Socavones and the drainage duty in the mining law of New Spain
Roman law made the lower ground receive the water running down from the higher. The mining ordinance of New Spain reversed it underground: the shallower mine that let its waters fall into the deeper one paid to drain them. The commentator who printed the rule at Madrid in 1761 granted it looked unjust before defending it, described the shafts, adits and horse-whims that did the work — two named from Nahuatl — and recorded the English pumping engine that cost 100,000 pesos and vanished.
Why this wins its question: Ask who paid when one mine flooded another in the Spanish Indies and the sources that win the question today either say nothing or answer with the general claim that colonial mining was extractive and unregulated. This entry answers from the text of the law and its commentary: Ordenanza XL quoted in full, with the two sworn assessors, the Justicia de Minas ordering payment, and the reversal of the Roman servitude of the lower estate that the commentator himself calls "dificil, y aun injusta" before justifying it as one of "las cargas con que el Soberano comunicò las Minas à sus Vassallos". It then supplies what a legal digest never does — the eight malacates turning at Urista, the beasts loaded inside the adit of Rayas, the Nahuatl etymologies of malacate and xacal, the hundred thousand pesos of English pumping machinery that vanished — and follows the subject forward twenty-two years to the 1783 article that made the adit compulsory and apportioned its cost to what each mine gained, adjusted to what the poorest could bear. Where a defensive account would stop there, this one adds the commentator's own warning that inspection served "de pretexto à la extorsion", Humboldt's independent record of the Real del Monte adit finished in 1762 and drowned again by 1783 at 9,000 duros a week, and the flat statement that no page read names one worker, wage or death.
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 rule is printed as Ordenanza XL of the mining ordinances commented by Gamboa. Because some mines might be flooded by the waters running from neighbouring and adjacent mines that are not so deep as they are, so that the working and beneficio of the deeper mines should stop and their owners receive damage, the crown commands "al nuestro Administrador General, y al del Partido, y à cada uno, y qualquier dellos, que tengan especial cuidado de visitar las dichas Minas, y de dàr orden como todas anden limpias, y desaguadas, y se labren, y beneficien". Where a mine takes damage from another's waters, the administrator, at the party's request, has two persons named by the parties and sworn in his presence view and determine the damage and the cost of clearing and draining, and "la Justicia de Minas lo mande pagar: de manera, que el daño cesse para se poder labrar, y beneficiar, y se desagravie à la persona que lo recibiò".
What makes the rule notable is that it inverts the ordinary civil law of water, and the commentator says so before defending it. Gamboa opens the chapter conceding that the determination "Dificil parece, y aun injusta", because it is a perpetual servitude of the lower estates to receive the waters that run naturally from the higher — his footnote quoting the Digest title de aqua et aquae pluviae arcendae, "Semper enim hanc esse servitutem inferiorum praediorum, ut natura profluentem aquam excipiant", and "Agri naturam esse servandam, et semper inferiorem superiori inservire". His conclusion reverses it for mines: "las Minas inferiores no prestan servidumbre à las mas altas para deber recibir las aguas de éstas; y que antes es agravio, digno de repararse, y resarcirse, el que se hace à los dueños de las Minas inferiores en inundarselas, por la diminucion que se causa en la labor, y el interès".
The ground he gives for the reversal is that drainage is not a private convenience but a condition of the grant. "En fuerza de el precepto de la Ley, todas las Minas deben andar limpias, y desaguadas; para cuyo efecto se manda à la Justicia observar el mayor cuidado en visitarlas: este precepto es una de las cargas con que el Soberano comunicò las Minas à sus Vassallos: esta es providencia, y Ley impuesta à los fundos metalicos, y à sus dueños: se forman los Pozos, ò Tiros, se dàn los Socabones, y se disponen Contraminas, para agotar con facilidad las aguas, y arrastrarlas." An owner who lets his shallower mine flood is therefore culpable on two counts, for not draining and for impeding the workings of his neighbour.
The enforcement clause carries its own warning, written by the man recommending it. It is the proper obligation of the Justicias de Minas to visit those of their district and order them all kept clean and drained; "si se inflamáran de este zelo los Alcaldes Mayores, podrian evitarse insensiblemente muchos daños", and the flooded and abandoned mining camps that had once yielded imponderable riches would not be seen as they are. Then the qualification: such visits would be very convenient — "si yà no es que invirtiendose los fines, mas sirvan de pretexto à la extorsion, que de incentivo para el trabajo". The same page that asks for more inspection records that inspection was a known instrument of extortion.
The working vocabulary of American drainage is partly Nahuatl, and Gamboa stops to say so. The wheel machine that raises the water is called "Malacate, por el exe, ò devanadera, en que los cordeles, ò sogas se enredan, ò desenredan al subir, ò baxar"; and "Dicese Malacate en el Idioma Mexicano el huso con que se hila, y de aì se transfiriò al de las Minas." The cover over the mouth of the shaft "se llama Xacal, que quiere decir Choza, ò Cobertizo, para libertarla de las aguas, y para abrigarse los Operarios". The spindle and the hut of Nahuatl thus name two standard fittings of an eighteenth-century silver mine, in a law book printed at Madrid.
The scale of the works is given by example. At Urista the workings stood "solo con descubierto de ochenta varas, quando tenian à pique ciento y ochenta perpendiculares, desde cuyo centro se veìa el Sol, y andaban à un tiempo ocho Malacates" — a work Gamboa calls worthy of the magnificence of a prince, which only the wealth of its owners, the conde de Santa Rosa and the conde de Santiago de la Laguna, could bear. The most celebrated adit he names is that of the mina de Rayas of the heirs of Don Joseph de Sardaneta at Guanajuato, "donde entran las bestias para conducir los metales, y las cargan dentro de el mismo Socabòn". For Potosí he reports, from Laet's Americae descriptio, that the socavón of the Venino needed "veinte y nueve años de un trabajo improbo, para doscientas y cinquenta varas hasta el Crucero"; that figure is Gamboa quoting another author, not a page of Laet read here, and the confidence is set accordingly.
An imported machine is recorded as a failure, with its price. Gamboa holds that to think machinery capable of exhausting the continuous springs of the mountains is to leave the labour and the extreme cost mocked; and that in Mexico much was made of "unas máquinas de Tubos, y Canales de metal, que hizo trabajar en Inglaterra Don Isidro Rodriguez de la Madrid; pero no se sabe su paradero, sino solo aver costado cien mil pesos, y que viviò muchos años, y muriò concursados sus bienes". If mines had to be drained at that cost, he adds, they would have to be abandoned; the common run of miners cannot lay out even smaller sums, and the avíos and credit that reach them in the ordinary way cost them immense trouble and humiliation.
Against the charge that American mining was crude, the commentary answers with a comparison rather than an assertion. The only means of overcoming the abundance of waters are the tiros or socavones, putting on the former the malacate, "máquina comun, y de facil execucion, que no es ruda práctica de los Americanos Españoles; sino la misma de que se han servido los Metalicos de las Naciones: y se vèn en Agricola los Tiros, y Socabones delineados en la forma, que se usan en los Minerales de Alemania". The dimensions of a gallery are then taken from Agricola directly, with the German pace converted in a footnote to "dos varas, y media Castellanas, salva la diferencia del Piè Geometrico al Alemàn".
An adit driven under other men's ground raised a property question the law answered narrowly. Where the socavón or tiro passes through another's pertenencia it is conceded "solo la servidumbre de dàr passo por fundo ageno; pero no para defraudar de los metales al dueño legitimo", a restriction Gamboa says is expressly provided in the ordinances of the nuevo Quaderno and in those of Peru; the adit must go straight on its way, opening only the precise width or height demarcated, and may not spread into crossings or deepen. Where it is driven also to the benefit of the mines it passes, the agreements made on costs and their apportionment, or on the value of the metal found, are to be observed, and failing a pact each pays as the ordinances on contraminas and general drainage provide.
Twenty-two years after the commentary, the crown turned the adit from a remedy into an obligation and solved its cost problem collectively. By the Reales ordenanzas de minería of 1783, owners of mines needing drainage whose situation permits it, and where profit should follow in the judgement of the district Facultativo, "han de estar sus dueños obligados á darlas Socabon suficiente á la evacuacion y habilitacion de sus labores, con tal que lo merezcan y puedan costearlo la riqueza y abundancia de sus metales". Where one adit would habilitate many mines and none alone could bear the work, all must contribute "á proporcion del beneficio que deba seguírselas"; where that proportion cannot yet be established they contribute in equal parts, adjusted to what the poorest mine can bear, and readjusted if its fortune improves — "de manera que no cese el trabajo del Socabon" — everything taxed and arranged by the district Diputación and its Facultativo de Minas. The adventurer who drives the adit is rewarded out of what he finds: new veins met in its progress give him the right and prize of a discoverer, and in known veins he may take one pertenencia in each.
The greatest of the adits Gamboa was writing about was finished the year after his book, and an independent witness records what it cost and what it earned. Humboldt reports that at Real del Monte the cañón "no se acabó sino en 1762 por el compañero de Bustamante D. Pedro Terreros", known by the title of conde de Regla, who by 1774 had drawn from the Vizcaína a net product of more than five million duros, gave Carlos III two warships of which one carried 112 guns, and lent the court of Madrid a million duros "que no se le han pagado aun"; the cañón de Morán crosses the Vizcaína vein at the tiro de San Ramón 210 metres below the floor on which the malacates stand. The waters afterwards outran the works: twenty-eight malacates, each needing more than forty caballerías, did not suffice; in 1783 the expense ran to 9,000 duros a week; after the old conde de Regla's death the works were suspended until 1791, and the machines that lifted the water — "no por médio de bombas sino de cubos de cuero ensartados en cuerdas" — then cost more than 150,000 pesos a year.
What these documents are, and what they cannot show, belongs beside them. Gamboa is an advocate: he writes as the Mexico City consulado's deputy at court and is arguing a case for the mining interest, which is why the registry sets his reliability below his tier. An ordinance is a command and not evidence that it was obeyed; the 1783 cost-sharing article is a scheme on paper and no page read here shows a socavón actually financed under it. Nothing read here gives the number of men who cut these adits, their wages, their hours, one accident, one death, or a single word from any of them, although the same chapters name the horses by the caballería and the costs by the week. Humboldt's depths are his own measurements and his figures for Real del Monte are estimates in a work of political economy, not accounts. Above all, the drainage duty was owed to the crown and to neighbouring owners: it is a rule about property in water, and it is not evidence of anything the law did for the men underground.