A ten-year extract of four royal treasuries, and the man who published his own claim with its error bar (1730-1740)
A viceroy of New Spain ordered every royal treasury to report what the king's dues had come to in each of the ten preceding years. Mota Padilla printed the northern returns, argued from them that mine output was near ten millions, showed why the comparison with Mexico could not be made clean, and then wrote that bold propositions discredit a history, confessed he did not know the totals to a fixed point, called his own claim a rash leap and asked someone else to test it.
Why this wins its question: Colonial Spanish American treasury series are among the best-studied fiscal records in existence, and the standard accounts reach them through modern editions of the cartas cuentas. What no account in reach supplies is a contemporary using such a return in public and arguing about its defects. This object gives one: the viceregal order of about 1740 that produced the extract, the ten-year totals for three of the four northern treasuries as printed, the branch list, the back-calculation from a tithe to a gross output of near ten millions with its three stated exclusions, the observation that revenue booked at Mexico was earned elsewhere and that no clean regional comparison was possible without separating it, and an estimate of the untaxed economy inferred from the pearls worn by women of every rank and caste in the kingdom. And it prints the paragraph in which the same man reforms his own proposition, confesses he cannot know the totals, calls his claim a rash leap and asks somebody else to check it, which is not how eighteenth-century colonial writing is usually described.
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 data exist because a viceroy commissioned them, and the page says so. Page 317 records that at the same time as the author wished to know what the kingdoms of Galicia and Vizcaya produced in favour of the royal treasury, the viceroy of New Spain, the duque de la Conquista, had the same wish, in order to form a concept of the administration of the royal treasury that was in his charge, and ordered that the royal officials of all the treasuries should remit him an extract of what his Majesty's dues had amounted to in each one of the ten preceding years. What follows in this entry is therefore not a chronicler's guess but a chronicler's use of a viceregal statistical return.
The return is printed with its branch list, which is what makes it usable. Page 318 records that the treasuries of Guadalajara, Zacatecas and Sombrerete, which are those of the Galicia, and that of Durango, which is of the Vizcaya, formed extracts of all the branches of which their administration is composed, from the year 730 to that of 40, of seigniorages, medias anatas, silvers, mercuries, alcabalas, mesadas, stamped paper, tributes, subsidy, vacancies, sales of offices and the rest; that one year with another of the ten referred to, that of Guadalajara was found to have produced two millions three hundred and thirty-two thousand three hundred and thirty-five pesos, four tomines and ten grains; that of Zacatecas three millions seven hundred and twenty-one thousand six hundred and fifteen pesos, three reales, nine grains; that of Durango two millions two hundred and fifty-five thousand five hundred and fifty-eight pesos, six tomines, two grains; and that in the last year the Durango treasury lacked all the dues from the camp of Chihuahua which had not been brought in when the extract was formed, and which by preceding years would amount to three hundred thousand. He concludes that the four treasuries import about a million each year. No separate figure for Sombrerete is printed on the page, and the three sums given, spread over ten years and increased by the Chihuahua arrears, fall short of ten millions; the round figure is his and this entry does not reconcile it for him.
The paragraph this object exists for is a piece of published self-limitation, and it is unusual enough to quote closely. Page 317 records that the author had not remained satisfied with reporting the riches the kingdoms produce; that, as we are used to seeing in histories, spirited propositions commonly discredit the rest of them; that he therefore wished to reform the proposition in which he says that Galicia and Vizcaya appear to produce more than the rest of New Spain; that for such a leap it was necessary to know two things to a fixed point, the one how much all New Spain produces and the other how much Galicia and Vizcaya produce, and that he confesses he does not know the whole to a fixed point; that he conceives the most opulent mines in metals of good grade that have obtained a name to be those of Galicia and Vizcaya, and that from this generality he drew the consequence of their greater production; that having taken the labour of founding the part that falls to him, another may take charge of qualifying his proposition; and that he will not have much to do, since he confesses it to be a leap, excused by his desire that someone else should occupy himself in finding out the truth of the part he has not been able to. A claim, the two quantities that would test it, the admission that one of them is unknown, the name of the inference used instead, and an invitation to falsify it, in a colonial chronicle of 1742.
He then states why the comparison he wants cannot be made clean, and the reason is an attribution problem a modern statistician would recognise. Page 318 records that Mexico has a large branch of alcabalas because the payment of most of those of the kingdom has been consolidated there, and that in them are included all the merchants of Galicia and Vizcaya, because the fleets from Spain and the Philippines and the fruits of Guatemala, Yucatan, Guayaquil, Cozumel, Caracas and the rest all come to Mexico for their first sale; that this is accidental, since if his Majesty wished, Galicia could have the trade of the Philippines in its ports and all the fruits of Guatemala and Peru could put in there directly, in which case Mexico would produce less in the alcabala branch and Galicia would be more opulent; that the extracts comprehend the provinces of New Spain as well as those of Galicia and Vizcaya and a comparison could only be formed if the product of these branches were seen separated by kingdoms; and that being confounded by their generality it may be considered that Galicia and Vizcaya produce part of those farms. Revenue recorded where a tax is paid is not revenue produced where the goods came from, and he says so before drawing any conclusion from the totals.
The same argument is run on coinage, and there it becomes a proposal. Page 319 records that Mexico has a mint which produces a large sum for his Majesty, but that the silvers worked or coined there are for the greater part from Galicia and Vizcaya, so that with only founding another mint in Galicia the king would obtain in it the same dues and more, from the silvers that go astray. The claim about the origin of the metal and the claim about what a second mint would capture are both the author's, he is a lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara arguing for a mint in his own city, and this entry reports the argument as advocacy.
From the treasury figure he back-calculates output, and he states the multiplier and the exclusions. Page 320 records that he takes himself to have found out the product of the four royal treasuries of Galicia and Vizcaya, which is little less than a million in each year, and that the greater part comes out of the mines whose silvers are tithed, whence he gathers that those mines produce little less than ten millions, that is, without the silvers that go astray, without the gold, which being of little bulk is easy to conceal, and without the pearls quinted in the Guadalajara treasury. The inference runs from a tenth taken in duty to a gross ten times larger, and the three named exclusions are the author's own warning that the answer is a floor.
He then tries to size what escapes, and the method is an inference from what people are seen wearing. Page 320 records that the pearls taken on the placers of the coasts are not so few, that in the year 728 it appears from the books of the Guadalajara treasury, and he says he saw it especially for that year, that sixteen pounds three ounces were paid to his Majesty for his royal dues, and that in the ten years from 30 to 40 there were nineteen pounds eleven ounces, because the diving ceased on account of the unsubdued Indians of the coast having assaulted the divers and taken their lives; that in the years 742 and 743 one arroba and one pound of pearls were paid for the quinto; that against those figures one should reflect on the portion that would be concealed, which he assures would not amount to one manifested in a hundred; and that the hidden ones were and always will be those of the best quality, which is gathered from the many pearls we see in the possession of all the women of the kingdom, since without distinction they have them and wear them, ladies and plebeians, mulatas and indias. He names a mechanism too: owners of boats pay their workers and sailors in pearls and miners pay in silver and gold in bar for want of coin, the parcels being small, and that is the cause of the leakage. The one-in-a-hundred figure is an assertion with no register behind it and is reported here as his.
Two sets of surrounding figures, given because they are what the extract was meant to be compared against, and because one of them undercuts the whole exercise. Page 316 records that a single mine of very low-grade ores at the camp of Los Asientos tithed at the Zacatecas treasury, in the fifteen years running from 712 to 727, sixty thousand six hundred and sixty-seven marks of silver, in the hands of Gaspar de Larranaga; that father Arlegui states that for three continuous years from 738 Manuel de San Juan, of the order of Santiago, was taking out one week with another twenty arrobas of silver from a cavity at Chihuahua; and that father Tello states that in the Zacatecas treasury alone it appeared by certifications that his Majesty's dues had amounted to twenty-nine millions up to the year 645. The same page then records the camp of El Mezquital, sixteen leagues from Guadalajara, whose gold passes twenty-three carats and three grains and is in such abundance that it is traded with throughout the kingdom, although as it were in secret, and all the poor who come and go to that camp, even to sell cigars, carry gold. An untaxed gold currency circulating openly enough for a chronicler to describe it is the strongest single objection to the treasury totals, and it stands in this entry beside them.
The limits of this entry, and the author's interest. Everything above is read from pages 316 to 320 of the Mexico 1870 printing of a manuscript finished at Guadalajara in 1742; the manuscript was not seen, the editors' transcription is not tested here, and no treasury account book, no viceregal extract and no archival series was consulted, the Archivo General de Indias not being reachable from where this entry was written. The figures are therefore reported as one reader of a viceregal return set them down and a nineteenth-century society printed them, and printed digits in a nineteenth-century edition of an eighteenth-century manuscript are the least reliable thing in it. The writer is not neutral: he is a lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara who wants a mint in his city, a Pacific port open to the Philippines, and direct trade for his region, and every argument in claims four, five and six serves that case. Nothing here establishes what the other treasuries of New Spain returned, whether the extract survives, whether the ten-million inference is defensible, or what fraction of output actually escaped duty; his one-in-a-hundred is an assertion and claim seven says so.