Cortes's Letters on the Conquest of Mexico + His Subsequent Voyages to Baja California
With Domingo del Castillo's 1541 Map of Baja and the West Coast of Mexico and Alzate y Ramirez's Nueva España
The three famous letters by Cortes (2nd, 3rd, and 4th) to Emperor Charles V chronicling the conquest of Mexico plus material on Cortes's voyage to Baja California as well as a report of all the expeditions to California up to 1769, the year of the Portola-Serra expedition which founded San Diego and Monterey. The volume contains important maps of Mexico and Baja California and the Pacific Coast of Mexico, as well as a suite of fine copper plates based on a famous Mexican codex and a folding engraved view of the Great Temple. These plates and maps were executed by the best engravers in New Spain at the time, including José Mariano Navarro and Manuel de Villavicencio and the book as a whole has been praised as one of the most beautiful specimens of the 18th-century Mexican press.
The maps, engraved by José Mariano Navarro:
- Plano de la Nueva España en que se señalan los Viages que hizo el Capitan Hernan Cortes assi antes como despues de conquistado el Imperio Mexicano... dispuesto por J. A. de Alzate y Ramirez año de 1769.
- [California & West Coast of Mexico] Este mapa esta sacado de el Original que para en el Estado de el Marques de el Valle. En lo alto pone una Ciudad que entonzes o por Relaciones se creio cierta i la llamaron Quivira. En la desembocadura del Rio Colorado en el Golfo de Californias...
- Domingo del Castillo's manuscript map of 1541, as reproduced by Lorenzana in 1770, was the first map to establish definitively that California was in fact a peninsula and not an island. Originally drawn during the Alarcon Voyage to California in 1541. Castillo's map has been called "the oldest and most interesting cartographical document on California which we have." As noted by J. G. Kohl in his Descriptive Catalogue of those Maps, Charts and Surveys Relating To America Which Are Mentioned in Vol. III of Hakluyt's Great Work (Washington, 1857).
Henry Wagner has written about the toponym of California, which appears on the Castillo map herein:
To illustrate this account the map of Castillo was inserted, which Lorenzana states was copied from the original in the archives of the Marquesado, that is, of the Cortés family. Since that time the original has never appeared, so we are still at a loss to know whether Castillo or Lorenzana put the name 'California' on the map - Wagner.
The book is often listed under the compiler, Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana y Buitrón, a brilliant figure in Viceregal Mexico, who served as Archbishop from 1766 to 1772.
Before returning to the Iberian peninsula, [Lorenzana] amassed an important collection of manuscripts relative to New Spain, housed today in Toledo's Biblioteca Pública. Among his many contributions to New Spain's history is this edition of the letter-reports of Cortés, which also contains records of tribute paid by various Mexican settlements to Moctezuma, and an account of the voyage of Cortés to California in 1535.... Typographically, the Historia de Nueva-España is one of the finest products of the press of Joseph Antonio de Hogal (1766-1787), and it is particularly notable for its excellent copper engravings - Johnson.
A foundational book for the history of Mexico, this book is also an essential book for any serious collection of Californiana.
José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez (1737 – 1799 ) was a Mexican priest, scientist, historian, cartographer and journalist.
Alzate y Ramirez was born in Ozumba and studied in the Colegio de San Ildefonso in Mexico City, graduating as a bachelor in theology in 1756.
Alzate y Ramirez was also a corresponding member of the French and Spanish academies of science, and one of the earliest trustworthy observers of Mexican meteorology. He attained a high reputation as a zoologist and botanist, and his researches led the way for modern exploration of Mexican antiquities.
He published the Gaceta de Literatura, and an essay titled La limite des niéges perpetuelles en Volcan Popocatepetl. He conducted several scientific experiments, and wrote numerous articles that were published in science journals. Inaugurated in 1768, his Diario literario de Méjico was suspended after only three months. He later created, in 1788, the Gaceta de Literatura, that was published until 1795.
In his lifetime, he wrote over thirty treatises on various subjects. Among other works, he wrote Observaciones meteorológicas (1769), Observación del paso de Venus por el disco del Sol (1770), Modelo y descripción de los hornos de Almadén, notes, additions and maps for the Historia Antigua de México, written by Francisco Javier Clavijero, and a Mapa de la América del Norte.
He also prepared a landmark map of New Spain and, in 1772, he published work that showed that the well-known psychedelic effects of pipiltzintzintli were due to natural causes and not the work of the devil.
In his honor, the Sociedad Científica Antonio Alzate was created in 1884. In 1935, this society became the National Academy of Sciences.