and properties are not yet understood” (ibid.).

As Stephanie Merrim (1984) explains, this dissymmetry between the visible and the readable – the essential difference of American nature – became the feature around which Fernandez de Oviedo's representational economy revolved. As I have noted elsewhere (Carrillo Castillo 1999; 2000a; 2000b), the insufficiency of language to name things triggered a tumultuous verbal display organized around the sensorial immediacy of the natural phenomenon – its sheer presence – and the intense subjective affections it produced in the privileged beholder – his own experience. However, previous analyses of Fernandez de Oviedo's methods of representation have overlooked the fact that the patent ubiquity of American difference already implied the reversibility of such a situation. All those trees and herbs that covered the whole field of vision could not be without those qualities and virtues which nature had to offer elsewhere in the world, even if only monkeys were “able to understand them and know which of them are good for their use” (Fernandez de Oviedo 1957, intro. to book 9, vol. 117, 278). All those nameless species could neither be accidents nor monsters since, as it was visually manifest, they were the constituents of the specific nature of the place – “these cannot be without properties because they cover most of this land” (ibid.).

The identification of “nature” with the recognizable landscape of a specific territory corresponds to an interpretation of Aristotle's teleological understanding of human interaction with nature in emphatic regional and environmental terms, one that involves the necessary presence of a human recipient within the environment that is the object of knowledge. Upon this basis, Fernandez de Oviedo was to build a very original program for both the comprehension of and the intervention in America, which he strove to present as the most suitable one for the development of Spanish imperial expansion. This program largely contradicted those launched by former chroniclers – Pietro Martire d'Anghiera – and standard academic trends in contemporary natural philosophy which maintained a more deductive approach to nature. The basic principle of Fernandez de Oviedo's approach to nature was the belief that plants, animals – e.g. the gatillos monos – and human communities were “naturally” linked to their local environment by a distinct semiotic network that was equally “naturally” recognized by all of them. The proficiency in the comprehension of this code was acquired through continuous experience. As Anthony Pagden noted, it was precisely this environmental notion of experience that Alexander von Humboldt found so appealing in Fernandez de Oviedo's writing three centuries later (Pagden 1993, 24–27).

According to Fernandez de Oviedo, the recognition of the specific relationship between men and nature in a particular region was the necessary point of departure for any positive knowledge of the beneficial properties of the natural species and for any successful intervention in the new territories. Recognition did not derive from the deduction of the quasi-infinite combination of elements, astronomic influence and climatic conditions converging in a specific point of the globe, as it was thought by a representative of the contemporary academic milieu, his friend the scholar and aristocrat Hernán Núñez Pinciano. On the contrary, such recognition could only be acquired, so Fernandez de Oviedo said, by means of sustained experience and by inhabiting the place in situ, as was the case of the Spanish soldiers and colonists currently exploring and settling the newly discovered territories.

According to this logic, what should be admired was not so much the difference of the American landscape – that, after all, was the visible sign of its particular nature, a particular nature which Castile possessed as well – but the infinite amount of new things and territories both seen and known on behalf of the Castilian crown by the Spaniards in such a short period of time. The “asombro” – wonder – and “espanto” – shock – initially provoked by nature in America were rhetorically replaced with admiration for the unheard-of feats being currently undertaken by his compatriots: “This being said, and bearing in mind the little time passed since the first Christians came to these lands …, I am not amazed of the many things that are still ignored, as much as I am of the great amount that are already known in such a brief period of time” (Fernández de Oviedo 1957, intro. to book 9, vol. 117, 278).

2. Stealing Names

The closest precedent to Fernandez de Oviedo's work, Decades de orbe novo, published in Alcalá de Henares in 1516 by the Milanese humanist and royal chronicler, Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, introduced scattered news and digressions about nature within a loose chronological account of the discovery of the territories that he called the “New World.” In contrast, Fernandez de Oviedo organized his descriptions in books and chapters following a simple taxonomical Plinian model of classification – fruit trees, herbs, terrestrial animals, birds, fish, and insects – and individual species, in such a way that the heading of each chapter names a particular species. However, the organized listing of American names devised by Fernandez de Oviedo did not correspond directly either to the logic of contemporary herbals, which were customarily arranged according to the model of Dioscorides materia medica, or the encyclopedic tradition deriving from Isodore of Sevilla. As it becomes clear from both the actual arrangement of the information and Fernandez de Oviedo's own words, his listing rather resulted from his understanding of his duties as an officer of the Empire. Fernandez de Oviedo was an inspector of gold mining and a notary, as well as a chronicler, and he understood this task as both to “legalize” ongoing practices de facto and to inform and ease future interventions into the territory. Thus he neither wanted to reduce alterity nor to impose a homogenous canon, but to produce an authorized (and official) guide to the heterogeneous linguistic landscape that covered the equally heterogeneous natural one.

Thus the names appearing in Fernandez de Oviedo's headings do not refer so much to the species per se, but to chronologically identified and geographically located linguistic practices as performed either by different native communities or by the newcomers. This explains why in the revised editions of the Historia general y natural that were published after the 1535 edition, Fernandez de Oviedo was always adding all the new denominations to the same phenomena which had been compiled by the Spaniards as they advanced in the conquest of the continent. For Fernandez de Oviedo the creation of a univocal dictionary of species was not as important as the organized recording of the various linguistic networks that mapped the yet unknown territory.

Mapping such local networks was perceived as the only possible path leading to an actual recognition and domination of the territory by Fernandez de Oviedo. Such a task could only be accomplished gradually, from within, through physical, continuous, and sometimes painful contact: through a process that Fernandez de Oviedo generally identifies as experiencia. The notion of individual experience was related, according to the first dictionary of the Spanish Royal Academy, the Diccionario de Autoridades, to suffering “works and pains, plagues, loss and war” (1734, vol. 3). José María Maravall (1986) underlined the important role of the idea of experience in the definition of Spanish early modern national identity and J. M. López Piñero (1979, 163–168) described its frequent use in Spanish scientific discourse in the sixteenth century. In Fernández de Oviedo's writings this generic term most often refers to the specific experience of the soldier or the settler in an unknown country. But Fernandez de Oviedo's model of behavior for any Spaniard arriving in America was the ideal attitude of the notary, the judge, and the soldier, always prompt to investigate the empirical and to translate local impressions into experience – experiencia. All colonists and soldiers should act like the virtuous captain Barrionuevo who developed an ability to read traces and symptoms in the landscape to capture a local rebel cacique in his own environment (Fernández de Oviedo 1957, book 4, chap. 6, vol. 117, 119).

Fernandez de Oviedo's particular interest in differentiating local denominations of a particular species has to do as well with his attempt to establish regional demarcations in a yet unbound territory that mirrored the demarcation of the Old World according to linguistic – or cultural – features. In this sense he referred to “the language of Cueva,” “the language of Nicaragua,” etc. Linguistic diversity was an essential means of mapping the territory according to cultural differences, which were then easily convertible into administrative ones, thus applying a geo-cultural logic that would become enormously effective later in colonial and imperialist developments. We should not forget that Fernandez de Oviedo's respect for the local was always part of an expansive process of territorialization, in which knowledge was always a means toward domination. The names given to animals and plants by the Spanish soldiers and colonists that Fernandez de Oviedo transcribed alongside the Native-American ones were the material traces of the violence acted upon the territory being mapped. These traces were inscribed ius belli and de facto, becoming an integral part of the American reality. Even when Fernandez de Oviedo often disapproved of these naming practices, they were nevertheless recorded as part of one and the same reality – the Indies – which was not the innocent land previous to the Spanish arrival, but rather an entity in the process of being discovered and conquered.

Native names – no less than the objects they named – were there to be captured. Just as his contemporary Bartolomé de las Casas, Fernandez de Oviedo paid special attention to the precise sound of native words. He directed that the sound of American names should be carefully transcribed avoiding any possible confusion, e.g., in the case of the higüero tree: “The accent of letter ‘u’ must be long, or pronounced slowly, in such a way that neither is it pronounced briefly nor are these letters pronounced together” (Fernández de Oviedo 1957, book 8, chap. 4, vol. 117, 252). The utterance of the name deserved nearly as much attention as the physical appearance of the phenomenon, applying to the transcription of the specific phonetic features of the never-heard-before names the same degree of vividness that he was applying to describe the never-seen-before phenomena.

The capacity of naming involved the functional and semantic “opening” of the American phenomena to the Spaniards. But the inscription of those names into the written records of the Empire implied more far-reaching consequences. Both Pietro Martire and Fernandez de Oviedo were eager to acknowledge the possibility of transferring the sounds uttered by the Indians to name their environment into the Latin alphabet. As Cañizares-Esguerra (2001) has argued, against Walter de Mignolo's opinion (1995), the Renaissance chroniclers never questioned the value of native languages. On the contrary, they used them systematically as a method of symbolic appropriation and domination. The names of the new things could be transcribed and recorded, written and learnt. Their transient status of being oral in nature was replaced by a new status, that of a stable object of knowledge to be conveyed within the usual means of Western culture, transferred to the metropolis, disseminated and, eventually, brought back to America, e.g., for purposes of colonial exploitation. The Spaniards could share the knowledge of the Indians through the comprehension of sounds, but their transcription produced a new symbolic realm from which their original owners, the Indians, were excluded. As Michel de Certeau (1988) noted, inscription was one of the most effective means of – both symbolic and actual – appropriation of America: once inscribed, names were not anymore the patrimony of the Indians. As Fernandez de Oviedo informs us, the investigation and recording of Indian names was all the more urgent since the indios antiguos were rapidly disappearing and with them their precious nominal knowledge of things and places that were still largely ignored by the Spaniards (Fernández de Oviedo 1957, book 6, chap. 7, vol. 117, 154).

3. The Politics of Difference

The actual recording and organization of such a vast amount of information was by no means the direct fulfillment of Fernandez de Oviedo's duties as royal chronicler or the systematic application of a method previously devised. On the one hand, very little is said in the brief official memorial of 1532 by which Fernandez de Oviedo was appointed about how his task should be undertaken. On the other hand, when Fernandez de Oviedo presented his project to the Emperor for the first time in 1526, the production of a systematic description of the American natural world still had to prove instrumental in his life-long project to become a high secretary at the imperial court. Between 1526 and his death in 1557, Fernandez de Oviedo published an early version of part one of the Historia general y natural (1535) and prepared the remaining parts two and three together with a completely revised version of part one. Except for two short trips to Spain, Fernandez de Oviedo stayed all this time in Santo Domingo, where most of his work was both conceived and produced. In 1555, he again presented a book, the so-called Quinquágenas, this time to Prince Philip, but on this occasion it was not in order to obtain a position at the court of the new regent, but, rather, to ask for financial support to publish the immense description of American nature which he had been immersed in for thirty years.

The precise features of the Historia general y natural were to be progressively defined within a highly changing, polemical context and through the complex process of production. The rules that governed Fernandez de Oviedo's method were largely implicit and were developed as he went about producing the work. Without taking this into account, Fernandez de Oviedo's position with regard to the question of naming cannot be understood. The normative ideal as an officer of the Empire that he strived for was not implemented according to an existing model, but was still being contested. Interestingly enough, in the case of Fernandez de Oviedo, the construction of the persona who would speak on behalf of the Empire from America implied a radical re-location of the relative positions of colony and metropolis.

The main controversy underlying the Historia general y natural was a disagreement between Fernandez de Oviedo and Pietro Martire d'Anghiera, royal chronicler of Charles V until his death in 1526. In a broader sense it was a disagreement Fernández de Oviedo had with all those who had identified American species with names from Spain “in dreams” – i.e., without having seen by themselves or having had experience of the New World in situ. Fernandez de Oviedo's disagreement with Pietro Martire concerned not just the identity of a particular animal or plant, but his procedure as a whole and the epistemological basis of his method. According to Fernandez de Oviedo, Martire had failed, first of all, in his main duty as a historian for not double-checking the testimonies he received. Again and again throughout the Historia general y natural, Fernandez de Oviedo reminds his readers about the spurious nature of Pietro Martire's sources, as in the case of the geographical denominations of the islands of Libuqueira and Cuba, mistakenly identified as Ayay and Alfa by his predecessor (Fernández de Oviedo 1957, book 2, chap. 8, vol. 117, 34; ibid., book 2, chap. 12, vol. 117, 47). Secondly, Fernandez de Oviedo questioned Martire's philological method for being too rigid and bookish to deal with the new and heterogeneous nature of the New World. Martire's explanation of the name manati, as deriving from the name of the Lake Guanniabo, made clear, according to Fernandez de Oviedo, his limited acquaintance with the many names given to that aquatic mammal in different regions (ibid., book 13, chap. 9, vol. 118, 65).

But the most radical of Fernandez de Oviedo's criticism concerned Martire's tendency to apply external comparative patterns to frame American reality. In the case of the hobos, mistakenly identified by Martire with the medicinal Egyptian mirobalanos, Fernandez de Oviedo supported his general attack against uncritical identification with the authority of two doctors who had observed in situ the specific properties of the American species. After this, Fernandez de Oviedo embraced the detailed description of the beneficial properties for the American hobo, this time considered an autonomous species instead of an imperfect reflection of a plant from the Old World. His identification did not depend on a set of external projections, but on a local and native source: “it was learnt from the Indians” (ibid., book 8, chap. 2, vol. 117, 250) What is even more important, Fernandez de Oviedo linked the recognition – and use – of the species to the hardships of everyday experience in such a new and unknown world.

Since the ultimate meaning of names was the specific relationship between human beings and their natural environment, Fernandez de Oviedo's position implied a systematic rejection of any possible identification between species from both Worlds, as well as a defense of the empirical basis of any nominal identification. A good illustration of this argument is the case of the Plinian crocodile, the cocatrice, that Pietro Martire had identified with the iguana. The first edition of the Historia general y natural dedicates chapter 2 of book 13 (on aquatic animals) to the iguana. The detailed description of its external appearance and its gastronomic qualities was followed by a comparison with the Plinian description of the crocodile showing the error of Martire's identification. Sometime between 1535 (date of the first edition) and 1542 (date in which the main draft of the new version was finished), Fernandez de Oviedo revised the text on the iguana and decided to transfer it to book XII on terrestrial animals. Quite possibly, in that very moment, he also added a passage in which he offered his own identification of the Plinian crocodile with the “aligators of the main land” that he had seen, measured, and even paid a “silver real” each for its eggs (ibid., book 12, chap. 7, vol. 118, 34).

By discrediting any external gaze, he was doing more than undermining Pietro Martire's authority or merely preventing any future challenge to his own authority from Spain. He was also defining the New World as an autonomous and self-contained entity, bearing its own labels and demarcations: that is, a natural entity, in the Aristotelian sense, on the same level as the Old World. Moreover, by locating everyday experience as the main criterion of recognition and nominal identification of the manati, the hobo, the iguana, and the crocodile, he was also framing American nature within the terms of the predictable and the familiar, thus replacing the boundless desiring gaze till then projected upon the newly discovered lands.

As the case of the tigre reveals, this controversial position took shape through the long process of production of the Historia. Fernandez de Oviedo paid attention to the tiger for the first time in the Sumario of 1526 (an advance of the forthcoming work he dedicated to the Emperor, probably in order to receive the appointment of royal chronicler) and some fifteen years later in book 12 of the revised version of the Historia general y natural that he did not manage to publish. Although the description of the animal remained practically identical in both texts, there was however, a radical shift in the way the question of naming was addressed. The tigre of the Sumario opened the section dedicated to terrestrial animals. It was nominally identified with the famous species described by Pliny, and was announced as if it were a trophy worthy of the Imperial majesty to whom the book was addressed: “On animals and primarily on the tiger” (Fernández de Oviedo 1526, chap. 11, folio 19r). When the description of the tigre appears again fifteen years later in the Historia general y natural it does so in chapter 10 of book 12, the place that corresponds to this species according to the general organization of the work. The title of the chapter bears a completely new attitude: “On the animals that in the main land the Spaniards call tigres, and the Indians call in different ways, according to their languages in those provinces where these animals exist” (Fernández de Oviedo 1957, book 12, chap. 10, vol. 118, 39). On this occasion the association with Pliny is replaced with an explicit reference to the heterogeneous linguistic practices of both the Indians and the Spaniards, in an equally heterogeneous scenario.

This emphasis on the supreme value of experience as against classical authorities cannot be exclusively taken, however, as the expression of Fernandez de Oviedo's increasing Creole zeal. The controversy between the humanist and royal chronicler Antonio Nebrija (1444–1522) in Divinatio in scribenda historia of 1509 and the Italian Lucio Marineo Siculo (1444–1533), as analyzed by Andrés Hinojo (1991) and José María Maestre (1995), reveals that early definitions of Hispanic identity were characterized by a distinct anti-Roman flavor. The recent feats of Imperial Spain, as they were praised by Fernandez de Oviedo in the introduction to the second part of the Historia general y natural, had granted Spain the leadership of the world and overshadowed the echoes of the past Roman glory. This Hispanic era was, according to Fernandez de Oviedo, an era of action and experience. After its first formulation in Sánchez de Arévalo's Compendiosa Historia in the fifteenth century, the idea of a natural disposition of Goths towards action against Roman taste for wordy self-celebration – paradoxically borrowed from Sallust's accusation against the Greeks – had become a topos of Spanish chauvinism (Tate 1970, 80). It was within this ideological context that Fernandez de Oviedo proudly stated in book one of the Historia general y natural that his work was the outcome of thousands of experiences and dangers instead of the hundreds of books that Pliny claimed to have used for his own.

The threatening consequences deriving from the vision of an open and heterogeneous world were compensated by the action of the Spaniards whose discoveries were drawing the universal map of names according to criteria learned through direct experience. Fernandez de Oviedo's confidence in the positive outcome of such an immense task was based upon the expansive ideology of empire that implied its infinite projection in the world. Such confidence moved Fernandez de Oviedo after his discussion on the identity of the tigre, to praise rhetorically the variety and difference of nature as currently revealed by the Spaniards.

Simultaneously Creole and imperialist, Fernandez de Oviedo's polemical position anticipated later developments in the history of Western science. As he claimed when criticizing the stubborn efforts made by his contemporaries to identify any American species with the medicinal terebinto, the Spanish recent discoveries not only had definitely opened the book of nature, but it had revealed the paucity of former assumptions to cope with the immensity and variety of the world. The search for a tree that might fit with the rigid list of properties that Pliny described for the terebinto not only prevented the identification of new and different species surely granted with more beneficial properties than the famous terebinto, but also blinded the Christians towards the existence of local varieties of terebinto with features and properties unknown to Pliny. In fact, Fernandez de Oviedo said, Pliny had not explicitly closed the list of possible local varieties of the medicinal species. On the contrary, nature appeared to Fernandez de Oviedo as an almost infinite range of local differences (Fernández de Oviedo 1957, book 8, chap. 10, vol. 117, 287–288).

A development of this idea can be found in one of Fernandez de Oviedo's contemporaries, the Lombard chemist and mathematician Girolamo Cardano (1501–1576) who, according to the English translator of Fernandez de Oviedo, Richard Eden, was an avid reader of the Historia general y natural and compared Fernandez de Oviedo “to the ancient writers” (Eden 1555, intro.). After commenting on Fernandez de Oviedo's description of the culture of corn and the production of cazabe, Cardano noted in his On the nature of man the need of finding a new and more general definition of bread that allowed the inclusion of any possible regional variety, beyond the five types that, with the new American examples, he had described in his work.

4. Toponymy

Toponymy, the naming of places, was a very important issue for Fernandez de Oviedo. In fact, his position in this regard was quite different from that in regard to animals and plants. Fernandez de Oviedo gave continuous advice and warnings to soldiers, pilots, and cosmographers on the crucial acts of either recording native names or naming a region, cape, bay or island. He was highly aware of the implications of producing a clear and unambiguous record of such names. The success of future expeditions, the administration of the new settlements and exploitations, and the possession claims of the Spanish monarchy depended very much upon the correct performance of such a task. In toponymy diversity of names was not a sign of the richness of the Spanish Empire, as it was the case with animals and plants, but a source of confusion and chaos.

One of Fernandez de Oviedo's contemporaries, the cosmographer and historian Pedro Medina, had noted in his Libro de grandezas y cosas memorables de España, that geographical denominations and the names of natural creatures were not exactly of the same kind. The former did not derive from the original baptism of species performed by Adam in Paradise. Names of places, he followed, were the outcome of the specific will of the different nations that had covered the surface of the Earth after the Flood. Those post-deluvian names, according to Medina, had been legitimately replaced several times as the result of invasions, change of rulers, etc. Toponymy thus mirrored the political and historical circumstance of a given territory. To illustrate his argument, Medina mentioned as an example the massive process of nomination being currently undertaken in the newly discovered territories of the Spanish Crown (Medina 1549, 2).

The relationship of toponymy with exceptional historical events and with the intervention of “legitimate agencies” – as the Spanish empire claimed to be – made it the object of a very specific regulation. According to Fernandez de Oviedo, giving names was the exclusive prerogative of the discoverer when acting on behalf of a legitimate political agency. The historical meaning and the political significance of the related actions of discovering and naming were made explicit in the highly regulated rituals of taking possession. As Patricia Seed described in her comparative analysis of the different ceremonies of possession of the British, the French, the Portuguese, and the Spaniards, the specific ritual performed on behalf of the Spanish crown implied a simultaneous war declaration against whoever may question the imperium of the Spanish monarchs over the territory (Seed 1995, 69–100). For this, the captain or officer who embodied royal authority should have full physical contact with the specific land or sea and, sword in hand, set the royal flag in the place. Fernandez de Oviedo described all the details of this procedure as performed by Núñez de Balboa when he entered the waters of the Pacific Ocean, which he had just discovered. By the same token, he harshly criticized the attitude of governor Pedrarías Dávila, under whose command Fernandez de Oviedo had originally arrived to America, when he performed the whole ceremony of possession with regard to territories that had already been discovered and named by previous expeditionaries (Fernández de Oviedo 1957, book 29, chap. 6, vol. 119, 233).

Fernandez de Oviedo was not only worried about the legal and historical consequences of naming and recording names. His interest in the subject was also related to his concern with cosmography and navigation. When comparing the first-hand reports submitted by pilots and captains with the official charts – the patrón real – produced by the cosmographers of the Casa de Contratación under the direction of Alonso de Chaves, Fernandez de Oviedo could not help but denounce the chaos and confusion provoked by the complete lack of criterion and coordination between the different sources. This was especially the case when describing the Atlantic coast, at the beginning of part 2. The many contradictions, blanks, repetitions, and arbitrariness contained in the charts and reports he was handling rendered an undesirable image of the Spanish historical intervention in the American territory, at the same time as it prevented the articulation of a stable frame of reference for future interventions. As Fernandez de Oviedo ironically commented on the common habit of naming the coast according to the saints of the day or the personal devotion of the dicoverer, “when reading one of our charts it seems as if a man were reading through these coasts either a calendar or a badly organized catalogue of saints” (Fernández de Oviedo 1957, book 21, chap. 6, vol. 118, 334).

Fernandez de Oviedo's objections to the naming practices of the Spaniards were not confined to the legal, historical, and technical realms mentioned above. In general, Fernandez de Oviedo did not feel at ease with the trail of new names the Spaniards left behind them, as he made clear when narrating Núñez de Guzmán's expedition to Jalisco and Nueva Galicia. On this occasion he discusses two cases which, from his point of view, are particularly flagrant: the names Mar del Sur, Southern Sea, and Nueva Galicia, New Galicia. Regarding the first, he argues that: “although the Spaniards usually call it Southern, they should rather say Western, since the coast is always heading north, and this sea is one and the same ocean” (ibid., book 34, chap. 6, vol. 120, 278). The second deserves a similar remark: “And the Spaniards call it New Galicia, and not because it is either more or less old than the land that is called Galicia in Spain, but because it was newly found by the Christians. And they thought that they should give it that name because it was a rough and hilly land” (ibid., book 34, chap. 1, vol. 120, 269). With regard to the former, Fernandez de Oviedo denounced the arbitrary and partial point of view implied in the use of the name Southern Sea, when designating a reality whose extension surpassed by far the scarce geographical notions of the newcomers. In the latter, Fernandez de Oviedo highlighted the autonomous nature of the American territory, confusingly hidden under the equivocal parallelism established by the Spaniards. A few lines later, Fernandez de Oviedo informed his readers about an original Indian denomination: “Nuchistlan.” For him, this name was perfectly appropriate since it was derived from the direct and continuous experience of local communities: “From there they entered a different province called Nuchistlan. It is called that way because many tuna plants grow there. This fruit is called nuchistlan in that territory in their language” (ibid., book 34, chap. 1, vol. 120, 276).

Probably under the influence of the archaeological approach to the toponymy of his admired Pseudo-Berosio – a presumably ancient historian forged by the Dominican friar Annio da Viterbo (1430–1502) whose Comentaria super omnia opera auctorum diversorumde antiquitatibus loquentium supported the territorial claims of the new European monarchies of the sixteenth century – , Fernandez de Oviedo recognized in the way natives named their territory a sense of identity with the place that he missed in the toponymy currently applied by the Spaniards in America. In the same way as Annio's logic had allowed Fernandez de Oviedo to defend the ancient historical rights of the Spanish monarchy over the Caribbean Islands in the first edition of the Historia general y natural (1957, book 2, chap. 3, vol. 117, 17), he could also recognize in the native names a degree of appropriateness that, once understood, would allow a more precise reading of the still boundless and empty territory, a reading in terms of the network of human habits and local practices produced in history that names both contained and designated. Only through this “cultural” understanding of the territory, or rather, the understanding of the territory in terms of “culture” and “tradition,” could a positive understanding of local nature be achieved and a comparison between the New and the Old Worlds be significant. Fernandez de Oviedo gave an example of how this could be done in the case of the Cape of Caribana: “There is a cape called Caribana from which the name of ‘caribe’ is derived, because this is the head and homeland of the ‘caribes’ territory. This name ‘caribe’ means courageous, bold or enduring. Note that it is like ‘hercules,’ which means strong and victorious in Egyptian, and, more properly in Greek” (ibid., book 21, chap. 6, vol. 118, 323–324). On very few occasions did Fernandez de Oviedo allow himself to name a place, and when he did, he followed the logic of “natural convenience” and “common experience” which he advocated in the case of natural phenomena. The range of mountains that he called Sierra del árbol de las trébedes received the name from an exceptional tree that grew in the area.

In the latest additions to the Historia general y natural, Fernandez de Oviedo systematically recommended captains and expeditionaries to respect indigenous denominations. By doing so he was contradicting the mainstream colonization of American toponymy that Pedro Medina justified and celebrated from Spain. Underlying the practical reasons that Fernandez de Oviedo mentioned, there was an increasing mistrust towards any alien intervention that ignored the distinct and autonomous nature of the American territories. From the point of view of an old member of the first generation of Spanish settlers in America, the arbitrary imposition of geographical references by newcomers appeared to be an illegitimate appropriation of rights that, after Columbus’ discovery, were exclusively held by those living in the place. That is, his own rights.

As we noted above, after Fernandez de Oviedo's failed project to unite the Creole and metropolitan views of American natural and geographical identity, these contradictory views were to develop one against the other for more than two hundred years. The two paths only seemed to converge again in the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), through the combination of the abstract language devised by Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) to name nature disregarding its geographical location with the recognition of local experience and praxis as the main source of knowledge. In that way, Von Humboldt fulfilled Fernandez de Oviedo's dream of conveying the local in universal terms without having to yield its specificity.