One hundred and fifteen marks for every hundred pounds: the mercury correspondido and the discoverers who could not afford the minimum issue
Mercury was rationed by the crown and priced by what it should yield: a miner drawing a hundred pounds was charged with manifesting a hundred and fifteen marks of silver. Mota Padilla, a lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara, argued in 1742 that cheaper mercury would raise both output and revenue, and recorded what the minimum issue of a whole quintal did to poor discoverers who needed eight pounds: forced partnerships, dispossession, lawsuits, and mines abandoned.
Why this wins its question: The mercury monopoly of the Spanish empire is well covered as a supply story, from Almaden and Huancavelica outward, and the correspondido appears in specialist work as an accounting term. What is missing everywhere in reach is the view from the bottom of the distribution chain. This object supplies it from two pages nobody quotes: the exact charge of one hundred and fifteen marks of silver to be manifested for every hundred pounds of mercury drawn, the argument that a lower price would have raised the crown's own revenue because the correspondido was worth more than the mercury, the freight arithmetic behind the price, and then the mechanism by which a minimum issue of a whole quintal excluded discoverers who needed eight pounds, drove them into partnerships that dispossessed them, and left the mines in litigation and unworked. It is written by a serving lawyer of the court that heard those suits, in 1742, and this entry keeps the parts of his proposal that do him no credit, the clearing of the towns of idlers by sea among them, on the same page as the parts that do.
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 accounting principle comes first and it is the reason the whole system worked. Page 320 records that mercury is not consumed except in proportion to the silver it produces, and that for that reason the charge is regulated. Page 321 gives the rate: that the miner is charged, for every hundred pounds of mercury, not only with its value but with a hundred and fifteen marks of silver that he must manifest, so that from them may be paid to his Majesty the dues of the tithe, one and a half per cent, and one real of seigniorage on each mark. A consumable input was thus used as an assay of production and as the base of the tax on it, which is the same device modern economic historians use in reverse when they reconstruct output from mercury issues.
His fiscal argument is that the monopoly was priced against its own revenue. Page 321 records that there is no doubt that if mercury were given to the miners at a lower price they would consume much more, and would always pay with it the correspondido, which is worth more than its value; that the greater part of the price of those mercuries comes from the freights, because these increase in proportion to the distances; and that, being carried overland more than four hundred and five hundred leagues, it is plain that the costs must be added to the price. The proposition is that the crown was losing more in the duty foregone on unrefined ore than it gained on the sale price of the mercury, and it is stated by a serving lawyer of the audiencia rather than by a projector.
The remedy he proposes is a sea route, and its list of goods is a useful inventory of what a mining camp had to import. Page 321 records that if from one of the ports of the coasts of the South Sea the mercuries were carried to Sonora and Sinaloa, the province of Ostimuri and the rest, which is the part where there are innumerable mines, they would be provided more cheaply with those mercuries, iron, steel, powder, salts, magistrales, litharge, lead and whatever else is needed in the mines; and that they would also be provided with clothing and provisions and even with workers, because in such galleys volunteer hands would travel. The same sentence carries the part that a celebratory reading would leave out and this entry does not: that the cities and towns would be cleaned of the idle and the loafers, which is not easy to carry out by land except at great cost, because they register the road when they are taken and have the ease of returning, which would not happen if they were carried by sea. The proposal is for cheaper inputs and for the transportation of the poor in the same breath.
He knows the digression needs defending and defends it in a sentence worth having. Page 321 records his answer to the objection that his business is to arbitrate when it ought to be reduced to a simple narration: that at the time of relating the circumstances of so vast and extended a kingdom it seems to him convenient to propose, here and there, the experience of one who has the thing present, some means by which that kingdom may be peopled; that it has been recognised that the easiest way to pacify the kingdom is to people it with Europeans, in whose shadow the missionary religious make their harvests; and that, knowing that commonly a man is moved to arduous things by interest, and that all have this in the mines, he ought to make it easy for them to work them. The chain from cheap mercury to settlement to conversion is his, and the interest of the writer is on the surface of it.
Then the passage this object exists for, which is about who the rationing actually excluded. Page 321 records that the discoverers of such mines are commonly poor; that with two iron bars, at the cost of their own labour, they take out ores and grind them between two stones; that they do not see the silver for want of the mercuries, because they cannot bear the cost of drawing one, two or more quintales from the treasury when they need only eight or ten pounds; and that from this arises that these poor are forced to abandon their mines, or to give shares in them to others. The barrier described is not the price of mercury but the minimum quantity a royal store would issue, and it fell on exactly the producers with the least capital and the newest claims.
What followed from the forced partnership is set down as a sequence, and the writer says he is describing what happens. Page 321 records that those who take the shares are always under the impression that the poor deceive them; that if, once assured of the good grade of the metal, they accept the partnership, within a few days they push the owner aside and keep the mine; that from this follow the laments of the poor man, the lawsuits, and at last it is found that the mine goes barren and ceases to be worked; that this is what happens to the letter; and that it is by now held for certain that when a mine is litigated the grades are lost. That last clause is a mining commonplace whose sense is that a mine under litigation deteriorates while nobody may work it, and this entry renders it that way while noting that the printed words will also carry the reading that the law is lost. The witness is a lawyer of the court where such suits were heard, writing that the suits themselves destroyed the asset.
He then states the black market the prohibition produced and, unusually, argues against the prohibition while professing to respect it. Page 321 records that for a poor man to obtain a little mercury it costs him double, because its trade is forbidden; that he supposes the inconveniences that follow from that trade to have been weighed for this just provision, which he venerates, namely thefts of ores and the leaking away of silver; that the thefts are not avoided, because in all the mining camps there are dealers who buy ores, so that it is the same whether the one who stole it sells it or the one who would refine it; and that the leakage is not avoided either, because the dealer refines the metals. The structure of the argument is that a prohibition intended to stop diversion does not stop it, is defeated by an intermediary the prohibition itself creates, and doubles the price to the smallest buyer.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 320 and 321 of the Mexico 1870 printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742; the manuscript was not seen and the editors' transcription is not tested here. No mercury account, no minimum issue regulation, no mining ordinance and no case file was consulted, and no archive in Spain or Mexico is reachable from where this entry was written, so the rate of a hundred and fifteen marks to the hundred pounds is reported as this author states it and has not been checked against a treasury instruction. Nothing here establishes what a quintal of mercury cost at Guadalajara or at Chihuahua, how many discoverers were dispossessed in the way described, how many such suits the audiencia heard, or whether any of his proposals were adopted. The account of the forced partnerships is a lawyer's generalisation from the litigation he saw and carries no count of cases; claim six says so, and the reading of the last clause given there is this entry's own.