-
5. Flotas to New Spain: The Last Phase, 1757-1778
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
[An encomendero’s] sense of vanity swells when [he is] called a Xotista . . . Juan Antonio de los Heros Fernández (1790) Duties, more duties, duties on entry at Cadiz. Duties on departing and duties on reentry at Cadiz, plus aggravation and details. Duties have ruined trade. Plaint preserved in the Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid By now it is evident that, unlike other eighteenth-century imperial trading systems, the Spanish transatlantic system of managed trade operated until the last quarter of the century out of a single metropolitan port, Cadiz, where merchants had acquired “an exclusive trading right each exercises with his own capital.”⁄ Their derecho exclusivo consisted of the privilege of intermediaries (shippers, agents, factors) earning commissions “because the bulk of their exports belong to foreigners.”¤ Conspicuously absent were the high-volume exchanges of domestic manufactures for colonial primary products that characterized English and French imperial trading patterns of the time. This trading pattern assured the survival and in most cases the proWtability of the trading communities of Cadiz and Mexico City. Organized and enforced by the state through the Consejo de Indias, with the collaboration of the Casa de Contratación at Cadiz, it facilitated collection of duties payable in specie, a welcome source of liquidity to the Hacienda. The system also assured the salaries of the bureaucracy of the Casa de Contratación, customshouse personnel and coast guardsmen, and the wages of dockyard workers and longshoremen. Like the state, the civil service employees lived oV customs duties, inspection and other fees, and surcharges associated with a long-standing and involuted transatlantic trading system (which is not 5. Flotas to New Spain: The Last Phase, 1757‒1778 • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • to claim that it was static). The point is, all accepted and exploited a commercial and Wscal system of mutual beneWt rooted in the silver mines of America. The interests of Spanish merchants and their foreign Wnanciers/ collaborators, public and private personnel, and state and private bodies converged; en masse, they had lobbied hard for resurrecting the Xota system to New Spain and its Jalapa feria in the 1750s as they had for Xotas and galeones in the Proyecto of 1720. Managed Trade at Cadiz Perhaps nothing better epitomized the Spanish system of managed colonial trade than an obsessive reliance upon a formal shell of techniques of control over shipping, crews, and goods and upon duty collection and associated fees in preparation of a vessel joining a Xota to New Spain in the two decades after 1757. Preoccupation with step-by-step surveillance and repeated double-checking imply that evasion outweighed compliance.‹ Dispatching a 200- to 400-ton vessel and cargo to Veracruz began with the purchase of a license from the Consejo de Indias (and often a bribe) at Madrid, with departure from the Bay of Cadiz following only months or, in some cases, years later.› The cost of the license—on average, 40–50,000 pesos per registered ship of 300 tons—was usually in part defrayed by surreptitious substitution of a far larger vessel. “For the licence runs only to 300 tuns at most, [but] the vessel Wtted out is seldom less than 600,” the Reverend Edward Clarke, an English observer, noted in the early 1760s.fi At this point, the shipper (cargador) would turn to a foreign resident for capital, goods, or both. A foreign resident with goods to sell looked for a reliable Spanish intermediary to move them to the colonies for sale. He located a cargador to whom to consign the merchandise (who would register and ship the goods in his own name); then the cargador chose a Spanish comisionado or encomendero to accompany the shipment, sell it, and return the proceeds in pesos or staples. Contracts between foreigner and Spaniards were unregistered and stated the true ownership of the goods entrusted and the earnings expected.fl Once a shipper had lined up a shipowner, or patrón, he furnished the shipmaster (maestro) with a listing (nota) of initialed bales, boxes, and bundles of merchandise and an estimate of their volume or weight.‡ Along with this list, the shipmaster submitted a petition (poliza) to the contador principal of the Casa de Contratación for approval (despacho) of the voyage to one designated colonial port, with the cargo noted in a presumably accurate manifest (hoja de registro). This enumerated the Spanish proprietor(s) of 120 • The Colonial Option [54.227.136.157] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 04:35 GMT) cargo and three alternate consignees in...