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      The Books of a Bishop

      By December 1767, twenty-nine-year-old Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón had likely grown tired of waiting to begin the journey to distant Peru and his new life in Spanish America. Earlier that year King Charles III had called him to serve the Spanish Crown and the Catholic Church as chantre, or musical director, of Lima’s metropolitan cathedral. In the meantime, he had completed his duties as a consultant to the Inquisition in Madrid and had prepared for departure. By June, his license to cross the Atlantic was in order. Yet almost half a year later, he still found himself waiting. At least some of the delay must have been meteorological: 1767 was one of the most active years for North Atlantic hurricanes, and October and November were prime storm season. At that time of year, ships making the crossing from Cádiz to the southern ports of Spanish America had to take particular care not to find themselves stranded in the windless equatorial region or battered by ferocious winds with nicknames like the “bellowing forty” that lurked below thirty degrees latitude.¹

      Though waiting for the weather to improve was the most prudent course, such inaction must have been all the more difficult, considering that Cádiz was a city built around voyages. In 1717, it became the center of Spanish trade with the American colonies when the Crown pronounced it the monopoly port on the Peninsula because its wide harbor better accommodated the larger ships of the eighteenth century. Situated on a narrow isthmus a few miles off the mainland, the city stood on rocky, sandy terrain surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving vessels passed through the intimidating La Candelaria Fortress, with its breakwaters and cannons, before reaching the protected Santa María port. As the fourth-largest city in Spain, Cádiz in 1750 was home to 60,000 people, making it comparable in size with other large European cities such as Dresden and Stockholm. Many of its inhabitants were from merchant families whose affluent, cosmopolitan lifestyle marked it as a fashion and culture center second only to Madrid. The city was also famous for its merchant neighborhood, the so-called City of the Hundred Palaces, as well as its cathedral, which, when construction was complete, would feature grandiose towers as high as those of the famous Giralda of Seville.²

      The ocean air and bustling streets of Cádiz were strikingly different from the cool, verdant valleys of Navarre that the Bishop’s family called home. Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón was born on January 6, 1737, in the town of Cabredo, Navarre. Located in the Pyrenees region of northeastern Spain, Navarre was its own kingdom and held special fueros, or local legal privileges, including an independent viceroy and ruling Cortes. Shared culture, language, and social systems linked Navarre and the rest of Spanish Basque country (Alava, Guipúzcoa, and Vizcaya) with the French Basque provinces of Basse Navarre, Labourd, and Soule. Martínez Compañón’s father, Mateo, worked as a customs officer to provide for his wife, María Martínez de Bujanda, and their family. Though there are no images of him as a child, Martínez Compañón as an adult was thin and of average stature, with pale skin and black hair. He had thick, dark eyebrows, prominent cheekbones, and a long Romanesque nose. His portrait (see Plate 8) highlights his curious eyes and penetrating, determined gaze.

      Martínez Compañón began his education studying Latin in the nearby town of Quintana, continuing in La Merced Convent in Calatayud (Aragón), where he studied philosophy. He completed his first university training in canon law at the Universities of Huesca and Zaragoza, also in Aragón. He earned his degree in canon law in 1759 at the College of the Holy Spirit at the University of Oñate in Guipúzcoa. This course of study would have included grammar (or reading, writing, and Latin); rhetoric (dealing with classical works in Spanish and Latin, and learning persuasive speaking and writing techniques); and philosophy (which covered logic, physics, mathematics, and moral philosophy). It was designed to prepare the student to think on his feet and argue convincingly while referencing the most important classical scholarship—essential skills for a successful ecclesiastical career. After serving as a chancellor at the University of Oñate, Martínez Compañón was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1761 in the town of Vitoria. Two years later, still at Oñate, he earned his doctorate in theology and canon law. This advanced degree allowed him entry into the highest echelons of church bureaucracy. In 1766, he was called to serve as an adviser to the Inquisition, an appointment that brought him into the orbit of high-level Church and Crown officials and likely factored in his subsequent career successes. One year later, his hard work was rewarded when he was presented to King Charles III as a potential canon of Lima’s cathedral.³

      During the few months’ delay before his departure, the young prelate would have had ample time to get to know the two men who would accompany him to America. Pedro de Echevarri, his personal servant, was twenty years old with dark hair and eyes. His face was dotted with smallpox scars. Also Basque, he came from Oñate.⁴ Echevarri served Martínez Compañón in Lima, and became his secretary once the young canon was promoted to bishop. He attended him on his grueling visita through the mountains, jungles, and deserts of Trujillo and later followed the newly promoted archbishop of Santa Fé north to Bogotá, New Granada. As Martínez Compañón’s personal secretary, Echevarri patiently penned the thousands of pages of official correspondence that his employer dictated. His handwriting is legible and pleasing to the eye—especially when compared with that of his superior, which is gnarled, small, and hurried. It appears to be Echevarri’s hand that transcribed the hundreds of names on the images of the watercolors of Trujillo del Perú, and it was he who wrote out the collection inventory. Without Echevarri’s careful cataloging of the Bishop’s papers and his insistence that Martínez Compañón’s natural history be sent to Spain after his death, much of the Bishop’s life’s work might have been lost. In many ways, Echevarri is one of the most important, yet least audible, characters in the story of the Bishop, the Indians, and Trujillo.⁵

      Documents reveal almost nothing about the second servant who accompanied Martínez Compañón. Ceferino Manuel de Isla, a native of Santander, was eighteen years old in 1767, with a dark complexion and thick eyebrows that set off his brown eyes. He was to travel independently to Peru, overseeing the prelate’s luggage on a separate ship that would sail south around Cape Horn and up the Pacific coast to Lima. This route typically took about four months—at least one month longer than arriving directly at Montevideo or Buenos Aires. The longer journey was the only way to handle large amounts of heavy cargo that could not be moved across the Andes Mountains on foot. In this case, the cargo that Ceferino supervised was perhaps the most precious thing that Martínez Compañón brought to Peru: crates and crates of his beloved books. These constituted one of the largest private libraries in the entire viceroyalty, with more than two thousand volumes inventoried upon his arrival in Trujillo. The Bishop had tracts by scientists, ecclesiastics, and government reformers in Spanish, Latin, Italian, and French. His library inventory reveals that he was intimately familiar with the dictates of European political economy reform, the early modern methods of making natural histories, and the most influential scholarship on the native peoples of the New World. These books were both inspiration and reference for his campaign to create a utopia in Trujillo that would become a real-time contribution to one of the most contentious debates of his day: whether the people and the nature of the New World were inherently inferior to those of the Old. Martínez Compañón brought from Europe practical guidebooks that he and his priests could use to help local communities improve agricultural techniques and develop local trade networks. He carried several texts explaining

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