Bienes de difuntos: the estates of those who died in the Indies

The machinery by which the estate of a Spaniard who died in the Americas was inventoried, auctioned, locked in a chest with three keys and shipped to Seville with the dead man's name, surname and home town, so that heirs an ocean away could be found and paid. Its two best printed witnesses are royal orders of the 1520s and the manual of the Casa de la Contratacion of 1672, and both of them also record what the system lost, stole and lent to the Crown.