Review

Reviewed Work(s): Ensayo de historia americana. by Felipe Salvador Gilij and Antonio
Tovar; El Orinoco ilustrado y defendido. by P. Jose Gumilla
Review by: William M. Denevan
Source: The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 48, No. 2 (May, 1968), pp. 288-290
Published by: Duke University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2510774
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BOOK REVIEWS I COLONIAL AND INDEPENDENCE PERIODS 289
teenth and eighteenth centuries wrote accounts of the natives and
lands with which they were familiar. One is the well-known Orinoco
ilustrado by Jose Gumilla. 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), pub-
lished 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 pub-
lished in Bogota (Ensayo de historia americana, Biblioteca de His-
toria 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 Gumilla, a leader in
establishing the Orinoco missions. After several years of preparatory
study in Bogota, Gilij opened a new mission in 1748 at La En-
caramada near the south bank of the Orinoco below its junction with
the Rio 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 geog-
raphy 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 descrip-
tions 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 con-
siderable 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

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 290 HAHR I MAY
deprecating the Indian way of life or glorifying the noble savage
("Pero yo quiero ser juez imparcialisimo de los indios . . ." [II,
109]). Gilij was much concerned with the destruction of the Orinoco
tribes by introduced diseases, and he took elaborate quarantine pre-
cautions 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 trans-
lator, 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 repro-
duced 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 Jose
Gumilla. Gumilla '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, con-
taining often detailed editorial notes, a lengthy discussion by
Demetrio Ramos of previous editions, a bibliography of Gumilla 's
writings and writings on Gumilla, a new introduction by Jose
Nucete-Sardi, and the introduction to the 1945 Madrid edition by
Constantino Bayle. (For a review of the 1955 Bogota edition see
HAHR, XXXVI [1956], 423.)

University of Wisconsin WILLIAM M. DENFvAN

Vista hecha a la provincia de Chucuito por Garci Diez de San Miguel

en el anio 1567. Prepared by JOHN V. MURRA. Introductions by
WALDEMAR ESPINOZO SORIANO and FRAY PERO GUTIERREZ FLORES.
Lima, 1964. Ediciones de la Casa de la Cultura del Perui. Docu-
mentos Regionales para la Etnologia Etnohistoria Andinas. Map.
Notes. Bibliography. Pp. xii, 444. Paper.

Andean specialists who have attended meetings over the past

three years should already recognize the importance of this new sourc
on Central Andean ethnohistory. The "promoter" of this volume

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