Francisco Hernández expedition (1570–1577)
First scientific expedition to the New World.
The Francisco Hernández expedition (1570–1577) is recognized as the first scientific expedition to the New World. It was led by Francisco Hernández de Toledo, a naturalist and physician of the Court of King Philip II, who was highly regarded in Spain for his works on herbal medicine. Among its most important achievements were the discovery and introduction to Europe of plants such as pineapples, cocoa, and corn.
Quick Facts
- Leader
- Francisco Hernández de Toledo
- Sponsor
- King Philip II
- Departure from spain
- August 1571
- Arrival in new world
- February 1572 in Veracruz
- Duration
- 1570–1577
- Total cost
- about 60,000 ducats
- Key plants introduced
- pineapples
- cocoa
- corn
Facts from the source article.
Expedition
In 1570 Hernández was appointed Archiater physician for the New World and commissioned by the King to study the region's medicinal plants. He sailed in August 1571 with his son and landed in Veracruz in February 1572. For three years he traveled through Mexico and Central America with a geographer, painters, botanists, and native doctors, collecting and classifying botanical specimens. He also studied Nahua culture and medical practices, taking notes and preparing illustrations with the help of three indigenous painters baptized as Antón, Baltazar Elías, and Pedro Vázquez. The expedition encountered and described plants including pineapples, cocoa (called Cacahuatl by locals), corn, Guaiacum officinale, Smilax regelii, Strychnos nux-vomica (known as Mahuatl Quauhtlepatli), sweet granadilla, passionfruit, and hallucinogenic plants such as peyote, maguey, and Datura. From March 1574 until his return to Spain in 1577, Hernández lived in Mexico, conducting medical tests with gathered plants, assembling a large botanical collection, and studying local medicinal practices and archaeological sites. The resulting work comprised 24 books on plants, one on fauna, one on minerals, and ten volumes of paintings and illustrations. José de Acosta calculated the total cost at about 60,000 ducats. During the 1576 cocoliztli epidemic, Hernández performed autopsies at the Hospital Real de San José de los Naturales with surgeon Alonso López de Hinojosos and physician Juan de la Fuente, describing symptoms such as high fever, severe headache, vertigo, black tongue, dark urine, dysentery, severe abdominal and thoracic pain, large nodules behind the ears, acute neurologic disorders, and profuse bleeding from nose, eyes, and mouth, with death often in 3 to 4 days.
Publications
When Hernández came back to Spain in 1577, he brought along live plants and many seeds. He wrote a short introduction that got printed, but he passed away before his full work could be published. The materials stayed at the Royal Monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial, and almost a hundred years later a fire destroyed a large portion of his original manuscript. King Philip II gave Nardo Antonio Recchi, a physician from Naples, the job of putting together a publishable version of the texts. Recchi sorted the plant descriptions into eight groups based on shared physical features and set apart those plants thought to be helpful in treating what people in Spain called "The French Disease," which had sickened millions across Europe. Recchi died before his own work could come out, and it ended up being bought by Federico Angelo Cesi, an Italian scientist and the founder of the Accademia dei Lincei. The first actual publication happened in Mexico in 1615, titled Quatro libros de la Naturaleza, y virtudes de las plantas y animales que están reunidos en el uso de Medicina en la Nueva España, y el Método, y corrección, y preparación, que para administrallas se requiere con lo que el Doctor Francisco Hernández escribió en lengua latina. It was put out by the Dominican priest Francisco Ximénez, who had gotten hold of a copy of Recchi’s Latin manuscript. In 1628, Cesi released a heavily shortened version of Recchi’s Latin text in Rome, called Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae thesaurus, with contributions from Johann Schreck, Fabio Colonna, Johann Schmidt, and Cesi himself. After Cesi died, another edition came out in 1648, prepared by Johannes Schreck and Fabio Colonna, under the title Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium mexicanorum historia a Francisco Hernández in indis primum compilata, de inde a Nardo Antonio Reccho in volumen digesta.
More in Spanish Exploration in the Age of Discovery
Spotted an error? Know more?
Reader corrections go straight into our review queue. Suggest an edit · How this site is sourced