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This manuscript records the daily expenses of the "hornaza" (furnace), a workshop that cast silver bars into coins at the Casa de Moneda de Potosí. The document is interspersed in a judicial file confronting the brothers of the Juan de Dios Hospital and Convent against the administrator of the furnace, Francisco García de Frías. Three accounting journals were inserted within the judiciary process from the beginning of the 17th century as documentary evidence describing the maintenance expenses of the enslaved black population in the heavy work of smelting silver bars at 4,000 meters above sea level.

The 73 numbered pages contain daily entries made by the defendant and administrator of the furnace, García de Frías, for purchases of meat, fish, bread, wine and chicha to feed the slaves. It also records clothing expenses, such as Quito cloth and baize breeches. No other book or document from this period (1624-1628) points to the tools manufactured by blacksmiths to limit the movement of black people, through stocks, shackles and prisons that prevented their escape. These pages also record the names of the furnace workers, such as Manuel Angola, Juan Senca and Juan Biobo, and their place of origin in the present-day countries of Angola, Congo and Guinea.

The document is a reliable testimony of the life of enslaved black persons in Potosí, one of the coldest cities in the Andes. Confined to the silver smelting furnace that ran 24 hours a day, slaves rested on platforms lined with sheepskin, whose purchase is recorded in the manuscript. The tallow candle lighting was very important, as well as the daily alms that the foreman requested for the celebration of masses during the city's religious festivals. This exceptional journal was inserted as documentary evidence within the judicial process followed by the prior and brothers from the "Convento Hospital del Beato Juan de Dios", as plaintiffs, when they claimed to have a fair title to the furnace by virtue of the donation made before the notary public of His Majesty that the legitimate owner Don Juan Rodríguez de Vergara made in their favour.