The strange object labelled Lapis Bezoar ex Iguana rests today in the reassembled cabinet of medicinal curiosities that was kept for centuries in the back room (rebotica) of the Salvador family apothecary in Barcelona, Spain (Figure 1). What is this strange object doing here? And what can it tell us about the place of New World objects in the global history of collecting and medicine?

This particular object, and indeed all those called bezoars, was believed to possess medicinal powers (Figure 2). But by what criteria was this bezoar stone placed in the reserved cabinet or rebotica collection rather than on the open, commercial shelves of the apothecary? Where was the line drawn between the marvellous or curious object and the commercial commodity that could be readily sold as medicine in the dispensary? This line reflects both the presentation and disenchantment of nature that followed from the first globalisation, while the ex-iguana bezoar stone registers the ambiguities of authenticity in the Indies. In truth, there was no fixed line between the marvellous and the mundane, or indeed between the authentic and the fake; instead, there was a continuous movement, reflecting the changing state of knowledge, geopolitical realities and the private interests of those who curated the collection and ran the apothecary.

Bezoar stones are concretions with a hard nucleus found in the stomachs of certain animals. They were among the most sought-after objects susceptible to two-way transit between pharmacies and Wunderkammern or curiosity cabinets, in part because they linked two exotic points of origin ‘in the Indies’ that were united under Iberian empire and trade. Indeed, the connection between the two Indies in the European market in materia medica reveals key elements of the process of the first globalisation of knowledge about the natural world. In that global field, America or the ‘Occidental Indies’ became a realm of substitutes that could compete with drugs, spices and medicines from the ‘Oriental Indies’ or Asia. Initially, Spain’s main rivals in the global materia medica trade were the Portuguese and the Venetians, but these were soon joined by British, Flemish, French and Dutch interests. ‘Oriental’ bezoars had circulated around the Mediterranean world since the Middle Ages, and indeed between the Middle East and continental Europe. These had begun to arrive in greater numbers from the last decades of the 15th century, when the Portuguese opened up the sea route to India and the oriental Indies. ‘Occidental’ bezoars, which were ‘invented’ in the New World or occidental Indies by Iberians who drew upon local knowledge, began to arrive on the European market of exotic medicinal products in the 1560s, where they competed with the oriental bezoars already there.

By the 17th and 18th centuries, the unreliability of information concerning the origin and properties of bezoars from Iberia’s oriental and occidental Indies, combined with the need to obtain proof of authenticity in an expanding trade rife with falsifications, provoked scientific controversies. These in turn encouraged the gathering of additional information and the development of new experimental practices. A bezoar extracted from a reptile and not a ruminant, coming from Yucatán and not from the mountains of Persia, was potentially a polemical object riddled with ambiguities. These very same ambiguities could make it valuable as a collector’s item. The ambiguity of an iguana bezoar in a cabinet like that of the Salvador family is reflected in questions concerning its epistemological or even ontological status. Was it genuine or false, an original or an imitation, natural or artificial, real or imaginary? And what were the consequences of opting for one side of the dichotomy or the other?

The question of economic interest, the criteria of verisimilitude that operated in the linking of new medicines with new maladies and the success obtained by various American substitutes for oriental or Asian medicinal products were three factors that influenced the conferral of authenticity, originality and naturality on the American bezoars, including those derived from reptiles like the iguana. On the other hand, behind the presence of this object in the Salvador collection is the complex and tricky question of the appropriation and disenchantment of the natural world. It is this question that makes the cabinet of natural curiosities a paradoxical place. Indeed, the Iberian invention of the substitute American bezoars invites us to consider the expropriation of nature and native knowledge about nature.

The americana collection in the cabinet of the Salvador family reflects the history of scientific controversies and medicinal uses that surrounded the commercial circulation of artificialia and naturalia from the Indies. Most of its contents have survived, including thousands of items of naturalia, almost five thousand leaves of the herbarium and more than fourteen hundred books, as well as the furniture, drawers and shelves of the cabinet, all made in the middle decades of the 18th century. Also surviving is a rich collection of documents consisting of various manuscripts, notarial files and hundreds of letters from correspondents in France, Italy, Holland, England, Portugal and Spain. In addition, there are numerous testimonies left by visitors to the cabinet. This material makes it possible to arrive at a fairly clear picture of the circulation and handling of American curiosities in Barcelona over the course of the almost two centuries of the cabinet’s existence.

In theory, one would expect that, as a city of the Spanish crown, the main route of the exotic materia from the Indies would have been via the Atlantic ports of Cadiz and Seville, but this was not the case. Although some items certainly reached Barcelona via Andalusia, the evidence of the letters, labels and leaves of the herbarium demonstrates that most of the americana in the Salvador collection arrived via the global ports of London, Leiden, Amsterdam and particularly Lisbon. Many of the items came from Jamaica, Suriname and Brazil rather than from Mexico, Peru or Cuba. Our Barcelona apothecary and cabinet, it turns out, was connected to a global web of Indies trade that extended beyond the Hispanic realm.

The London connection began in 1706 when the oldest member of the third generation of the family, Joan Salvador i Riera (1683–1726), was obliged to interrupt his grand tour – which had taken him to Montpellier, Paris, Rome, Naples, Palermo and elsewhere – and return to Barcelona. The turbulent situation in Europe that followed the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14) had complicated trade. In the Iberian Peninsula, the lands of the crown of Aragon (Valencia, Aragon and Catalonia) sided with the Austrian Habsburg candidate, who was eventually established in Barcelona. The city became a seat of the court and was frequented by the fleets of Habsburg allies, namely the Dutch and English crowns. Given a situation that favoured communication with Holland and England rather than France, Joan Salvador decided to send a letter to London on Christmas Eve 1706. Addressed to James Petiver (1665–1718), an apothecary established in London since 1685, fellow of the Royal Society and possessor of an enormous natural history collection, Salvador wrote: ‘I ask you, Sir, to be so kind as to send me a share of the plants and other curiosities that you receive from the Indies, such as shells, butterflies and others, the knowledge of which I am extremely enthusiastic about.’ In return, Salvador offered fossils, samples of salt from the Cardona mines, shells, marine plants and whatever local natural product might interest the London collector. The intense correspondence continued for 12 years until Petiver’s death in 1718. The letters exchanged between James Petiver and Joan Salvador reveal how some of the American flora, fauna and minerals were already ‘packaged’ before they circulated among several European collectors. They were offered in lots, identified and included in a series that might therefore recur in an identical form in different cabinets. Afterwards, the Salvador family continued to maintain contact with England via Hans Sloane, owner of a vast collection and founder of the British Museum, who acquired the Petiver collection and no doubt his contacts as well. Petiver had managed to establish a global network of agents, intermediaries and correspondents as diverse as Jesuits and pirates, naval officers and filibusters.

The Dutch connection of the family in Barcelona went back further still but was also strengthened by the War of Spanish Succession. The two main correspondents and suppliers were Hermann Boerhaave in Leiden and George Clifford III in Amsterdam. The correspondence reveals the arrival in the Barcelona cabinet of armadillos, iguanas, serpents, bezoars and an infinity of americana, as well as books published by Boerhaave and dedicated to the Salvador family. In the Dutch case, evidence suggests that americana also travelled in the opposite direction, from Barcelona to Amsterdam. These americana included plants, fruits and seeds that did not come directly from the New World but had been cultivated for many years in Spain; sweet potatoes and potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, agaves and Opuntia cacti were abundant crops in Valencia, Murcia and Andalusia.

Finally, the Lisbon connection was a pipeline of americana for the Salvador collection and pharmacy, indispensable for fauna, flora and minerals from the New World. In the last decades of the 17th century and the first half of the 18th, Lisbon was a cosmopolitan city with a key position in global commercial traffic and information about extra-European or Indies natural products. The network set up in Lisbon by the Salvador family included a group of merchants, some of whom were relatives and others would-be relatives. They were all Catalonian in origin, if not from the Maresme itself, the coast just north of Barcelona where the Salvador family originated. The dozens of surviving letters from that correspondence are written in Catalan and are full of family or local news that go beyond a strictly commercial relation. There are continuous references to the arrival of Portuguese vessels from Brazil (Rio, Pernambuco and Bahia), Guinea and India. Such references punctuate the letters that Martí, Sala and other correspondents sent to the Salvador family. These letters accompanied products destined for both the dispensary and the cabinet, including our Lapis Bezoar ex Iguana (Figure 2). The small glass jar containing our specimen was kept in a splendid cupboard containing some five hundred similar jars (Figure 3). It took its place beside objects with labels such as Pedra Bezoardica, Lapides Bezoar Porci, Lapis Bezoar Orientalis, Lapides Isti Reperti in Pene Suis, Lapis Bezoar ex Equus Marinus, Bezoar de Serpiente, Lapis Bezoar ex Capra, and so on.

The cupboard of the cabinet in question was made by Josep Salvador i Riera (1690–1761), only a few years after Hans Sloane’s notable discussion of bezoars appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of 1749. Sloane had described the ‘Rhinoceros bezoar’ from Mombasa and another stone found ‘in the Head of the most venomous Snake of the East Indies called Cobra de Cabelo’. In a letter to the Royal Society, Sloane relied upon the authority of the Esperienze intorno a diverse cose naturali of Francesco Redi (1686), in which the Tuscan physician expounded his experiments with bezoars of various kinds, including that of the American iguana, as well as other remarkable products of both Indies. Both these works were held in the Salvador library.

In short, that some bezoars found themselves adjacent to others on a reserved shelf in a Barcelona apothecary reflected both the scientific controversies regarding New World nature and the position of its products in an increasingly globalised world shaped by the inseparable duo of the two Indies, first united by Iberian trade and collecting networks.

FURTHER READING

Delbourgo, J. (2018) Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (London: Penguin Books).

Egmond, F. (Forthcoming) ‘Plants and medicine’, in A Cultural History of Plants in the Early Modern Period (1400–1650), edited by A. Dalby (London: Bloomsbury, Cultural Histories Series).

Ibáñez, N., J.M. Camarasa, and E. Garcia (eds.) (2019) El Gabinet Salvador: un tresor científic recuperat (Barcelona: Museu de Ciències Naturals-Institut Botànic).

MacGregor, A. (ed.) (2018) Naturalists in the Field: Collecting, Recording and Preserving the Natural World from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Leiden: Brill).

Margócsy, D. (2014) Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).

Morcelli Oliveros, J. (2019) Americana en la rebotica: comercio, redes epistolares y comunicación científica en el Gabinete Salvador (Barcelona, 1669–1726), PhD dissertation (Bellaterra, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona).

Pardo-Tomás, J. (2014) Salvadoriana: el gabinet de curiositats de Barcelona; The Cabinet of Curiosities of Barcelona (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona).

Stephenson, M. (2010) ‘From marvelous antidote to the poison of idolatry: the transatlantic role of Andean bezoar stones during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 90 (1): 3–39.

Stols, E., W. Thomas, and J. Verbeckmoes (eds.) (2006) Naturalia, mirabilia & monstrosa en los Imperios Ibéricos (siglos XV–XIX) (Leuven: Leuven University Press).

Walker, A., A. MacGregor, and M. Hunter (eds.) (2012) From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and His Collections (London: British Library).

Yaya, I.M. (2008) ‘Wonders of America: the curiosity cabinet as a site of representation and knowledge’, Journal of the History of Collections, 20 (2): 173–88.