“I think I found a typo in your book.”
The words caught me off guard. I mean, here was Augi, my
extraordinary numismatic researcher but notoriously bad speller, telling me,
Mr. Perfectionist, that my book, The Practical Book of Cobs, had an
error. It simply could not be.
“What are you talking about?” was all I could say.
“In the Mexican assayers. You have this name ‘Bercerra’ but you
meant ‘Bezerra’.”
He was referring to Gerónimo Bercerra on page 69, assayer for
Mexican cobs from 1666 to 1677. I knew the name with that spelling had been
passed from edition to edition of our book without comment and even appeared
that way in other references.
“In Spanish we have the name ‘Becerra’, spelled in old documents
as ‘Bezerra’, but not ‘Bercerra’.”
Augi, whose real name is Agustín García-Barneche, is from
Argentina, and Spanish is not only his first language but his cultural
heritage.
“OK,” I said, “if you prove it, then I will believe it.”
So Augi hit the books, or more accurately I should say he hit
the Internet, specifically some virtual libraries and online databases of
Hispano-American research. And it did not take long.
“I found it,” he said almost instantly. “Jerónimo Bezerra. He is
mentioned in a thesis about metallurgy from Mexico a few years ago. And I
think his brother was an assayer too.”
Those last nine words, really an offhand comment, were the key to solving a
nagging mystery that was older than any numismatic researcher alive today.
* * *
The thesis Augi found is entitled Tres Constructores de Obras
Científico-Técnicas de Minería y Metalurgia en la Nueva España del Siglo
XVII: Luis Berrio de Montalvo, Jerónimo de Becerra y Juan del Corro (Three
Developers of Scientific-Technical
Works on Mining and Metallurgy in New Spain during XVII Century: Luis Berrio
de Montalvo, Gerónimo de Becerra y Juan del Corro),
written in 2000 by
María
Luisa Rodríguez-Sala for the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales of the
Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico. It
is an advanced paper in the broad area of mining and metallurgy that has
obvious connections to assaying. Just nobody bothered to look there for
information about mint assayers. Like so many other fields, numismatics
tends to ignore related fields and fills the gaps in information with what
we see on the coins themselves.
In this case, however, the coins in question are among the most common and
obvious of all Mexican silver cobs. In every edition of every book on cobs
and assayers I have ever seen, there is no mention of a name for assayer P
of the mid-1600s (1634-1666). The coins in question comprise the bulk of
finds from two major shipwrecks (the Concepción of 1641 and the
Maravillas of 1656) and from countless hoards and finds around the
world. The coins very typically show a clear and large “oMP” next to the
shield, and, in the early 1650s at least, very often show a surprisingly
clear date in the peripheral legend. To finally have a name for this assayer
means we can fully attribute hundreds of thousands of coins for the first
time.
The
research paper focuses on Gerónimo Becerra and his technical contributions
to metallurgy. As a “renaissance man” of sorts, Becerra was a scientist, not
only in the field of metallurgy but also in medicine, at least as it was
defined in the 17th century. His work Anathomia Philosóphica
(Philosophical Anatomy) was an important text in its time relating to
psychology, in which Becerra explained intellectual, sensitive and emotional
activities linked to the composition and operation of the five senses. As we
know, however, he was not a medical doctor by trade but a coin assayer at
the Mexican mint, as well as a technical researcher relating to that
profession. By order of the mint in 1671 he wrote a 24-page paper entitled
Breve relacion del ensaye de plata y oro (Brief relation of the
assaying of silver and gold), a sort of training manual for performing
assays written in a very baroque and flowery fashion. Note especially that
he mentions gold, which was not being coined at the time. The silver coins
produced during his tenure as assayer are marked with a large G for Gerónimo
under the oM mintmark, which is seen for the dates 1666 through 1677.
According to Ms. Rodríguez-Sala’s
thesis, Becerra died on February 15, 1677, which, incidentally, explains why
coins of that date with his initial are so rare.
But even more important was how
Becerra got the job as assayer in the first place. According to the thesis,
Gerónimo had an older brother, Pedro, who was assayer before him and in fact
passed the office to him due to illness. While nothing further about Pedro
could be found in Ms. Rodríguez-Sala’s paper (for he was not a pioneer in
metallurgy like his younger brother was later), this was enough to fill a
huge void in Spanish colonial numismatics. Assayer P of 1634-1666 now had a
name: Pedro Bezerra!
We can make three further
observations from this new information. First of all, we see yet another
instance of an assayer using his first name and not his last name for his
initial on the coins, but we believe that habit is coincidental and has more
to do with the fact that G and P were standard letter punches in the mint’s
kit, since they were used in the words of the legends, whereas B was not.
Second, Gerónimo Bezerra’s advanced technical study helps us appreciate that
assayers were important officials in charge of serious metal-testing and not
just figureheads or minters hammering the coins. Finally, we wonder if the
fact that Gerónimo Bezerra was such an advanced metallurgist and published
scientist had anything to do with the decision to begin minting gold coins
in Mexico in 1679. Surely given the delays in communication he must have had
some role in the innovation, and perhaps he even planned to mint the first
gold coins before he died suddenly.
In any case we now have some
answers where before we had a guess and a blank. Assayer P was Pedro Bezerra
(1634-1666), and assayer G was Gerónimo Bezerra… a “typo” I am quite happy
to correct in the next edition of our book.
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