El Lazarillo de ciegos caminantes desde Buenos-Ayres hasta Lima (1773)
The road book of the royal post inspection that laid out the stages between Buenos Aires and Lima, published in 1773 over the name of a Cuzco-born narrator who calls himself Concolorcorvo. It is a working document of an administrative reform - where the posts were sited, and why - and it prints the abuse the reform replaced: mules taken by force from the poorest muleteers, which the book itself calls a tyranny no words can explain.
Why this wins its question: The Lazarillo reaches English readers as a literary curiosity - the first road novel of the River Plate, an authorship puzzle, a source of quotable gaucho colour. Read as what its title page says it is, it is the field record of an administrative reform: the 1773 printing, opened here, shows the mails being resited at the Saladillo de Ruy-Diaz on the advice of men who knew the ground, an agent despatched with written instructions to place the posts from there to Mendoza and if needed to Valparaiso, and a stage stretched to sixteen leagues for a stated operational reason. And on the same footing, because the reform is only intelligible against it, the book's own account of what preceded it: mule levies four times larger than the need so the owners would buy their animals back, the poorest men's animals kept, and the whole named in the text as a tyranny beyond words. Neither the literary reading nor the polemical one carries both halves.
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 of the 1773 printing reads "EL LAZARILLO DE CIEGOS CAMINANTES desde Buenos-Ayres, hasta Lima con sus Itinerarios" as exactly observed, "con algunas noticias utiles a los Nuevos Comerciantes que tratan en Mulas; y otras Historicas". Below that: "SACADO DE LAS MEMORIAS QUE hizo Don Alonso Carrio de la Vandera en este dilatado Viage, y Comision que tubo por la Corte para el arreglo de Correos, y Estafetas, Situacion, y ajuste de Postas, desde Montevideo." The book announces itself as the by-product of an official inspection of the royal mails.
The same page names its author as "DON CALIXTO BUSTAMANTE CARLOS Inca, alias CONCOLORCORVO Natural del Cuzco, que acompano al referido Comisionado en dicho Viage, y escribio sus Extractos", and gives the imprint "CON LICENCIA. En Gijon, en la Imprenta de la Rovada. Ano de 1773." A book about the roads of the viceroyalty of Peru and the new viceroyalty's Atlantic port thus appears over the name of a man described as a native of Cuzco, writing up a Spanish inspector's memoranda.
The pages read here do not settle who wrote it, and they are the reason the question exists. The second part opens with the narrator being addressed inside the text by the inspector - "YA Senor CONCOLORCORVO, me dixo el Visitador, esta Vm. en sus Tierras; quiero decir en aquellas que mas frecuentaron sus Antepasados" - so the name on the title page is also a name a character in the book is given by another character. That, on a title page whose imprint places a Peruvian road-book in Gijon, is weak evidence of authorship. This object claims only what the printing says; it does not claim that Calixto Bustamante Carlos Inca wrote the text, and the attribution is disputed.
The book is, in its substance, an itinerary: the stages, distances and water of a route, written for people who had to move goods along it. Its section "Ruta desde Buenos Ayres a Santiago de Chile, por Mendoza" begins by noting that from Buenos Aires to the Saladillo de Ruy-Diaz the posts are common to the two runs, to Potosi and to Chile.
That same page records a concrete administrative decision and the method behind it. Formerly the runs parted at the pueblo called la Cruz Alta, and some mails cut across from el Pergamino to la punta del Sauce carrying their own horses; the inspector, "con dictamen de hombres practicos", ordered instead that the mails divide at the Saladillo de Ruy-Diaz, for greater ease and safety as far as the fort called el Sauce. Having to take charge of the general route to Lima by Potosi, he sent Don Juan Moreno, "Persona de mucha agilidad", to site the posts from the Saladillo as far as Mendoza and, if necessary, to the port of Valparaiso, under written instructions. A postal network is being designed on the ground, by consultation with the men who knew the country.
The book prints, in as much detail, the system the reform was meant to end, and its language is not administrative. Those who gathered mules for the mails "componian una competente quadrilla de Ladrones", because by rounding up four times more mules than were needed they forced the owners to ransom them with silver, which "aquellos inhumanos Satelites" divided among themselves - leaving penned for the service of the mails "las Mulas de los mas pobres, y por consiguiente las mas flacas, y estropeadas". The judgement is the book's own: "No hay voces verdaderamente con que explicar esta tirania."
The same passage follows the cost through to the animals and the town. The muleteers were often forced to sell mules cheap to feed those shut in a corral that had barely dung in it, and the penned animals then faced a stage of eight or nine leagues at a long trot under double load, so that some never reached the next post, lying down exhausted, and others arrived broken-backed and barely able to carry the harness back to pasture. Word of this got about, so carriers supplying the town timed their approach to avoid the mail's departure or arrival, halting some leagues short rather than lose their thin and tired mules - and the town consequently went short of supplies.
Where the network had to be stretched, the book says why, and the reason is social. On the road through Tucuman the scattered settlers at el Totoral and el Simbolar are dismissed as "Gente de poca consideracion, y la mayor parte Gauderios, de quienes no se pueden fiar las Postas, por lo que esta ha sido preciso ponerla con la distancia de 16 leguas, como sucedera siempre que haya el mismo incombeniente." The judgement is unfriendly and comes from a party whose business was securing the mails, but it is a stage length explained by whom the crown would and would not trust with the king's letters.
The same page turns the criticism upward, at officials rather than at countrymen. The reason the route was taken by la Dormida is that in those places there were only maestres de campo, sargentos mayores and capitanes, whose rank served as a pretext for excusing themselves from the duty of postmaster; the governors of Tucuman, the text says, "parece hacen grangeria de esta multitud de Oficiales, que creo excede al numero de los Soldados, que quitan, ponen, y reforman a su advitrio", and the writer reports having seen a robust man of thirty holding the rank of sargento mayor reformado. Militia commissions sold or granted at discretion are named in a licensed book as the obstacle to running the mails.
The book also states, in the inspector's voice and as a boast, the proposition this corpus exists to weigh. Opening the second part, he tells the narrator that from the Chichas to the Guarochiries every hill is pregnant with silver and gold of greater or lesser assay, that his ancestors made little use of it, and that the Spaniards drew more silver and gold from the entrails of these lands in ten years than the narrator's countrymen in more than two thousand - a comparison he attributes to the reckoning of the most judicious men. He adds that the great buried and lake-thrown riches of legend were "artificio de los Indios, o sueno de aquellos, o a lo menos mala inteligencia". The claim is an assertion by an interested traveller with no figures behind it, and it is recorded here as what the book says, not as a measurement.
The limits of this witness are plain and worth stating. It is the account of an inspection written by the inspecting party, in which the inspector is the reforming hero; it records what he ordered, not what the posts afterwards did. The abuses it prints are prior abuses, and a book that indicts its predecessors is the least reliable witness to its own success. Nothing read here gives volumes of mail carried, costs, or any independent check on the itineraries. What it is good evidence for is the state of the route as the reforming party found it, the reasoning by which the stages were resited, and the fact that a crown official's road-book could describe the requisition of poor men's mules for the king's mails as a tyranny, in print, with a licence.