Ophir de España and Fernando de Montesinos’s scientific background, pursuits, and colonial defense

Ophir de España: Memorias historiales y políticas del Perú (1644) was written by a seventeenth-century metallurgist and scientist named Fernando de Montesinos. As a colonial author and chronicler, who is recognized for his protracted and peculiar version of pre-Columbian Andean history, he was deeply invested in mining and metallurgy in the New World for nearly fifteen years. He frequently abandoned his ecclesiastical responsibilities as an assigned priest and dedicated his time to mining, extracting silver from negrillos, and writing various literary works associated with these subjects and intellectual pursuits. Ophir de España is the culmination of Montesinos’s research. This three-book chronicle utilizes mining, metallurgy, natural history, and scientific thought to safeguard the Spanish Empire’s continual access to the mining industry and wealth of the New World while simultaneously representing Montesinos as an intelligent and accomplished scientist. Considering the totality of Ophir de España, reading the chronicle through a natural history lens, and incorporating an extended biography on Montesinos based on his unexplored personal life located in obscured colonial legal and archival documents, this study establishes that Montesinos was an early colonial scholar who was determined to make a name for himself, sought to protect the Spanish Crown from rising threats of corporatism, and yearned for a generous financial reward for his scientific endeavors. Instead of debating the authenticity and origins of Book II of Ophir de España, this study takes a more holistic approach to Montesinos and the entirety of the chronicle to show that Montesinos used Book II to support his primary objectives and was, in all reality, following recognizable academic trends of his time. He employed pre-Inca history to advance political, legal, and religious arguments that justified the presence of Spain and its representatives in the New World. Delving deeper into colonial Latin American archives and relying more on unpublished manuscripts and documents can shed light on lesser known or even unknown colonial authors, which in turn can help broaden the colonial canon and provide a richer understanding of colonial Latin America. Correspondingly, the continual exploration of colonial archives might provide additional insights on authorial motives and intentions and challenge dominant scholarly discourse and thought.