Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón was doubtless among the most striking figures of late colonial Peru. A zealous polymath, his irrepressible interests and reformist zeal during a long decade as Bishop of Trujillo (1779–90) are brought to light more evocatively than ever before in this highly readable and carefully researched book. Martínez Compañón's curiosity and investigations were so wide-ranging that on the one hand he can be described as the ‘founder of Peruvian archaeology’ (for his survey of the Chimú ruins at Chan Chan), and on the other he has provided linguists with prime source material for eight native languages spoken in the bishopric of his day (all are now extinct bar a few inland pockets of Quechua). He undertook an epic visita pastoral of his jurisdiction lasting almost three years (it should be pointed out that the Bishopric of Trujillo was as large as the entire United Kingdom today, including Scotland), and both during and after this tour he fizzed with plans and projects. These included, to list but a few: the establishment of two colleges for native children in Trujillo; the promotion of village schools throughout the region; the foundation of numerous new towns, and most impressively of ‘Los Dos Carlos’, to house the labourers at the mines of Hualgayoc near Cajamarca; and the introduction of extensive rights for the Hualgayoc workers, from social welfare to inheritance rights, honorific titles and payment in cash instead of kind.
Most famously, Martínez Compañón oversaw encyclopaedic research into the people, history, resources, fauna and flora of Trujillo. This research was to accompany a great written account that was never completed, but it nevertheless yielded 24 wooden crates filled with animal, vegetable and mineral specimens, along with antiquities. It also produced almost 1,400 watercolours, prepared by local artists and bound into eight volumes, now held in the Royal Palace library in Madrid. These illustrations, in a vernacular style, cover the full spectrum of human activity and of animal and plant life, and provide a major focus of Emily Berquist's account. The book as a whole – and perhaps especially its sixth chapter, on the botanical illustrations – reads as a cry for the importance of the watercolours, which have surely never been scrutinised with such care. Berquist's research into Martínez Compañón's huge collections, and in particular the role of locals (including native people) in their preparation, aspires to make a most novel contribution to the history of botany and the natural sciences at this time. Her careful cross-referencing of the written index to the botanical specimens with the corresponding images yields wonderful finds; these include identification of a leishmaniasis-carrying fly and its victim, a century before insect-vectored diseases were properly understood by modern science (pp. 150–1). (By contrast, the otherwise persuasive interpretation of a further scene as representing consumption of hallucinogenic ayahuasca is marred by an untenable reconstruction of the native-language name of the vision snake depicted: pp. 172–3.) Berquist suggests that by surveying, sampling and depicting the natural riches of Trujillo, and highlighting the achievements and fomenting the qualities of its native people, Martínez Compañón sought to contribute to the prosperity and civility of the empire. A major argument of the book, in fact, is that the Bishop thus sought to counter the European tradition that denigrated Americans and their environment as degraded or degenerate.
The term ‘utopia’ looms large over this book; indeed, throughout extensive sections, it features on virtually every page. It is a complex term, and this reviewer found it difficult to pin down the diverse activities of Martínez Compañón among competing potential meanings. He was a clergyman, of course, and one is minded to recall the utopian religious of the sixteenth century (Vasco de Quiroga and Bartolomé de las Casas are discussed in the introduction). He was ‘utopian’ in the modern understanding that might be summarised as ‘displaying hopeless or impractical idealism’, since very few of his plans and schemes ever came to fruition. Thus, the Indian colleges in Trujillo never opened, only a small minority of the village schools and new towns endured, and both ‘Los Dos Carlos’ and the Bishop's broader proposals for the Hualgayoc mines remained dead letters. Even the contents of Martínez Compañón's meticulously assembled crates of specimens were mostly dispersed and lost after they arrived in Spain. The Bishop's utopia, then, remained largely within his own head, or in his volumes of illustrations (and there is certainly something utopian in the scenes of human harmony and industry portrayed there). But above all, Martínez Compañón emerges from this account as very much the Enlightened reformer, an exemplary product of the late Bourbon age (Berquist hints that the writings of the Spanish minister of the 1740s, José del Campillo y Cossío, were particularly influential here). His plan for ‘Los Dos Carlos’, for example, is described as ‘a classic liberal recipe for promoting individual initiative and free commerce’ (p. 135). The terms ‘reform’ and ‘improvement’ feature almost as frequently as does ‘utopia’, in fact, and Martínez Compañón displays the diagnostic late Bourbon concerns for researching, recording, rationalising and rendering useful to the crown and the public good the resources of Trujillo, whether human or otherwise. Indeed, Berquist's book is distinguished from earlier scholarship on the Bishop precisely by its focus on his ‘secular reform programme’. In these contexts, it seems possible that a repeated emphasis on utopia actually gives a slightly misleading sense of the nature of his endeavours.
The book is embellished with 24 full-colour plates. It will be of real interest to a wide range of scholars: of the Enlightenment and science in the Spanish Atlantic world, of the late Bourbon viceroyalty of Peru, and of course of the northern region of Peru, where Martínez Compañón spent what he referred to as his ‘headiest days’.
