The Biblioteca de Historia Nacional, published by the Academia Colombiana de Historia, epitomizes the traditional stream of Colombian historiography. More than half of the 140 volumes published by the Academia concentrate on Independence and the early republic. The majority consist of rather standard political analyses and panegyrics. Even the more useful letters, memoirs, and autobiographies concentrate on favorite precursores or héroes. The latest, or one hundred and forty-first, publication of the Academia happily runs counter to this trend. Although burdened by a woefully inadequate introduction, Jesuit Antonio Julián’s La perla de la América, provincia de Santa Marta is a handsome facsimile of the original 1787 edition. This eighteenth-century social and economic analysis of the Santa Marta region is now available to a new generation of readers, since the 1951 Biblioteca Popular de Cultura Colombiana version has long been out of print.
Antonio Julián arrived at Cartagena in 1749 as one of the “Missionaries of Santa Marta,” a Jesuit group that aimed to convert and civilize the independent Guajiro tribes. Infighting with civil authorities and with the rival Capuchins doomed this effort. Nevertheless, Antonio Julián remained, and in extensive travels along the coast noted those plants, animals, agricultural products, Indian tribes, and commercial trends that form the main topics in this nostalgic account, written from Italian exile.
What impresses one most is the persistence of four themes as relevant to the eighteenth- as to the twentieth-century Santa Marta region, namely, drugs, contraband, lost Indian civilizations, and neglect. The Jesuit enthusiastically recommends the development of coca exports as a substitute for tea and coffee, credits the leaf as a curative for everything from tooth decay to hypochondria, and promotes the coca habit as a hunger killer for Europe’s working masses. He details the contraband trade and provides a fascinating glimpse of the smuggling colony of Darién. He prophesies, with justice, as recent excavations in the Tayrona National Park have demonstrated, that the center of Tayrona civilization had yet to be found. Finally, he complains that central planners neglect Santa Marta’s development. His well-written and lively account remains essential reading for historians dealing with Santa Marta, with Colombia, or with the eighteenth century in general.
