2018/04/03 by Roberto Chauca · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Colonialism, slavery, and trade #History of Colonial Brazil #Global Maritime and Colonial Histories
paper · doi:10.1080/10609164.2018.1481272
openalex publication_date 2018/04/03 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2025/11/06
Amazonia became an important laboratory of inquiry and evangelization for Franciscans and Jesuits in the early modern Spanish Empire. The missionary endeavours depended upon knowledge friars acquired and produced about the rivers, landscapes, and societies of their new home in the tropical lowlands of South America. Friars were particularly interested in finding and naming the axis of this new territory. ‘Amazonas,’ however, became an untameable fluvial entity that defied unitary conceptualization. Whereas the sixteenth-century concept of the river revolved around the dimensions of its estuary, seventeenth-century missionaries focused on length, volume, and headwaters to define Amazonia. The attempts to define the river produced a dispute between the two religious orders and indeed within each group, as Franciscans and Jesuits sought to make their ‘Amazonas’ normative. The present study explores this debate and asserts that hydrography became a language of authority and contention among early modern missionaries of Amazonia.