Juan Lopez de Velasco, Descripcion universal de las Indias (1571-1574)
The first attempt to describe every part of the Spanish Indies in one book, compiled by the cosmographer-chronicler of the Council of the Indies between 1571 and 1574 and left in manuscript for three hundred years. It counts towns, households, encomenderos and tributary Indians; it fixes the longitude of Mexico from a lunar eclipse; and it rejects Atlantis and the ten tribes to argue that the New World must join the Old somewhere in the north.
Why this wins its question: Lopez de Velasco is usually met, if at all, as a name attached to the questionnaire behind the relaciones geograficas, and the Descripcion itself is described from a distance or through the demographic totals quoted out of it. The book is short in its general part, quotable, and says things the summaries do not: that the Indies were defined as a hemisphere measured from Toledo; that the 1574 count was two hundred Spanish towns, thirty-two thousand Spanish households, some four thousand encomenderos and a million and a half tributaries, explicitly excluding wives, children, the old, the hidden and the unpacified; that the longitude of Mexico was fixed at 103 degrees from two lunar eclipses observed in 1544 by Joanoto Duran, and that the correction moved the demarcation line more than eighty leagues in Castile's favour; that the peopling of America was argued to a northern land connection after Plato, Carthage, Ophir and the ten tribes were set aside as weak conjectures; and that the same volume calls mestizos ill inclined to virtue and records the slave trade as the replacement for prohibited Indian mine labour. Each of those is taken from the pages of the 1894 Madrid printing opened here, with the printed page number beside it, and the editor's own list of the manuscript's errors is included rather than suppressed.
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 sheets read here are the first book printing of the work. The title page gives "GEOGRAFIA Y DESCRIPCION UNIVERSAL DE LAS INDIAS recopilada por el cosmografo-cronista Juan Lopez de Velasco desde el ano de 1571 al de 1574, publicada por primera vez en el Boletin de la Sociedad Geografica de Madrid, con adiciones e ilustraciones, por Don Justo Zaragoza", printed at Madrid by the Establecimiento tipografico de Fortanet, printer to the Real Academia de la Historia, 1894. The text itself opens on printed page 1 under the head-title "DESCRIPCION UNIVERSAL DE LAS INDIAS Y DEMARCACION DE LOS REYES DE CASTILLA".
The manuscript behind the book is a working draft, and its route into print is documented by the editor. Justo Zaragoza states that he began publishing it in the Boletin de la Sociedad Geografica de Madrid in May 1880; that the manuscript had been acquired for his library by Cardinal Francisco Antonio de Lorenzana, archbishop of Mexico from 1766 to 1772 and afterwards of Toledo; that it was then in the provincial library of Toledo under the shelfmark S. R. Est. 11, caj. 4; and that it is the draft of the great Libro de la descripcion de las Indias which Juan de Ovando, visitor of the Council of the Indies, commissioned from Lopez de Velasco.
The work was official, reviewed and paid for, and the paper trail is quoted. Ovando's note records that in the book of the description of the Indies made by Juan de Velasco some things had been emended in the Council and that a copy could afterwards be drawn from the corrected book for His Majesty. Lopez de Velasco's own petition to Philip II, asking that the Council determine what was to be done with the book so that he could make the one the king had ordered for his chamber, carries on its back the endorsement "Ju.o Lopez de Velasco. A xxvij de nou.e 1576"; and a royal disposition of 11 January 1577, cited by the editor from Jimenez de la Espada, granted the cosmographer-chronicler 400 ducados for making and ordering his book of the geography of the islands and provinces of the Indies.
The book opens by defining its subject as a hemisphere rather than a set of colonies. The Indies, islands and mainland of the Ocean sea of the kings of Castile, commonly called the New World, are all the land and seas contained in one hemisphere or half of the world of 180 degrees of latitude and as many of longitude, counted from 39 or 40 degrees west of the meridian of Toledo; reduced to leagues of seventeen and a half to the degree, the demarcation measures three thousand one hundred and fifty leagues north to south and as many east to west, of which two thousand are of discovered mainland lengthwise and about one thousand across at the widest.
Printed page 2 carries the empire in one paragraph, under the heading "SUMA DEL ESTADO TEMPORAL Y ESPIRITUAL DE LAS INDIAS", dated to the year the compilation was finished. In everything discovered and settled up to 1574 there were two hundred Spanish towns, cities and villas, with some mining camps in the form of towns, and in them and in the stock estancias and other holdings close to thirty-two thousand households of Spanish vecinos, of whom three thousand nine hundred or four thousand were encomenderos and the rest settlers, miners, traders and soldiers; eight or nine thousand Indian settlements, nations or parcialidades; and, so far as the tax assessments allowed it to be established, a million and a half tributary Indians distributed among some three thousand seven hundred repartimientos of the crown and of private persons, plus about forty thousand black slaves.
The same page states what the number of tributaries excludes, and the exclusions are the reason it cannot be read as a population. The million and a half is counted without their children and wives, and without the old and the unmarried, and without the many who hide themselves and are left out of the assessments so as not to pay tribute, and without those who are not at peace; and the compiler adds that the Indian settlements themselves cannot be summed properly because most are still to be gathered into towns. This is a fiscal count of adult tributaries made by the body that levied the tribute, and it says so.
The administrative and ecclesiastical skeleton is given in the same breath and is unusually concrete. The Royal Council of the Indies, residing near the king, holds the supreme jurisdiction and temporal government and much of the spiritual; within those states there are two kingdoms, nine royal audiencias and chancillerias, twenty-nine or thirty governorships with title from the king, twenty-four seats of royal treasury officials and treasuries, and three mints. The spiritual state divides into four archbishoprics, twenty-four bishoprics and one abbey, holding three hundred and sixty monasteries - one hundred and twenty-seven Franciscan in eight provinces and a custody, one hundred and twenty-six Dominican in two provinces, seventy Augustinian in two more, twenty-six of La Merced in four, and two houses of the Society of Jesus - with eight convents of nuns and two districts of the Inquisition.
The longitude of Mexico is settled in the book by celestial observation, and the reasoning is set out rather than asserted. Wherever there is an observation of the Moon, which of all the celestial ones gives longitudes with least error, it is to be preferred to any other enquiry; the descriptions and maps made from the padron of Seville commonly put the city of Mexico at 91 degrees of longitude from the meridian of the Canaries, but Joanoto Duran, styled cosmografo-perito, observed two eclipses of the Moon in New Spain in the year 1544 and, checking them in later years, found the meridian of Mexico to lie six hours and fifty-two minutes of time from that of Toledo, to which 103 degrees of longitude correspond. The book follows that figure, noting that other celestial observations by private persons exist but are neither so authentic nor so well founded.
The same passage names what the correction was worth politically, in the compiler's own words rather than a modern reading of them. Regulating the charts of the royal cosmographers, which in many things disagree with one another, by Duran's longitude, the line of the demarcation commonly drawn by Cabo de Humos in Brazil comes to fall some 5 degrees further east in favour of Castile, which is more than eighty leagues inside the part Portugal claims. An eclipse measurement, a meridian and a treaty boundary are one argument here, and the book does not pretend otherwise.
The chapter "DE LA PRIMERA POBLACION DE LAS INDIAS" refuses the learned answers of its own century and reaches, on stated evidence, for the one modern archaeology confirmed. It reports that it is not discovered or established whether the continent runs unbroken to the north or joins the third part of the world called Asia, so that it is doubted by what way men could pass from this world to that. What Plato writes in the Timaeus about a sunken Atlantic land is not held for authentic history; the Carthaginian navigations, Solomon's voyages to Ophir and Tarshish and the migration of ten tribes of Israel up the Euphrates are dismissed together as weak conjectures; and there remains only to believe, until there is fuller enquiry, that the New World joins the other somewhere, as the coasts of China and of New Spain give sign by running towards a junction in the north.
The chapter on the castes is where the book prices itself, and it is quoted here because reporting the counts without it would be a distortion. Under the heading "DE LOS MESTIZOS, NEGROS, MULATOS Y ZAMBAIGOS" the compiler records that mestizos, children of Spaniards and Indian women or the reverse, increase daily everywhere and come out for the most part well built and able, and then that they are ill inclined to virtue and much given to vices, and so do not enjoy the rights and liberties of Spaniards and may not hold Indians unless born of lawful marriage; that the children of black men and Indian women, called zambaigos, are the worst and vilest people there; and that for the number of them some parts stand in danger of disturbance and rebellion.
The same chapter states the mechanism that linked one protection to another coercion, without comment. Blacks of Monicongo and of Guinea had been carried to all those parts in great quantity, for the need there had been of them to take gold and silver from the mines and for the sugar mills and other enterprises, after the throwing of Indians into that work was prohibited; they could not be carried from Spain or elsewhere to the Indies without express royal licence and payment of the duty owed on each licence. The relief of Indian labour in the mines and mills is recorded in the same sentence as the slave trade that replaced it.
The editor prints the manuscript's defects instead of smoothing them, which is the reason a reader can trust the rest. Zaragoza reports the judgement that the description carries the same order, identical phrases and the same errors as an anonymous Sumario of the Indies which Juan Bautista Gessio had censured with no great gentleness three hundred years before 1880; he lists the errors himself - localities placed in a jurisdiction other than the one assigned to them, the same place repeated and given to two opposing jurisdictions, personal names wrongly written or written in different forms, confusion of i and y and of u and b; and he states that he corrected none of it so as not to alter the original, not even the spellings Piru and Guatimala. His one liberty was to enlarge the general table into something closer to a geographical dictionary and to add an alphabetical note of the discoverers and founders of towns in the Indies down to 1574.
What this source establishes and what it does not is worth stating plainly. It establishes what the Council of the Indies believed about its own territories in 1574, in the words of the officer paid to compile it, and what that officer thought worth counting. It does not establish that the figures are accurate: they rest on tax assessments of unknown completeness, the compiler himself says most settlements could not be summed, and the editor of the only printing has listed the manuscript's geographical mistakes. Nothing here is a census, and nothing here was checked against a second contemporary count.