A chronicler of the Spanish colonization of the Western Hemisphere, Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdes wrote a monumental history entitled Historia General y Natural de las Indias Occidentales that provided Europeans with crucial information about the Americas during the first half of the 16th century.
A child of an Asturian family, Oviedo met CHRISTOPHER CoLUMBUS at the royal court in Madrid when he was 14 years old, and he met him again later at Granada. He was present in Barcelona when Columbus brought back captured Natives from the Western Hemisphere, and then he spent time with Columbus’s sons when they, like him, became pages to Infante Don Juan, heir to the Spanish Crown. After Don Juan’s death in October 1497, Oviedo traveled to Italy, where he remained from 1499 to 1502, traveling and working in Genoa, Milan, and Rome before traveling back to Spain. In 1514 he made his first trip to the Western Hemisphere as inspector of the GOLD mines of the mainland in the service of Pedrarias Davila, and the Americas became, from that moment onward, the central focus of his scholarship and life. Oviedo held various posts in the Spanish imperial bureaucracy, including inspector general of trade and governor of Cartagena (appointed in 1526). Oviedo’s scholarship so pleased King CHARLES V that he became chronicler of the Indies in 1532, a title befitting his expertise in the complex history of Spain’s overseas ventures. In 1535 he became governor of Santo Domingo, a post he held until 1545.
Oviedo’s Historia General y Natural de las Indias included details on myriad aspects of the lives of the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their natural world. He provided the prices of goods and services, noting at one point that a prostitute cost eight to 10 CACAO beans (used for money), and he told in great detail about the abundant resources to be found in the West Indies. Convinced that this natural wealth could be transformed into great profits, in the late 1530s he became partners with GIOVANNI Battista Ramusio, secretary of the Council of Ten (one of the ruling bodies of Venice) and Antonio Priuli, procurator of the Basilica of San Marco in Venice, to establish a company that would transport goods, via Messina and
Cadiz, from HISPANIOLA to Venice. No evidence survives about the successes or failures of the venture.
Twice widowed, Oviedo spent his last years working on his scholarship, although his great Historia remained mostly unpublished at the time of his death on June 26, 1557. Scholars disagree on where he died, with some claiming he breathed his last in Valladolid and others asserting that he passed away in Santo Domingo. Wherever he perished, his work survived, both in Spain and elsewhere, forming a major part of Ramusio’s Navigationi e Viaggi, published in Venice in the 1550s, a work that had an enormous influence on the English promoter of colonization Richard Hakluyt the Younger. Such chains of information, made possible by the spread of the PRINTING PRESS and the subsequent dissemination of books across Europe, assured Oviedo’s prominence among the 16th-century chroniclers of the Western Hemisphere’s peoples, resources, and history.
Further reading: Antonello Gerbi, Nature in the New World: From Christopher Columbus to Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, trans. Jeremy Moyle (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1985).
World History
