Piloto mayor y cosmógrafos de la Casa de la Contratación
The state office that licensed Atlantic pilots and kept the master chart. From 1508 the Casa de la Contratación examined and graded the pilots of the Carrera de Indias, taught them in a salaried chair of cosmography, stamped their compasses and astrolabes, broke the ones that were wrong, and corrected a padrón general from what returning pilots reported. The same code fixed the syllabus, barred the examiner from teaching or selling instruments to candidates, and shut foreigners out of the chair.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts give the padrón real and the pilot examination a sentence apiece, usually inside a paragraph about the Casa as a customs house, and cite no text. Read from the code and from the Casa's own manual, the thing has parts: an advertised concurso with edicts sent to three universities and four pilot towns; a statutory syllabus naming the Sphere, the Regimiento, magnetic variation and the age of the moon; a sevenfold penalty for gifts to the examiner and a ban on his teaching or selling to candidates; fixed inspection afternoons at which a false astrolabe was melted and an uncorrectable chart cut and locked in the treasury; a padrón amended in the time left over; and a sailing order that made every fleet a survey. It also has the two facts most accounts omit — that the chair was closed to foreigners and a Portuguese candidate was refused the grade on that ground, and that by 1672 the marking and sealing had fallen out of use, as the Casa's treasurer writes in the middle of describing 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 office was defined by its examining function. Veitia Linage, libro II capítulo XI, page 139, lists three pilot-major posts in the Carrera — the Casa's, the Armada de Galeones', and the Flotas de Nueva España's — and says of the first that it is "el oficio que se instituyò para examinar, y graduar los Pilotos, y censurar las cartas è instrumentos necessarios para la navegacion", and that it is preeminent in rank and ought to be so in learning, because it is the Casa's pilot-major who grades the pilots of the Carrera, from whom those of the galleons and fleets are afterwards chosen.
Its origin is dated to 1507-1508 and the book that dates it argues with itself. Veitia, page 140, reports from Herrera that Ferdinand called Juan Díaz de Solís, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón, Juan de la Cosa and Amérigo Vespucci to court, resolved to send them to discover southward along the coast of Brazil, and judged it necessary that one remain in Seville "para hazer las marcas (que assi llamaron entonces las que oy cartas de marear)"; Vespucci was the most practical and was given the title of piloto mayor at Burgos on 22 March of that year with 50,000 maravedís of salary, and the same title gave him "facultad para examinar los Pilotos". Veitia then notes that the cédula preserved in the Casa's own first book of titles is dated Burgos 22 December — the year printed on his page is 1608, plainly a compositor's slip for 1508 — so the founding date rests on a chronicler the archive does not confirm.
The master chart was a standing, corrigible artefact, not a single map. By a cédula of 24 July 1512 Juan Vespucci and Juan Díaz de Solís were ordered to make "el padron para las cartas de navegaciõ", which is why Veitia calls them the first cosmographers of the Carrera (page 140); in 1516 Hernando Colón, son of the first admiral, "juntó los Cosmographos, y Pilotos de su Mag. y hizo vn mapa, y padrõ, por el qual se huviessen de regir de alli adelante las navegaciones" (page 146). Veitia also records the mechanism of correction in action: in 1515, when the Castilian and Portuguese demarcations of Cabo de San Agustín disagreed and "no se conformavan las cartas de marear de Castilla", the judges of the Casa asked leave "para hazer junta de Pilotos, y corregirlas", and the chart approved by Solís and other experts — that of the pilot Andrés de Morales — was to be held the best.
The post was filled by advertised public competition. Recopilación libro VIIII, título 23, ley j — Philip II, San Lorenzo, 16 September 1595 — orders that when the office falls vacant the president and judges "hagan poner edictos, y publicar, que se ha de proveer en el mas benemérito", with a term proportioned to the distance of the ports; that the opositores come to the Casa "y en concurso sean exâminados por los Cosmógrafos"; and that of those examined the three most able and experienced in the art of navigation be nominated to the Council of the Indies, which chooses. Veitia, page 141, describes the practice: the edicts were posted in Seville and "se embian a las Vniversidades de Salamanca, Valladolid, y Alcalà", and to Cádiz, Sanlúcar, Puerto de Santa María and Ayamonte where pilots lived, because it is rare to find the theoretical and the practical in one man.
The examiner was separated from the teaching and the instrument trade by law. Título 23 ley ij (ordenanza 130 de la Casa; Philip II, el Pardo, 4 December 1591) forbids the piloto mayor to teach the rules, the use of instruments or the art of navigating, on pain that any pilot or master who learned from him could not be examined for two years and the piloto mayor pay ten ducados. Ley iij (ordenanza 131) forbids him to make charts or instruments for the pilots he is to examine, or to sell those made by others, on pain of paying double, while allowing him to make and sell maps and globes. Ley iiij (ordenanza 132) forbids him to receive "oro, ni plata, ni moneda, ni combite, ni cosas de comer, por sí, ni por interpósita persona, ni por via exquisita" from any candidate, "pena de que pagará con las setenas lo que llevare" — sevenfold restitution.
A salaried chair of cosmography was attached to the examination, with its syllabus written into the law. Ley v (ordenanza 218; Monzón de Aragón, 4 December 1552) establishes a cátedra in the Casa where the art of navigation and part of cosmography are read, and prescribes the course: the Sphere, or at least its first two books; the Regimiento, on the altitude of the sun and of the pole; the use of the chart and how to cast the point on it and always know where the ship is; the use and manufacture of the aguja de marear, astrolabe, quadrant and ballestilla, and how to mark the needles so the pilot knows in any place how far the compass northeasts or northwests, "porque esta es una de las cosas mas importantes"; the use of a general clock, diurnal and nocturnal; and the age of the moon on any day of the year, to know the hour of the tides for entering rivers and bars.
The course was shortened three times in fifteen years. Veitia, page 145, traces it: the 1552 cédula required a year of attendance, or the greater part of one, before any title of pilot or master could be given; a cédula of 3 June 1555 reduced it to three months; another of 6 October 1567 moderated it to two; and a chapter of a Council letter of 1568 declared that the two months were to be counted with the feast days falling in them, and that as to reading and writing "bastasse que supiessen leer el Regimiento de navegacion, y firmar sus nombres". The requirement that survived into the eighteenth-century code is the syllabus, not the year.
Instruments were inspected on fixed days and destroyed when wrong. Ley viiij of the same título sets the sittings on Mondays and Fridays, four to six in the afternoon in summer and three to five in winter, with the seals kept in a two-key chest in the Casa; compass needles are charged on the lodestone and stamped with a mark of approval if true; and if an instrument is not right, "en lo que toca al Astrolabio, se rompa, y vuelva á fundir", while a chart with an error that admits no correction "se corte, y quede en la Sala del Tesoro, para que no se pueda usar de ella". Ley x (ordenanza 142) fixes the order of business: examine candidates first, then mark instruments, and with the time left over "entiendan en ver, y reconocer el Padron general, y añadir en él lo que reconocieren por necesario".
The chart was fed by the fleets. Libro VIIII, título 15, the Instrucción de Generales, capítulo 47, orders the generals to charge "al Piloto mayor, y demas Pilotos, que reconozcan, y demarquen los baxos, placeres, ó tierras, que nuevamente descubrieren, y las que estuvieren mal arrumbadas, ó situadas en las cartas de que usan", to bring in writing what they observed and declare it to the president and judges of the Contratación, "para que nos dén cuenta de ello, y se añada, ó enmiende en las cartas". Observation at sea, deposition at Seville, amendment of the padrón: the loop is written into the sailing orders.
Entry to the pilots' examination was itself regulated. Ley xvj (ordenanza 135; Philip II, Madrid, 11 November 1566) requires the candidate to prove naturaleza of Castile, Aragon or Navarre, more than twenty-four years of age, good habits and good judgement, "no blasfemo, ni jurador, ni el que tuviere vicio notable", six years of navigation to the Indies, and that he be diligent — with four witnesses, at least two of them pilots who have sailed with him and would entrust him their ship. Ley xviij (ordenanza 128; Valladolid, 2 August 1527) requires the examination to be held inside the Casa "y no en la suya, ni en otra parte", before the two salaried cosmographers and the pilots then in the city, "con que no sean ménos de seis personas sabias en el Mar", all sworn first to do it well and faithfully.
The system excluded by birth as deliberately as it selected by examination. The 1552 chair was to teach "los que la quisieren aprender, con que no sean extrangeros, sino naturales de estos Reynos de la Corona de Castilla, Aragon, y Navarra" (ley v); a candidate for the pilots' exam who was not a natural of those kingdoms had to show that he was married with wife and dwelling in them, or if single held the vecindad needed to trade in the Indies — the provision that closes on folio 281 immediately above ley xvj. Veitia, page 142, prints a case: in 1630 Gaspar Piñero Lobo stood for the piloto mayor's place "queriendo estar á todo rigor de exâmen, y concurso", was well reported on, and was met with "la objecion de ser Portugues, y prohibido por esto de conseguir el grado de Piloto".
By 1672 the inspection regime had lapsed, and the Casa's own treasurer says so. Veitia, page 146, having set out the marking and sealing rules, concludes that "aviendo sido en aquellos primeros tiempos el observar estas circunstãcias, ya oy no estàn en vso, en lo que mira al punto de marcar los instrumentos, ni sellar la carta", because what is commonly used in navigation is what the cosmographer of the Casa makes or amends, and the chart Sebastián de Ruesta printed. The gap between the ordinance and the practice is documented here by the institution, not against it.
Neither source can say how well any of it worked. The Recopilación prints orders and the dates they were given, not returns: it records that examinations were to be held before six sworn experts, not how many candidates failed. Veitia, page 146, cites a standing rule, drawn from a cédula of 26 November 1586, that when the cosmographer of the Casa warns the judges "q el examen de los Pilotos no se haze como conviene" they are to provide the necessary remedy — a remedy that exists because the complaint did. Veitia is also the treasurer and juez oficial of the tribunal he describes. What the two sources establish is what the crown required and what one insider reports of the practice, and no more.