Ulli: the first European accounts of rubber, from Oviedo's batey chapter to the holquahuitl of the Mexican materia medica
Two Spanish books describe an elastic solid Europe had no word for. Oviedo, on Hispaniola, watches balls of boiled roots and juices bounce higher than Spain's air-filled balls, and reasons from the bounce why players strike with hip and shoulder, not hand. Hernández's Mexican materia medica of 1615 names the tree and the word — holli, corrupted to ule — and files the gum under medicine. Neither turns it into anything, and the chapter praising the players is written when almost none are left.
Why this wins its question: The history of rubber in English normally begins in the eighteenth century, with European travellers in South America, and the Mesoamerican material is handled as prehistory: the ball game gets a sentence, the substance a footnote. What is almost never quoted is what the sixteenth-century Spanish observers actually wrote, which is better than its reputation. This object prints Oviedo's paragraph on a ball dropped from the hand rebounding higher than a European wind-ball and bouncing again and again "disminuyendo en el saltar por sí mismas"; his inference that a solid ball forces play with hip and shoulder because the hand would be broken; his refusal to award the invention to Pliny's Pyrrhus; and, from a Mexican imprint of 1615, the sentence that gives the Spanish word its Nahuatl parent — holli, corrupted to ule — together with the fifteen medical indications and the claim that Cortés had the game played in Spain. It also puts the cost in the same frame rather than a separate paragraph: the chapter that admires the players of Hispaniola says in its own last page that only a remnant of those people is left. Two openable books, quoted, instead of a summary of either.
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 sixth book of Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo's Historia general y natural de las Indias carries a chapter whose heading states the point of it: "CAPITULO II. Del juego del batey de los indios, que es el mismo que el de la pelota, aunque se juega de otra manera, como aqui se dirá, y la pelota es de otra especie ó materia que las pelotas que entre los chripstianos se usan." The chapter runs from page 165 to page 167 of the text printed by the Real Academia de la Historia in 1851 from the author's codex; what interests Oviedo is stated in the heading as the material, not the game.
He describes the manufacture as a boiling and a moulding. "E las pelotas son de unas rayçes de árboles é de hiervas é çumos é mezcla de cosas, que toda junta esta mixtura paresçe algo çerapez negra. Juntas estas y otras materias, cuéçenlo todo é haçen una pasta; é redondéanla é haçen la pelota, tamaña como una de las de viento en España, é mayores é menores: la qual mixtura haçe una tez negra, é no se pega á las manos; é despues que está enxuta tórnasse algo espongiosa, no por que tenga agugero ni vacuo alguno, como la esponja, pero alijeresçesse, y es como fofa y algo pessada." The negative observation is the precise one: spongy in behaviour without being porous in structure.
The passage that follows is a description of elasticity, made by the only test available and against the only European object that could serve for comparison, the air-filled ball. "Estas pelotas saltan mucho mas que las de viento sin comparaçion, porque de solo soltalla de la mano en tierra, suben mucho mas para arriba, é dan un salto é otro é otro y muchos, disminuyendo en el saltar por sí mismas, como lo haçen las pelotas de viento é muy mejor." A ball dropped, not thrown; the rebound higher than the European ball; the successive bounces decaying of themselves.
Oviedo then reasons from the material to the technique of the game, which is what makes the account something more than a curiosity. Because the balls are solid — "como son maçizas, son algo pessadas" — a player who struck one with the open hand or the closed fist would "en pocos golpes abririan la mano ó la desconçertarian"; and for that reason the players strike with the shoulder, the elbow, the head, the knee, and most continually the hip. The rule of the game is derived from the property of the substance.
He compares what he is watching with the only European game he knows that resembles it, and gives the Indians the better of the comparison. In Lombardy and Naples he had seen gentlemen play with a very thick ball "tan grande como una botija de arroba ó mayor", called balon or palon, struck with the foot; the forms are alike, but "saltan estas de acá mucho mas é el juego en sí es de mas artifiçio é trabaxo mucho". He adds that it is a thing to marvel at how skilled and quick "los indios (é aun muchas indias)" are at it, that it is played men against men and women against women, sometimes mixed, and sometimes married women against virgins.
The same chapter records, without connecting the two facts, that the people whose game it is have nearly ceased to exist on the island where he is writing. Describing what the players wore before and after the Spaniards came, Oviedo writes that "al pressente essos pocos que hay, todos andan vestidos ó con camisas, en especial los que están en poder de chripstianos; y si algunos no lo haçen assi, es entre las reliquias que han quedado destas gentes del caçique don Enrique." Those few that there are; the remnant left of these people. The chapter that preserves the earliest sustained European description of rubber is written over the collapse of the population that made it.
Oviedo closes the chapter with a question of priority that cuts against his own side. Pliny, he notes, attributes the invention of the ball game to king Pyrrhus, "del qual ninguna notiçia tienen estas gentes: por manera que deste primor no debe goçar Pirro, hasta que sepamos quién fué el verdadero é primero enseñador de tal juego, pues questas gentes se han de tener por mas antiguas que Pirro." A royal chronicler writing for the crown declines to award the invention to classical antiquity.
The other book is the Mexican one. Chapter X of the first book of the Quatro libros de la naturaleza — Francisco Ximénez's Spanish version of Francisco Hernández, printed at Mexico in 1615 — is headed "DEL ARBOL QVE LLAMAN holquahuitl, ò arbol chilli", and states where the substance comes from and what it is called: cut the bark and "destila vna goma que los yndios llaman holli, y los Españoles corrupto el nombre vle". The etymology of the Spanish word hule is printed in a Mexican imprint of 1615 by a compiler who says plainly that the Spanish form is a corruption of the Nahuatl one.
The same chapter tracks the gum's change of colour and its use as a ball. It is "al principio de color de leche, y se va poniendo amarilla, y vltimamente negra", the change following upon its being gathered and worked; "y de tal manera salta esta goma que adereçada y puesta en figura de pelota redonda, comunmente se vsa della en lugar de pelota de viento." Two books written a lifetime and two thousand kilometres apart reach for the same comparison — the wind-filled ball — because European material culture offered no other.
What the Mexican book does with the substance is file it under medicine. The ule "prouoca admirablemente la orina, mundifica la madre, y aplicada en ella misma remedia la esterilidad"; mixed with the juice of yollo xochitl it brings down the menses; taken by mouth alone or with things of like virtue it heals humoral fluxes and "las camaras de sangre", and does the same mixed with picietl, "que llaman tauaco", made into little pellets; thrown into food it fattens; mixed with the insects called axin and swallowed in pellets it is said to give the taker "cierta ligereza estraordinaria" and to soften the bones so that the body bends like a tumbler's; applied to the seat it cures choler and takes away pain and burning thirst; and it dissolves the clouds and floaters that impede the sight. An elastic solid enters the European written record as a drug.
The 1615 chapter also states, in one clause, that the ball game itself crossed the Atlantic: "aquesta es aquella tan celebrada goma, con que los yndios solian exercitar aquel juego de pelota, tan admirable de veer que ellos solian vsar, el qual se vido algunos años en España, procurandolo Don Hernando Cortes Marques del Valle." The game was seen in Spain for some years, and it was Cortés who arranged it. The statement is printed some eighty-five years after the events it refers to, by a compiler working at second hand from Hernández's papers, and is recorded here with that distance attached.
Taken together the two books define the limit of what sixteenth-century Europe did with the material. Between them they record a spectacle arranged at court, a pharmacy of some fifteen indications, and an unimprovable physical description of bounce; no manufacture, no trade article, no instrument. The uses that reached print are the two that existing European categories could hold — a thing to watch and a thing to prescribe.