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Overview

During the 1850's the new found Colombian government wanted to create a commission that's sole purpose was to survey the landscape within the boundaries of the new nation. "Scientists, writers, and artists were invited to make part of the project led by the Italian military,geographer and cartographer" - The commission was led by Agustín Codazzi, an Italian-born soldier and engineer. Agustín Codazzi was in charge of developing a complete description of the country, of mapping the physical geography and the chorographic aspect of each province. The Colombian Chorographic Commission was a state enterprise, originally developed and financed by the government of Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera and finally undergone during the government of José Hilario López An 1839 law allowed the government of Colombia to hire engineers and geographers to chart the territory, but it took eleven years for this idea to be put into action due to political instability. A later law stated that a comprehensive description of the country, including its products and resources, should also be completed. Unfortunately, due to civil war, the Commission was cut short.the expedition operated during a ten-year period between 1850 and 1860 during which it was subject to the influences of external political events such as civil wars, regime changes, and a protracted battle between Liberals and Conservatives.

The Commission

The Commission’s writers interpreted the natural and human history of the Andean cordilleras in a distinctly nationalistic manner, drawing on a legacy of past revolutionary struggles and an overcoming of imperialism in order to paint a picture of a country with a promising future. The expedition adopted a similar attitude toward its archaeological findings of the Muisca tribe, the most important being the Gámeza boulder. By emphasizing the achievements of ancient tribes, the Commission and its sponsors created a link between their own fragile young republic and the great civilizations of its pre-Hispanic past. In 1850, the Chorographic Commission -initially composed of just Agustín Codazzi, Manuel Ancízar, and support workers- embarker on its first expedition. During that year and the following year, the commission traveled through several provinces north of Bogotá in the Eastern Cordillera. In his field notebooks, and especially in his published memoir of the commission's first two years, Pilgrimage of Alpha, Manuel Ancízar painted verbal portraits of the locations they visited, for example, the town of Santa Rosa de Viterbo, the capital of the Province of Tundama. he portrayed its inhabitants as exemplifying a pattern that repeated itself across the Northeast. For the commission's nation-state-building project, the uncivilized inhabitants and unhealthy climate of the Pacific Provinces- which included Chocó as well as neighboring provinces of Buenaventura and Barbacoas- called for a different approach than that of the Andean provinces. Whereas the highlands merited democratic institutions, the Pacific lowlands required coercion. Pérez's comments about the men who carried him into Chocó were representative of how he and Codazzi viewed most of the inhabitants of the Pacific coastal provinces: as barbarians. In the Pacific lowlands, the process of nation-state formation advanced by the commission was a colonizing project. In December 1855 members of the Chorographic Commission stood on the eastern slopes of the Colombian Andes and looked out at the view stretching eastward As they descended into the foothills and plains, the group's numbers diminished. Karsten and Triana left to collect plants around Bogotá. Before the commission even reached the plains, moreover, people were getting sick. By the end of January, almost all of the laborers were seriously ill. They traveled first to Villavicencio, at the foot of the cordillera in the jurisdiction of San Martín, then furtjer south to the Village of San Martín itself. After a month, they went north to the Villages of Pore, Medina, and Moreno in Casanare Province. The commission ventured as far north as the Arauca River on the Venezuelan border and traveled along the Meta River, but the travelers still saw only narrow swathes of the plains. the commission returned to Bogotá in early March. In December 1856, the commission once again left Bogotá. A group including Codazzi, his son Domingo, Paz, and Carrasquel departed for the Amazonian territory known as Caquetá. Codazzi explored the upper Caquetá and Putumayo Rivers and various tributaries with the assistance of Indian boatmen. Outside of the capital town of Mocoa, he reported that " I have not encountered... other rational people than the Mosquera family" (in colonial terminology, Indians were not "rational"). He traveled as far south as present-day Ecuador, and then headed north and met up with Paz in late March at the archaeological ruins of San Agustín in the southern highlands and explored the headwaters of the Magdalena River.

Disillusion

These expeditions to the Eastern Plains and Caquetá took place during an especially frustrating period for the commission. In addition to the usual problems of illness, difficult terrain, uncooperative local officials, and broken equipment, the commission faced new challenges in Bogotá. The presidential administrations that followed the 1854 war were seemingly less willing, or less able, to fund the commission out of the depleted treasury. by 1855, Codazzi's originally six-year contract was running out, with thirteen provinces to go. Codazzi argued that the delays were due to events beyond his control, particularly the 1854 war. He complained that the commission's expenses had left him in debt. An agreement was reached, though funding problems continued. In late 1855 and again in 1856, the government was unable to unwilling to provide the full funds needed for the coming year.

Liberals v. Conservatives

The commission was essentially created by the Liberal government which favored an anticolonial critique in archaeological interpretation, the Conservatives viewed Spain’s influence as a positive force. While Liberals imposed an anticolonial intent on the Commission’s findings, the larger community clearly refused to accept these results without question. Some even attempted to assert their own interpretation of the archaeological findings. In his 1895 book Chibchas antes de la conquista española, Vicente Restrepo discounted the supposed sophistication of the Muiscan pictographs and “scoffed at analogies between the Chibchas [Muiscas] and the modern nation.

Artist of the Commission

Nine years and three different artists later, the Chorographic Commission had produced both an Atlas of Colombia and many watercolor drawings that portrayed not only the physical landscape, but also social, economic, and agricultural aspects of the country, including its people, transportation, crops, and trades. The North American landscape artist Frederic Edwin Church‘s stay in Colombia in 1853 also coincided with the first year of the Commission. Through these ventures, images became the means to portray new discoveries in the largely unexplored territory of Colombia. Mutis’s botanical drawings were a key part of the creation of a school of botanical studies. Humboldt, though not an artist himself, created drawings that were later made into prints that appealed to a public fascinated with travel, adventure, and the exotic, among them Church, whose painting Tequendama Falls near Bogotá echoes Humboldt’s drawing of the same place.

Legacy

A key event in Colombian geography, politics, history and art, this Commission proves to be an effort created by a group of people who believed in the importance of organizing, studying and classifying. The legacy also stands by a heritage that developed an enterprise secured under the branches of science, art and literature. A means for the second-half of the century to have a sense of belonging and of adaptation to a land which was now theirs and which had to be appropriated and grasped as their own. A country that would constantly be divided, politically, ideologically and geographically and whose merit lies in maintaining its physical, democratic and idiosyncratic unity for the next 150 years.