José de Acosta
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José de Acosta, SJ (1539 or 1540<ref>D.A. Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State, 1492-1867. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1991, p. 184 give 1540 as his date of birth.</ref> in Medina del Campo, Spain – February 15, 1600 in Salamanca, Spain) was a sixteenth-century Spanish Jesuit missionary and naturalist in Latin America. His deductions regarding the ill effects of crossing over the Andes in 1570 related to the atmosphere being too thin for human needs led to the modern understanding of a variety of altitude sickness, now referred to as Acosta's disease.
Life
José de Acosta was born in Medina del Campo in Spain, about twenty-four miles from Valladolid, in Old Castile, on the left bank of the swampy river Zapardiel, and overlooked by the old castle of La Mota. The Acosta brothers were fellow townsmen of the conquistador Bernal Diaz, who told the story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.<ref>Joseph de Acosta, Edward Grimston, Clements Robert Markham, The Natural and Moral Historie of the Indies, Hakluyt Society, 1880 pp. i–ii</ref> Acosta was of converso background.<ref>Brading, The First America, pp. 184, 186.</ref> According to one scholar, he was "a heavy man of uncertain, melancholic temper."<ref>Brading, The First America, p. 184.</ref> His parents had five sons, Gerónimo, Christóval, José, Diego, and Bernardo. Four of the five Acosta brothers joined the Society of Jesus. In 1553, at the age of thirteen, Acosta became a novice in the order at Medina del Campo. He was a was lecturer in theology at Ocana, and in April 1569, he was sent to Lima, Peru, where the Jesuits had been established in the proceeding year.
Panama
At age 32, Acosta left Spain with several other Jesuits in 1570, landing at Cartagena de Indias, and finally at Nombre de Dios. He then journeyed through 18 leagues - about Template:Cvt - of tropical forest, taking in the scenery, novel sights, and the clever antics of troops of monkeys in Capira. From Panama, he embarked for Peru to pursue missionary work. He expected to experience unbearably intense heat in crossing the equator, but found it to be so cool in March, that he laughed at Aristotle and his philosophy.<ref>ibid., de Acosta, p.ii</ref>
Peru and Acosta's disease
On his arrival at Lima, he was ordered to cross the Andes, apparently to join the Viceroy of Peru in the interior. He took the route, with fourteen or fifteen companions, across the mountainous province of Huarochiri, and by the lofty pass of Pariacaca (over Template:Cvt), where the whole party suffered severely from the effects of the rarefied atmosphere. Acosta describes these sufferings, which were to be repeated on the three other occasions of crossing the cordillera. Acosta was one of the earliest people to give a detailed description of altitude sickness, and to link it to "air... so thin and so delicate that it is not proportioned to human breathing",<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> and a variety of altitude sickness is referred to as Acosta's disease.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> He also mentions an attack of snow blindness and the way in which an Indian woman cured him.
Acosta had arrived in Peru two years after Don Francisco de Toledo had become Viceroy in 1568. Following Toledo's beheading of the Inca Túpac Amaru, the Viceroy devoted five years to a tour through every part of the Viceroyalty of Peru, and to settlement of the country, in which he was aided by Acosta, the licentiate Polo de Ondegardo, and the Judge Juan Ortiz de Matienzo. Acosta also accompanied the Viceroy to Charcas, and was with him during his unsuccessful foay against the Chirihuana peoples.<ref>op. cit., de Acosta, p.iv</ref>
The principal seat of the Jesuits was at that time in the little town of Juli, near the western shores of Lake Titicaca. Acosta observed the comet of 1577, from November 1 to December 8. The Jesuits created a college in Juli, where the languages of the natives were studied, and, eventually, a printing press was established. Acosta stayed at Juli and spent devoted much of his time preparing several manuscripts, which he later took back to Spain, including the first two books of the Natural History of the Indies. At Juli, Father Acosta received information respecting the Amazon River from a brother who had formerly been in the famous piratical cruise of Lope de Aguirre.<ref>op. cit., de Acosta, p.iv-v</ref>
Towards the close of the viceroyalty of Toledo, Father Acosta appears to have moved from the interior of Peru to Lima. Here he mentions superintending the casting of a great bell, for which there was difficulty in getting fuel for the furnace, making it necessary to fell great trees in the Rímac River's valley. Viceroy Toledo was practically the founder of the University of St. Mark at Lima, where Acosta was to occupy the chair of theology. Here he was again able to display his abilities as a famed orator.
In 1571, José went to Cuzco as a visitor of the recently founded college of the Jesuits. He returned to Lima three years later to again fill the chair of theology, and was elected provincial in 1576.
In 1579, the Viceroy dispatched a fleet under Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa, partly to chase Sir Francis Drake on the coast, and partly to explore and survey the Strait of Magellan. Acosta had conversations with the pilot of Sarmiento's fleet, and was allowed to inspect his chart, thus obtaining much hydrographic information, and particulars respecting the tides in the straits. He also conversed with the new Viceroy Don Martín Henríquez on the same subject.<ref>op. cit., de Acosta, p.vi</ref>
Acosta founded a number of colleges, among them those of Arequipa, Potosí, Chuquisaca, Panama and La Paz, even when met with considerable opposition from the Viceroy Toledo. His official duties obliged him to investigate personally a very extensive range of territory, so that he acquired a practical knowledge of the vast province, and of its aboriginal inhabitants. At the 1582 session of the Third Council of Lima, Father Acosta played a very important part and was its historian. He delivered an eloquent and learned oration at its last sitting on October 18, 1583.
Mexico
Shortly after the Third Council of Lima, he packed all his manuscripts, the literary labors of fifteen years, and commenced his voyage to Mexico. During the passage, he was a shrewd observer of nature and knowledge seeker. He learned from an expert Portuguese pilot that there were four often-visited portsTemplate:Citation needed of no magnetic compass variation on the Earth, and that one of them was Corvo Island in the Azores. Acosta landed at the port of Huatulco, at the western end of the Gulf of Tehuantepec, in the Oaxaca province, then journeyed by land to Mexico City, where he resided in 1586. He had opportunities of which he diligently availed himself for collecting information touching the civilization and religion of the Aztecs and natural products of this country. His chief informant respecting the rites and festivals of the Mexicans was brother and Prebendary, Juan de Tobar.<ref>op. cit., de Acosta, p.viii-ix</ref> For information on the Mexica, Acosta followed Juan de Tovar's Relación del origen de los indios que habitan esta Nueva España según sus historias, a possible summary of Fray Diego Durán's Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e islas de Tierra Firme - in turn derived in part from an anonymous Nahuatl history of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, known as the Crónica X.<ref>Huerta, Blas Roman Castellon. "Acosta, Joseph De." In Davíd Carrasco (ed.). The Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures. : Oxford University Press, 2001.</ref>
Return to Spain
Acosta had been called to Spain by the King in 1585, prior to being detained in Mexico, in order to debate against Alonzo Sánchez's plans to initiate an invasion of China. He sailed home to Spain in the fleet of 1587, which contained a precious cargo, including twelve chests of gold each weighing Template:Cvt, 11,000,000 pieces of silver, and two chests of emeralds each also weighing Template:Cvt, in addition to loads of ginger, sarsaparilla, Brazil wood and animal hides.<ref>op. cit., de Acosta, p.ix</ref> In Spain he filled the chair of theology at the Roman college in 1594, head of the Jesuits College at Valladolid, as well as other important positions. At the time of his death in his 60th year, he was rector of the college at Salamanca.
Works
Aside from his publication of the proceedings of the provincial councils of 1567 and 1583, and several works of exclusively theological import, Acosta is best known as the writer of the Template:Lang,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> as well as Template:Lang (1588),<ref name=FE>Template:Cite web</ref> Doctrina Cristiana y Catecismo Para Indios (1585) <ref name=FE /> and Template:Lang.
Soon after the publication of the Historia natural y moral, it was translated into various languages. It is chiefly the Template:Lang that has established the reputation of Acosta, as this was one of the first detailed and realistic descriptions of the New World. In a form more concise than that employed by his predecessors, Francisco Lopez de Gómara and Oviedo, he treated the natural and philosophic history of the New World from a broader point of view.<ref>Template:Cite journal</ref> In it, more than a century before other Europeans learned of the Bering Strait, Acosta hypothesized that Latin America's indigenous peoples had migrated from Asia.<ref>Template:Citation</ref> He also divided them into three barbarian categories. The Historia also described Inca and Aztec customs and history, as well as other information such as winds and tides, lakes, rivers, plants, animals, and mineral resources in the New World.
See also
References
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- Adovasio, J. M. and David Pedler. "The Peopling of North America." North American Archaeology. Blackwell Publishing, 2005. p. 32.
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- Jose de Acosta, S.J. (1540-1600) Pioneer of the Geophysical Sciences Template:Webarchive @Fairfield University
Bibliography
- Acosta, José de (2002). The Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Edited by Jane Mangan; translated by Frances Lopez-Morillas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Template:ISBN
- BEROSE - International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology. "Acosta, José de (1540-1600)", Paris, 2019. (ISSN 2648-2770)
- Burgaleta, Claudio M. (1999). José de Acosta (1540–1600): His Life and Thought. Chicago: Loyola University Press. Template:ISBN.
- Template:Cite journal
- Template:Cite encyclopedia
- Template:Cite encyclopedia
- MacCormack, Sabine (1991). Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Template:ISBN.
- Pagden, Anthony (1982). The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology. New York: Cambridge University Press. Template:ISBN.
- Pagden, Anthony (1993). European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Template:ISBN.
- Pino Díaz, Fermín del (2019). “Contribución del Padre José de Acosta a la constitución de la etnología: su evolucionismo”, in BEROSE - International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
- Pino Díaz, Fermín del (2019). “Vida y obra de José de Acosta, misionero jesuita y cronista indiano”, in BEROSE - International Encyclopaedia of the Histories of Anthropology, Paris.
Further reading
- Ando, Clifford; McGinness, Anne; and MacCormack, Sabine G. (2015). “Natural Philosophy, History, and Theology in the Writings of José de Acosta, S.J. (1540–1600).” In Journal of Jesuit Studies 2(1): 1–35. doi.org/10.1163/22141332-00201001.