Seville, July 26, 1519. Two weeks before five ships began their descent of the Guadalquivir, a clerk of the Casa de la Contratación entered three pages of pharmacy into the expense ledger of the Armada de Molucas. Those pages survive as Contratación, 3255, L.1, ff. 96v–97v in the Archivo General de Indias, the itemized account of everything bought from the apothecary Juan Bernal to keep some two hundred and forty men alive on a voyage no one could measure in advance.
An Apothecary in the Seville of the Carrera de Indias
Bernal was no minor supplier. He kept shop in a city that had become the single licensed gateway to the Americas, traded drugs across the Atlantic, and had earlier formed a commercial partnership with the physician Diego Álvarez Chanca, who had sailed on Columbus’s second voyage. The fleet’s medicine chest came out of that mercantile world rather than from any royal dispensary.
A Ledger Page, Not a Book of Remedies
The writing is a plain Iberian documentary hand, laid out as administrative accounting rather than as a treatise: an opening formula, then the goods set out in sequence, with quantities at the left and prices ruled into a narrow column at the right. Cordial waters come first, followed by conserves, oils, ointments, plasters, and simples. There is no decoration, and none was intended.
What the Crown Was Willing to Pay For
Such reckonings existed to be audited, and their value now is exactly that: a priced, dated inventory of early sixteenth-century therapeutics as actually assembled, not as prescribed in a pharmacopoeia.
Four of the five ships never came home. The accounting of what they carried did.
We have 1 facsimile edition of the manuscript "Record of the Medicines Purchased for the Armada of Ferdinand Magellan": Botica en la Expedición de Magallanes y Elcano facsimile edition, published by Taberna Libraria, 2021
Request Info / Price