The Natural and Moral History of the Indies

Abstract

The publications of the Hakluyt Society (founded in 1846) made available edited (and sometimes translated) early accounts of exploration. The first series, which ran from 1847 to 1899, consists of 100 books containing published or previously unpublished works by authors from Christopher Columbus to Sir Francis Drake, and covering voyages to the New World, to China and Japan, to Russia and to Africa and India. This volume, first published in 1880, translates the first detailed description of the geography and indigenous culture of South America, written by Joseph de Acosta (1540–1600) and published in Spanish in 1590. Acosta was one of the first explorers to record and analyse the geophysical phenomena of the 'New World' and attempt to explain them scientifically. Volume 2 contains Books 5–7 of Acosta's work, describing the life of the indigenous population and including a brief history of the end of the Inca empire.

Colonialism, Landscape and the Subterranean

“…hard and difficult and bleak and sterile places, but the love of money renders them soft and abundant and well populated. (de Acosta 2000, 165)…”

“…Arguing that many more mines still remained to be discovered in Peru than had already been exploited, he described it as a land that appeared to be ‘sown’ with metals, ‘more than in any other land known at present in the world or in any written about in the past’ (de Acosta 2000, 164). Combined with the actual discovery of rich deposits of ore in locations such as Potosí, Spanish notions of the Andean underground as a repository of almost inexhaustible riches imaginatively endowed the bleak environments of the Andean plateau with the potential to become productive, lived‐in landscapes.…”