Part Two
3
MOVING DOCUMENTS
My Dear Sirs—My pen is incapable of expressing the tragic consequences visited upon this city (that was once Guatemala) by the many and forceful earthquakes, the heavy and copious torrents of rain that fell at the same time. . . . And I must tell you that all the goods, letters, notices, and papers sent on June 1 to these kingdoms and all of the monthly mail to and from the provinces lie entombed—buried in the fragments and ruins of the roof and walls of the old office, such that to send you this letter, we have been forced to take refuge under a straw roof in the little plaza of San Pedro.1
—Don Simón de Larrazábal, Administrator of the Guatemalan mail, August 1, 1773
To travel like a letter in colonial Guatemala entailed something very different in 1700 than it did in 1800. By the time Antonio José de Irisarri traveled with a correo in the early nineteenth century, the Guatemalan mail system was a fairly efficient and reliable means of moving documents across the isthmus and farther, to Mexico and Spain. But the development of such a system occurred only in Irisarri’s time. For much of the colonial period, the mail system was an unreliable and above all sluggish means of communication.
Concentrating primarily on the operation of the mail system in the Bourbon period, this chapter argues that the regular and frequent exchange of documents did not become possible in Guatemala until the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In this period, the pace of communication grew systematic and more places were incorporated into regional mail routes. This change in pace would greatly influence the type and genre of document sent through the mail. It would also influence the conception of space and distance, as communication from previously “distant” places became more readily accessible.
The conception of distance projected and utilized by administrators of the mail system in Guatemala shares the “common skeleton” elaborated in the previous chapters. But the mail administrators in Guatemala were men who traveled infrequently outside of the capital. Their conception of space and distance encompassed a broad swath of territory anchored in the Guatemalan capital, and it thereby offers insights into how regional peripheries were perceived from the region’s administrative center. The accounts and “topographic plans” that they created did not rely on state-of-the-art cartographic techniques, and the absence of detailed cartographic information in Guatemala only partly explains this choice. Examining documents created by mail administrators in the context of contemporary definitions of space and distance, this chapter argues that textual representations rendered Guatemalan distances more effectively. The term “league” described temporal—as well as spatial—intervals, and text-based itineraries therefore expressed distance best.
The Workings of the Mail System
The early colonial mail system in Spanish America patched an essentially Spanish system onto an Indian labor force.2 It is certain that, especially in the early colonial period, Spanish officials relied on indigenous roads, indigenous knowledge of routes, and indigenous guides. The scarcity of sources on early communication, however, makes it impossible to determine whether the Spanish and Indian systems merged or whether a parallel Indian system existed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What can be determined is that many continental Spanish conventions expanded with the empire. Legislation prohibiting the opening of mail packets, distinguishing urgent mail from “ordinary” or private mail, and instituting the practice of paying prior to delivery gives some sense of the state of the peninsular service in the mid-fifteenth century. Under Ferdinand and Isabel delivery grew more frequent, and, importantly, more uniform. What had been the royal and public postal services of Aragon, Castile, Mallorca, and Catalonia fell for the first time under the jurisdiction of a correo mayor, or principal mail administrator.3
However, a functional network of continental communication by no means expanded easily into a transatlantic mail system, however earnest the efforts by monarchs in Spain. Charles V established the position for Correo Mayor de Indias, principal mail administrator of the Indies, in 1514, long before anyone was available to take the post.4 Philip II followed Charles V in drafting legislation that attempted to address the problem of mislaid correspondence, protesting that “many people and even entire towns and cities have failed to inform us of many things we would wish to know.” Declaring that the remedy of this was “vital to the crown,” he ordered his subjects to “take care that all letters and packets written . . . by any cities, towns, places, and people of every quality and station be sent to us with utmost care so that we may receive it.”5 Yet fluid and reliable communication proved almost impossible to achieve. Weather, piracy, and the difficulties of establishing safe ports all presented formidable challenges.6
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, two large fleets left Spain each year: one bound for New Spain, the other bound for Tierra Firme. The mail directed to Guatemala and its provinces traveled with the fleet bound for New Spain, leaving between April and June, and the return mail leaving New Spain departed in March.7 As a consequence, while the maritime route between the American and Spanish ports could take as little as two to three months, an exchange of correspondence might take much longer. A letter written in Guatemala in February might be in time to depart with the March fleet out of New Spain and might then reach Seville as soon as May or June. But a reply from Seville could not be expected until, at the very earliest, May or June of the following year. Between 1559 and 1573, when it was still common practice for the king to acknowledge receipt of every piece of official correspondence received from the Indies, the dates of his notices indicate that letters sent to him by the audiencia in Guatemala took anywhere from five to seventeen months.8 In 1599, a typical letter sent by the audiencia took about a year to reach Spain.9
The maritime route was certainly erratic, at best, and unreliable, at worst, and as a consequence much of the correo mayor’s early energy was directed toward safeguarding and systematizing the Atlantic routes. But the emphasis placed upon improving communication between the Americas and Spain indirectly influenced the pace of development within the Americas. While internal communication was doubtlessly important to colonizing Spaniards, the weight of continental Spain as administrative center drew the early networks’ emphasis outward rather than inward. In other words, the need to formalize communication with Spain in no small part determined the use—or, rather, neglect—of local routes within the Americas.
Placing the weight of its direct supervision on the transatlantic route, the Spanish correo mayor left overland administration to individuals in the Americas, who largely fended for themselves throughout the sixteenth century. Their solution was to develop messenger systems that relied on semi-official couriers. A historian of the postal service in Mexico describes an informal system in New Spain that relied on “the goodwill of travelers” in the early to mid-sixteenth century.10 In Guatemala, Spanish administrators counted on a large body of Indians from Mixco Nuevo, an Indian town outside of the capital, and about two hundred mules for transportation of the mail by 1590.11 But as the Spanish and criollo population grew to inhabit places farther and farther afield of the colonial centers and administrative units were established from Chiapas to Cartago, the need for internal communication grew greater. Gradually, the crown attempted to systematize the internal network. The office of correo mayor was created by the audiencia in Guatemala in 1619. Spain had promoted the sale of office for correos mayores on the peninsula since the early sixteenth century; in the seventeenth century the crown continued this practice in the Americas, selling the office of correo mayor in Mexico, Guatemala, and Cuba.12 Three men held the office in Guatemala before Don Pedro Ortiz de Letona, who oversaw the mail system in Guatemala from 1730 until its incorporation by the crown in the 1760s.13
In the eighteenth century the Spanish crown, assisted by Bourbon administrators, finally—albeit only partially—achieved a greater systematization of the mail service, both in Spain and in the Americas.14 In 1706, Philip V placed all of the public offices, including the correos mayores, under the jurisdiction of the crown. In the mid-eighteenth century the postal service was reorganized and the Real Renta de Correos (Royal Post Office) began naming officials with fixed salaries.15 Several attempts were made throughout the century to regulate payment and carriage of the mail. A notable piece of legislation from 1720 set strict guidelines for how mail was to be carried on foot and by horse, both within Spain and to European cities outside of the kingdom.16 These reforms were eventually extended to the Americas, where offices were gradually incorporated into the crown. The second half and particularly the last quarter of the eighteenth century brought considerable and constant modifications to the mail system. In the eyes of Bourbon reformers, the movement of documents across New Spain had for too long been unreliable and slow.
The shape of these reforms can be appreciated most readily by taking a brief step back to consider the efforts of Don Pedro Ortiz de Letona, the last Guatemalan administrator to own the post before its incorporation by the crown. Shortly after acquiring his post in 1730, Ortiz made a first attempt to establish monthly mail service between Mexico and Guatemala. Until then, the mail to Mexico had traveled by courier, dispatched as the need arose by the order of the president.17 The Mexican administrator in the 1730s established a weekly service between Mexico and Veracruz, and he urged Ortiz to take advantage of this improvement by establishing a regular service as well. Opposition from Guatemala’s audiencia president, however, stalled the project for several years, and only with the appointment of a new president in 1746 did the project become possible.18 In 1748 the monthly mail service between Oaxaca and Guatemala was established, at a cost of 2,040 pesos per year, marking a significant improvement over the 32,000 pesos spent previously in correos extraordinarios over a six-year period. The correos would travel five hundred leagues in twenty-six days, leaving the remaining days to rest and collect mail.19
In the early 1750s, Ortiz made a similar attempt to improve the mail service heading south to the provinces. The Guatemalan audiencia president approved a set of measures in 1753 that would carry mail on a monthly basis to San Miguel, Tegucigalpa, and Granada; Costa Rica, lying further south, would send a correo north to meet the Guatemalan correo in Granada. (See Map 3.1.) Correspondents in all the provinces other than Costa Rica, where the turnaround would be bimonthly, would have at least a few days before the correo’s departure and could thereby expect to both receive and reply within a single month.20 The correos sent to the provinces would travel on horseback, in the manner of correos extraordinarios. Though transporting the mail on horseback added greatly to the cost of the journey, it was the only way to cover such significant distances: two hundred and sixteen leagues to Granada and two hundred and thirty leagues to Nicaragua.21
A proposal developed in the same year to carry mail to Omoa gives some sense of how efforts to improve the mail to remote locations continued to depend largely on extra-official carriers. The proposed route required that a soldier carry the mail from Guatemala to the nearby town of Petapa. From Petapa, another soldier would carry the mail to Cuiginiquilapa, where it would be passed on to correos who would travel in turn to Jutiapa, Santa Catarina, Ipala, Chiquimula, and Zacapa. From there one carrier would make the long journey to Omoa. The correos would be compensated at a rate of one real per league. The return trip, however, proved far more tenuous. From the fort in Omoa, the mail would be carried by a soldier to the ranking officer in the nearby outpost of los Vigenes, where he would request that a traveler on his way to Gualan carry the mail to a local Indian offical. From there, an Indian would carry the mail to Zacapa, where the return route would resume. In the orders establishing this route, the official concluded by requesting that the officer at the fortifications in Omoa express his profound gratitude to the travelers who assisted in carrying the mail.22 Attempting to balance the necessity of communication with the dangers of entrusting correspondence to extra-official carriers, he could only hope that reliable travelers would be on hand.
MAP 3.1. Mail destinations to the southeast of Guatemala City in the 1750s
Efforts to systematize such routes proved difficult to sustain. In 1768, Don Joseph de Garayalde, appointed as the first administrator of the newly created Administración General de Correos in Guatemala, surveyed the past operations of the mail system with evident disappointment.23 While the mail to Mexico had managed to maintain itself, the mail service to Omoa apparently had never become a permanent fixture. The monthly service to the provinces had survived only from 1755 to 1763, during which time it was partly subsidized by a sales tax.24 In 1766 the mail to the provinces was resumed, this time financed directly by portes, the fees charged for mail delivery, but this had only proved sustainable by allowing the correos to carry encomiendas, or goods entrusted for private delivery. As discussed further in Chapter 4, this measure was less than desirable, as the weight of the goods tended to slow the correos’ journeys significantly. The route had, at least, expanded beyond the handful of towns on the proposed route in 1753. Leaving the capital mid-month, it returned on the ninth or tenth of the following month “with all the replies from Sonsonate, San Salvador, San Vicente, San Miguel, Choluteca, Tegucigalpa, Comayagua, Puerto de Realejo, Leon in Nicaragua, and Granada.” The only exception was Cartago, in Costa Rica, “which only delivers mail until three or four months later as a result of the scant correspondence and the great distance to Granada.”25
Nevertheless, it was evident to Garayalde and to his superior in Spain, the Marques de Grimaldi and General Superintendent of the Post and Mail, that the Guatemalan system would need to be reformed. In regulations sent to Guatemala and dated September 24, 1764, the Marques de Grimaldi had already overhauled the maritime mail route. The “Provisional Regulations, which his Majesty orders be observed for the establishment of the new monthly mail that is to leave Spain for the Indies” set out exhaustive instructions for the passage of monthly mail between La Coruña, in Spain, and Veracruz. The guidelines discussed in Chapter 1 concerning the treatment of paper were here articulated explicitly, specifying the routes to be followed in the Caribbean (through Havana), setting strict measures for compliance to avoid delays, and indicating how the packets of mail were to be packed, in labeled trunks, so that each would reach its appointed destination in New Spain. The regulations also established the official rates for mail delivery.26
For Guatemala, as for most of New Spain, one of the greatest obstacles to creating a workable system lay in the fee schedule. Until the incorporation of the mail system, each piece of mail was paid for twice: by the sender, who paid the porte, and by the receiver, who paid a sobre-porte. A select group of officials were excused from payment, but private individuals and merchants were not. As a consequence, these often preferred to send their correspondence privately by personal messenger or trusted traveler.27 For the crown’s new mail system to be sustainable, it was necessary to capture these unofficial currents of correspondence and incorporate them into the official mail service. The fees, routes, and schedules had consequently to create an official alternative that would render the unofficial conduits of communication either redundant or too costly. The new guidelines for the mail service established by audiencia president Don Pedro de Salazar Herrera on February 22, 1768, attempted to do both. As an inducement, the crown authorized the Guatemalan president to abolish the fee (sobre-porte) charged to people in Guatemala for mail received from Spain.28 Guatemalans would pay nothing for the overland transportation of any mail sent to them overseas. But, at the same time, sending what was now termed “clandestine” mail—mail sent by any means other than through the official system—would be punished with a stiff fine.29 Any mail sent by private messenger to a destination on the route would be considered “clandestine.” Documents sent privately to locations off of the routes would be allowed, but only on the condition that they were stamped at the central office before being dispatched.30 This measure, which the administrator Garayalde described as “lenient,” was intended to acclimate the residents of Guatemala to the presence of the post offices while more routes were introduced.31 It allowed him to report some initial success after the first month under the new guidelines. While the majority of mail was still traveling clandestinely, the office stamped a fair number of packets.
TABLE 3.1.
Pieces of outgoing mail from Santiago, Guatemala in 1768
Source: Derived by the author from documents at the Archivo General de Centroamérica
However, as Garayalde’s list of successfully dispatched letters made clear, it would be impossible to curtail the volume of clandestine mail unless more postal offices were added to the system. Of the outgoing letters that Garayalde inventoried in March of 1768, only those traveling to Mexico were headed to an estafeta (post office); all of those heading south to the provinces had to be sent to the care of other officials, most often the local alcalde or corregidor. Furthermore, the routes created by Don Pedro Ortiz de Letona simply did not reach all the destinations in Guatemala where people—private individuals and officials alike—wanted to send their mail. Neither the route to the provinces nor the route to Mexico, for example, would carry correspondence to Omoa or to the Pacific coast.
The other significant challenge lay in trying to provide mail service to remote places in less time than a private messenger would have required. The first important step in this direction would be to establish regional post offices throughout the audiencia. Garayalde recommended the creation of at least three post offices in an initial attempt to redirect clandestine mail through the official channels: in the Golfo de Honduras, Castillo de San Felipe, Omoa; in Cobán, the Presidio del Petén; and in the Provincia de San Antonio, Soconusco.32 Don Joseph Melchor de Ugalde, Garayalde’s successor in the post of administrator in Guatemala, continued the effort to expand the mail routes and add estafetas. In a January 1, 1769 letter to his superiors in Spain, Melchor discussed the route to the gulf, which Garayalde had apparently not yet established, as well as additional routes to Soconusco and Verapaz, provinces to the west and north of Guatemala. Melchor recommended replacing the occasional service to the gulf with a regular correo, and for Soconusco he suggested that the governor of that province send a correo north to meet the Guatemalan carrier at a convenient hacienda on the route. But Verapaz, Melchor claimed, did not need mail service, and his argument makes evident the logic behind the establishment of new post offices.
To the Province of Verapaz it is not necessary to establish mail service because there would be no way to finance it, considering that there is only one Spaniard in the town—the district governor. All the other people are Indians, mestizos [mixed Spanish and Indian], mulattoes, and zambos [mixed Indian and Black], and they neither write nor have use for writing. The correspondence by the Dominican friars in the area would defray the expenses very little, because all of them including those at the monastery in Cobán add up to barely twenty, and the rest of them have no correspondence.33
In establishing post offices, then, administrators made assessments as to the literacy of the population and its demands for correspondence. These factors doubtlessly influenced Melchor’s decision to give priority to the routes heading east. In April1770, he wrote to announce the first official departure to Chiquimula, Zacapa, and Omoa in the gulf.34 The other principal factor that influenced Melchor’s decisions to expand provincial routes was commerce. He recommended improving the service to Gracias a Dios as a benefit to the tobacco industry, and he suggested adding an additional carrier to the Quetzaltenango route “because of its commercial ties and its abundance of Spaniards and Ladinos.”35
By 1772, these efforts had created a far more cohesive communication network across Guatemala than had existed ten years earlier. A list of place names created by Don Simón de Larrazábal, Melchor’s successor, offers an exhaustive account of all the “Cities, Valleys, Provinces, Towns, Settlements, Farms, and other Places” attached to the Guatemalan renta: about six hundred places of varied size and importance could expect to send and deliver mail.36 While not all of the places Larrazábal listed had estafetas, they were at least serviced by the route. Reaching all the way from Ciudad Real in Mexico to Cartago in Costa Rica, the mail system had managed to solidify the routes set out in the mid-eighteenth century, creating an expansive network of linked places.
Larrazábal details, at the end of his document, a few areas that were not serviced by the mail system, due to their “scant or non-existent correspondence.” The Partido de Verapaz, the Presidio del Petén, the Provincia de San Antonio, the Provincia de Soconusco, the Alcaldía Mayor de Esquintla, the Partido de Guazacapán, and the dozens of smaller villages near them were not connected to the Guatemalan mail system. These remained, for a time, off the map. With the fundamental network established, all that remained for Larrazábal in 1772 was to formalize estafetas in many of the places on his route and extend the routes to the few un-serviced areas.
But Larrazábal’s plans were interrupted and the foundations of the growing mail system were violently shaken with the earthquake of 1773. The city was destroyed, and after several desperate days Larrazábal made his way with the majority of Guatemala’s inhabitants to la Hermita, a valley several leagues distant that had once been used to pasture cattle and would soon become the new capital. In Cortés y Larraz’s landscape-map of the valley, la Hermita appears as a barely habited expanse of yellow hills. By September 1773, a month and a half after the earthquake, the valley was being transformed; Larrazábal had begun to reestablish the postal system in la Nueva Guatemala (New Guatemala), and the old capital, now Antigua, had only a farmhouse to receive and dispatch occasional correspondence.37 He must have worked incessantly in the years following the establishment of the new capital, because by 1778 his reports to administrators in Spain reflected a highly functional regional mail system.38
Before his retirement to a post in Mexico in 1779, Larrazábal sent a requested report on the Guatemalan renta’s revenues. Overall, the renta was doing well, and it promised to do better soon thanks to the new fee schedule. In August 1778, the payment of sobre-portes in New Spain was reinstated, and the original fees set out in 1764 were raised.39 But certain basic challenges remained in place, such as ensuring a reliable and profitable communication link with Spain. Larrazábal sent his superiors a balance sheet of the renta’s expenditures for each trip to Oaxaca. At a total cost of 1,398 reales, the trip to Mexico generally proved worthwhile, from the renta’s point of view, only when the correo was able to collect correspondence from Spain. The returns without it could be as low as 300 reales; with the arrival of correspondence from Spain, this figure could jump to 2,500 reales or more.40
Larrazábal further detailed the cost of the round-trip journeys to the principal destinations in Guatemala in his October 1778 report (Table 3.2).41 Larrazábal’s table demonstrates starkly the cost of maintaining peripheries. While journeys to Oaxaca were among the costliest, these were amply justified by the link to Spain, when it occurred. But places like Petén, León, and Verapaz looked quite different. Sustaining contact with these lightly trafficked peripheries had quite a price.
With the correo on horseback costing nearly ten times as much as the correo on foot, and the bulk of the portes coming from overseas correspondence, Larrazábal made it his priority in the last year of his administration to coordinate the schedule of the monthly mail with the arrival of correspondence from Spain in Veracruz. The date of the mail’s departure for Oaxaca (where it would go on to Veracruz) had since the 1760s been a point of debate among audiencia members and mail administrators in Guatemala. The ships’ uncertain arrival dates inevitably made the Guatemalan mail’s timing in Oaxaca hit-or-miss. In 1778, Larrazábal attempted to correct for the uncertainty inherent in the schedule by creating a second monthly mail to Oaxaca. If the first mail failed to coincide with the arrival of overseas mail in Oaxaca, the second mail would ensure that the entire month did not pass without receiving the packets from Spain. Don Juan Miguel de Yzaguirre, Larrazábal’s successor, adhered to this schedule until 1781, when he suggested doing away with the second monthly mail to Oaxaca and creating instead a regular link to Spain through Omoa.42 He canceled the second mail, which departed Guatemala on the twentieth of the month, but as a consequence coordination with the maritime mail once again became difficult. In the late 1780s and early 1790s, the mail administrators in Guatemala continued to debate with the audiencia the most favorable date for the Oaxaca mail’s departure.43 Despite the significant improvements in mail service overall, Guatemala still lay at a great distance from Spain.
TABLE 3.2.
Distances and costs of mail routes from Nueva Guatemala in 1778
Source: Derived by the author from documents at the Archivo General de Centroamérica
In contrast, local distances seemed to be shrinking. While coordination with the arrival and departure of overseas mail remained profitable but problematic into the late eighteenth century, the regional system that gathered and distributed mail overland grew progressively more expansive and efficient. Don Miguel de Ateaga y Olozaga, the Guatemalan administrator in the 1790s and early 1800s, steadily added nearly a dozen post offices each year in the 1790s. The result was a wide-reaching communications network that, while not immediately profitable, laid the groundwork for substantial future earnings in the form of local traffic. In 1795, Ateaga sent a “plan topográfico” (topographic plan) to his superior in Spain that listed exhaustively the places serviced by the mail system and the distances, in leagues, between them.44 The fold-out “plan topográfico,” housed today at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, is almost identical to a 1793 plan created by Ateaga and housed at the Archivo General de Centroamérica in Guatemala (Figure 3.1).45
FIGURE 3.1. Portion of the 1793 “Estado o Razón” showing Guatemalan distances
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
Both plans intended to provide a comprehensive picture of the distances covered by the mail system. The 1793 plan, titled “Account or report of the distances that exist between this Capital and the other Cities or Provincial Centers: days in which the mail arrives and departs from them and leagues covered on the way to places transited by the mail on foot and on horseback,” like its 1795 counterpart, lists the place-names of locations along the correo routes, traveled both by horseback and on foot, and it further includes a monthly schedule of the arrival and departure dates to principal locations. As such, it provided administrators in Spain with the most complete reckoning of mail travel in Guatemala they had seen.
The Conception of Distance among Guatemalan Mail Officials
The lists and tables prepared by late eighteenth-century mail officials in Guatemala reinforce the route-based, hierarchical conceptions of distance and space discussed in previous chapters. In one important regard, however, the correo documents are different: the supplemental documents surrounding the correo charts and itineraries provide much greater context than that available for other itineraries and route-based documents. These documents go beyond illustrating the widely held conception of route-based, hierarchical space to provide some explanations for why officials may have relied on these concepts to make Guatemala visible, knowable, and quantifiable.
It bears notice that the Guatemalan administrators’ tables and lists were not the only format utilized by correo officials. Other representations of mail routes were sent to Spanish administrators from across the Americas in the late colonial period. A 1772 mail chart created in Chile, titled “Table of the distances that exist between the cities and other principal places in the Kingdom of Chile, based on the most exact calculation possible according to estimates,” places the quantification of distance at the axis of two places (Table 3.3).
TABLE 3.3.
Portion of 1772 Chilean distances chart
Source: Derived by the author from documents at the Archivo General de Indias
Similar to a modern chart calculating driving distances, the Chilean chart maximizes the use of space on the page to quantify the distances between more than forty places.46 While the distances are likely calculated along routes, the format of the table does not emphasize routes, ignoring intermediate destinations in favor of total distance. The table furthermore places no emphasis on the relative importance of places, locating place-names along the steps of the table in alphabetical order. Only prior knowledge of the region would permit a reader to identify the most administratively significant places.47
An 1804 document sent to Spain from Buenos Aires takes a different approach, approximating most closely what a modern reader would expect. A detailed cartographic representation, the “mail and postal offices” map from Buenos Aires, quantifies the distances along the mail routes from place to place. The viewer is able to contrast the aerial, spatial representation with the quantification of distance.48 However, while it identifies places and distances along routes, the map places as much if not more emphasis on topographical features, namely the network of rivers and tributaries. Spreading across the surface of the map like veins, the detailed waterways dominate the landscape, covering all but the top two-thirds of the left side and filling the map with their prominent titles.
At the other extreme of visual and textual representations, an 1806 document from Peru, titled “Itinerary of the mail and post offices and other stopping points among the communities of naturales that live along the four routes of this Kingdom, these being the Cuzco, Arequipa, Valles, and Pasco routes,” traces a narrative journey from place to place along the routes, quantifying distance for each leg of the journey but also describing the state of the road, the availability of supplies, and the nearby settlements.49 Resembling some of the relaciones discussed in Chapter 1, the Peruvian itinerary places a heavy emphasis on routes in their context. Road conditions, supply sources, and climate are as integral to the description of distance as is the measurement of leagues. As these few varied examples demonstrate, American postal administrators in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries relied on a variety of visual and textual forms to quantify distance and represent the extent of their mail systems.
The itinerary-table prevalent in Guatemala was, nevertheless, a widely used form. The relaciones, tribute reports, and other genres discussed in previous chapters all demonstrate its prevalence. Prevalence and precedent alone, however, do not account for why itineraries remained a favored form of representing the mail system into the late colonial period.50 After all, the requests for information from Spain in this period specifically requested maps. Ateaga wrote in April 1795 regarding the administrators’ request, in what is probably an exact quote of their language, that he will work on the “comprehensive Topographic Map of the post offices in this administration, the distances between them, their local situation, their stopping points and subdivisions.”51 Why, then, send itineraries instead?
Part of the explanation lies in examining what cartographic tools Ateaga had on hand. By the late eighteenth century, mapping technology was sufficiently well developed in Spain, and by extension in Spanish America, to have made an accurate cartographic representation of the mail routes possible—at least in theory.52 The 1804 map from Buenos Aires created only a decade later testifies not only to the technological capacity of American administrators but also to their willingness to see distance along postal routes quantified visually. It is almost certain, however, that such mapping technology was unavailable in Guatemala.53 The existing printed maps of Central America, while reasonably accurate, were insufficiently detailed for the postal officials’ purposes.54 And while Spanish archives are full of maps sent from Central America to Spain in the colonial period, there is no evidence to suggest that these maps (or their duplicates) were considered useful cartographic guides within the region itself. In other words, the maps by Cortés y Larraz’s anonymous painter, the maps accompanying the relaciones geográficas, and the numerous other maps created in Guatemala did not serve any demonstrable purpose for officials living within Guatemala. These maps were clearly intended to make Guatemala visible to distant readers, and it may be that this was the only goal they accomplished.
The replies by mail officials suggest that what they required and lacked was a spatial representation that would address their understanding of the region and, presumably, contain the requisite amount of detail. Simón de Larrazábal complained in 1778 that “in this Kingdom there is no general map of its territory, as I have already made known to my superiors.”55 And Ateaga, when pressed by Madrid to create a map, protested, “the local placement of post offices cannot be represented due to the absence of formal Maps of the Kingdom, and the information provided by the Administrators is an inadequate substitute.”56 The information provided by subordinates for his composite document was of a different nature.
The other part of the explanation regarding why administrators sent itineraries lies in examining how they defined mapa and its related spatial concepts. Ateaga’s protests and disclaimers indicate that the tables he sent to Spain were not, in his estimation, “mapas formales.” What, then, did he understand a mapa to be? Ricardo Padrón’s study of early modern Spanish cartography in the new world traces the development of the term mapa, shedding light on how the Guatemalan officials may have understood it. Comparing entries from Sebastian Covarrubias Horozco’s 1611 Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española with others from the Real Academia Española’s Diccionario de autoridades (1726–1739), Padrón observes that mapa shifted markedly in meaning. By the eighteenth century, mapa reflected centuries of scientific and technological innovations: what Padrón calls “the cosmographer’s hegemony.”57 The Diccionario de autoridades defined mapa as follows:
The geographical description of the earth, usually done on paper or canvas, and upon which one puts the places, seas, rivers, mountains, other notable things, with proportionate distances, according to the scale one chooses, marking the degrees of latitude and longitude of the country one describes, so that the location or place of these things on earth can be known.58
As Padrón argues, by the eighteenth century mapa suggested an abstract, almost scientific conception of space, represented on a flat surface in relation to topographical features. In contrast, Covarrubias’ definition of mapa is both vaguer and more inclusive: “MAPA. Is what we call the table, canvas or paper on which one describes the earth, in whole or in part, and might be derived from MAPPA, which means canvas or cloth.”59 Padrón’s insightful comparison suggests that by the eighteenth century, cartographic innovations had narrowed the term so that the tables prepared by the administrators could no longer legitimately be called maps. Innovations in cartography beginning in the Renaissance and furthered by technological innovations during the Enlightenment had served to transform the category.60
In some sense, however, the administrators’ use of the word mapa is misleading. While their usage of mapa suggests a break with pre-Enlightenment and pre-Renaissance cartographic tradition, their treatment of distance, space, and place points to certain continuities. Specifically, they appear to have preserved a traditional conception of distance incorporating a temporal component. In his analysis of sixteenth-century narrative accounts of the new world, Padrón argues that early Spanish colonists understood space in terms inherited from the middle ages: “they perceive ‘place’ and ‘nonplace,’ and they understand ‘space’ as the route one takes to get from one place to another.” They relied, in other words, on the idea of “space as interval rather than area.”61 Padrón goes on to argue that by the eighteenth century and in formal Spanish usage, this conception had changed. He describes a change concurrent to the evolution of mapa in the meaning of the term espacio, or space: a change that eliminates the temporal dimension. Covarrubias describes space, he indicates, as a synonym of place: “From the Latin word SPATIUM, capedo, intervallum; meaning place.” But, significantly, he also uses espacio temporally: “It also abbreviates the interval of time,” Covarrubias writes, “and so we say for space of time of so many hours, etc.”62 In contrast, the eighteenth-century Diccionario de autoridades defines espacio as “capacity, breadth, longitude or latitude of a terrain, a place, or a field. It is taken from the Latin spatium, which signifies the same.”63 The definition appears to have incorporated many of the scientific principles informing the definition of mapa.
It is tempting to see in this contrast a sharp break in the conception of space; but these definitions from the respective dictionaries do not tell the whole story. The second definition of espacio in the Diccionario de autoridades echoes Covarrubias: “it also means interval of time: and it is said as follows, for the space of an hour, of a day, of a month, of a year, etc. Intervallum. Temporis Spatium. Santa Teresa, Biography, Chapter 29: She can well envision it with her imagination, and look at it for some space [of time].”64 Essentially, the Diccionario and the Tesoro both foreground the spatial description, but the Diccionario, with its enumeration of primary and secondary definitions, only appears to do so more starkly. (Covarrubias does not enumerate meanings.) The split of time and space seems even more doubtful if definitions of place and time are considered in comparison. For Covarrubias, “place is said of all that which contains in it other things. . . . Place often signifies city or town or village, and we say: in my place, in the town where I was born. . . . To make a place for something, to make way. To not have a place, to not have time.”65 And of tiempo he says, “to have time, to have a place. . . . To make time for something, to make a place.”66 The Real Academia definition follows Covarrubias closely: “place: a space that contains other things. It derives from the Latin locus, which signifies the same; place2: also signifies site or point; place3: also means City, town or village; . . . place6: also signifies time, space, opportunity or occasion.”67 Tiempo it defines with only indirect reference to place as “the successive duration of things,” but considering the scope of Covarrubias’s laconic musings, most of which are in Latin, not much is lost.68 The definitive entry in Diccionario de autoridades, however, concerns distancia: “The space or interval of place or time, by which things or events are separated from each other.”69 As the various entries make clear, far from being divorced of the temporal element, space itself and even more so its related forms, distance and place, remained closely tied to time in the eighteenth century according to formal Spanish definitions.
It is unlikely, therefore, that by the eighteenth century space and place had completely shed their temporal components in Spain and Spanish America. Cartography and the related term mapa evolved while conceptions of distance, space, and place preserved a more traditional temporal emphasis. A similar coexistence of competing conceptions is evident in the use and definition of the league, which geographer Roland Chardon has exhaustively studied in the North American context. The league emerged from two distinct metric bases.
The first was a time-distance concept by which the league was defined in terms of distance walked in an hour (or other temporal unit), and became linearly manifested in standards of human movement, such as the foot, step, and pace; from these were created states, miles, and leagues. The second basis was geodetic, wherein itinerary measures were defined in terms of a certain number to the degree of the terraqueous great circle.70
Despite efforts to unite and standardize these measures, the league eluded a stable definition. Chardon points out that in the European context, he has come across more than one hundred “specific and different definitions of the league.” To some extent this variety proliferated also in the colonial Americas, where the diversity of leagues—for example, in South America—could be “bewildering.”71
Covarrubias defines “legua” rather inflexibly as “the space along a route that contains three miles.”72 The Diccionario de autoridades, however, defines “legua” as “a land measurement whose magnitude varies greatly among Nations; seventeen Spanish leagues correspond to one degree, and each league is what one regularly travels in an hour.”73 Definitions in modern sources that consider colonial usage also vary, despite the fact that “the standard of 5,000 varas or somewhat over 2-1/2 miles was adopted by Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza in 1536 in Nueva España.”74 Even after the attempted standardization in 1536, no single definition prevailed across Spanish America.
Fortunately, according to Chardon, only a few different leagues were employed in Central America and the Caribbean, and those rather uniformly. The Spanish league may have varied across North America as a whole (as Chardon’s table of more than a dozen Spanish American leagues confirms), but it varied less within specific regions.75 Of the two most common measures, the legua común (common league) and the legua legal (legal league), the legua común was used most in the Reino de Guatemala: “It is listed as the legua in Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, but in general the legua común appears to have been used primarily to describe itinerary distances rather than precise land measurements. As such, it tended to represent an hour’s travel on foot.” Even in Europe, Chardon argues, the “league’s original purpose . . . to delineate an hour’s travel on foot . . . seems never to have been fully discarded.”76 So while the Spanish league may have officially—and in most of the empire—been an exclusively spatial measure of roughly 2.6 miles, in Guatemala it was very likely different.
Leagues were temporal not only in theory. Further scrutiny of the correo tables from Guatemala confirms that distance and leagues were clearly temporal in practice, too. Three marked tendencies emerge when the charts are considered together: an emphasis on hierarchy of place; a conception of space organized through routes; and the quantification of distance as space-time intervals along those routes. These tendencies echo the representational choices in the document genres considered previously. They also, significantly, mirror the two models of composite documents discussed in Chapter One: documents built cumulatively over time-space intervals along routes and documents produced radially by peripheries informing the center.
The hierarchical organization of place is evident in every aspect of the charts, most clearly in how they place the Guatemalan capital clearly at the “center.” The first two sections of Ateaga’s 1793 table, as well as Larrazábal’s 1778 table, quantify distances from the capital to other cities and cabeceras. Recalling Henri Lefebvre’s description of Spanish-American space as a “gradual progression outwards from the town’s center, beginning with the ciudades and reaching out to the surrounding pueblos,” this approach for cities and cabeceras can be rendered visually as lines radiating outward.77 Lefebvre’s description, which hinges on a spatial/temporal descriptor, “progression,” suggests a hierarchical, radial organization: a central place connected to subordinate locations by paced intervals.
MAP 3.2. Representation of 1793 table, showing destinations of the Guatemalan mail
The itinerary sections in Ateaga’s chart further establish relative importance by designating certain places as destinations and others as merely transit points. A picture emerges of one central place—Guatemala City—surrounded (or rather followed) by a constellation of second-tier places. This hierarchy of place is reflected even more explicitly in Larrazábal’s 1772 list of places. The document heads each sublist of towns and villages with a principal place, which can be a “valle,” “provincia,” “partida,” or “villa.”78 Every place is subsumed by the hierarchy and defined by its place in it.
The more interesting aspect of hierarchically organized place reflected in the tables is the manner of rendering unnamed space invisible. Terrain surrounding these listed places is suggested only indirectly by the league-measures; specific places beyond those listed are negated. The itinerary-as-list does not even allow for “blank spots,” as would appear on an aerial map.79 It simply makes them impossible to see. Instead, the itinerary draws attention to the places themselves and, indirectly, the route connecting them. The route appears not as a line or a ribbon of road but as a number.
Space, then, is depicted as a network of measured segments, some originating in the capital and others originating in important cities farther afield. These segments, the crucial ligatures linking places along the Guatemalan postal routes, are leagues, listed in Ateaga’s charts as numbers. As the leagues are not defined, it is at first glance impossible to know what version of legua the Guatemalan official utilized. By visualizing the itineraries, however, it becomes clear that the mail officials surely used the legua described by Chardon as comprehending the distance covered in an hour. Indeed, without such a definition, many portions of the 1793 itineraries seem preposterous. The route from Guatemala to Petén (Figure 3.2), for example, lists an interval of 18 leguas for Guatemala to San Raimundo and 10 leguas from San Raimundo to Salamá. On a modern map, however, the distance from San Raimundo to Salamá is more than double the distance from Guatemala to San Raimundo.
Without knowing the precise road traveled from one place to another, it is difficult to discount the possibility that a very circuitous road for the first part of the journey—measured only in terms of spatial distance—accounts for its exaggerated length in relation to the second part. However, the two segments of the journey lying between San Agustín and San Luis make this possibility unlikely. (See Map 3.3.) The interval between San Agustín and Cahabón (then Cahbon) is 8 leagues, despite the fact that it is roughly three-quarters the length (as the crow flies) of the 62-league interval between Cahabón and San Luis. When we consider the additional fact that the previous interval between Cobán and San Agustín is also 8 leagues but spatially less than a quarter of the San Agustín-Cahabón interval, the solution becomes clear.
FIGURE 3.2. Portion of 1793 chart showing the route to Petén
Source: Archivo General de Centroamérica. Photograph by the author.
MAP 3.3. The 1793 route from Guatemala to Petén
The route from San Agustín to Cahabón plummets downhill dramatically, as the highlands of the Verapazes (between 1,500 and 2,100 meters above sea level) descend into the lowlands (Cahabón sits at less than 300 meters above sea level). In contrast, the journey from Cobán to San Agustín follows a less dramatic but still noticeable rise (between 900–1,500, rising to 1,500 to 2,100), and the terrain between Cahabón and San Luis is mostly flat. If leguas were only a measure of spatial distance and apparent inconsistencies were due only to windy roads, the doubtlessly circuitous descent from San Agustín to Cahabón would register as relatively long, not dramatically short. The only way to account for the reckoning of leguas is to consider them as expressions of spatial distance over time: “the distance covered by a mule in an hour,” or some like definition.80 Distance, in this conception, clearly signifies places along routes divided by space-time intervals.
If leguas are thought of as quantifying both space and time in this context, the tables take on a different aspect. Visual representations of the routes such as the maps presented here distort distance, since “distance,” in the mail administrator’s terms, encapsulates the temporal as well as the spatial. Visual depictions serve only to artificially constrain the itineraries to one dimension and thereby, paradoxically, flatten them. The more accurate depiction renders both variables at once without privileging one or the other. An official who consulted a visual map of the reino would determine very little about when correspondence might reach its destination. By perusing the 1793 and 1795 tables, however, he would be able to glance at the first line and know at once that if the correo rode for ten hours a day, he would get the trunk of mail from Guatemala to San Salvador in less than a week.
This conclusion suggests that the temporal-spatial measure was more than a mere matter of convenience or an imperfect alternative in the absence of formal maps. Archbishop Cortés y Larraz used his watch, as he implied, out of necessity. Similarly, the instructions sent for geographical reports recommended relying on temporal measures when reliable spatial measures were impossible. But the mail documents suggest that for the particular conditions in Guatemala, the temporal-spatial measure was more than a measure of last resort. Leagues that accounted for time as well as space actually quantified Guatemalan distances more accurately, and tables and lists thereby represented Guatemalan distances best.
Such a conclusion also helps to more fully render the conception of peripheries—those places lying at a great distance—in the Spanish empire. To be distant entailed being temporally, as well as spatially, remote. The table prepared by Larrazábal reveals starkly the cost of overcoming such temporal-spatial obstacles. Governing a periphery from the center, that is communicating with its officials and staying appraised of its happenings, was costly and time-consuming. And it was fraught with physical inconveniences and dangers; communication with places like Verapaz, Petén, and Costa Rica was only as reliable as the men who carried correspondence there and back.