Gran Colombian Print Culture and the Erasure of the Spanish Enlightenment

Colombians have long known that "El Sabio" Francisco José de Caldas (1771–1816) was the patriotic founding father of Colombian geography at a time when geographic knowledge, and the Colombian Republic, were both in a state of infancy. Universities, plazas, streets, monuments, scientific networks and institutes, and even a territorial department and several municipalities have all been named in honor of El Sabio Caldas. Popular Colombian narratives of Caldas portray him as the self-taught genius from Popayán who developed interests in natural history, geography, and astronomy. Because of El Sabio's dangerous passion for knowledge, Spanish general Morillo ordered Caldas's execution. When Caldas pleaded for his life, Morillo is rumored to have coldly sealed Caldas's fate with the words "Spain has no need for sabios." Several historical events between 1808 and 1816 helped invent this narrative of Caldas. Indeed, Caldas was from Popayán. He had penned several treatises about geography, astronomy, and natural sciences. Caldas's role in Santafé de Bogotá's declaration of independence has tended to overshadow the fact that, in 1812, Caldas had called for independence from the Spanish Cortes, not Fernando VII. The Spanish king's deployment of Reconquista armies to South America radicalized Caldas against monarchy. By 1816 Caldas and several other prominent members of New Granada society were arrested, and the massive collections of botanical specimens, drawings, and maps held in the astronomical observatory were confiscated. Caldas was executed. The vast collection of materials was sent back to Spain.

The lionizing of "founding" individuals for specific disciplines is by no means unusual. Scholars have long noted how "inventions of tradition" have been employed by scientific societies and other social and cultural groups around the world to create a sense of historical legacy and legitimacy for specific intellectual and political endeavors. Recent scholarship on the history of geography and cartography has therefore rightly stepped away from conventional hagiographic accounts of a small number of important founding fathers — and even fewer mothers — whose work progressively improved cartographic accuracy in order to instead engage in a more complex and critical reading of the discipline's past. In Colombia, partly due to his popular, nationalistic appeal, Francisco José de Caldas and his writings have become the object of rigorous intellectual inquiry along these lines. And yet these and other studies in the history of exploration, cartography, and geography place an overwhelming focus on the power-laden discourse of maps themselves, or specific expeditions that produced cartographic knowledge, or individual mapmakers.

This chapter offers a different methodological approach toward understanding the significance of Caldas, his work, and his writings. Rather than taking Caldas's original writings as the focus of analysis, this chapter parses out the specific circumstances behind early 1820s efforts to edit and reprint Caldas in ways that produced him as Colombia's founding father of geography. Caldas's execution by Morillo's armies allowed early republican print culture to manufacture, for the first time, the narrative of Caldas as the lone savant working without any institutional support from the Crown. The feat is remarkable. Early republican leaders sought to convince a society that had recently witnessed a massive buildup of cartographical, geographical, and natural history knowledge under the Bourbons that the Spanish monarchy created a regime of ignorance. Caldas, to be sure, was no lone pioneer. He was one of hundreds who, in the late Bourbon period, collected statistics, wrote natural histories, drew maps and chorographies, explored odd geological landscapes, and engaged in historical research. New Granada was a land teeming with people like Caldas. And yet Caldas has emerged as the lone, autodidact martyr who exemplified the barbarism and obscurantism of the Spanish monarchy. Examining the historical framing — and erasures — produced in print during the 1820s reveals an under-appreciated dimension to the critical role print culture played in early Spanish American republics. The lionization of Caldas as martyr of knowledge, forgotten and marginalized by Spain, emerged in the early republic's press to erase the wealth of knowledge produced and supported by the Crown. Caldas became the Galileo of the first Colombian Republic. Despite this repudiation of the Spanish Crown, Colombia's official newspaper's editors drew on the natural knowledge produced through the Crown's support to argue that Colombia's centralized political economy would best extricate wealth from natural resources and circulate diverse populations. The Colombian Republic thereby legitimated itself as the antidote to a colonial legacy of superstition and persecution while asserting its claims to centralized rule for wealth extraction and circulation.

The chapter demonstrates how early republican leaders edited and reprinted Caldas's words to set in stone priorities for the new republic. Those priorities still resonate with some Colombians, as can be seen in the photograph in figure 1. This massive slab of words greets visitors to Colombia's Instituto Geográfico Agustín Codazzi (IGAC). Originally penned by Caldas in 1808, these words have been quoted time and again to elicit a patriotic drive to acquire knowledge of "our" mountains, rivers, coastlines, and territories. At the time of his writing, Caldas lamented that geographic knowledge about his place of birth was in its infancy. He argued no expense should be spared to ensure the production of a stately, dignified, detailed map, a "magic painting" that would attract the brightest minds and foment industry, navigation, education, transportation, and production and extraction of natural resources. Caldas warned against the humiliation, lethargy, and poverty created by geographic ignorance. Caldas's words, along with several other excerpts from his Semanario del Nuevo Reino de Granada, the scientific journal Caldas edited from 1808 to 1810, have been decontextualized, edited, and reprinted time and again. In the 1820s, Caldas, the lone savant, became the patriotic genius who proposed the free circulation of commodities and technical knowledge that the early Colombian Republic needed. The life of Caldas as themartyred geographer conveyed...