Page - 66 - in Maximilian Hell (1720–92) - And the Ends of Jesuit Science in Enlightenment Europe

Chapter 166 any academic treatise, but some of his letters—addressed to Kazy, Kéri Borgia, and another former fellow novice in Trenčín, József Bartakovics (1722–63), no- table on account of his pursuits in poetry and drama83—have been preserved.84 These provide an insight into his travels along the Andesian tributaries of the River Amazon and his work among the natives of Moxos (Mojo) province, and in a typical Jesuit fashion into the “natural and moral history” of the region.85 While most of Zakarjás’s fellow Hungarian missionaries suffered severely— including incarceration and death—from the consequences of the suppres- sion of the Society of Jesus in the Iberian monarchies in the late 1750s, he man- aged to return to Hungary in unclear circumstances and worked as a schoolmaster and librarian in the town of Komárom (Komárno, Comaromium, Komorn) until his death in 1772. There is no evidence of any direct contact between Hell and these figures at a later date—although, given his and Kollár’s positions in the highest academ- ic circles in Vienna over nearly thirty years between Hell’s appointment and Kollár’s death, in their case such contact may almost be taken for granted. Nev- ertheless, their profiles point to certain sensibilities in northern Hungarian Je- suit culture that are relevant to any attempt at understanding Hell’s own tra- jectory, and vice versa: an interest in and commitment to the tradition of the ancient Hungarian monarchy and dedicating critical scholarship to its inter- pretation; a concomitant willingness to serve the Habsburg dynasty and the government, partly via such scholarship, in its efforts at improvement; and an openness to the wider world even at the expense of considerable physical exer- tion and personal hazard. Nothing specific can be known or even conjectured about Hell’s profession- al formation in the disciplines in which he later earned the greatest distinction, mathematics and astronomy, until his Viennese years. Upon his enrollment in Babarczi, “Magyar jezsuiták Brazíliában a 18. század közepén” (PhD diss., University of Szeged, 2011). 83 http://jezsuita.hu/nevtar/bartakovics-jozsef/ (accessed April 12, 2019). 84 Published as “Zakarjás János és Fáy Dávid délamerikai jezsuita misszionáriusok uti levelei (1749–1756),” Földrajzi Közlemények 38 (1910): 115–28, 215–36. Eder, however, whose more robust health allowed him to travel even more widely, wrote a Descriptio provinciae Moxi- tarum in Regno Peruano (published posthumously in Buda in 1791, and in La Paz in 1888), still regarded as an important source for the ethnography of several isolated tribes in the region. 85 The term, of course, refers to José de Acosta’s Historia natural y moral de las Indias (1590), which established the tradition of learned Jesuit travel account. On Zakarjás’s contribu- tion, see Lajos Boglár, “The Ethnographic Legacy of Eighteenth-Century Hungarian Trav- ellers in South-America,” Acta ethnographica 4, nos. 1–4 (1955): 313–59, here 323–33 (in- cluding the English translation of the letter to Kéri Borgia).