Marcos Jiménez de la Espada was a nineteenth-century Spanish naturalist who travelled to Latin America in the 1860s as part of the Comisión Científica del Pacífico, a scientific expedition organized by the Museo de las Ciencias Naturales de Madrid. The expedition, which accompanied a far more controversial Spanish naval expedition, made the circuit of Central and South America. Jiménez de la Espada was a polymathic naturalist in the tradition of Alexander von Humboldt. Upon his return to Spain in 1868, he began to work on a series of historical studies on precolumbian and colonial Latin America. He was particularly concerned with recovering and editing critical texts from the early Spanish chroniclers of the Indies. This volume, which emerges out of a conference on Jiménez de la Espada held in 1998, explores many facets of this complex figure.
The first section of the book includes a brief introduction to Jiménez de...
