Botanical Empire

European collectors in the sixteenth century eagerly tried to get their hands on images and texts depicting Latin American nature, and, whenever possible, live and preserved specimens for their cabinets and gardens.

– Daniela Bleichmar, Visual Voyages


There was a certain science to describing. The desire to possess flowers and feathers and beetles and bones seeded and spread. Salt water could not slake this thirst. Because their thirst could not be slaked no matter how many times they crossed the ocean sea, men made museums and built archives. They cultivated gardens full of American plants. They strove to conquer nature—to unlock and own all of its secrets.

a Peruvian
passionflower uprooted
given to the pope

~

Pirates plundered spices and plants as often as silver and gold. Why would they bury their treasures unless it was to harvest them? Better to trade bullion to Asia for nutmeg and silk, for tea and porcelain. They seized cargos of sugar and cochineal when they could, but sometimes had to settle for wine and fowl. Drake took artists with him aboard the Pelican to map coastlines. Dampier catalogued nature on his seafaring adventure.

a macaw’s feathers
were arrayed in shifting hues
some loose, some fluffy


~

Empires sent cosmographers and clerics. Clerics learned local languages and scientists hired Indigenous artists and scribes. Indigenous artists drew pictures and scribes wrote works of natural history. The Nahuatl they used to describe the many uses of flora and fauna got translated into Spanish, but much was lost between columns—between editions and further translations. Those who were aware prized the wisdom of the Aztecs, but many European patrons had no idea what knowledge hid in their vast collections of texts, engravings, and watercolors.

the book made proxies:
images for living plants:
a handheld museum