Natural and Moral History of the Indies

it warns: or rather, if they knew the Creator and Lord of all, they did not serve and glorify Him as they should have, having become vain in their inventions, a thing that the Apostle so justly argues and accuses them of.

Romans 1.

CHAPTER 2. That the sky is round on all sides, and moves around itself.

Plutarch, On the Opinions of the Philosophers, Book 2, c. 2.

BUT coming to our purpose, there is no doubt that what Aristotle and the other Peripatetics, together with the Stoics, felt regarding the sky being entirely of a round figure, and moving circularly and around, is punctually so much the truth that we see it with our own eyes, those of us who live in Peru, much more manifest by experience than it could have been to us by any philosophical reason and demonstration. For to know that the sky is entirely round, and that it girds and surrounds the earth on all sides, and not to place doubt in it, it is enough to look from this hemisphere at that part and region of the sky that revolves around the earth, which the ancients never saw. It is enough to have seen and noted both Poles, on which the sky revolves as on its hinges: I mean the Arctic and Northern Pole, which those of Europe see, Augustine, Book 2 of the literal commentary on Genesis, c. 10. and the other Antarctic or Southern (which Augustine doubts), when, having passed the Equinoctial line, we exchange the North for the South here in Peru. It is enough, finally, to have traveled more than sixty degrees from North to South, forty on one side of the Line, and twenty-three on the other side, leaving for now the testimony of others who have sailed at much greater latitude and arrived at almost sixty degrees to the South. Who will say that the ship Victoria, worthy indeed of perpetual memory, did not win the victory and triumph of the roundness of the world, and no less of that so vain void and infinite chaos that the other philosophers placed?