Many Jesuit priests serving in the New World during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wrote accounts of the natives and lands with which they were familiar. One is the well-known Orinoco ilustrado by José Gumilia. Another study of equal merit on the Venezuelan Orinoco missions is the Saggio di Storia Americana by the Italian Jesuit Filippo Salvatore Gilii (Gilij in Spanish), published in Rome between 1780 and 1784. However, except for Volume 3 in German, Gilij was not translated or fully republished, and the original has remained a rarity. Finally in 1955, Volume 4, much of which concerns Colombia, was translated into Spanish and published in Bogotá (Ensayo de historia americana, Biblioteca de Historia Nacional, Vol. 88). Now a Spanish edition of the first three volumes has been published in Caracas.
Gilij (1721-1789) came to South America at the age of twenty in response to a call for missionaries by Padre Gumilia, a leader in establishing the Orinoco missions. After several years of preparatory study in Bogotá, Gilij opened a new mission in 1748 at La Encaramada near the south bank of the Orinoco below its junction with the Río Apure, and he remained here working with the Tamanaco Indians until the Jesuit expulsion in 1767. His mission was a humane one, as exemplified by his defiant refusal in 1756 to allow the royal boundary commission to use his Indians as boatmen. And it was a successful mission in that it grew in size during his residence while many other missions of the area were short lived.
Gilij wrote what is essentially a physical and cultural geography of the middle Orinoco region. While his primary interest was in the native peoples, and he had an admitted deficiency in the natural sciences, all of Volume 1 and part of Volume 2 provide good descriptions of geology, drainage, climate, soils, vegetation, and wild life. Most of Volume 2 contains cultural material on the Tamanaco Indians, a Carib tribe which had already been reduced to fewer than two hundred people by 1750 and became extinct in the early nineteenth century. Almost all our knowledge of Tamanaco ethnology comes from Gilij. In addition to descriptions of social life, there is considerable detail on economic activities and also some information on Jesuit efforts to introduce new crops and agricultural techniques. The third volume describes native religion, the missions, and the Orinoco languages plus comparative material on other New World languages.
Gilij was an objective and usually reliable observer who was critically familiar with the classic and contemporary studies of aboriginal America. Above all, he avoided the extremes of either deprecating the Indian way of life or glorifying the noble savage (“Pero yo quiero ser juez imparcialísimo de los indios . . .” [II, 109]). Gilij was much concerned with the destruction of the Orinoco tribes by introduced diseases, and he took elaborate quarantine precautions to limit the spread of epidemics in his mission. He was one of the first to maintain that America was depopulated not by the arms of the conquistadores but by disease, especially smallpox (II, 75).
This new edition of Gilij includes an introduction by the translator, Antonio Tovar, and indexes of geographical names and persons mentioned. There are detailed notes, lengthy appendices, and an index of cosas notables, all by Gilij. Two maps and eight plates are reproduced from the original Italian edition. Page numbers of the original edition are given to facilitate textual comparisons. Tovar and the Academia Nacional are to be congratulated for a fine and long-needed publication which has rescued Father Gilij from undeserved obscurity.
The Biblioteca de La Academia Nacional de la Historia has also recently republished El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido by José Gumilla. Gumilia’s account of the geography, ethnology, and the Jesuit missions of the Orinoco region was originally published in 1741 and subsequently has reappeared in nine different editions. In contrast to Gilij’s work, it is well known and has been the object of numerous studies. This is the best and most complete edition, containing often detailed editorial notes, a lengthy discussion by Demetrio Ramos of previous editions, a bibliography of Gumilia’s writings and writings on Gumilla, a new introduction by José Nucete-Sardi, and the introduction to the 1945 Madrid edition by Constantino Bayle. (For a review of the 1955 Bogotá edition see HAHR, XXXVI [1956], 423.)
