Missionaries and Darwin: J.H. Gybbon Spilsbury’s Manuscript "Religious Beliefs of Some Native T
After taking a few minutes to fill out a Newberry Library card at the institution itself, LUCVS members have full access to some of the rarest books and manuscripts in the world, right here in Chicago! Many do projects on their archival findings, and write papers which provide excellent details and ideas for future research that otherwise would not be accessible to scholars. The following excerpt from such a paper written by a LUCVS member, demonstrates what incredible and unexpected historical and literary treasures lurk in the repositories of research libraries:
I. Introduction
The Newberry Library of Chicago contains some manuscript materials of Rev. Joseph Henry Gybbon Spilsbury, a British nineteenth-century clergyman and linguist. These materials include notes for a Quechua dictionary and grammar book, and a manuscript entitled Religious Beliefs of Some Native Tribes in South America. Dated to 1890, Religious Beliefs provides a brief yet sweeping account of different pre-Columbian beliefs, practices, and myths several South American groups, including the Incas, Muiscas, and Caras, among others. It does not appear that Religious Beliefs was ever published. Nevertheless, the document provides an argument that seems to combine two purposes: evangelization and the anthropological study of South American peoples before the Spanish conquest. Spilsbury creates a catalogue of various beliefs, emphasizing that he is trying to do something different from the previous travelers and missionaries who have “moulded and twisted” the beliefs of the people before the arrival of Europeans “until they have emerged under some definite shape, tinged by preconceived religious beliefs and modes of thought” (Spilsbury 1). Yet Spilsbury’s account is not without several important limitations. First, it is limited to Spanish sources to discuss such beliefs. Second, the information he includes in his account describes beliefs and myths that are congruous with a Christian framework, such as the assumption of monotheism and Spilsbury’s reliance on Biblical themes and narratives.
In this paper I have examined how this document fits into both Victorian scientific discourse and Christian evangelism, as well as how both of those discourses fits into the larger project of British imperialism. Although I recognize that Spilsbury’s document is complicit in imperialism, and at times even perpetuates the very tactics of previous European missionaries he seeks to criticize, I argue that its representation of people in South America breaks from Spilsbury’s intellectual contemporaries in significant ways. While other scholars and naturalists were interested in the evolutionary links between groups of people, they were often fascinated with how different—and therefore backward—indigenous people of South America supposedly were. By thinking about pre-Columbian indigenous beliefs in a familiar monotheistic tradition, Spilsbury creates an account that is more interested in the commonalities than differences amongst people.
II. Joseph Henry Gybbon Spilsbury
Little is known about Spilsbury’s personal life other apart from his academic and career pursuits. As mentioned above, he published a Quechua dictionary and grammar, El Quichua, Gramática Y Crestomatía: Sequido De La Traducción De Un Manuscrito Inédito DelDrama Titulado Ollantay published in 1897 (See Endnote 1) which provides translations and exercises in Spanish, English, and French. He even included a play in his grammar book, Ollantay, again translated into three other languages (See Endnote 2).The introduction to the grammar (also, in three languages), includes a short history of the Incan empire, which leads to a detailed description of Quechua grammar. He refers to fray Domingo de Santo Tomás, the Dominican friar who wrote the first Quechua grammar and dictionary in 1560 (Bauer 13). From his notes and the introduction to the dictionary, he appears fluent or at least familiar in seven languages-English, Spanish, French, Quechua, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. The title page of El Quichua, Grammatica Y Crestomatía states he held an M.A. and a PhD., although it does not state what institutions he received his degrees from. The title page also announces that he was a professor of languages at the Colegio Nacional and the Escuela Normal del Uraguay. The Newberry Library connects Spilsbury to another document, “Le vieux savant [manuscript] : (poésie dédiée à Mr. le docteur Spilsbury, professeur du Collège National de Concepcion del Uruguay), 1895 Jan. 31”. The library summary of the document states that the work was dedicated to a “Dr. Spilsbury of the Colegio del Uruguay in Concepción del Uruguay, Argentina,” probably the same J.H. Gybbon Spilsbury. According to this summary, Spilsbury “studied the native peoples of South America while working as an English missionary in Argentina, produced a Quechua translation of the Bible, and authored Quechua-Spanish and Quechua-English dictionaries and grammars” (Newberry). The summary does not provide details of his missionary work or his translation but among his notes were a few translations of the book of Joshua from the Old Testament….
If Spilsbury lived in Buenos Aires, he does appear to have stayed there, signing Religious Beliefs “(Rev) J.H. Spilsbury, Ph.D., F.R.G.S./S. John’s Parsonage/Stanstead, Essex” (18) placing his return to Great Britain sometime during or before 1890. F.R.G.S. stands for “Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society”(“F.R.G.S.”). There is a record of Spilsbury attending the Eighth Ordinary Meeting of the Royal Geographical Society on Feb. 28th, 1898 but few other records seem to exist of his involvement in the society. Still, his membership indicates scientific, perhaps anthropological, interests as well as linguistic ones. He cites Darwin on the first page of his manuscript, a matter I will discuss later in fuller detail, but overall his scholarly pursuits seem to reach into the sciences as well as linguistics.
Spilsbury begins the manuscript with a brief introduction before diving into his first section. In his first lines, he contends that there was a prevalence of monotheistic beliefs among several different peoples of the continent. He also invokes Darwin in this introduction, quickly situating himself in British naturalist interests in South America. As mentioned above, he also moves to distance himself from previous travelers and missionaries. I shall examine this introduction in closer detail later but it is important to note the framework he creates in his first two paragraphs: a classification of beliefs informed by Darwinian writings and an argument that monotheism was prevalent in the Americas even before the arrival of Christianity.
After the short introduction, he begins with the Incan conception of Pachacamac, “whom … was to them a far-off Being, unable to be understood, too majestic, too just, to be influenced by the desires or aspirations of men; so that their real worship was offered to representatives of the Supreme One, or attributes of his goodness” (Spilsbury 1). Spilsbury emphasizes that the Incas worship Pachacamac’s attributes rather than Pachacamac himself. He also lists the beliefs of the Muiscas and the Caras, among others, whom he argues shared this belief in a Supreme God who was too distant to be worshipped directly. He argues that the “attributes of…goodness” of this Supreme One included the sun, the moon, plants, and other elements of nature, that these elements are not in and of themselves deities to be worshipped. In doing so, he creates a similarity between Pachacamac and a Christian god by emphasizing the monotheistic wholeness of Pachacamac, a diety that encompasses nature itself.
Not only does he provide summaries of different beliefs, he provides a translation of what he calls a “Quichua prayer to Pachacamac, which is said by the earliest Spanish writers on the Conquest of Peru to be of great antiquity” (Spilsbury 2). He does not state who these Spanish writers were nor their sources for the prayer. Still, Spilsbury provides the Quechua prayer, followed by his translation: (Translation)- “ 'To Pachacamac' Thou, our Father, art the Great Being Who hast clothed all the stars with gold and appointed their azure ways- Thou art He who hast formed our Sun to be the divider of time, and to be the joy of all things by regulating our lives- Day by day, Thou causest herin to go forth to illuminate everything with his glory, bringing life to the trees and ripening of their fruits" (3). Spilsbury does not provide a theory of translation; he does not state whether he opted for a literal translation of the prayer or opted for fidelity to rhyme, meter, or other poetic elements. Still, the connection of the Supreme Being to nature and the harvest shines forth. The use of the word “Father” echoes of the Godhead of the Christian trinity and the prayer “Our Father,” and his pronoun use echoes the King James Bible…
When looking at Religious Beliefs of Some Native Tribes in South America on its own, it is necessary to recognize Spilsbury’s project as another exercise in imparting imperial Victorian values at the expense of indigenous peoples. Spilsbury is a British missionary who, using information solely drawn from other European sources, seemed to be searching for Christian touchstones within various native religions that he lumps together in one eighteen-page document. In significant ways, he is continuing the imperial problems of the very Spanish predecessors he sought to critique. His membership in the Royal Geographic Society places him in the same circles as Everard F. im Thurn and other British naturalists who treated South America as a pre-historic space, peopled with tribes who were useful in generating biological and anthropologic principles but were denied commonality with their observers. Spilsbury’s intent to distance himself from previous colonizers and missionaries was the same move his contemporaries made, even as they participated in imperialism via science. Yet ignoring the way Spilsbury’s writings could be put into conversation with other naturalist and missionary documents within imperial discourse would be to dismiss texts that offer a different voice that at times challenges the projects it is implicit in. Yes, Spilsbury blindly views pre-Columbian religions with an undeniably Christian framework but in doing so, he offers a chance to create commonality with South American peoples, to recognize shared humanity, that Darwin, im Thurn, and others recoiled from. By placing monotheism, not animism, as an evolved, universal trait of humanity, he possibly bridges the gap that is so glaring in his contemporaries’ work. While one voice does not erase the history of British presence in South America, a history that would lead to conflict well into the 20th century, his work breaks in significant ways from the usual narrative of British imperialism. By paying more attention to Spilsbury’s work, scholars could create a fuller, more complex, depiction of the intersections of evangelization, linguistics, biology, and anthropology in nineteenth century scholarship.
End Notes
1. The title of Spilsbury’s dictionary uses the spelling “Quichua” and he uses this spelling throughout his writing. However, Quichua is actually dialect of Quechua spoken in Ecuador and Argentina (Adelaar & Grimes). Spilsbury does not seem to make a formal distinction between the regional differences between Quechua and Quichua but he does note the several dialects in the Incan empire, including what he calls the Quito dialect “which is used in the actual republic of Ecuador and is the most corrupted” (El Quichua, Gramática Y Crestomatía 3). For the use of this paper, I will use the spelling Quechua unless using a direct quote.
2. The treatment of this drama is worthy of a paper or book all on its own. However, for the purposes of this paper, my focus is on Religious Beliefs, so for now I will reserve any treatment of the play for another project.
Works Cited
Bauer, Ralph. "Introduction." An Inca Account of the Conquest of Peru By Titu Cusi
Yupanqui. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2005. Print.
"FRGS." Vance, Burt. A Dictionary of Abbreviations. Oxford University Press, 2011. Web. 10 October 2014.
Newberry Library. "Summary of Le vieux savant [manuscript]: (poésie dédiée à Dr. le docteur Spilsbury, professeur de Collège National de Concepcion del Uraguay." Web. 12 October 2013.
Spilsbury, Joseph Henry Gybbon. Religious Beliefs of some Native Tribes in South America. 1890. MS Newberry Library, Chicago.
