The archives with more miles to the galleon

Press, 15 January 1986, Page 16

The archives with more miles to the galleon

PAUL ELLMAN,

in Seville for the "Guardian,” London,

browses among the memorials of the once-greatest power on earth.

On October 14, 1785, two mule trains, one of 13 wagons and the other of 14, clattered over the cobbled streets of Seville under heavy cavalry escort after a month-long journey across the rutted, dusty highways of Spain. Their cargo, 253 cases fashioned from solid oak, contained nothing that would have interested the mostly illiterate bandits who infested the roads and mountains of Spain at that time. Spain no longer received the flow of gold and silver and precious stones from the New World that allowed it briefly to enjoy the privilege offered to few nations, that of being the most powerful country on earth. The wagons instead, were with documents that tracked the] 7

rise to glory and decline that followed it. Their arrival marked the beginning of a process which would ultimately produce a unique treasure house, the archives of the Indies, a repository of 43 million documents now celebrating its 200th anniversary. Charles in, who earned himself the nickname of the “paper king” through his determination to pre-, serve the record of past glories for a nation seemingly in irreversible decline, ordered all the documents recording the Spanish conquest of the Americas to be brought to Seville. The Spaniards were compulsive keepers.of records. Some say this was because the country had been in the grip of notaries since the 12th century, others that the vast

wealth accumulated from the New World was used to create a cumbersome bureaucracy with little else to do but record the minutiae of Empire. “It’s a centre of studies for a whole continent,” says Mrs Rosario Parra, director of the archives for the last 17 years. “Everything refers to the history of the Americas from the 15th to the 19th century.” She stresses that the archives are not like a library. Although the inventory is now virtually comElete, the archives require finelyoned academic skills and the instincts of a sleuth on the part of those who can use them for research. “The inventory does not say what each document deals with,” Mrs Parra says. Ideally, a researcher using the archives should be skilled in Spanish, diplomatic history and paleography, the study of ancient handwriting. So difficult was the handwriting of «he time to decipher — and

there was no fixed grammar as it is understood today — that Miguel de Cervantes, the great Spanish writer, said of it: “Some documents could not even be understood by the devil.” A letter written by Cervantes is one of the archives’ great treasures. Typically, it was stumbled across accidentally by a researcher looking for material in another field.

Written to Philip II in 1590, the letter asks the king to arrange a job in the Americas. The request was turned down and a year later Cervantes, perhaps out of pique, began his masterpiece, Don Quixote, which so mercilessly tore apart the myths that sustained tris age that it became known as the “book that killed a nation.”

Other documents include letters signed by Christopher Columbus and other explorers like Amerigo Vespucci and Fernando de Magellan, and correspondence from the builders of the Spanish empire like Hernan Copies, the “conquistador” of

The archives have even yielded a letter signed by George Washington on December 17, 1789, and addressed to the chiefs of the Choctaw Indians.

Among the archives’ most valuable documents are its 16,000 maps, which record the unfolding vision of a world in the process of being discovered. The maps have found a role in the 20th century beyond satisfying the curiosity of scholarship. It was in the archives of the Indies that Eugene Lyon, a Florida historian, made the connection which enabled treasure hunter Mel Fisher, also from Florida, to locate finally the galleon Nuestra Senora de Atocha, which sank in 1622 during a storm 41 miles off Key West.

the possible location of the galleon while doing research for his Ph.D in Seville in 1970. “I think you could write the history of the Americas from there” he says of the Archives. “It’s a mine you could never exhaust. It’s an inexhaustible deposit.” Mrs Parra indicates disapproval of the use of the archives for 20th century gain. To mark the bicentennial, the archive is holding a special exhibition featuring 300 of its most precious items, including the original treaty under which the Falkland Islands were sold by France to Spain. The archives are housed in a building completed in 1572 and which originally was a trading exchange. At the time Seville held a monopoly on Spanish trade with the Americas. It is located in the historical centre of Seville next to the 12th century minaret known as the Giralda which was built by the Moors and which adjoins the massive bulkfpf the gothic cathedral.

The galleon has so far yielded 400,000 dollars in silver but Fisher' estimated recently that emeralds and other valuables in the cargo could eventually produce a haul worth billions of dollars.

Lyon, who is .director of the St Augustine FoutMation, figured out