Unpublished original manuscript by José Ignacio Pombo Popayán (Colombia), 1761 - Cartagena de Indias (Colombia)
Original unpublished manuscript of José Ignacio Pombo Popayán (Colombia), 1761 – Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), 16.
José Ignacio de Pombo was, according to Humboldt, the only important merchant in New Granada. Payanés by birth, he founded in Cartagena the most powerful trading house of his time and set up the first insurance company of the viceroyalty. He married María Josefa Amador, daughter of one of the richest Spanish merchants established in Cartagena. According to Alfonso Múnera, “he was the intellectual who best expressed, in a period of deep crisis, the interests of the great Spanish merchants established in Cartagena and of the Creole elite in general” and also the one who most clearly expressed the flagrant contradictions of Spanish and American enlightened thought.
One of Pombo’s prosperous businesses was the trade of Quina, a medicinal substance obtained from the bark of the “Cinchona officinalis” tree found in the Amazon jungle and the eastern Andes mountain range.
The multiple benefits provided by cinchona led Pombo to become interested in the study of this plant. The fruit of his work was reflected in this manuscript of which only two copies were known until now; one in the Library of the Bank of the Republic of Colombia (MSS115) dated 1806 and another copy in a factitious volume of the Yale University Library (MS 1775) that gathers diverse botanical texts of the Peruvian environment.
Pombo was in close contact with Celestino Mutis and with his favorite student Francisco José de Caldas, whom he unceremoniously sponsored in his botanical research in New Granada. We also know that he was in contact by letter with Humboldt.
At the end of the manuscript we find an index that details the rich content that we find throughout the pages; species of cinchona and how to distinguish them, virtues of each species, medicinal uses, trade of cinchona in each region, information on its cultivation, collections of cinchona, botanical description of the plant, conclusions and many other data of great botanical and historical interest. On the last leaf of the manuscript we find four drawings of the leaves of four different species of cinchona; Cinchona Lancifolia, Cinchona Oblonoifolia, Cinchona Coxdifolia and Cinchona Ovalifolia, along with a small description to help distinguish them.
On the front cover we find a manuscript from around 1920 signed by Guillermo Valencia, a Colombian writer, poet, journalist and historian who happens to be a distant relative of the author of the manuscript, José Ignacio Pombo. This note by Guillermo Valencia reproduces in its entirety the text that Francisco José Caldas dedicated in number 16 of the Semanario del Nuevo Reyno de Granada in 1809 to this manuscript by José Ignacio Pombo, highlighting its importance and wishing it to be published as soon as possible.
We understand that Guillermo Valencia acquired this work through his family and after studying and researching it, he added this note by Caldas to highlight and contextualize it.
In addition, on the title page of the manuscript, under the title of the work, we find a signature in the form of an exlibris that reads “Leleux”. Pedro Antonio Leleux was the aide-de-camp, secretary and confidant of Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar. In 1802 Leleux left France to go to London to learn English and look for a job. There he would establish friendship with Francisco de Miranda and Simón Bolívar thanks to his work in the London bookstore Dulan of which Miranda was a client. After Leleux’s journey accompanying Bolivar in his heroic deeds, it is known that Leleux spent some time in Cartagena de Indias (the place where José Ignacio Pombo died). From Cartagena de Indias Leleux would later return to France to establish a bookstore and printing press, so it could be assumed that this manuscript fell into Leleux’s hands at some point, perhaps with the intention of publishing it at some point, something that never happened.
The handwriting of this manuscript has been compared with a handwritten letter of José Ignacio Pombo and the handwriting is similar if not identical.
The front cover with the text by Guillermo Valencia is loose and the title page of the manuscript is almost loose. The water paper of the binding is slightly detached from the cover in some places, otherwise the manuscript is in good condition.
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