Talk:Chilean hemp trade

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Page scope

Chilean hemp trade treats the shipment of hemp and hemp cordage from central Chile to Callao and the other Pacific ports of Spanish America: how the trade began in the early 17th century, the ports and the sea passage, the goods and the people who made and shipped them, the figures for its size, duties and royal orders, its decline by 1796 and the exports after independence to the 1920s. Hemp growing in Chile itself belongs to Chile and to the Aconcagua Valley and La Ligua Valley growing areas; Spanish hemp policy across the empire to Cannabis in the Spanish Empire.

Data verification

Record source conflicts, dating problems and sources not used here. Keep narrative content on the article.

Discussion

Sources

Contemporary accounts. Alonso de Ovalle (1646), Diego de Rosales (written before 1674, printed 1877), Acarete du Biscay (English translation of 1698), Amédée Frézier (travels 1712–1714; read in Nicolás Peña's Spanish translation of 1902), Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa (Relación histórica, 1748, and the confidential Noticias secretas de América, printed in London in 1826), Juan Ignacio Molina (Spanish translation of 1788) and Manuel de Salas (report of 1796, printed in 1910).
Records. The minutes of the cabildo of Santiago for 1643 and 1644 (Medina's edition of 1906); the table of the trade between Lima and Chile in the Mercurio Peruano (Lima, 1791, table no. 4 of the "Disertación histórica y política sobre el comercio del Perú"); the Chilean law of 15 October 1832 as printed by Solano Pérez (1833); the United States Department of Agriculture's Foreign News on Hemp for Chile (1926).
Historians. Mario Góngora (1970) on the estates, the export-duty accounts and Espinosa's proposal; Manuel Díaz-Ordóñez (2005, 2019) and Díaz-Ordóñez with Antonio José Rodríguez Hernández (2017); Armando de Ramón and José Manuel Larraín (1979) on the weighing of cordage at Valparaíso; Jorge León Sáenz (2009) on the Pacific shipyards; Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna's Historia de Valparaíso (1869, 1872), a 19th-century history that often gives no archival reference; Claudio Gay (1865).
Not yet read. Chile's Estadística comercial (from 1844), which would give the exports of hemp and cordage by year and by country after independence; Marcello Carmagnani's study of the Chilean colonial economy (1973); Armando de Ramón and José Manuel Larraín, Orígenes de la vida económica chilena (1982); Sergio Villalobos on colonial trade; the volumes of Diego Barros Arana's Historia general de Chile that Díaz-Ordóñez cites; Arteta de Monteseguro's Discurso instructivo (1783), known here only through Díaz-Ordóñez and Rodríguez Hernández. No figure for exports of hemp or cordage between 1810 and the 1920s is given on the page.

Where the sources disagree

How much cordage went to Peru. Juan and Ulloa (1748, p. 349) estimated about 8,000 quintales a year from the countryside of Santiago to Callao; Vicuña Mackenna dates the figure to 1743. Díaz-Ordóñez and Rodríguez Hernández cite Arteta (1783) for more than 8,000 quintales around 1780. The Mercurio Peruano table (1791) and Salas (1796) give 3,000 quintales of jarcia en blanco. Vicuña Mackenna reports a figure of 749 quintales for 1796 from Vicente Carvallo, which he thought improbable. Felipe Gómez de Vidaurre's list of the goods sent from Chile to Callao (Historia geográfica, natural y civil del Reino de Chile, vol. 2, in Medina's edition, p. 315) gives 500 quintales of cordage; the list is undated and the figure is not used on the page.
Price of jarcia en blanco in the 1790s. The Mercurio Peruano table for 1791 gives 10 pesos a quintal; Salas's export table of 1796 gives 8 pesos.
Quintales and tonnes. Some later work by Díaz-Ordóñez gives the 17th-century Chilean harvest in tonnes (below 100 tonnes a year, or about 90 tonnes), figures that do not agree with the quintal figures of the documents he cites for them. The page gives the quintal figures of the documents and does not convert them.
Shipments to Spain in 1645. Gay (1865, p. 133) writes that documents of 1645 record 27,300 quintales shipped to Spain, citing no document. Díaz-Ordóñez and Rodríguez Hernández (2017, p. 14) conclude that Espinosa's scheme for exports to Spain was not carried out. The page follows them.
Chilean cordage at Callao. In the Noticias secretas (1826, p. 84) the shipyards of Callao and Guayaquil take their cordage and tallow from Chile. Díaz-Ordóñez and Rodríguez Hernández (2017, p. 16) read the same work as saying that Chilean cordage reached the Callao yards only from time to time.
The 1614 figure. Vázquez de Espinosa gives 1,270 quintales for the Quillota valley in the year of an official inspection, 1614; Díaz-Ordóñez (2005) presents it as annual production.

Georeferencing

A town on the route is given a point where two gazetteers, Wikidata (the item for the town) and OpenStreetMap (the settlement node), put it within about 2 km of each other. Points are entered to two decimal places.

Quillota: -32.88, -71.25. Wikidata Q56108 -32.880, -71.247; OpenStreetMap -32.880, -71.247; 0.0 km apart.
Valparaíso: -33.05, -71.62. Wikidata Q33986 -33.046, -71.620; OpenStreetMap -33.046, -71.620; 0.0 km apart.
Coquimbo: -29.95, -71.34. Wikidata Q3871 -29.953, -71.338; OpenStreetMap -29.953, -71.338; 0.0 km apart.
Callao: -12.05, -77.14. Wikidata Q105037 -12.052, -77.139; OpenStreetMap -12.052, -77.139; 0.0 km apart.
Lima: -12.06, -77.04. Wikidata Q2868 -12.060, -77.038; OpenStreetMap -12.046, -77.031; 1.7 km apart.
Guayaquil: -2.19, -79.89. Wikidata Q43509 -2.190, -79.888; OpenStreetMap -2.190, -79.887; 0.1 km apart.
El Realejo: 12.54, -87.16. Wikidata Q137423971 12.542, -87.165; OpenStreetMap 12.542, -87.165; 0.0 km apart.

Papudo is given without a point: Wikidata has an item for the commune of Papudo but none for the town. The La Ligua and Aconcagua valleys, Argentina and the United Kingdom are given without a point: a valley or a country has no single point.

Infobox

Places. The origin is the Quillota valley, named with its town, and the La Ligua and Aconcagua valleys (Frézier; Díaz-Ordóñez and Rodríguez Hernández; Vicuña Mackenna). The ports of shipment are Valparaíso, Papudo and Coquimbo (Díaz-Ordóñez 2019; Frézier; Juan and Ulloa); they share one stage because they are alternatives. The destinations are Callao and Lima (Juan and Ulloa; the Mercurio Peruano; Acarete), Guayaquil (Juan and Ulloa) and El Realejo (Díaz-Ordóñez 2019), and Argentina and the United Kingdom for the 1920s (United States Department of Agriculture). The few lots that reached the Philippines through Acapulco, and the match-cord sent to the army in the south of Chile, are in the text only: a list of waypoints cannot show a branch.
Route type. By sea: the cordage went from the Chilean ports to Callao and the other ports by ship. The hemp was carried overland from the valleys to the ports. The 1926 report does not say how the exports to Argentina and Britain travelled.
Years. 1622, the first year of the export-duty accounts that Góngora tabulates, to 1924, the last year for which a cited source gives exports. Vázquez de Espinosa's 1614 is a year of production, not of shipment.
Status. Not known: the sources cited stop in the 1920s without saying when the exports ended.
Legal status. Changed over time: cordage paid export duty under the Crown, and in 1832 hemp and the goods made from it were freed from export duty.
Scale. Juan and Ulloa's estimate, given with its year; the other figures are in the Scale section.

Images reserved in the article

Under The route: a schematic map of the Pacific coast from central Chile to Central America, with the hemp valleys of central Chile, the ports of Valparaíso, Papudo and Coquimbo, and dashed lines north by sea to Callao, Guayaquil and El Realejo. The lines are schematic and the caption says so.