Miguel Vendrell y Puig (C-18)
Translated and introduced by Claire Gillespie (College of William & Mary)
At first glance, this mathematical dissertation appears to be Don Miguel Vendrell y Puig’s technical description of the hydraulic machine that he hopes to build. However, as the initial sections of the manuscript make clear, the text is marked by rhetorical tropes, references to mathematicians and historians, and a formal persuasive tone. As a study in the politics of hydraulics, the Ynstituciones Mathematicas becomes a text that reveal the competition for power implicit in any infrastructure change, most especially one in the “new city” of Veracruz; this translation represents a new opportunity for English-language readers to see how issues of political power and technical knowledge intersect in the day-to-day life of colonial committees.[1]
Hydraulic machines exist to manipulate the most essential human need: water. Water not only sustains life in a strictly biological sense, but also has spiritual connotations for human civilizations over time, and cultural groups around the world.[2] The location of water sources shapes where groups of people choose to build societies. The ability to control water’s location, then, is one of the most powerful – and thus political – tasks available to those who are capable of creating water-controlling mechanisms.
A Brief History of Hydraulics
Systems that manipulate water date back to 6,000 years ago. Ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians built irrigation canals, dams, water tunnels, and horse- or donkey-powered chain lifts to transport water from the Nile, Euphrates, and Tigris Rivers to the increasingly urban Middle East.[3] Thousands of years later, the Greeks created a more hygienic draining aqueduct system.[4] During this era, Archimedes introduced ideas about buoyancy; today, scholars consider his “water screw” to be the first pump in recorded history.[5] The Roman Empire also used aqueducts, roof pipes, and cisterns to plan and build larger-scale water systems, consolidating the relationship between imperial expansion and water management.[6] Many water systems fell into disrepair with the decline of the Roman Empire, and technical knowledge of hydraulics advanced little until the early fourteenth century, when Leonardo da Vinci designed one of the earliest modern hydraulic machines: the dragline.[7] In the following centuries, early modern French and English mathematicians and scientists such as Rene Descartes, Robert Boyle, and Blaise Pascal added to the hydraulic engineering scholarship through their studies of water pressure.
Hydraulics and Colonization
In a 2012 article, Sara Pritchard demonstrates how the French water management practices of creating large-scale hydraulics projects in Algeria played a crucial role in legitimizing their colonizing efforts.[8] [8] By claiming a large knowledge base of hydraulics – “hydroimperialism” – and depicting water scarcity as a pressing issue in nineteenth century Algeria, the French claimed, consolidated, and organized their colonial power through management of natural resources.[9] This “hydrocolonialism” thus worked toward the continuing of French hydraulic knowledge, too, and served as an excuse for the French to send scientists to Algiers for hydraulic research.[10]
Writing some hundred years earlier, and half a world away from French imperial activity in North Africa, Don Miguel Vendrell y Puig nevertheless approaches issues of water management and large-scale engineering in Veracruz from a similarly imperial perspective, and with a specific grounding in French mathematical concepts. Commissioned by the Cabildo (Council) of the city to design a replacement for the insufficient aqueduct system that had been developed by Father Pedro Buzeta, Vendrell y Puig uses “la idea original de los ingenieros franceses” (the original idea of French engineers) or non-indigenous knowledge to create one of Veracruz’s most essential structures.[11]
Veracruz
Located about nine miles north of the Jamapa River in the southwestern corner of the Gulf of Mexico, Veracruz was the main port city used for trade between Spain and New Spain from 1600 until the late eighteenth century.[12] Bourbon reforms that increased trading opportunities with the rest of the Caribbean, economic instability, and the political unrest that would lead to the Mexican War of Independence in the next century made Veracruz in the 1790s a place of mercantile opportunity.[13] These opportunities attracted many European-born Spaniards, who immigrated to Veracruz to seek new trading connections.[14] The increased population – or even the prospect of an increased population – may have been all that was necessary for the Cabildo to commission Don Miguel Vendrell y Puig to design a new hydraulic machine. In other words, it is not clear from the extant documents whether there was already a need for such a system, or whether the city council welcomed the proposals of would-be inventors in anticipation of increased demand.
Don Miguel Vendrell y Puig
A pilot, inventor, master in the art of navigation, and amateur math student with special skills in hand tools, Don Miguel Vendrell y Puig came to Veracruz in 1770 or 1771, according to Juan Jose Gonzalez’s 1943 collection of Trece leyendas e historias de la ciudad de Veracruz (Thirteen legends and histories of the city of Veracruz).[15] Here, González describes Vendrell y Puig as a man versed in the sciences and a rare exception in the colony in 1774.[16]
The Cabildo
The Cabildo (Council) was a governing body of locally elected officials originally mandated by the Spanish crown. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Cabildos in various towns of New Spain were noted for their loyalty to the crown.[17] By the eighteenth century, however, the Cabildo became an increasingly independent body.[18] With little financial support, the Cabildo fell perpetually short in its ability to perform the daily municipal duties assigned to it.[19] Though these economic limitations led to an inefficient local government, they likely kept the Spanish crown in control, at least in name, longer than if the Cabildos – many of which later supported Mexico in the Mexican War of Independence – had been more active.[20]
The Text: Selection and Importance
The manuscript begins at page number 53 and runs through page 70, indicating that the Ynstrucciones Mathematicas once belonged to a larger collection of documents. The manuscript is now held in the Special Collections Resource Center of Swem Library, at the College of William and Mary. Although its provenance is unclear, library archivists believe that a former archivist may have purchased this document from Ebay. The manuscript ends with a fold-out sketch of the hydraulic machine; this page measures fifteen and a half by eight inches, while the rest of the pages are eight by twelve inches. The manuscript, unfortunately, has suffered considerable damage over the years. It has a water stain about an inch thick on the top of the pages and where the two pages meet. Many holes cut through he text, often obscuring the letters. The handwriting, however, is very neat, and the letters are consistent, allowing us to make reasonable guesses about missing letters (e.g., filling in an “s” when a tear in the manuscript makes a word appear as “ma-”). Given the extensive deterioration, we are thankful that the manuscript has now been digitized, and that portions of it will be available to English-language readers through the Early Americas Digital Archive.
The text follows a rather straightforward order. Don Miguel Vendrell y Puig first introduces his project in a formulaic address to the council, and then describes seven theorems. These theorems are mathematical or engineering concepts particular to the hydraulic machine that Vendrell y Puig hoped to make. He concludes with a persuasive tone, similar to that of the opening passages, and he references earlier generations of engineers, mathematicians, historians, and other thinkers in the same way that mark the introduction. The section I translated from the introduction illustrates the breath of scientific knowledge Vendrell y Puig uses to make a persuasive argument for his hydraulic machine.
Methods as a Translator
My first task as translator was to transcribe the text, which proved difficult at times because of the holes in the manuscript. In my transcription, I use periods to mark the moments where a letter was illegible and I could not make a reasonable guess as to what it should have been. I use brackets to mark my best guesses of letters I am still unsure about. Finally, I use parenthesis to mark letters that are unclear but that I am relatively sure are correct. Passages that are underlined in the translation are also underlined in the original manuscript.
After I transcribed the text as accurately as possible, I translated the manuscripts literally, one word at a time. Using this literal translation, the transcription, and the original manuscript, I began rearranging syntax and word choice to come to a translation that blends the formal rhetoric, technical details, and political nature of this piece. My most important goal was to preserve the author’s elevated and learned tone. My second most important goal was to stay as close to the original text as possible, preserving the particular blend of reverence for antiquity and celebration of his own genius that place Vendrell y Puig within the conventions of Enlightenment science in the colonial Americas.
Bibliography
Bakker, Karen. “Water: Political, Biopolitical, Material,” Social Studies of Science 42 (2012): 616-623.
Barrera Osorio, Antonio. “Experts, Nature, and the Making of Atlantic Empiricism.” Osiris 25.1 (2010): 129–148.
Booker, Jackie R. “The Veracruz Merchant Community in Late Bourbon Mexico: A Preliminary Portrait, 1770-1810,” The Americas 45.2 (1988): 187-199.
Cairo, Robert F. “Materials Toward an History of Early Hydraulic Engineering Machinery Employed in the Development of Rivers, Harbors and Canals,” Nautical Research Journal 31.3 (1985): 126-140.
Carlin, A. Roberta. A Paleographic Guide to Spanish Abbreviations, 1500-1700/Una guía paleográfica de abbreviaturas españolas, 1500-1700 (Henderson, Nevada: Universal Publishers, 2003).
González, Juan José. “Don Miguel Vendrell y Puig, Piloto de Altura e Inventor,” Trece leyendas e historias de la ciudad de Veracruz (Veracruz: n.p., 1943), 37-41.
Lynch, John. “Intendants and Cabildos in the Viceroyalty of La Plata, 1782-1810,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 35.3 (1955): 337-362.
Mays, Larry W. “A Very Brief History of Hydraulic Technology During Antiquity,” Environmental Fluid Mechanics 8.5-6 (2008): 471-484.
Mukerji, Chandra. “Women Engineers and the Culture of the Pyrenees: Indigenous Knowledge and Engineering in Seventeenth-Century France,” Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe?: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 19–44.
Pike, Fredrick B. “The Cabildo and Colonial Loyalty to Hapsburg Rulers,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 2.4 (1960): 405-420.
Pritchard, Sara B. “From Hydroimperialism to Hydrocapitalism: ‘French’ Hydraulics in France, North Africa, and Beyond,” Social Studies of Science 42: (2012): 591-615.
Protocolo 74, Archivos Notariales de la Universidad Veracruzana, 1810-05-04, pp. 124v-126v.
Smith, Robert Sidney. “Shipping in the Port of Veracruz, 1790-1821,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 23.1 (1943): 5-20.
Smith, W. Robertson. “Ctesias and the Semiramis Legend,” The English Historical Review 2.6 (1887): 303-317.
Thayer, Bill. Diodorus Siculus Library of History, Loeb Classical Library Edition. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1933. Accessed May 1, 2014. http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Diodorus_Siculus/2A*.html#ref17
[1] Don Miguel Vendrell y Puig refers to the “Nueva Cuidad de Veracruz” twice in the first paragraph, placing what I see as a special emphasis on the colonial nature of Veracruz.
[2] Karen Bakker, “Water: Political, Biopolitical, Material,” Social Studies of Science 42 (2012): 617.
[3] Larry W. Mays, “A Very Brief History of Hydraulic Technology During Antiquity,” Environmental Fluid Mechanics 8.5-6 (2008): 471-472.
[4] Ibid., 475
[5] Ibid., 477
[6] Ibid., 480-481
[7] Robert F. Cairo, “Materials Toward an History of Early Hydraulic Engineering Machinery Employed in the Development of Rivers, Harbors and Canals,” Nautical Research Journal 31.3 (1985): 126
[8] Sara B. Pritchard, “From Hydroimperialism to Hydrocapitalism: ‘French’ Hydraulics in France, North Africa, and Beyond,” Social Studies of Science 42: (2012): 594.
[9] For more information, see Antonio Barrera Osorio, “Experts, Nature, and the Making of Atlantic Empiricism.” Osiris 25.1 (2010): 129–148 and Chandra Mukerji, “Women Engineers and the Culture of the Pyrenees: Indigenous Knowledge and Engineering in Seventeenth-Century France,” Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400-1800, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 19–44.
[10] Sara B. Pritchard, “From Hydroimperialism to Hydrocapitalism: ‘French’ Hydraulics in France, North Africa, and Beyond,” Social Studies of Science 42: (2012): 592.
[11] Juan José González, “Don Miguel Vendrell y Puig, Piloto de Altura e Inventor,” in Trece leyendas e historias de la ciudad de Veracruz (Veracruz: n.p., 1943), 37.
[12] Robert Sidney Smith, “Shipping in the Port of Veracruz, 1790-1821,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 23.1 (1943): 5.
[13] Jackie R. Booker, “The Veracruz Merchant Community in Late Bourbon Mexico: A Preliminary Portrait, 1770-1810,” The Americas 45.2 (1988): 188.
[14] Ibid., 197.
[15] González, “Don Miguel Vendrell y Puig,” op. cit., 37.
[16] Ibid.
[17] Fredrick B. Pike, “The Cabildo and Colonial Loyalty to Hapsburg Rulers,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 2.4 (1960): 405.
[18] John Lynch, “Intendants and Cabildos in the Viceroyalty of La Plata, 1782-1810,” The Hispanic American Historical Review, 35.3 (1955): 346.
[19] Pike, “The Cabildo and Colonial Loyalty,” op. cit., 409.
[20] Ibid., 410.
EADA Entries:
Ynstítuciones Mathematícas (Veracruz, 1794)
Mathematical Institutions (Veracruz, 1794)