Note 10 — Official Visitation by Valdivia

On the fourteenth of January, 1690, his investigations being concluded, the examiner left Acapulco, and sent ahead by the fast carriers as many as twenty loads of his own equipage, with a servant, and verbal orders that the guards should give them free passage. Information of this exemption reached the custom-house of this city, and its special judge, Don Juan Jose de Ciga y Linage, stationed officers on the route for safety. The examiner set out, by easy stages, because he was conveying a woman who had lately become a mother—one of his two maidservants, with whom he traveled, whom he had secretly married while in the bay, a little before landing at Vera Cruz; and the said lady died, a few days after leaving Acapulco, and was buried in the town of Cuernavaca. The said freight and equipage arrived at Mexico, and, notwithstanding the orders of the examiner, the following articles were unloaded in the custom-house: twenty-one chests, four boxes, two escritoires, three boxes, one screen, four china jars [tibores],10 one trunk of clothes, and four civet-cats. Permission was given that the animals be sent to the house of Don Geronimo de Chacon, to whom the above goods came directed; but the rest was kept [at the custom-house], the packages being opened, and a list of the goods being made. The said examiner being asked for a load that had gone astray on the journey, he replied, desiring to shield himself and another person, that it did not belong to him, and he knew nothing about it. The cause of this search was, it seems, that secret warning had been given [to the customs officers] of perfumes, fine stuffs, and other goods improper for [the possession of] an examiner.