Ricardo Padrón has performed a heroic and innovative work of research by returning to well-known works and reading the boring bits. The kernel of his work is a comparative study of the descriptions of the New World by Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Francisco López de Gómara, and Bartolomé de Las Casas: what Mariano Cuesta Domingo called “cartografías en prosa.” Modern readers skip them, Padrón says (p. 143), and, Cuesta apart, he is surely right.
We think of the sixteenth century as revolutionary in Western cartography. Scale mapping began. Marine charts developed a sense of distance as well as direction. Exploration multiplied data and encouraged accuracy. Just as painters deployed perspective, so mapmakers represented spatial reality more fully and realistically than their predecessors. They saw the world from a cosmic height, synoptically and whole, instead of at ground level. The Spanish monarchy was a forge and powerhouse of what...
