Metl, the maguey: the plant a 1615 Mexican pharmacopoeia said could supply almost everything, and the drink the same monarchy taxed and policed
A Mexican imprint of 1615 counts the uses of the agave the Nahua called metl one by one and says the plant alone could supply almost everything human life needs. A creole naturalist of 1788 claimed more than thirty uses obtained by the Indians; a physician printed a chemical study of pulque in December 1772. The cost is in the same record: the drink was a crown monopoly, and a royal order of 1778 proposed administering the taverns to reduce the drunkenness.
Why this wins its question: English coverage of the agave is split between botany that starts with Linnaeus and food writing that starts with tequila, and the colonial record is usually represented by a single quotation from Hernández at second hand. This object goes to four printings and reads them: the 1615 Mexican chapter that itemises fence, roof, beam, thread, needle, war point, food, medicine and fifty arrobas of sap from one plant; the 1788 claim of more than thirty uses obtained by the Indians, made by a creole editor who accuses European authors of having copied Hernández superficially; the December 1772 laboratory account of pulque manufacture in limed bull-hide vats, with an evaporation experiment, a suspicion that the medicinal virtue is in the sediment and an explicit refusal to settle it without further experiments; and the 1778 royal order that names pulque as a ramo estancado of the royal treasury in the same sentence in which it proposes to administer the taverns to reduce their scandals. The contemptuous judgement printed on the Indians' drinking, in the same 1615 chapter that records their knowledge, is quoted here rather than omitted.
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 chapter is where the printed record of the plant begins for a reader in the Americas. Folio 149 of the 1615 Mexican imprint of Ximénez opens "CAP. XII. DE LA PLANTA LLAMADA METL, que quiere dezir, maguey", and the first sentence gives the naming and the botanical problem together: "La plãta llamada Metl, es la q̃ los mexicanos, llamã maguey, suelẽ allarse muchas diferécias, de las quales trataremos en particular", beginning with the species whose leaves resemble those of aloe "ò sauila, pero mucho mayores, y mas gruessas", sometimes equalling in length and height a tree of middling size, spined on both edges and ending in a hard and very sharp point. The chapter that follows it, CAP. XIII, is given to a second species, "DEL MAGVEY AMARILLO QVE llaman Metl coztli", also called coztic metl and "beuti metl, ò maguey de grãde vtilidad".
The inventory of uses on the next page is the reason this plant belongs in a history of technology and not only of botany. Nothing, the book says, is so abundant in New Spain, and if men lived with the moderation and temperance that reason required, "con esta plãta sola parece q̃ bastara, à los proueher de todas las cosas, necesarias à la vida humana, q̃ cassi son innumerables los prouechos, y vtilidades, q̃ della se sacan". It then itemises them: the whole plant serves as fence and guard of the estates; the leaves serve as tiles to keep the rain off roofs; the stalks serve as beams; from the same leaves are drawn threads from which they make alpargatas and lienzo and other cloth work for sacks "y otras cosas q̃ nosotros solemos hacer, del lyno, ycañamo y algodon"; from the spines are made nails and pins, and also "alfileres, aguxas y abroxos", and points fitted for war, and combs; and when the shoots are cut away with a stone razor the cavity yields a juice or liquor in such quantity that a single plant distils "cinquẽta arrobas, y mas", from which are made wine, vinegar, honey and sugar, the boiled sap thickening until it sets as sugar.
The same passage records a religious use of the plant without comment, as part of the inventory: the spines were used by the Indians "para oradar, las orejas, y por esta via mortificarse quãdo se ocupauã enel culto desus dioses". A book printed in Mexico in 1615 under three ecclesiastical licences describes the instrument of a pre-conquest devotion in the same breath as the fibre and the roofing.
Folio 150 continues into the medicine, and the entries are specific enough to be tested. The sap provokes the menses, softens the belly, moves the urine, cleanses the kidneys and the bladder, breaks the stone and clears the urinary passages; the liquor in which the roots of tobacco, "pitziel xochitl, y matlaxochitl", have been cooked is said to cure wounds; a leaf of the same maguey roasted at the fire, pressed out into a bowl and mixed with a little finely ground saltpetre, rubbed on the marks of fresh wounds, removes the scars very easily "yq̃ muy poco ò nada se conozcã, como consta por muchas esperiencias"; cloth "firmissima" is made from the roots; the leaves and the trunk cooked in an earth oven "q̃ llamã baruacoa" are good to eat and taste somewhat of diacitron; and roasted leaves laid on the place act against pasmo and calm pain, "mayormẽte si se beuiere el çumo caliẽte", although with the warning, printed in the same sentence, that it dulls and numbs the sense.
The counterpoint is not a modern gloss but the top of the same folio. The list of ways of making the liquor easier to drink ends with the compiler's judgement on the people whose knowledge he has just spent two pages recording: these are things with which "mas facilmẽte se embriaguẽ, q̃es loque esta gẽte mas desea, y apetece como si les pesasse de ser hõbres, y desear gozar de la suerte de los brutos, animales". The contempt and the ethnobotany are the work of the same hand on the same page, and this object prints both.
A century and a half later a creole naturalist in Mexico City made the plant a test of who was doing botany honestly. In the tome of the Gacetas de literatura read here, Alzate writes that without leaving Mexico "con solo hacerse cargo del Maguey se puede componer una larga disertacion: veo que Hernandez, aquel gran botánico, describió lo que vio: otros le han copiado, ò han surtido ideas superficiales", and that without setting up as a botanist, because he is not one, "puedo asignar mas de treinta utilidades que los indios consiguen por medio del maguey, pero esto será en otra ocacion". A footnote to the same sentence asks the taxonomic question the plant kept posing - "El Maguey es árbol, ò arbusto?", printed with the opening inverted mark this object cannot carry. The claim credited to the Indians is a count of applications, and the man making it is arguing on the same page against De Pauw, "el alucinado Pau", for having judged American productions weak from a study in Berlin.
The manufacture of the drink was described in print at Mexico in December 1772, in a weekly paper of physics and medicine. Number 9 of the Mercurio volante, "Miercoles 23. de Diciembre de 772", is headed "PROSIGUE LA HISTORIA DEL PULQUE" and describes the plant: in a store called a tinacal, sited according to the lie of the ground and the distance of the magueyales, the vessels for fermenting the scraped sweet juice of the maguey stand in order; each is formed of a bull's hide fitted on a timber frame in the figure of a rectangle, the whole vessel imitating a cradle; the inside of the hides is dressed with slaked common lime steeped in water, and a competent quantity of strong pulque already made is put in, "que sirve como de fermento".
What follows in the same number is experimental work, reported with its method and its uncertainty. The author evaporated common tavern pulque: far below boiling heat it made so much white foam, like well-beaten egg whites, that evaporation was impeded, and he skimmed it repeatedly without end; he drew off about an ounce of a very glutinous dark extract of an austere taste between caustic and bitter, "en el olor, i en su tenacidad mui semejante à la cola, hecha de pieles maceradas i podridas", which he attributes to the scrapings of the hides, and he invites the reader to check him: "Quien quisiere certificarse mas, haga la experiencia". The annotations then ask whether the greater part of the medicinal virtue of pulque resides in that sediment, suggest that pulque clarified, decanted, filtered or fermented in wooden vessels might not have the same virtue as the common tavern drink, and refuse to settle it: "esto no se puede determinar sin experimentos". His own opinion is that the lime so much used in the chemical process of pulque contributes much to the healthy effects observed in its administration.
The fiscal fact and the moral programme appear in the same royal order, printed verbatim in a Mexican legal compilation of 1787. Beleña copies a real orden addressed to viceroy Bucareli, "El Pardo á 18 de Marzo de 1778", signed by Joseph de Gálvez: the disorders of drunkenness and greater scandals committed in the pulquerías of the capital "son tan públicos, que han llegado á noticia del Rey", whose piety cannot suffer them and who wants them cut off and if possible torn out by the root. It orders that the alcaldes de corte and the ordinary magistrates live in their respective quarters and visit the pulquerías frequently; and, because that provision alone cannot reach the radical remedy, that a junta be formed of the archbishop, the regent of the Audiencia, the senior fiscal and the superintendent of the customs to examine the most effective means, "y especialmente el de si convendria ponerlas en administracion, como el Pulque, que es un Ramo estancado, á efecto de que manejandose de cuenta de la Real Hacienda, se consiga extinguir ó minorar quanto se pueda los indicados escándalos é inconvenientes". The drink was already a monopoly revenue of the royal treasury, and the remedy proposed for the drunkenness was to bring the taverns into the same hands.
What these four printings do and do not establish. They are evidence for what was written and printed about the maguey in New Spain between 1615 and 1787, not for how many plants were tapped, how much pulque was drunk, or what the estanco yielded: no figure of revenue, production or consumption is claimed here, because none was read. Ximénez is a compiler working at second hand from copies of Hernández he himself calls corrupt; the Alzate text is read in a Puebla reprint of 1831, thirty-one years after the original numbers, so the wording cannot be checked against the 1788 sheets; the pulque chemistry is a single investigator's account of his own experiments, published by himself in his own paper; and Beleña is an oidor printing the orders of the court he served. The agreement between them is about the plant, not about each other.