{
  "id": "herrera-descripcion-de-las-indias-ocidentales",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Antonio de Herrera, Descripción de las Indias Ocidentales (1601)",
  "summary": "Before the narrative of his Décadas, the crown's chronicler of the Indies put a separate book: a systematic geography of Spanish America, keyed to engraved tablas that drew the boundaries of each audiencia district. It measured the globe, timed every ocean crossing, and then listed the nine high courts in the order they were founded, with the number of judges in each. On the same page it records that the viceroy hands out the vacant repartimientos of Indians.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "americas",
    "spanish-empire",
    "books",
    "cartography",
    "colonial-institutions",
    "geography",
    "historiography",
    "seventeenth-century",
    "navigation"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "lopez-de-velasco-descripcion-de-las-indias-1574"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relaciones-geograficas-de-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "recopilacion-de-leyes-de-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "casa-de-contratacion"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "alcedo-diccionario-geografico-1786"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "republica-de-indios"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "villasenor-theatro-americano-1748"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "pedro-martir-decadas-de-orbe-novo"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What is Antonio de Herrera's Descripción de las Indias Ocidentales?",
    "Were there printed maps of Spanish American administrative districts?",
    "How many audiencias were there in the Spanish Indies, and in what order were they founded?",
    "How long did the Spanish transatlantic and Pacific crossings take around 1600?",
    "Who was the cronista mayor de las Indias?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The text read here is the Descripción as printed in Madrid in 1725 by the Oficina Real de Nicolás Rodríguez Franco, separately paginated at the head of the Historia general. Its engraved title page reads \"DESCRIPCION DE LAS INDIAS OCIDENTALES DE ANTONIO DE HERRERA CORONISTA MAYOR DE SU MAG.D DE LAS INDIAS, Y SU CORONISTA DE CASTILLA. Al Rey Nro. Señor\", and carries the author's portrait medallion lettered \"Ant.o de Herrera Coro.ta de su Mag.d Natural de la Villa de Cuellar\". Everything quoted below is attributed to this eighteenth-century printing, not to the 1601 sheets, which were not opened for this object.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "The Descripción is a separate book from the narrative it precedes. Its head-title on page 1 is \"DESCRIPCION DE LAS ISLAS, Y TIERRA-FIRME DE EL MAR OCCEANO, QUE LLAMAN INDIAS OCCIDENTALES\", and its first chapter is headed \"CAPITULO I. De la Demarcacion, i division de las Indias Occidentales\". The running head across its pages is DESCRIPCION, and it carries its own page numbering, ending in the seventies where the Décadas then begin at folio 1.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The book opens on a measurement rather than a discovery. \"El Ambito de la Tierra es de trecientos i sesenta Grados, que reducidos à leguas Castellanas, son seis mil i trecientas\" — the circuit of the earth is 360 degrees, which reduced to Castilian leagues are six thousand three hundred. That is the working constant of Spanish cosmography of the period, seventeen and a half leagues to the degree, and it is printed before any land is named.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The same opening paragraph states the claim the book exists to support, and states it as a claim about shipbuilding rather than about conquest: men, believing the world held no more than Europe, Asia and Africa and not content with that, took to the art of navigating and to the invention of high-boarded ships, adapting them so that they could bear the force of the sea's waves, \"i en este Arte han hecho ventaja los Españoles à todas las Naciones del Mundo\". The marginal note repeats it as a heading: \"Los Españoles han hecho ventaja à las otras Naciones, en la Navegacion de los Navios de Alto bordo.\"",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "The description is keyed to engraved maps by number, and the text cues them where they belong. At the close of the chapter on the navigations the line \"Aqui entra la segunda Tabla\" stands alone between two chapters, and the folding plate that follows is lettered \"DESCRIPCION DE LAS YNDIAS DEL NORTE\" and numbered 2 in the cartouche. The plates are therefore not decoration bound in at the front but an apparatus called by the prose.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "What that plate draws is unusual for a printed map of 1601: jurisdiction. Tabla 2 carries a graticule with the tropic of Cancer and degrees of latitude and longitude marked along its frame, and on the land it letters \"Aud.a de la nueva Galizia\", \"Audj.a de la nueva España\", \"Audj.a de Guatimala\" and \"Audj.a de la Española\", each at a small building symbol, with dotted lines running between them to divide the districts. Coastlines, Florida, the Lucayos, Cuba, Jamaica, Yucatán and Venezuela are named, but the organising content of the sheet is the administrative boundary.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The chapter on the navigations reads as a timetable. From the islands of the Azores to Sanlúcar de Barrameda mariners reckon three hundred leagues in fifteen days, others in thirty; Castile to the Río de la Plata is 1,600 leagues and to the Strait of Magellan close to two thousand, a passage that takes five months because the ships must reach those provinces in their summer and cannot leave Castile at a season that would cross the line in June or August; Panama to the Ciudad de los Reyes usually takes two months out and under thirty days back, and from there to Chile and back to Panama nine hundred leagues in less than two months.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The Pacific crossing is given with its asymmetry explained. From Acapulco to the Moluccas and the Philippines they reckon 1,600 or 1,700 leagues, navigated in two months or two and a half, departing in November as the season freest of calms; the return to New Spain is longer, because not being able to come back the way one goes it is necessary to climb to thirty-nine degrees and to set out in May or June, two thousand leagues of voyage that take four months in the sailing. The route by the Strait of Magellan from Castile to the Islas del Poniente is put at four thousand leagues and reckoned difficult on that account as well as for the passage itself.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The book's organising division is administrative and is said to be so. Nature having divided the West Indies in two parts by the isthmus of Portobelo to Panama, one to the north and the other to the south, \"Los Reies de Castilla, i de Leon, con Acuerdo del Supremo Consejo de las Indias, han ordenado, que en cada parte haia vn Visorrei, i con las Audiencias, Governaciones, i Obispados, que se iràn mostrando\". The geography that follows is arranged by those units.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "Page 66 lists the audiencias in the order they were founded, with their composition. The first was Santo Domingo on the island of Española, with a president letrado — though now, because of the war, a soldier with the title of captain general — and four oidores who carry varas as alcaldes and hear civil and criminal causes on appeal and in first instance in casos de corte. The second was Mexico, whose first president Nuño de Guzmán \"no tuvo autoridad, porque se puso en el entretanto\"; with the second audiencia the president was Bishop Sebastián Ramírez, previously of the Española court, who held the government of the kingdoms and the supreme authority and left settled what touched it. Its president is now the viceroy, with eight oidores, three alcaldes del crimen and two fiscales, one for civil and one for criminal causes.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "The list continues: the third audiencia was Panamá in Tierra Firme, the province keeping that name and losing \"Castilla del Oro\", which the kings had ordered it be called, because the common speech was that men went and came from Tierra Firme; as the affairs of Peru grew in 1542 it was thought this court should pass to the Ciudad de los Reyes. The fourth was founded in the Provincia de los Confines, suppressed as unnecessary, and in 1570 refounded in the city of Santiago in the kingdom of Guatemala. The fifth was Santa Fe de Bogotá in the Nuevo Reino de Granada; the sixth Guadalajara in the Nuevo Reino de Galicia, which despatched a long time without a seal until business grew and a seal, a registry and a president were given it; the seventh San Francisco del Quito, which likewise had regent and alcaldes mayores without a seal before a president was seated; and the eighth the Ciudad de la Plata in the province of los Charcas.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c12",
      "text": "The reason given on that page for the whole apparatus is a duty rather than a convenience. The king, for the good, profit and relief of his subjects and the peace and quiet of the towns, \"segun que el Rei es obligado à Dios, i à ellos\", agreed to order the audiencias and royal chancillerías of the Indies to be established with the statutes and ordinances given them, so that the ministers do their office, justice be well administered, and the towns obtain the benefit intended by it.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c13",
      "text": "The cost sits in the same sentence as the machinery, and the book does not separate them. Of the audiencia of los Reyes the page records that the viceroy resides there and is its president, and will be president of Charcas and Quito when he is in them, \"i encomienda todos los Repartimientos de Indios, que vacan en los Distritos de ellas\" — he grants all the repartimientos of Indians that fall vacant in their districts. Of Guatemala it records that the president alone has the government, \"i encomienda Indios, provee los Corregimientos, i otros Oficios Temporales\", and of Charcas that the provision of encomiendas is reserved to the viceroy of Peru. The distribution of Indian labour is described as a routine faculty of the same courts whose stated purpose is that justice be well administered.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c14",
      "text": "The dating of the description can be read off its own present tense. It names the Conde de Monterrey as viceroy of New Spain, Luis de Velasco as viceroy of Peru, Antonio Osorio as governing the Española, Doctor Criado de Castilla at Guatemala, Francisco de Sande at Santa Fe, Santiago de Vera at Guadalajara, Miguel de Ibarra at Quito and the licenciado Cepeda at Charcas, all as holding office \"aora\". The state of the Indies it prints is therefore that of about the turn of the seventeenth century, not of 1725.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c15",
      "text": "The eighteenth-century apparatus around the text is a different voice and should not be read as Herrera's. The 1725 dedication to the king speaks of \"el dichoso Imperio Español\" and \"estas gloriosas Conquistas\" and argues at length against those who disparage Spanish merit; it is a panegyric of its own decade. The prologue of the same house is more useful, because it states an editorial rule: having found Herrera contradicting himself between Década V libro VI capítulo I and capítulo VIII over who went with Pedro de Alvarado to Peru, and judging the slip easily mendable, the editors write \"lo dejamos como lo hallamos impreso, porque no sabemos què efectos havrà producido en los interesados esta confusion\". A reprint that declares where it declined to correct its author is a reprint whose fidelity can be weighed.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c16",
      "text": "What this object does not establish should be said. The pages opened do not settle how far the tablas were engraved from the crown's own padrón or from manuscript materials of the Consejo de Indias, who cut them, how the Descripción of 1601 differs in text or plates from this 1725 issue, or whether the audiencia boundaries drawn on the sheets corresponded to any effective administrative line on the ground. The remaining tablas, the chapters on the Indias del Mediodía and the Islas del Poniente, and the 1601 edition itself were not opened.",
      "sources": [
        "herrera-descripcion-indias-ocidentales-1725"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Herrera is met in English almost only as the author of the Décadas, and usually as a compiler to be checked against better witnesses. The Descripción bound in front of them is treated as a preface and skipped, and the fourteen tablas are reproduced, when they are reproduced at all, as decorative early maps of the Americas. This object reads the Descripción as what it is on the page: an administrative geography with a printed atlas keyed to it by number, in which the organising content of the sheets is the district boundary of an audiencia rather than a coastline, and in which the book's own first paragraph measures the globe at 6,300 Castilian leagues before naming any land. It puts the ocean timetable, the order of foundation of the nine courts and the number of judges in each on the record from the page, and it prints, from the same page 66, the clause that makes those courts the distributors of vacant repartimientos of Indians — the achievement and its price in one paragraph, which is how the document itself has them. It also separates the 1725 house's triumphal dedication from Herrera's text, and quotes that house's own statement of where it refused to correct him.",
  "confidence": 0.85,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-16",
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    "name": "Antonio de Herrera, Descripción de las Indias Ocidentales (1601)",
    "description": "Before the narrative of his Décadas, the crown's chronicler of the Indies put a separate book: a systematic geography of Spanish America, keyed to engraved tablas that drew the boundaries of each audiencia district. It measured the globe, timed every ocean crossing, and then listed the nine high courts in the order they were founded, with the number of judges in each. On the same page it records that the viceroy hands out the vacant repartimientos of Indians.",
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    "citation": [
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        "name": "Descripcion de las Islas, y Tierra-firme de el Mar Occeano, que llaman Indias Occidentales, de Antonio de Herrera, Coronista Maior de las Indias, y Coronista de Castilla",
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    "headline": "Antonio de Herrera, Descripción de las Indias Ocidentales (1601)"
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