Material Traces of Faraway Places: Specimens from Colonial New Spain in Madrid’s National Museum of Natural Sciences

On April 27, 1790, the first natural history museum in New Spain—Spanish territory from California to Guatemala—opened its doors. Its founder, José Longinos Martínez, had arrived in the Americas in 1787 as the taxidermist for the Royal Botanical Expedition, one small part of an immense national scientific undertaking by the Spanish government. While Longinos dedicated his museum to the new king, Charles IV, he established this institution in defiance of the Crown, which had demanded that all natural objects of interest be sent to Madrid. The former King Charles III had sent off scientific expeditions to gather the wonders of nature from his vast empire while simultaneously ordering colonial subjects in the Americas to send anything similar that they found to the court in Europe. Longinos took care to send back some specimens to the Royal Cabinet of Natural History so as not to arouse too much suspicion. Over the centuries, these specimens have become nearly invisible among the countless other animals, plants, and minerals that made the journey across the Atlantic. Drawing on collections-based, museological research in the Royal Cabinet’s modern incarnation, the National Museum of Natural Sciences, this paper will uncover the traces of objects that Longinos sent to Madrid which still survive today. When compared to similar remnants of Longinos’s collection in Mexico City, these difficult-to-find traces in Madrid elucidate what was unique to the rise of 18th-century public natural history collections in Madrid versus New Spain, although both sourced from the same natural materials.