Francisco Xavier de Gamboa, Comentarios a las ordenanzas de minas (Madrid, 1761)
The commentary on mining law written by a Mexican-born lawyer acting as the Mexico City merchants' deputy at the court of Madrid, and printed there in 1761. It is law and metallurgy in one book: alongside the ordinances it explains the working vocabulary of the mines, some of it borrowed from indigenous languages, records who invented which method of extracting silver and in what year, and reprints in full the harshest contemporary indictment of the Indies mines before answering it.
Why this wins its question: Colonial Spanish America is usually presented as a place that received European science rather than one that wrote it. Gamboa's 1761 volume is the standing counter-example and is almost never opened: a Mexican-trained lawyer, deputy of the Mexico City merchants at Madrid, printing with royal privilege a book that is simultaneously the authoritative commentary on mining law, a glossary of a working technical vocabulary partly taken from indigenous languages, and a dated register of who invented which silver process and where — Pedro González de Tapia and Pedro de Mendoza Meléndez in New Spain in 1643, Torre Barrio y Lima in Peru in 1738. It is quoted here from the 1761 sheets, together with the page on which Gamboa reprints in full the accusation that Spaniards treated the Indians worse than beasts, and the page on which he answers 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.
The title page reads "COMENTARIOS A LAS ORDENANZAS DE MINAS, DEDICADOS AL CATHOLICO REY, NUESTRO SEÑOR, DON CARLOS III", by "DON FRANCISCO XAVIER DE GAMBOA, Colegial de el Real, y mas antiguo de San Ildefonso de Mexico, Abogado de la Real Chancilleria de aquella Ciudad, y de Presos de el Santo Oficio de la Inquisicion, su Consultor por la Suprema, y Diputado de el Consulado, y Comercio de la Nueva-España en la Corte de Madrid", printed "CON APROBACION, Y PRIVILEGIO DEL REY" at "MADRID. En la Oficina de Joachin Ibarra, calle de las Urosas. Año MDCCLXI".
The author's own description of himself locates the book precisely in the colonial order: a graduate of the royal college of San Ildefonso in Mexico City, an advocate before the audiencia of that city and before the prisoners of the Inquisition, and the deputy of the consulado and commerce of New Spain at the court of Madrid. It is a work of colonial jurisprudence written by a colonial subject and printed at the imperial centre, dedicated to the reigning king.
Gamboa states in his prologue that the book will explain the technical language of the mines, and that this language is partly indigenous in origin: "el nobilissimo Arte Metalico tiene sus propias voces facultativas, mutuadas algunas de el Idioma Indico en su origen" — corrupted, he adds, by the Spaniards, "corrompidas por los Españoles". He gives the sense of the most usual terms only, remarking that the whole of them would be "empressa para un Diccionario".
The book's declared end is stated in the same passage and is creole: the design of the work, if it succeeds in being useful to the republic, will be "grande honor nuestro, y de nuestra Patria" — the patria in question being New Spain.
Chapter XXII is a treatise on extraction methods rather than on law, and its running heads name the sections: the invention of the quicksilver process, the beneficio de patio, the beneficio por cazo, the twenty-four-hour process with its inventors and their "prolixos experimentos", and the beneficio de colpa with its inventor and the way to test the caparrosa. A commentary on ordinances thus doubles as the fullest printed description of Mexican silver metallurgy of its date.
Gamboa's account of amalgamation credits nature with the discovery and art with the improvement: nature taught men smelting by showing them the hills melted with fire, and itself guided them, by the particles of quicksilver found among the ore, to the incorporation of hard ores with quicksilver, salt and water — an operation "grossera, y pesada en los principios", costing months to yield the gold and silver, which art and experience have perfected by means of the magistrales and other mixtures "de forma, que rinden la ley en veinte, ò menos dias, y aun se ha llegado à tocar en 24. horas".
The twenty-four-hour method is attributed to two named men in New Spain and to a public trial: "Descubrieron este Arte Pedro Gonzalez de Tapia, y el Capitan Pedro de Mendoza Melendez en la Nueva-España en 1643. siendo Virrey el Conde de Salvatierra, en cuya presencia, y de los Ministros de la Real Audiencia de Mexico, se hicieron experimentos con la precaucion debida al fin de su solidèz, y certeza", the trials being authorised as well by several miners and practitioners of the greatest intelligence in the ores of Guanajuato, Pachuca and Taxco.
What the faster method saved is stated in the same section, and it names labour: it spared the repasos and the wasting of the quicksilver, "ahorrandose el gasto, y ocupacion de Indios, con los demàs que demanda el beneficio ordinario". The ordinary patio process, on the text's own showing, consumed indigenous labour in the treading of the heaps; the innovation is presented as a saving of that labour without any account of what the labour cost those who did it.
A second method is credited to a mine owner in Peru. The art or handbook of the new silver process using colpa or caparrosa, white or yellow, "lo descubrió Don Lorenzo Phelipe de la Torre Barrio y Lima, dueño de Minas en el Assiento de San Juan de Lucanas en el Perù en 1738", printed at Lima in that year and reprinted at Madrid in 1743, with a separate summary of it in the same year whose commendation was written by Feijóo.
Gamboa records the failure of the best of these methods to survive. No amalgamation works, he writes, then yields its silver within twenty-four hours, the ordinary run being twenty to twenty-five days or a month; and after so many experiences and authorities as supported it, the twenty-four-hour process "era digno … de averse perpetuado", so that either it was not, or other more powerful reasons and experiences caused it to be forgotten. An American technical advance is recorded here by a contemporary as having been lost.
The book argues for trained, examined and salaried technicians a generation before the crown founded a mining college. Gamboa asks why, when a good master costs a sugar mill so much, the finishing of silver should be entrusted to an ignorant man — "Y para dàr el punto à la Plata, se ha de confiar de un gran barbaro?" — and concludes "Dotados, y examinados deben ser los Azogueros, de quienes tanto se necesita en los Cuerpos de Minerìa", as the assayers already were under the ordinances.
Gamboa prints the case against the mines at length before answering it, and the passage he reproduces is as harsh as anything written in the period: an invective asking what a land inhabited "con tanta sangre inocente" could have produced, stating that Indians and Spaniards disputed the advantage in barbarism — "Disputaban Indios, y Españoles ventajas en la barbarie" — the Spaniards for their part having treated the Indians "peor que si fuessen bestias", and ending "Para ellos cabamos nuestras minas, para ellos conducimos à Cadiz nuestros thesoros". The author of the quoted passage is not named within the portion read.
His answer is the imperial case, and it is recorded here as his argument rather than endorsed: such declamations he calls vain invectives against the visible effects of divine providence, and he holds that from the minerals of gold and silver come the settlements, and from these "la civilidad, y reduccion de los Indios", and thence consumption, tillage and the royal dues. That an interested advocate should print the indictment in full and then argue against it is a fact about the book worth having; that his answer is a providential one is a limit on it.
The evidential limits are plain. This is a lawyer's commentary arguing a case for the mining interest, not a record of practice at the mine face: it shows what was ordered, what was known and what its author wished the crown to believe. It gives no output figures verified independently here, no account of mortality or of conditions underground, and no indigenous voice — the indigenous contribution it does record is a vocabulary, borrowed and, on Gamboa's own statement, corrupted.