Indigo in New Spain: a tahona, a sowing tube and a memoir written to answer the charge that Spain only vegetates
A first-person memoir printed in a Mexican compilation of 1855 under the head ANIL, by the eighteenth-century editor who had published a translated treatise on indigo in his periodical of 1772. It records two Mexican improvements to a Caribbean industry - a tannery mill that cut the cost of hulling indigo seed from sixteen or twenty pesos to two or three reales, and a sowing tube - and states its purpose: to answer those who say the Spanish nation only vegetates.
Why this wins its question: Indigo in Spanish America is usually written about as a Guatemalan export statistic, and the eighteenth-century Spanish American reply to the charge of scientific backwardness is usually summarised rather than quoted. This object reads a memoir that does both at once and prints its particulars: the surgeon Andres de San Julian who brought the cultivation to the Amilpas about 1754 and died having realised nothing; the Valdovinos brothers of Cuernavaca who put the hulling of the seed through a tannery tahona and cut the cost from sixteen or twenty pesos to two or three reales; Jose de Azcarate's seed tube fixed to a bag behind the plough; the lime-water precipitation learned from a colonist out of Carolina and checked against a printed description before being recommended; and four recipes for cement that the writer wants used on the water conduits of Tlaxpana and Chapultepec. Beside that it puts, from the same pages, the two things such a memoir is not usually quoted for: that its measure of the new sowing tube is the labour of twelve enslaved men in the islands, and that its author ends by warning that indigo planted on cane land and in the gardens of Cuernavaca reduces the crop of sugar, maize and other food.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
What the 1855 compilers printed under the head ANIL is not an article of their own but an eighteenth-century memoir in the first person, and it opens by dating itself: in the year 1772, the writer says, he printed in translation, in the periodical he was then publishing under the title of Asuntos varios, a memoir on the benefit of indigo drawn up by a missionary of Louisiana, and its interest showed itself when a merchant who sent it to the province of Caracas received many thanks, great advantages having been obtained by putting into practice all the observations it contained. The editor of the Asuntos varios sobre ciencias y artes of 1772 was Jose Antonio Alzate, and the internal evidence fits him; but no signature or attribution was found on the pages opened, so the identification is carried here as an inference and nothing below depends on it. The text is later than 1789, since it quotes the Gaceta de Madrid of that year.
The cultivation was recent in New Spain and its introduction is credited to one man who failed. In New Spain, the memoir says, the cultivation of indigo was unknown until about the year 54, when Andres de San Julian came - a professor of surgery, in the writer's opinion a Frenchman though he passed for a Catalan - who having travelled in the foreign islands had observed the cultivation and benefit of indigo, recognised that it could be sown here, and planted it in the Amilpas. His fortune was the usual one of new enterprisers: whether because he had not completely observed the process, or because he suffered oppositions and discords, what is certain is that he passed a very miserable life without being able to realise the plan of his project. The writer adds that true patriots will know whom to thank for attempting to establish a new branch of commerce even without fruit.
The first improvement recorded is a piece of ordinary mechanical ingenuity with an extraordinary cost saving attached, and the labour it displaced is named. The indigo seed is enclosed in a hard tube, and to get it out indios and indias ground it on the metates or stones for grinding chocolate; besides being very costly, the practice was hard to staff, because it produces a stinking powder that discomforts the grinders. This difficulty was overcome by the brothers Antonio and Jose Valdovinos, residents of Cuernavaca, who contrived to have it milled in a tahona or tannery mill in which a stone wheel travels on its edge; the result was quick and advantageous, and at a cost of two or three reales what had formerly cost more than sixteen or twenty pesos was separated.
The second improvement is a sowing device, and the writer measures it against slave labour in the islands without appearing to notice what the comparison admits. Jose de Azcarate, a Biscayan and owner of the hacienda de Guadalupe in the jurisdiction of Cuernavaca, hit on sowing the seed at small cost and well distributed: after the furrow was formed by the ox-drawn plough, a workman poured the seed through a tube fixed to the lower part of a bag along the whole extent of the furrow, and mixed sand with it to spread it evenly. With this happy expedient, the memoir states, one workman sows in an hour more than twelve black men sow in the islands in a whole day, a comparison the writer draws from the account of Beauvais de Raseau, in which the black men make holes with hoes and the black women follow throwing into each hole a little seed mixed with ash or sand. The productivity claim of this passage is a claim about a slave economy, and the enslaved workers are its measure.
The polemical purpose of the memoir is explicit, and it is the reason the text is worth reading as evidence about opinion rather than only about indigo. The ungrateful who assert that the Spanish nation only vegetates, and that it is very backward with respect to the arts - foreigners reprinting the same thing - ought they not to fall silent, the writer asks, on seeing that Spaniards established in New Spain what foreigners in the islands do not know. He is sure that Quatremere de Isjonual, in the memoir on indigo crowned by the Paris academy of sciences in 1784, insists much that the lands destined to indigo in the islands be ploughed, and rejoices that under his influence some ploughs have been shipped there; had he known the practice of this country, the writer asks, how would he have grounded his idea. The Spaniards, he concludes, are not so slothful as various pretended men of learning wish to persuade us.
The chemistry of the process is treated as an open question to be settled by trial, and the writer is careful about priority in a way his polemic is not. Having learned from a colonist arrived by superior order, who had served in Carolina, that mixing a portion of lime water precipitates the indigo in eight hours where the regular method takes fourteen and leaves part of the product suspended, he sought out the best books on the subject, which Juan Eugenio Santelices Pablo lent him, and found the colonist's report confirmed in a description of the cultivation and manufacture of indigo in Carolina by William Burck. He reports that a Frenchman who had passed from Mexico to Peru told him fresh cheese steeped in water was used there to precipitate indigo, and that a person of ability who had observed the indigo works of Guatemala assured him that bull's rennet steeped in water was used in the same way; if that practice is sure, he writes, the Spanish nation should be recognised as the inventor of a happy discovery, since the use of lime in Carolina is very recent. The conditional is his own.
He also transfers a technique sideways, out of the dye works and into public infrastructure. Four cements for stopping the cracks through which indigo escapes from the tanks are set out - sea shells ground unburnt and sifted with quicklime and water; equal parts of quicklime, brick and iron scoria worked with very little water; sea shells dissolved in lemon juice and the sediment mixed with egg whites, a strong mastic used in the French islands; and the one they know as the Chinese, of pitch, coconut or chia oil and sifted quicklime, so hard in water that it also serves to glue pieces of pottery. Not only indigo makers and the owners of estates with dams would be able to use them, he argues: so much money is spent daily on stopping the fissures of the underground conduits of Tlaxpana and Chapultepec that a saving could be had by using this cement, since to close a small crack workmen now open large cavities with the crowbar at great expense.
The memoir ends by arguing against its own enthusiasm, which is the part of it that a triumphal reading would leave out. The increase of indigo sowings in New Spain will be useful, he writes, whenever abandoned ground is taken up; but to sow indigo on land that formerly served for sugar cane, and even in the gardens of Cuernavaca as some do, is pernicious, because it diminishes the product of sugars, maize and other seeds and fruits. A footnote to the same passage quotes the Gaceta de Madrid of 1789, number 33, on the ruin of the foreign sugar islands, and reads the news as proof of the aridity being experienced there.
What this object rests on and what it does not should be plain. Three pages of an 1855 Mexican compilation were opened, printing an eighteenth-century memoir whose author is not named on them; neither the Asuntos varios of 1772 nor any other printing of the memoir was reachable, so the text cannot be collated and it is not known whether the compilers abridged it. Nothing here establishes how widely the tahona or the sowing tube were adopted, what quantity of indigo New Spain produced, or whether the lime-water method displaced the older one. The memoir is an interested document, arguing a case about Spanish inventiveness, and every claim above is worded as what it states.