Imperium et empiria or the confluence of two traditions: the Navy and the Jesuits in cyclone prediction, 19th century
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3989/asclepio.2024.21Keywords:
Jesuits, Iberian Science, Cyclone Science, Prediction, Spanish EmpireAbstract
In Cuba and the Philippines, predictive science reached unprecedented milestones. Spanish Jesuit missionaries established the world’s earliest tropical cyclone warning systems. They not only founded the Observatories of Manila ad Belen in Havana; the director of the latter, Benito Viñes, published his laws of circulation and translatory movement of hurricanes –probably the most universal Spanish empirical contribution to nineteenth-century physics–. This article analyzes the why and how of these achievements. The why is explained by the meeting of two deeply rooted traditions that converged in these colonies: on the one hand, the imperial maritime recording tradition, which promoted the recording of meteorological data in ships’ logbooks; and on the other, the tradition of observatory sciences cultivated by the Society of Jesus in Europe and overseas missions. The how implies the establishment of a network of “floating observatories” (from the Spanish Navy) and the adoption of a “correlational” approach to physical phenomena, with which Viñes developed his predictive method based mainly on cloud observations. The confluence of these two traditions in cyclone science symbolizes the culmination of an empirical trend that began in the sixteen century: imperium et empiria.
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Funding data
Eusko Jaurlaritza
Grant numbers IT1441-2022
Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades
Grant numbers PID2023-147611NB-I00