This is a prodigious work, a compendium that exhausts the short history of the island of Nueva Cádiz de Cubagua, and will almost surely exhaust the casual reader as well. Indeed, the book is not meant for the casual reader, but for the scholar interested—deeply—in the history of early sixteenth-century developments in the nascent New World Spanish Empire. The statistics of the work are almost overwhelming: 2,086 footnotes, 395 pages of text, and 210 pages of appendixes, bibliography, indexes, a table of contents, and a guide to illustrations. One is almost reduced to clichés when considering the outpouring of information on this tiny pearl fishery that briefly flourished off the coast of Venezuela in the age of discovery and conquest, and then rapidly settled back into abandoned obscurity in the early 1540s, the victim of resource depletion, hurricanes, and pirates.
The author’s purpose was to be exhaustive and he discharged that responsibility to the John Boulton Foundation, the sponsors of the work, with a massive display of thoroughness. The study ranges from a poetic, almost impressionistic, discourse on pearls in his introduction, to lengthy, detailed chapters on everything from the organization of the pearl trade to the island’s society in its short halcyon existence as a fountain of that lucre.
Otte roamed over the wildest possible extent of sources like a master pianist at his keyboard. He drew upon the classic chroniclers, such as the ubiquitous Bartolomé de las Casas, great collections of primary papers such as in the legendary Archive of the Indies, and from the best of modern historians of many nationalities who have investigated the dynamics of the Spanish Empire.
But this massive work does not pass into the category of magisterial, no matter the length, the energy, and clearly the commitment dedicated to its production. Otte did not intercede between his research and his writing and perform the critical step that transforms one’s raw material into real historical literature. Perhaps he was simply overwhelmed with his findings and thus related them all, breathlessly and laboriously. We would have had a truly moving and revealing story of these early sixteenth-century men, their dreams and acts, if Professor Otte had refined and tempered this wealth of material through his unquestionable talents. Still, it will satisfy the professional and occasional errant novice in search of information about the early pearl fisheries of Cubagua. It all seems to be there.
