Pedro Vicente Maldonado

Pedro Vicente Maldonados statue.

Pedro Vicente Maldonado Sotomayor (born December 24, 1704 in Riobamba ; † November 7, 1748 in London ) was a polymath , best known as a cartographer of the area of ​​today's Ecuador . He was also well educated in mathematics, physics, astronomy, administration, and general geography.

Origin and school education

Maldonado was the third son and one of nine children of one of the richest and most respected families in Riobamba in the Andean region of today's Ecuador . His father, General Pedro Anastasio Maldonado Sotomayor, came from Arequipa and was promoted to Knight of the Order of Alcantara there. His mother, María Isidora Palomino Flores, was the daughter of a general and respected local dignitary. She died when Maldonado was 12 years old. The family owned large estates, herds of cattle and weaving mills. Maldonado first attended Jesuit schools in Riobamba. In the natural sciences, his older brother, the priest José Antonio Maldonado, who had also studied mathematics and natural sciences at the royal and papal Universidad de San Gregorio Magno in Quito , supported his studies. From 1718 Maldonado attended a Jesuit high school in Quito and later, like his brother, the Universidad San Gregorio, located in the same Jesuit convent . In 1720 he passed the bachillerato and then graduated in 1721 at the age of 16 with a degree in natural sciences as a maestro of the exact sciences with top grades in logic, physics and metaphysics.

Landowner, self-taught, first research trips

He deepened the knowledge from his studies, some of which still corresponded to Aristotle 's level of knowledge , by dealing autodidactically with modern and contemporary mathematical and philosophical writings. He read Gérard Desargues , Pierre de Fermat , Isaac Newton , Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz , Blaise Pascal and René Descartes in Latin and French, respectively.

In 1725, on behalf of the Jesuits, Maldonado explored and measured parts of the Canelos region along the Pastaza and Bobonaza rivers in the Amazon basin in order to plan routes between the order's mission stations. After returning from there, he went on independent research excursions and trips. In particular, he explored the páramos and volcanoes of his home region.

Maldonado's father died in 1724 and the parental property was shared. In 1725 he returned to Riobamba and took over the management of his parents' haciendas Juibe , Agoyán and Ulva . Maldonado also learned Quichua to communicate with the indigenous communities on the family's haciendas.

In 1728 Maldonado acquired the tribute collection of an encomienda near Riobamba, which he held until 1737; from 1729 he had his first residence in Quito. From 1733 he managed the Encomienda Angamarca for the Countess of Osuna who worked at court for five years . He is handed down as a competent and correct administrator who was also accepted by the indigenous communities whose taxes he collected. In 1734 he became one of the mayors of his hometown and thus also had administrative and judicial tasks.

On February 5, 1730 he married Josefa Pérez Guerrero y Ontañón, daughter of the governor of Popayán . Pérez Guerero died in 1740. Maldonado and they had four daughters, only one of whom, Juana, survived childhood.

Maldonado and the French Geodesic Mission

Maldonados statue in Paris.

Maldonado's zeal for research was confirmed again when in 1736 the Franco-Spanish Geodesic Mission , which under Charles Marie de La Condamine included some of the most important geographers and natural scientists of his time, came to Quito to determine the exact position of the equator and thus the shape of the earth .

Maldonado made friends with La Condamine, among others. He participated in several mission research trips and repeatedly received mission members at his family home in Riobamba. When the members returned to Europe in 1743/44, they invited Maldonado to present his research there.

Project of the transport route to Esmeraldas

La Condamine had already become aware of Maldonado before the first meeting, as Maldonado had been pursuing the project of a transport route from Quito to the northern part of the Pacific coast of the Real Audiencia de Quito , whose most important port at that time was Atacames .

The aim of this "first civil engineering project of the colony" was to build a new route for the goods from Quito and the Andean region (especially textiles) to the coast. The most important connection to the port city of Guayaquil was hardly passable during the winter rainy season and the road to Lima - Callao in the south or Cartagena de Indias in the north was very long and arduous.

As early as 1621, the post of governor of the northern coastal province of Esmeraldas was officially announced as a reward for the construction of such a path. In 1734, Maldonado applied for permission to carry out the project, and in 1735 received permission from the Viceroy of Peru , José de Armendáriz , and the approval of the post of governor should it be successful. His brother José Antonio Maldonado had taken on the formalities of the application in Lima, while Maldonado carried out studies on site.

After more than a year of planning, Maldonado began building the path, which was completed in mid-1740 using its own capital and in part with the planner's personal physical work. The inspector José de Astorga , sent by the viceroy, certified Maldonado in his report of April 1740 that he had actually exceeded the task. The route ran from the village of Nono, northwest of Quito, around the folds of the Pichincha , over Guarumos, the El Castillo, Niguas and Tambo de la Virgen hills to the confluence of the Caoní river in the Río Blanco near Puerto Quito , where the waterway leads to the Río Blanco, which became the Río Esmeraldas , continued. This made it possible to get from Quito via Atacames to Panamá within 14 days , whereby the economy of the Andean region was potentially significantly more integrated with the rest of the Spanish colonial empire.

Maldonado had already become governor of the Esmeraldas province in 1738 . In order to fathom the economic benefits of his potentially rich but economically neglected province, he undertook extensive mineralogical, botanical and geographical investigations, which were also driven by his scientific interest. He founded numerous villages that were to serve as starting points for settlement, reclamation and economic use.

He also undertook the planning of another, more northerly transport route from Ibarra along the Río Santiago to La Tola , which he founded on the Bay of Pailón. However, he received little support from the representatives of the Spanish monarchy and the church in Quito, as resources for the civilizing project of Maldonado were scarce there.

Trip to europe

Maldonado traveled to Europe at the end of 1743, not only because of the invitation of the mission members, but above all to receive the commitment and resources of the Spanish king for his extended project. He previously married his second wife, the widowed María Ventura Martínez de Arredondo. He had given his brothers a general power of attorney for governor duties.

Maldonado embarked for Lisbon and got from there to Madrid, where in 1744 he had his report on the transport route and civilization project printed and submitted to the India Council .

The Council of India expressly praised his project and granted him resources for various projects, including the Ibarra – La Tola transport route. He confirmed Maldonado in the office of governor with increased pay (4,600 pesos annually) and granted the same to his family for two generations. King Philip V awarded him an important medal and appointed him "Gentilhombre de cámara", equal to a member of the Royal Guard of Honor .

Maldonado then traveled to Paris, where he met again with Condamine. On March 24, 1747 he was appointed Corresponding Member for Latin America of the Académie des Sciences . In addition to Condamine, with whom he refined and finalized his map of the province of Quito, Joseph de Jussieu and Pierre Bouguer , also participants in the Geodesic Mission, were among his closest contacts in Paris . He then traveled through Flanders and the Netherlands to London. There he was proposed as a corresponding member of the Royal Geographical Society on October 27, but died - probably of angina pectoris - before the appointment could be decided and announced. He was buried in Saint James's Church .

heritage

cartography

Maldonado's most important work was the map of the area of ​​the Provincia de Quito , the colonial predecessor of today's Republic of Ecuador , which was partly developed with Condamine and which was only published after his death.

Maldonado had already pursued the idea of ​​such a map since he surveyed the Amazon lowlands in 1725. During his research and undertakings in the northeast of the Real Audiencia, Maldonado had almost completed his map of the region when he met the members of the Geodesic Mission. La Condamine in particular taught him additional technical knowledge of cartography and made him familiar with special instruments. Maldonado and La Condamine both pursued projects of such a map and exchanged information constantly, including on a trip that both undertook in 1743 on the Amazon to the Atlantic .

When Maldonado came to Paris, he hired the workshop of the royal geographer d'Anville to engrave the printing plates and print the map, which was not yet completed when Maldonado died. La Condamine then published the map as a "map of the province of Quito and its neighboring regions" posthumously in 1750 in Paris. Probably in the following year a new edition of the map was printed at the expense of the Spanish king. The four printing plates in which the card is engraved passed from La Condamine to the Spanish ambassador in Paris. In 1947 they were donated to the Ecuadorian state and are now in the city archives of Maldonado's hometown Riobamba.

Alexander von Humboldt wrote about the map that, with the exception of the maps of Egypt and some West Indies, it was the most accurate map of non-European territories that existed in his time. Maldonado's work was all the more valued because it was done by a native of the mapped area, in which no corresponding tradition existed. The previous maps of the Quito area were all drawn up by European scholars, including the German Jesuit Samuel Fritz (map from 1691, printed in 1707).

Maldonado also left extensive records of natural history, botany, mineralogy and geography, especially of the Esmeraldas region. Some of his notes were sent to Madrid by the Spanish ambassador in France, and most of them are believed to have been lost. Between 1943 and 1950, eight volumes of documents on Maldonado were published from Spanish archives under the direction of José Rumazo González.

Transport route and modernization in Esmeraldas

The transport route and the civilizing project of Maldonado in Esmeraldas fell into disrepair quickly after the governor's death and left hardly any lasting traces. His daughter Juana and her husband Manuel Díez de la Peña could not complete the project, his grandson Nicolás de la Peña Maldonado failed in the 1770s with the petition to reassign him to his grandfather's post as governor with halved income. After Maldonado's death, the viceroy of New Granada, Sebastián de Eslava , had submitted a petition to the king denying the use of the route to Atacames and even accusing him of supporting smuggling. The original appraiser José de Astorga was convicted of false appraisals and the Maldonado by the India Council awarded orders and resources in 1755 under King Ferdinand VI. withdrawn and classified as "permanent concealment" ( silencio perpetuo ). The Esmeraldas region was only re-developed and made accessible as planned in the 20th century. It is still one of the less infrastructural regions of Ecuador.

The route of the transport route coincides today in parts with the Oleducto de Crudos Pesados oil pipeline and was used as part of the preliminary studies for its construction, for example. T. rediscovered in its course. On the other hand, some preserved pieces, which today resemble hiking trails, were endangered during the construction work.

Posthumous honors

The Colegio Maldonado in Riobamba

In 1867, under President Jerónimo Carrión, the Colegio Nacional Maldonado was established in Riobamba, which is still the most famous school in Maldonado's hometown.

In addition, in 1886 the Ecuadorian government managed to have a small reprint of Maldonado's map produced in Spain using the original printing plates.

The place "Pedro Vicente Maldonado", capital of a canton in the province of Pichincha since 1992 , bears Maldonado's name.

The Ecuadorian research station established in the 1980s and 1990s in Antarctica (on the southern Shetland island of Greenwich Island ) is called Pedro Vicento Maldonados. It is operated by the Oceanographic Institute of the Ecuadorian Navy.

Since June 28, 2005, a bronze bust of Maldonado has stood on the “Place de l'Équateur” between the 8th and 17th arrondissements near Parc Monceau in Paris .

literature

Works

• Carta de la Provincia de Quito y de sus adjacentes. En que la Costa desde la Boca de Esmeraldas hasta Tumaco con la Derrota de Quito al Marañón , por una senda de à pie de Baños à Canelos , y el curso de los Rios Bobonaça y Pastaça van delineados sobre las proprias demarcaciones del difunto author. Obra Posthuma de Don Pedro Maldonado Gentilhombre de la Camara de S. Mag. Y Governador de la Prov. de Esmeraldas. Hecha Sobre las observaciones Astronomicas y Geograficas de los Academicos Reales de las Ciencias de Paris y de las Guardias Mar [inas?]. de Cádiz y también de los RR.PP. Missioneros de Maynas . Sacadas à la luz por order, y à expensas de su Magestad; Gravé par Guill. Delahaye ; N. Gerard fecit , Paris, sn (1750). Bibliographic entry from the Library of Congress , Washington, DC, with a detailed scan of the card in MrSID format
• Representacion que hace a su Magestad el Governador de la Provincia de las Esmeraldas D. Pedro Vicente Maldonado, sobre la apertura del nuevo camino, que ha descubierto a su costa, y expensas y sin gasto alguno de la Real Hacienda para facilitar el Ponarcis [? ] Entre la Provincia de Quito, y Reyno de Tierra-Firme , Madrid, c. 1745. Maldonado's report on the transport route for the Spanish king; includes José de Astorga's report ( Descripcion del nuevo Camino que à su costa, y expensas ha abierto el Suplicante, etc. ).

Biographies

• Carlos Ortiz Arellano: Biografía de Pedro Vicente Maldonado (1704 - 1748) , Comisión Nacional Permanente de Conmemoraciones Cívicas / Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, Quito 2002. Available online at http://www.conmemoracionescivicas.gov.ec/ccc/cc6. pdf .
• the same: Pedro Vicente Maldonado: Forjador de la patria ecuatoriana (1704 - 1748) , Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana Benjamín Carrión, 2004, ISBN 9978-62-362-0 .
• Alfredo Costales Samaniego and Piedad Peñaherrera de Costales: Los Maldonado en la Real Audiencia de Quito , Quito: Banco Central del Ecuador, 1987.
• Neptalí Zúñiga: Pedro Vicente Maldonado. Un científico de América , Madrid: Publicaciones Españolas, 1951 (with a preface by Gregorio Marañón ).

Web links

Remarks

1. ↑ Rodolfo Pérez Pimentel, Pedro Vicente Maldonado y Sotomayor , in: Diccionario Biográfico del Ecuador , Guayaquil 1987-, vol. 3, p. 283ff.
2. ↑ Ernesto Salazar: "El camino de Esmeraldas: Historia de una vía colonial", Revista Terra Incógnita , No. 17, V-2002. The article is available online at http://www.edufuturo.com/educacion.php?c=1177 .
3. ↑ Information from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador on the engagement in the Antarctic ( Memento of the original from November 7, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (Spanish) 
4. ↑ Press release of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of June 30, 2005 on the inauguration of the bust (Spanish) ( Memento of the original of May 18, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 

Short biographies and bibliographies

• Rodolfo Pérez Pimentel, Pedro Vicente Maldonado y Sotomayor , in: Diccionario Biográfico del Ecuador , Guayaquil 1987-, vol. 3, p. 283ff.
• Short biography of Humberto Oña Villareal at edufuturo.com (Spanish)
• Short biography and bibliography on the homepage of the national cultural institute Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana (Spanish)
• Short biography on the homepage of the Ecuadorian Armed Forces (Spanish)