He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West, and reported the following:
Page 99 includes the following complete paragraphs (as well as partial paragraphs before and after):Learn more about The Indies of the Setting Sun at the University of Chicago Press website.Like the other imperial historians, Oviedo manages the story of the crossing so as to control the implications of this discovery. He does not fictionalize the encounter with the Unfortunate Isles, the way von Sevenborgen does, but he nevertheless imitates the secretary in remaining silent about the suffering of the men, saying nothing about hunger, thirst, sickness, or death along the way, yet making sure to mention the strong, favorable winds that bore the ships across the ocean, with no storms to trouble them along the way. He says nothing about distances or longitudes, leaving the reader with the impression that the South Sea is broad, but providing none of the information that he or she would need to map it. One is left with the same impression one gets from reading von Sevenborgen, that the first European crossing of the Pacific Ocean presented no real difficulty, that it was smooth sailing all the way. Like the other narratives by authors closely connected to the court of Charles V, Oviedo’s account of the crossing is a tale of the successful conquest of the Ocean Sea.This passage does a fairly good job of giving the reader a sense of what the book is like. The Indies of the Setting Sun is about Spanish attempts to imagine the Pacific Ocean as a relatively narrow expanse that integrated rather than separated America and Asia, as part of larger effort to claim East and Southeast Asia as a western extension of the Spanish empire in the New World. This passage from page 99 summarizes of a key section of chapter three, which compares the way that different accounts of the Magellan expedition told the story of the first crossing of the Pacific Ocean by Europeans. The reader might be familiar with Antonio Pigafetta, a member of the Magellan expedition who wrote the most complete and extensive eye-witness account of the voyage. In this passage, he or she learns that there were other historians of the expedition as well, among them von Sevenborgen and Oviedo, and that unlike Pigafetta, they were “imperial historians,” that is, writers who exhibited a strong bias in favor of the Spanish empire and its interests. The reader learns that the imperial historians came up with a template for telling the story of the Pacific crossing that supported Spanish efforts to present the Pacific as a large but manageable oceanic expanse across which Spain could effectively project power and that Oviedo not only repeated this template, but did what he could to control the damage to Spain’s interest presented by Pigafetta’s frank and shocking version of the story.
The next two chapters provide a second account of the same events explicitly drawn from Pigafetta. This often happens in the Historia general, creating the impression that we are dealing with a diligent historian who does not want to get in the way of his eyewitness sources, and eagerly provides different versions of events so that the reader can make up his or her own mind about whom or what to believe. In keeping with this practice, Oviedo dutifully notes that the Venetian was an eyewitness to the events he describes and should therefore be believed. Nevertheless, he then goes on to undermine Pigafetta’s authority. The chapter becomes an act of discursive violence, a direct assault on the single source that posed the most difficulty for the imperial account of the Pacific crossing and its imperial cartography of the South Sea.
From this passage, the reader learns that the Indies of the Setting Sun is not about exploration and discovery, but about the ways that voyages of exploration were narrated, packaged, and presented to the reading public in the service of various agendas. He or she learns about the influence of ideology in the making of early modern texts that claim to be truthful, even scientific, and perhaps suspects that this is a book about the role of power in the making of geographical and historical knowledge. Not bad for a couple of paragraphs from page 99.
--Marshal Zeringue
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