The caminos reales of New Spain — a wheeled road to Santa Fe, and no wheeled freight on it
Humboldt's chapter on the roads of New Spain, read from the page, describes a system: four principal roads out of the capital, a spine called el camino de tierra adentro running 440 leagues to Santa Fe, longitudinal roads easy to keep and arduous transversal ones to the coasts, community inns in the middle of the pueblos — and, beside a carriage route longer than the Alps, the admission that goods still moved on mules driven by mestizos and Indians because no wheeled freight existed.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro begin with Oñate in 1598 and end at a modern National Historic Trail, and accounts of colonial Mexican transport tend to be either romantic about mule trains or dismissive about roads. Neither quotes the one contemporary description that treats the network as a system with numbers attached. This object binds each statement to the page of Humboldt's chapter XII where it stands: the four roads and their distances, the carriage route to Santa Fe measured against the Alps, the admission in the next clause that no wheeled freight existed, the community inns in the pueblos, the 64 million pesos crossing by the two ports, a town council's 1,416,800-peso estimate for a realignment, and the weekly mule trains carrying silver south and mercury north — with an explicit claim naming what a single observer in 1803 cannot tell you.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The system as Humboldt sets it out in libro V, capítulo XII. Because communication with Europe and Asia passed only through Veracruz and Acapulco, everything imported crossed the capital, "que por esta razon se ha hecho el punto central del comercio interior"; Mexico City lies in a straight line 69 leagues from Veracruz, 66 from Acapulco, 79 from Oaxaca and 440 from Santa Fe del Nuevo-Méjico. From that position follow the four most frequented roads: "1° el de Méjico á Veracruz, por la Puebla y Jalapa; 2° el de Méjico á Acapulco, por Chilpanzingo; 3° el de Méjico á Guatemala, por Oajaca; 4° el de Méjico á Durango y á Santa Fe de Nuevo-Méjico, vulgarmente llamado el camino de tierra adentro", with the roads to San Luis Potosí and Monterrey and to Valladolid and Guadalajara counted as branches of "el camino real de las provincias internas".
The northern spine was passable by wheel, and Humboldt reaches for a European yardstick to say how far: "Desde Méjico á Santa Fe pueden andar carruages, en un espacio que seria mas largo que la cordillera de los Alpes, si esta se prolongara sin interrupcion desde Ginebra hasta las costas del mar Negro." On the central plateau, he adds, four-wheeled coaches run in every direction from the capital to Guanajuato, Durango, Chihuahua, Valladolid, Guadalajara and Perote. The roads of the tableland running SSE to NNO, which he proposes to call longitudinal, are "de muy fácil conservacion" because the plateau offers neither ravines nor gorges and falls only gradually from 2,300 to 800 metres.
The cost is in the same sentence as the achievement, in Humboldt's own words and not in a commentator's. Immediately after the list of coach destinations he writes: "pero á causa del mal estado actual de los caminos, no se ha establecido carreteo para el trasporte de los géneros; y se prefiere el uso de acémilas". A road network a carriage could cross for hundreds of leagues had no wheeled freight service on it; goods went by pack animal because the surface would not carry carts.
Who actually moved the traffic is on the record too. "Millares de caballos y mulos en largas recuas cubren los caminos de Méjico. Un número considerable de mestizos y de indios se emplean en conducir estas caravanas" — and they slept in the open or in "tambos ó casas de comunidad que estan construidas en medio de los pueblos para la comodidad de los viageros", the animals grazing free on the savannahs and fed maize as fodder or grain when drought killed the grasses. The community inn built in the middle of the pueblo is a piece of public provision worth naming; the clause with which Humboldt explains the muleteers' choice — "prefiriendo esta vida vagabunda á cualquier otra ocupacion sedentaria" — is his judgement of them, printed here as his and not adopted by this object.
The hard roads were the ones to the sea. "Los caminos que desde la mesa interior van á las costas, y que yo llamo trasversales, son los mas penosos, y merecen principalmente la atencion del gobierno": Mexico to Veracruz and Acapulco, Zacatecas to Nuevo Santander, Guadalajara to San Blas, Valladolid to the port of Colima, Durango to Mazatlán by the western arm of the Sierra Madre. On the two roads to Veracruz and Acapulco, he reckons, the precious metals, the produce of agriculture and the goods of Europe and Asia crossing annually "son de un valor total de 64 millones de pesos fuertes" — treasure moving, in his comparison, over something like the road from Airolo to the hospice of the St Gotthard.
A colonial town council costing a road, in figures. Of the two ways down to Veracruz — the Jalapa road and the longer detour by Orizaba and Córdoba — Humboldt notes that the Orizaba road would be much shorter if, instead of running to Veracruz by Cotastla and the venta de Jamapa, it crossed the mountain ground called the Sierra de Atoyaque; and he prints the estimate: "Segun un presupuesto que hicieron los regidores de la villa de Córdova, la construccion de este nuevo camino costaria 1,416,800 pesos." The alignment dispute and its price tag were being argued by the regidores of a New Spanish villa, not decided in Madrid.
What the northern artery carried, both ways, in one sentence: "Los millares de mulos que todas las semanas llegan de Chihuahua y de Durango á Méjico, traen, á mas de las barras de plata, cuero, sebo, un poco de vino de Paso del norte, y harinas: tomando en retorno lanas de las fábricas de Puebla y de Queretaro, géneros de Europa y de las islas Filipinas, hierro, acero y mercurio." Silver bars and hides and El Paso wine coming south every week; Puebla and Querétaro woollens, Asian and European goods, iron, steel and the mercury the mines could not work without going north. The road to the far provinces was not a line of march but a two-directional market.
The limits of this entry. Everything above comes from one witness — a Prussian traveller who saw New Spain in 1803 and 1804, read here in the Spanish translation printed at Paris by Renouard in 1827 — and it describes the roads at the very end of the colonial period. Nothing read here says when any of these roads was opened, who ordered or financed it, or by what labour it was built and repaired, and no claim above says anything on those points; the carriage road down to Veracruz that the consulado was then building is not described in the pages read. Nor does this object claim anything about what the routes became after independence, in Mexico or in the territories the camino de tierra adentro ran into.