orchids and orchidology in central america. 500 ... - lankesteriana.org

ossenbaCh — Orchids and orchidology in Central America
in Central America shows a void that lasted almost 125
years, in what Carlos Fuentes called “the long night
of El Escorial”. In Steele’s words, “the seventeenth
century was sterile” (Steele, 1964: 11). \It should not
surprise us either that the only exceptions during this
period came from Central Europe. In 1588, the German
Jacob Theodor, better known as Tabernaemontanus
(1522-1590), publishes the Neuw vollkommentlich
Kreuterbuch (“New Complete Herbal”).
In this work, without indication of origin, a plant
named Indianisch Mispel or Viscum Indicum is
illustrated, that according to Nieder & Barthlott is a
species of Stelis, although, in the opinion of Béhar
and Pupulin (pers. comm., 2007) its ‘lepanthiform’
sheaths could indicate that it is rather a species of the
genera Trichosalpinx or Lepanthopsis (Fig. 11A). All
three genera have a wide range of distribution and can
be found from Mexico and Central America through
the Caribbean and South America. It is therefore
clearly speculative to include this curious reference
of Tabernaemontanus in the history of the orchids
of Central America. The woodcut was probably
prepared from a herbarium specimen that could have
been collected in almost any region of the Americas.
Tabernaemontanus incurred in an understandable error,
including an epiphyte orchid in a genus (Viscum) that is
a parasite. The famous German philosopher Immanuel
Kant made the same mistake two hundred years later
when, writing about the cultivation of vanilla, he said
that you “… only have to tie it unto a tree, from which
it takes its juice” (Nieder & Barthlott, 1992: 243).
As the second exception, we already mentioned the
botanical description of vanilla by l’Ecluse in 1605.
It was ironically the same Charles de l’Ecluse who
published, in 1576, a flora of Spain (Rariorum aliquot
stirpium per Hispanias observatorum historia), just
as Spain debated about the necessity of expanding the
index of prohibited books of 1559 (the new index was
finally published in 1584) (Jacquet, 1994: 78).
The “English American” — the journey through
Mexico and Central America of Thomas Gage
(1625-1637). Thomas Gage (1597?-1656) was one
of the most peculiar characters that ever visited our
region. Of Irish origin and born into a traditional
Catholic family, Gage studied in France and Spain
in convents of the Jesuits by decision of his parents,
who wanted him to become — together with his four
brothers- missionaries for the conversion of England
(one of the main objectives of the Spanish Jesuits).
While studying in Valladolid, Gage decided to leave
the Jesuits and joined the Dominicans, and it was as
part of a Dominican group on route to the Philippines
that he arrived in Veracruz in 1625, one the first non-
Spaniard to do so since the Spanish conquest of the
territory (despite of the presence of foreigners in the
Spanish colonies being strictly prohibited by a Royal
decree). From Mexico he went on to Guatemala and
entered the order’s mission in the city. Gage lived
for twelve years in New Spain, for the most part in
Guatemala and among the indigenous population.
He came to know the customs, the language, and the
feelings of the Indians as very few before or after him.
He returned to England in 1637, traveling through
Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Cuba, and then
in 1642 publicly abandoned the Catholic Church for
a Puritanical form of Anglicanism. Gage later called
himself “the only Protestant that was ever known to
have traveled to those parts” (in the introduction to his
book ). He embarked in 1654 as chaplain of Cromwell’s
expedition to the Antilles and died finally in Jamaica
in 1656. Gage published in 1648 the account of this
travels through America in A New Survey of the West
Indies being A Journal of Three thousand and Three
hundred Miles within the main land of America. His
narrative was very popular in his time and one of the
reasons were the fantastic accounts of Gage (a mixture
of imagination and truth, full of exact details but also
of exaggerations, of descriptions of gold mines and
fabulous treasures). Gage’s work was widely read and
discussed and translated to several other languages.
In his work, Gage mentions in several occasions the
use given to vanilla in relation to the preparation of
chocolate (see above “The history of Vanilla”).
The renaissance of science. Slowly, in the last
decades of the XVI century, Spanish intellectuals
began to rebel against the disciplinary power of the
Church. The challenging ‘philosophic letter’ of Juan
de Cabriada, a militant manifest, openly in favor
of laboratory experiments, raised in 1687 waves of
enthusiasm and also scared rejections. With the change
of the century, methods of direct observation gained
more and more importance. Fernando VI paid special
LANKESTERIANA 9(1—2), August 2009. © Universidad de Costa Rica, 2009.
31