Sugar and the first ingenios of Hispaniola — the transfer, its price list and its ledger
Oviedo gives a chapter to who first made sugar in the Indies, credits a bachiller who brought the masters from the Canaries, then prints the testimony against his own award. The same pages give what a mill cost, the price of an arroba, and — as an operating requirement — the eighty to a hundred and twenty enslaved people each mill kept. Forty years on the crown's cosmographer counts thirty mills and twelve thousand enslaved.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of Caribbean sugar almost always begin in the seventeenth-century British and French islands, and where they reach back to Hispaniola they do it through modern summary, without a page. This object is built from two sixteenth-century witnesses read as scans: Oviedo's chapter on the ingenios, which names the men, the river, the Canary Islands the masters came from, the ducats a mill cost and the price of an arroba — and then prints the old settlers' testimony that contradicts his own award of priority, which no secondary account preserves. Against it stands the crown cosmographer's own count of thirty mills in the 1570s, taken from the same paragraph in which he records more than twelve thousand enslaved Africans and two surviving Indian villages. Achievement, capital cost, technology, bankruptcies and human ledger are all here as separate sourced claims, from officials of the empire that built it.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Oviedo gives the question a chapter of its own. Book IV, chapter VIII of the Historia general y natural de las Indias is headed "Que tracta de los ingenios é trapiches de açúcar que hay en esta Isla Española, y cuyos son y de qué manera ovo prinçipio esta rica grangeria en aquestas partes". He opens by calling sugar "una de las mas ricas grangerias que en alguna provinçia ó reyno del mundo puede aver", and awards the credit: everyone had their eyes shut until the bachiller Gonçalo de Velosa, "á su propria costa de grandes y exçesivos gastos", brought the sugar masters to the island, built a horse-driven trapiche on the bank of the río Nigua, fetched the working officers from the Canary Islands, and "molió é hizo açúcar primero que otro alguno" — so that to him alone the thanks are due, "como á prinçipal inventor de aquesta rica grangeria".
Then, on the same page, he prints the evidence against his own attribution. "Pero la verdad desto inquiriendo, he hallado que diçen algunos hombres de crédito é viejos, que hoy viven en esta cibdad, otra cosa": that the first to plant sugar cane on the island was one Pedro de Atiença, at the city of la Concepción de la Vega, and that the first to make sugar was Miguel Ballester, alcaide of la Vega, "natural de Cataluña", more than two years before Velosa did — though what Ballester made "fué muy poco". Oviedo does not adjudicate; he lets both stand and concludes that "de la una é de la otra forma" this is the origin of sugar in the island and the Indies. The priority is left contested in the source, so it is left contested here.
The transfer is traceable in the text as a transfer of people and of machines, not of a crop alone. Velosa "truxo los maestros de açúcar á esta isla" and brought the officers "desde las islas de Canaria" — the Atlantic island industry moving one leg further west. Oviedo also keeps the two technologies distinct throughout: the trapiche driven by animals and the ingenio driven by water. Of a horse trapiche at the villa de Açua he writes that such works "no son tan poderosos como los de agua, pero son de mucha costa, porque lo que avia de haçer el agua, revolviendo las ruedas, para la molienda de açúcar, lo haçen las vidas de muchos caballos".
He also prices the thing. Beyond the cost of the building where the sugar is made and the second house where it is purged and stored, there are mills "que passan de diez é doçe mill ducados de oro é mas, hasta lo tener moliente é corriente. Y aunque se diga quinçe mill ducados no me alargo." Each powerful mill needs a herd or two of cattle, "de mill ó dos mill ó tres mill dellas que coma el ingenio", carts to bring cane to the mill and firewood to the fires, and continuous labour on the food crops and the irrigation. At the top of the scale he reports the ingenio of the licenciado Çuaço on the river Ocoa, which with "los negros é ganados é petrechos é tierras é todo lo á él anexo" was reckoned at over fifty thousand gold ducats, its owner telling Oviedo it returned six thousand ducats a year or more.
The cost is on the same page as the capital, in the same voice, and it is not an aside: it is a specification. Every well-equipped mill, Oviedo writes, requires "á lo menos continuamente ochenta ó çient negros é aun çiento é veynte é algunos mas, para que mejor anden aviados" — enslaved people listed in the sentence that lists the cattle the mill eats and the carts that fetch its wood. The same grammar recurs when a mill is broken up: the heirs of one failed ingenio near the Hayna "acordaron de partir las tierras é los negros é las vacas é petrechos é todo aquello de que se podian aprovechar". Elsewhere he notes that the molasses and leavings that are wasted "se dan á los negros é trabajadores". The industry this object describes was built on chattel slavery, and its own admiring chronicler itemises it that way.
What the industry did to the Atlantic run, in Oviedo's own accounting. Counting the mills grinding and those being built, "hay en sola esta isla veynte ingenios poderosos, que cada uno dellos es muy rico y hermoso heredamiento; sin otros trapiches de caballos", the arroba selling on the island "á ducado y á peso y á menos". And the freight: "es de notar que hasta que ovo açúcares en ella, las naos tornaban vaçias á España, é agora van cargadas della é con mayores fletes de los que para acá traen, é con mas ganançia." A return cargo, where there had been ballast.
Roughly forty years later the crown's own cosmographer-chronicler writes the two halves of the ledger into a single paragraph. Juan López de Velasco, compiling the Descripción universal de las Indias for the Council of the Indies between 1571 and 1574, records of Hispaniola "mucho azúcar, que en esta isla se ha dado en grande abundancia, y así hay en ella treinta ingenios entre trapiches, que muelen con caballos ó bueyes, é ingenios de agua" — and, in the next lines, that the island's trades are sugar and cattle hides and some gold "si se saca con esclavos negros, de que hay en los ingenios y estancias más de doce mil dellos en la isla". Gold is no longer worked at all, he writes, "por haberse acabado los indios y ser la gente pobre".
The same official page states the demographic outcome without softening it. "Cuando la isla se descubrió, escriben que había en ella un millón de indios, que todos casi se han acabado con la guerra, y por los muchos que murieron de viruelas, y porque de aburridos se ahorcaron muchos y mataron con el zumo de la yuca, que es ponzoñoso" — the sentence goes on to add the labour of the mines, which at the outset was excessive — and ends: "no hay pueblo ninguno dellos sino dos de hasta cincuenta indios." Confidence is set below the other claims because the figure of a million is López de Velasco reporting what others "escriben" rather than a count of his own, and the pre-contact population of Hispaniola is one of the most disputed numbers in the historiography; what is not in doubt in the source is the ordering of causes and the two surviving villages.
Failure was ordinary, and Oviedo records it as carefully as success. He notes that "de quinçe años á esta parte algunos ingenios han quebrado é se deterioraron", and gives cases: one mill founded by the licenciados Antonio Serrano and Françisco de Prado was abandoned and lost because, being founded by "letrados legistas y de semejante materia el Bartulo no les dexó algun documento, erraron el artifiçio" — jurists who had no text to consult on mill-building and got the works wrong, and whose purses could not sustain it either. Another, near the ribera de Hayna, "se perdió á causa de la açequia é agua que le faltó". A third was given up by the son who inherited it "porque era mas la costa quel provecho".