thumb|250px|Portrait of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, located at the Colombian Academy of History.
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (August 1478 – 1557), commonly known as Oviedo, was a Spanish soldier, historian, writer, botanist and colonist. Oviedo participated in the Spanish colonization of the West Indies, arriving in the first few years after Christopher Columbus became the first European to arrive at the islands in 1492. Oviedo's chronicle Historia general de las Indias, published in 1535 to expand on his 1526 summary La Natural hystoria de las Indias (collectively reprinted, three centuries after his death, as Historia general y natural de las Indias), forms one of the few primary sources about it. Portions of the original text were widely read in the 16th century in Spanish, English, Italian and French editions, and introduced Europeans to the hammock, the pineapple, and tobacco as well as creating influential representations of the colonized peoples of the region.
Early life
Oviedo was born in Madrid of an Asturian lineage and educated in the court of Ferdinand and Isabella. He was a page to their son, the Infante John, Prince of Asturias, from about the age of fourteen until the Prince's death in 1497, and then Oviedo went to Italy for three years before returning to Spain as a bureaucrat to the emerging Castilian imperial project. Oviedo married first Margarite de Vergara, who died in childbirth, and then Isabel de Aguilar. Isabel and their multiple children later died within several years of joining Oviedo in America.
Oviedo later wrote two extensive works of permanent value, which for the most part were not published until three centuries after his death: La historia general y natural de las Indias and Las Quinquagenas de la nobleza de España. The Quinquagenas is a collection of quaint, moralizing anecdotes in which Oviedo indulges in much lively gossip concerning eminent contemporaries. It was first published in Madrid in 1880, edited by Vicente de la Fuente. The manuscript was kept in the Monserrate monastery for many years and then the Royal Academy of History. Surviving portions were used by José Amador de los Ríos in preparing an 1851 edition titled Natural y General Hystoria de las Indias.]]
The Historia, though written in a diffuse style, furnishes a mass of information collected at first hand. Las Casas, the fellow contemporary chronicler of the Spanish colonization of the Caribbean, denounced Oviedo as "one of the greatest tyrants, thieves, and destroyers of the Indies, whose Historia contains almost as many lies as pages". The incomplete Seville edition was widely read in the English and French versions published by Eden and Poleur, respectively, in 1555 and 1556.
Extinct animals
In zoology, the General History of the Indies is of particular interest for its descriptions of Hispaniolan animals, including some that became extinct between Oviedo's time and the development of the modern science from Linnaeus and Cuvier. The only land mammals of the island according to Oviedo, besides rats and mice (which Oviedo believed native, but were introduced accidentally by Europeans), were:
- The hutia: a grizzled-gray (pardo gris), four-legged animal resembling a rabbit, but smaller, with smaller ears and a rat-like tail. Hunted with dogs by natives and Spaniards alike, it was "no longer found except very rarely". Gerrit Smith Miller Jr. identified this animal as either the living Hispaniolan hutia or one of the extinct Isolobodon hutias.
- The "mute dog" (perro mudo, literally "mute dog", translated as "dumb dog" by Miller): a Native American dog that could not bark, had erect ears, and all kinds of hair length and colorations found in domestic dogs. It was raised by the natives in their houses and used to hunt hutias, though European dogs were more effective. It was extinct on Hispaniola at the time of Oviedo's writing, but he saw similar dogs in native settlements of other islands and the American mainland (in what is now Nicaragua).
Notes
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