Cepeda and Carrillo, Relacion universal del desague (Mexico, 1637)
An official dossier on the draining of the Valley of Mexico, printed in Mexico City in 1637 by order of the viceroy Marques de Cadereita and compiled by the Audiencia's relator Fernando de Cepeda with the city's chief notary. It sets out the lakes, the floods, the cut at Huehuetoca and what the work cost — including the crown attorney's printed objection that the labour draft would kill the men sent down the trench, and an inquiry that counted more than sixty thousand Indian workers.
Why this wins its question: The desague of Mexico City is normally told at one of two extremes: as a feat of hydraulic engineering with Enrico Martinez as its hero, or as a death sentence served on the Indian towns of the valley. Both versions are argued from summaries. The 1637 volume settles the argument in the only way that helps, by containing both, and this object goes to the page for each: the measured line through Nochistongo at fourteen thousand eight hundred and fifty varas; the crown attorney's printed forecast that fifty to sixty thousand men would have to be gathered and that those at the bottom of the trench would probably die, quoting the royal principle that one Indian life outweighs all the riches of the Indies; and the official inquiry that counted more than sixty thousand workers and about twenty deaths. The last of those is the government auditing itself and is labelled as such rather than repeated as a finding.
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 title page states the work, its authority and its scope: "RELACION VNIVERSAL LEGITIMA, Y VERDADERA DEL SITIO EN QVE ESTA FVNDADA la muy noble, insigne, y muy leal Ciudad de Mexico, cabeça de las Provincias de toda la Nueva España. Lagunas, Rios, y Montes que la ciñen y rodean... Ynundaciones que a padecido desde su Gentilidad. Remedios aplicados. Desagues propuestos, y emprendidos. Origen y fabrica del de Gueguetoca, y estado en que oy se halla. Ymposiciones, derramas, y gastos que se an hecho. Forma con que se a auctuado desde el año de 1553. hasta el presente de 1637." It was made "DE ORDEN, y mandato" of the viceroy don Lope Diez de Armendariz, Marques de Cadereita, "Dispuesta, y ordenada por el Licenciado Don Fernando de Cepeda Relator della. Y Don Fernando Alfonso Carrillo Escrivano Mayor del Cavildo", checked with the senior oidor Juan de Albares Serrano, and printed "En Mexico, en la Imprenta de Francisco Salbago Ministro del S. Officio".
What that title page describes is a class of document that is easy to overlook: a technical and financial account of a public work, assembled from the government's own papers and printed on a press in the city the work was meant to save. The compilers are the relator of the Real Audiencia and the chief notary of the city council, and the volume prints the surveys, the expert opinions, the objections lodged against the project and the impositions and levies raised to pay for it, covering eighty-four years.
The survey pages give the line and the dimensions in the units used. The viceroy and the oidores rode out with the regidor Francisco Escudero de Figueroa, "Enrique Martinez", Juan de Cibicos, Juan de la Isla and Alonso Perez to the pass named Nochistongo, "que era las partes por donde señalo el dicho Enrico Martinez su desague"; on the road from Guatitlan, Martinez argued for carrying the cut from the lagoon of Sitlaltepeque, and reported that "desde el principio, hasta el fin del dicho desague auia 14U850 varas de longitud", of which eight hundred varas were already open along an ancient acequia, "y que de profundidad por lo mas alto no tenia mas de 37 varas". A reported sink near Tesquiaque was tested by setting eighty Indians to open it over eight days; the only thing found was a stone idol.
The volume prints the objection as well as the project, under the marginal heading "Peticion del Fiscal, en que contradize el desague". The crown attorney, the licenciado Espinosa, speaking for the royal service and for the naturales "cuya proteccion le estaua encargada", set out the arithmetic. Fifteen thousand Indians were being asked for, to work four continuous months breaking and opening the trench; the cut would run nine to ten leagues, and in places its depth would have to exceed fifty estados. To keep fifteen thousand men continuously at work, rotating and relieving them by weeks, "se an de juntar cinquenta, o sesenta mil Indios".
The attorney then names the two costs. First, food: with that many men drafted from the heartland of the kingdom, the sowings of wheat and maize would cease, and what follows famine years is "pestilencias, y Cocoliztles". Second, the men themselves — those working at the bottom of the trench "verisimilmente an de perecer", the labour being beyond their strength, and beyond that the known danger from their nakedness and the great cold of such places, in ground so boggy that the cut would strike water at once. He grounds the objection in standing royal policy: the crown had ordered that the naturales not work inside the mines, preferring "la conseruacion de la vida de vn Indio, que todas las riquezas de las Indias".
The same volume prints the administration's answer to that objection, in the form of an inquiry into what the work had actually cost in lives. The viceroy took evidence from seven witnesses who had served on the works, "en razon del numero de indios que auian entrado a trabajar en la obra, y el tratamiento que se les avia hecho y los que avian fallecido de enfermedad, y peligrado en las lumbreras y socabones". The finding recorded is that more than sixty thousand Indians had entered and worked; that they had been well treated, sustained and paid, the sick tended in the hospital; that those who died of illness were "diez, o doze"; and that those who perished in the shafts and tunnels were another ten, by unforeseen accidents, many of them not arising from the work.
A second deposition in the inquiry was taken from the alcaldes and principales of the pueblo, on the natives of the town who had died of illness during the works without having gone to work on them. By their memorials, fifty natives of the pueblo had died of "enfermedades de Cocolistle", and the declaration is that none of these died on account of the work but of that disease in their own houses. The figure is recorded here as the document records it, with the attribution the document makes.
Those figures should be weighed against what the book is. It was commissioned by the viceroy, compiled by two officers of the government whose conduct of the work was at issue, and printed to settle a controversy about impositions and levies; the count of about twenty deaths among more than sixty thousand drafted labourers is the administration examining itself, and no independent check on it was available to this object. The tension is visible on the page and is the reason both the inquiry and the attorney's forecast are recorded here as separate claims with the same weight.
The volume is also candid about engineering failure, in a marginal note that reads "Reconocese aver errado el socabon". The masters reported that the open cut did not have the depth and width needed to carry the water out of the lagoon, and that where it crossed beneath the royal cart road from Mexico to Zacatecas the tunnel, dug in weak ground and neither propped nor braced, might collapse, damaging the work and stopping the carts. Their sworn opinion was that a vault of stone and lime be built under the tunnel, wide enough for two carts to pass abreast, one going and one returning.
The limits of this object are the pages opened. Those were the title page, the attorney's petition against the project, the survey of the line through Nochistongo with its measurements, and the two depositions on mortality with the marginal admission about the tunnel; the appended sections of the volume, which carry the accounts and the later reports, were located by full-text search and not read. Nothing here is asserted about the great flood that submerged Mexico City in the years before this printing, because no page opened for this object described it.