{
  "id": "correos-de-las-indias",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "The royal mail of the Indies: a law of inviolable letters and a service bought back from its owner",
  "summary": "A title of the Recopilación makes letters between Spain and the Indies free and inviolable, and orders the Indian foot-couriers paid into their own hands. Two centuries later the crown bought the post office of New Spain back from its private owner, joined it to the new maritime packets, and opened offices in towns where the traffic did not pay. The report saying so also records the villages hurt by furnishing horses, and proposes saving money on Indian runners who earned less.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "colonial-institutions",
    "colonial-law",
    "spanish-empire",
    "americas",
    "new-spain",
    "peru",
    "law",
    "trade",
    "eighteenth-century",
    "indigenous-peoples",
    "institutions",
    "labour"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "recopilacion-de-leyes-de-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "casa-de-contratacion"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "manila-galleon"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "lazarillo-de-ciegos-caminantes-1773"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relaciones-de-gobierno-de-los-virreyes"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "protector-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juzgado-general-de-naturales"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "republica-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "solorzano-politica-indiana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "diario-de-mexico-1805"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cosme-bueno-disertacion-arte-de-volar"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "ferrocarril-de-la-habana-a-guines"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "papel-periodico-de-la-havana-1790"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "pedro-vicente-maldonado"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "gomez-ortega-transportar-plantas-1779"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "juzgado-de-bienes-de-difuntos"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "obras-publicas-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "caminos-reales-de-la-nueva-espana"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "casados-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "flotas-y-galeones-de-la-carrera-de-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "tambos-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mulas-y-arrieria-de-las-indias"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "How did letters travel between Spain and Spanish America?",
    "Was there a postal service in colonial Spanish America?",
    "What law protected the secrecy of letters in the Spanish empire?",
    "Who were the Indian chasquis and were they paid?",
    "When did the Spanish crown take over the post office of New Spain?",
    "What did the maritime mail of 1764 change for Spanish America?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The sixteenth title of the third book of the Recopilación is headed \"DE LAS CARTAS, CORREOS, É INDIOS CHASQUIS\" and runs to the end of the volume, closing with \"FIN DEL TOMO PRIMERO\". It is a title about carriage rather than about ceremony: its laws bind viceroys and audiencias in how they write to the King, shipmasters in what they do with the packets they land, governors in how fast they forward what reaches their port, and chief postmasters in what they may charge and whom they may not defraud. What is read here is the fourth impression of 1791, made by order of the Council of the Indies, not a manuscript.",
      "sources": [
        "recopilacion-indias-1791-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "One law makes the traffic free in both directions. Whoever carries letters or despatches from Spain to residents in the Indies is to give or forward them freely to whoever is to receive them, and is under no obligation to show them to any governor or justice; the same punctuality is required of what comes from the Indies; and anyone who obstructs the correspondence directly or indirectly forfeits all his goods to the treasury, is banished from the Indies and loses any office he holds of the crown. The margin dates it to Charles V and the Cardinal Governor at Talavera, 11 January 1541, and to the governors at Valladolid, 16 April 1550.",
      "sources": [
        "recopilacion-indias-1791-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "A second law, of Philip II at Burgos on 14 September 1592, opens by admitting the abuse: ministers in the Indies had taken, opened and detained the letters sent to the King and those of private persons, so that the crown had not been informed. The reasoning is worth quoting because it is a reasoned defence of postal secrecy rather than a bare prohibition. Letters are \"el instrumento con que las gentes se comunican\", opening them is an offence against God, and they \"han sido y deben ser inviolables á todas las gentes\" — and the law adds the practical ground, that the aggrieved \"que no pueden venir con quejas\" must be able to send an account of them. No prelate, ecclesiastic, secular or judge may open or detain any letter, under penalty of the temporalities and expulsion for prelates and perpetual deprivation of office for judges.",
      "sources": [
        "recopilacion-indias-1791-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The carriers are bound at both ends of the ocean. Owners and masters of ships, by a law of Charles V at Valladolid of 18 July 1551, are to hand over the letters and packets as soon as they reach a port of the Indies and to detain them no time at all, on pain of forfeiting half their goods and ten years of banishment from that port and province, and neither they nor anyone else may open the packets or undo the bundles.",
      "sources": [
        "recopilacion-indias-1791-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "One law of Philip IV, Madrid, 2 September 1623, is a timetable for the South American circuit rather than a prohibition. The viceroy of Lima is to send a small vessel with the silver fleet from Tierra Firme; the president of Panama is to embark on it every packet carried by the royal armada and see the boat sail again at once, so that the despatches are at Callao by the middle of August; the viceroy then has until November to answer; the president forwards the replies to Cartagena to catch the aviso leaving at the beginning of January, which can reach Spain by the middle of March. A scheduled intercontinental exchange of correspondence, with the interval for the answer written into the law.",
      "sources": [
        "recopilacion-indias-1791-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The two laws that close the title are about the Indian runners, and the first of them is an admission of failure. Philip II at San Lorenzo, 22 September 1593: in some parts of the Indies \"se ha reconocido grande omision en pagar á los Indios Chasquis, Correos de á pie\", who are sent out with the letters of public and private business; the work they suffer in it is great; many laws of this compilation provide that the Indians are not to be molested or vexed; and it is the royal will that they be relieved of all forced labour and paid without delay \"en sus propias manos\". Viceroys, presidents, audiencias and justices are to have particular and continual care to protect them and to remedy the labour they suffer.",
      "sources": [
        "recopilacion-indias-1791-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The second, of Philip III at Madrid on 2 July 1618, closes the loopholes the first had left. No transactions, reductions, delays or deductions are to be made with the Indian chasquis and couriers on what is owed them — and the law voids them expressly \"aunque sea de consentimiento de los mismos Indios interesados\", with judicial decree or without. Every four months the fiscal of the audiencia, the protector and an advocate are to settle accounts with the chief postmaster for the wages of that period, and if he does not pay at once they are to seek execution against him in the audiencia, which is to order it \"sin estrépito, y figura de juicio\", without requiring the party suing in the Indians' name to give security, so that the runners are \"no molestados, ni defraudados de su sudor, trabajo y servicio\". A public official is made the standing plaintiff for a class of workers against the officer who employs them.",
      "sources": [
        "recopilacion-indias-1791-t1"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "Two hundred and fifty years after the first of these laws, the visitador general of New Spain gave his successor's viceroy an account of what the service had become. He opens the section headed \"RENTA DE CORREOS\" by crediting the maritime post with having \"unido los grandes Imperios de las dos Americas en reciproca correspondencia con la Monarquia Capital\", and states that its consequence in New Spain was that the office of chief postmaster by land was incorporated into the crown and the revenue administered under rules that secure the public faith.",
      "sources": [
        "galvez-informe-general-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The same pages give the office's history and its price. Land posts began in Spain in 1518; as the Americas were conquered the offices were created across them; Charles V in 1525 made a perpetual grant of chief postmaster of Peru to Doctor Galíndez de Carvajal; but in New Spain the employment came to be erected as a saleable and transferable office, and had lately been alienated to Don Antonio Méndez Prieto for sixty-one thousand seven hundred and seventy pesos, the sum at which it was valued when his title was issued. The report also notes that the earlier private holders, having the office by grant for money paid, were obliged to carry the letters of the tribunals and ministers of justice and of the treasury free of postage, and still kept an excessive profit.",
      "sources": [
        "galvez-informe-general-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The reform is dated and attributed. Article 17 of the Reglamento Provisional made by the marqués de Grimaldi on 24 August 1764 for the establishment and government of the maritime post between Spain and the West Indies directed that the offices of Veracruz and Mexico be joined at once to the new administration on the King's account, promising to indemnify their owner; a particular instruction of the same date to Don Domingo Antonio López ordered relay posts set up between Veracruz and Mexico, while the remaining provincial offices stayed with their private holders until the crown resolved to incorporate them and return to the interested parties what was lawfully theirs.",
      "sources": [
        "galvez-informe-general-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "The buy-back is described with its resistance and its terms. The report says Méndez Prieto, protected by the profits the whole kingdom's posts produced him, found many supporters for obstructing the new establishment; that the King then resolved on outright incorporation by royal decree of 21 December 1765; that interest at five per cent on the sixty-one thousand seven hundred and seventy pesos was to be paid until the amount due him was settled; and that he was in the end left in possession of the office of regidor, paid his interest in full from 1 July 1766 to the end of April 1769, and repaid the capital \"sin descuento alguno\". The administration on the royal account was established on 1 July 1766 under two administrators, at Mexico and at Veracruz.",
      "sources": [
        "galvez-informe-general-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c12",
      "text": "The exemptions were narrowed and the cost of not narrowing them is stated. By article 10 of chapter 18 of the Reglamento not even the viceroys are exempt in America from maritime postage; the older franking practice, extended beyond its limits while the visitador was away in the Provincias Internas, \"llegó á importar mas de catorce mil pesos\" in 1767 alone; and the settlement adopted was that where the funds of the penas de cámara failed, the postage of official packets from Spain and the islands should be paid out of the treasury rather than carried free.",
      "sources": [
        "galvez-informe-general-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c13",
      "text": "The heaviest cost in the section falls on the people the earlier laws had tried to protect, and the report puts it in its own words. The villagers who supply the horses and pack mules when the couriers need them suffer \"perjuicios contínuos\" which they complain of, and which will not cease entirely until relay posts are established on the principal routes. In the same breath the remedy proposed for extending the service to the provinces is to economise \"mediante los Indios ú otros correos de apie que hacen tanta ó mas diligencia que un extraordinario acaballo y ganan mucho menos\" — Indian foot-runners who do as much as a mounted express and earn much less. The saving and the burden are stated by the same official on the same page.",
      "sources": [
        "galvez-informe-general-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c14",
      "text": "Against that, the extension proposed is explicitly not a revenue measure. There are many provinces, the report says, where no post office or ordinary courier has been set up because the correspondence with the capital offers little or no profit; the recommendation is to establish offices in the head towns of the districts and assign foot-couriers to carry the correspondence, and the reason given is that although they leave the revenue little, they will \"fomentarán el Comércio y producirán otros beneficios al Real Erario y al Público\". The net product of the branch is put at close to eighty thousand pesos in the previous year with only two routes running, and expected to approach a hundred thousand.",
      "sources": [
        "galvez-informe-general-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c15",
      "text": "Two limits belong on the record. The law of 1593 is evidence that the runners were going unpaid, not evidence that the remedy worked; the compilation prints the complaint and the remedy together and nothing in these pages says which prevailed. And the 1771 report is the self-assessment of the official whose own measures it describes, written to the incoming viceroy: it states that the liquid values of the revenue are to be remitted to Spain to meet the crown's urgencies, and its figures for the increase are its author's. Neither source is an independent audit of the service.",
      "sources": [
        "recopilacion-indias-1791-t1",
        "galvez-informe-general-1867"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "primary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "English accounts of communication in the Spanish empire stop at the treasure fleets and the aviso boats, and treat the mail as a by-product of the silver convoys. The two documents read here show something else, and neither is quoted in English: a title of the Recopilación that reasons its way to postal secrecy in 1592 from the need of the aggrieved to reach the King, and that makes a public prosecutor the standing plaintiff for unpaid Indian runners against their own postmaster; and a 1771 report that prices the buy-back of a privatised post office to the peso, dates the decree, and recommends opening offices in towns where the traffic will not pay because the trade is worth more than the revenue. The same report supplies its own counterpoint on the same pages — villages hurt by furnishing horses, and Indian foot-runners recommended precisely because they earn less — so the cost does not have to be imported from a critic. What neither document proves, that the laws were obeyed or the figures independent, is stated rather than implied.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-12",
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    "name": "The royal mail of the Indies: a law of inviolable letters and a service bought back from its owner",
    "description": "A title of the Recopilación makes letters between Spain and the Indies free and inviolable, and orders the Indian foot-couriers paid into their own hands. Two centuries later the crown bought the post office of New Spain back from its private owner, joined it to the new maritime packets, and opened offices in towns where the traffic did not pay. The report saying so also records the villages hurt by furnishing horses, and proposes saving money on Indian runners who earned less.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/correos-de-las-indias",
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    "dateModified": "2026-08-12",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Recopilación de leyes de los reynos de las Indias … Quarta impresión — Tomo Primero (Libros I a III)",
        "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=P1xp68LXgw8C&pg=PP9"
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      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "Informe general que en virtud de real órden instruyó y entregó el Excmo. Sr. Marqués de Sonora ... al Excmo. Sr. Virrey Frey D. Antonio Bucarely y Ursua con fecha de 31 de diciembre de 1771",
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    "headline": "The royal mail of the Indies: a law of inviolable letters and a service bought back from its owner"
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}