Chilean hemp trade
More actions
| From | Quillota, La Ligua Valley, Aconcagua Valley |
|---|---|
| By way of | Valparaíso or Papudo or Coquimbo |
| To | Callao, Lima, Guayaquil, El Realejo, Argentina, United Kingdom |
| How it travelled | By sea |
| What moved | Hemp |
|---|---|
| Carried by | Estate owners of the Quillota, La Ligua and Aconcagua valleys and merchants of Santiago, shipping on vessels bound for Callao |
| Scale | About 8,000 quintales of cordage a year to Callao (Juan and Ulloa, 1748) |
| Active | 1620s to the 1920s |
|---|---|
| Status | Not known |
| Legal status | Changed over time |
The Chilean hemp trade was the shipment of hemp, most of it made up into rigging and other cordage (jarcia), from the valleys of central Chile to Callao (the port of Lima) and to other ports of Spain's Pacific empire. The hemp was grown and worked around Quillota and in the valleys of La Ligua and Aconcagua, then carried to the ports of Valparaíso, Papudo and Coquimbo. From there it went north by sea to Callao and to the shipyards of Guayaquil and El Realejo.[1]: 99–100[2]: 193, 197 In the 17th century, by the account of the historians Manuel Díaz-Ordóñez and Antonio José Rodríguez Hernández, Spanish officials reported that hemp could not be grown at a profit anywhere in Spanish America except Chile.[3]: 12 The Jesuit Alonso de Ovalle wrote in 1646 that Chilean cordage supplied all the ships of the South Sea.[4] Cordage appears in Chile's export-duty accounts from 1622,[5]: 223–224 and the naval officers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, writing in 1748, put the cordage sent each year to Callao at about 8,000 quintales.[6] After independence, according to the naturalist Claudio Gay, only the trade with Peru still took Chilean hemp.[7]: 134 In the 1920s Chile exported hemp fibre to Argentina and, in 1924, to Great Britain.[8]
Origins
Díaz-Ordóñez and Rodríguez Hernández connect Chilean hemp with the Spanish plans of 1573 for an Armada del Mar del Sur, a South Sea fleet, to defend the Philippine trade, plans in which they give Chile and its fibre an important place. In the last quarter of the 16th century, however, the cordage, match-cord and hemp needed in the Philippines were still shipped from Spain to New Spain and carried overland to Acapulco.[3]: 7 In their account the first lasting crops in Chile were those of the Quillota and La Ligua valleys. Alonso García Ramón, interim governor in 1600–1601, contracted for match-cord to revive a harvest given up for want of demand, and in 1604 Governor Alonso de Ribera reported that he had resumed it to meet the army's need for match-cord.[3]: 8
The market lay in Peru. The two historians point to the silver and mercury mines of Potosí and Huancavelica, which used up rope, rigging, awnings and sacks in quantity, and to the rigging needed by ships built on the Pacific coast; Spain was too far away to keep these goods supplied, and attempts to grow hemp at a profit in the viceroyalty had failed.[3]: 10 A royal cédula of 23 April 1626 told officials across Spanish America to look into growing the fibre, and over the following decades they reported, Chile excepted, that it could not be grown at a profit in their territories.[3]: 12 The Carmelite friar Antonio Vázquez de Espinosa, writing in 1628–1629, found the hemp of the Quillota valley sold as cord for the royal army and as rigging, taken to Callao, for the ships of the South Sea.[9]: 677 The historian Jorge León Sáenz writes that in the Americas only Chile managed to make cordage from hemp, other places using henequen, sisal or cabuya and pita in its place, and that central Chile began making it at the beginning of the 17th century.[10]: 62–63
The route
The French engineer Amédée Frézier, who travelled on the coasts of Chile and Peru in 1712–1714, named the valleys of Quillota, Aconcagua, La Ligua and Limache as the places where hemp grew. The people of a village in the Quillota valley, he wrote, traded in wheat, hemp and cordage, which they carried to Valparaíso to rig and load the Spanish ships; the ships took it on to Callao and other ports of Peru.[1]: 99–100 The estate of Francisco Peraza at Ocoa, in the Quillota district, had a cordage works whose goods went out easily through the port; it also supplied the army with arquebus cord.[5]: 92–93
Díaz-Ordóñez names Valparaíso, Papudo and Coquimbo as the ports from which Chilean hemp left for the Viceroyalty of Peru.[2]: 193 The historian Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna wrote in 1869 that Quillota and La Ligua were the favourite centres of hemp growing in the 17th century and that the hemp was exported above all through Papudo.[11]: 86 At Coquimbo, according to the confidential report that Juan and Ulloa wrote for the Spanish government (printed in London in 1826 as Noticias secretas de América), ships loaded the copper of the district and also its fruit, hides, cordovan leather and cordage.[12]: 33 A table of the trade between Lima and Chile, printed at Lima in 1791 in the Mercurio Peruano, set the freight from Valparaíso to Callao at 12 reales a quintal of cordage.[13]: table no. 4
In their published account of 1748 Juan and Ulloa named wheat, tallow and hemp cordage as the goods that reached Peru from Chile alone.[6] Their confidential report says that the shipyards of Callao and Guayaquil drew their cordage and tallow from Chile, their iron from Spain, their pitch and tar from Realejo and Sonsonate and their canvas from the highland towns of Cajamarca and Chachapoyas.[12]: 84 At Guayaquil the rigging in the yard was the kind made in Chile, from hemp they judged better than northern Europe's in quality and in length, though badly heckled and cleaned; cordage of pita made in the district served only small vessels and the coasting trade, which went no further than Panama.[12]: 62 Díaz-Ordóñez counts the shipyards of Callao, Guayaquil and El Realejo, with the markets of Lima and Quito, among the buyers of Chilean hemp.[2]: 197
In Lima, cordage paid for imported goods. Acarete du Biscay, who travelled to Peru in about 1658, wrote that the merchants of Chile took the wares brought by the galleons and gave in exchange the goods of their country, among them cordovan, cordage, hemp, pitch and tar.[14]: 56–57 Nicolás de Maluenda, who held land at La Ligua, sent his cordage to Nicolás Lisperguer to be sold in Lima.[5]: 162 A few lots of Chilean cordage went on from Acapulco to the Philippines, whose ships were rigged mostly with European hemp.[15]: 56
Goods and traders
The trade was mainly in finished cordage. The chronicler Diego de Rosales wrote that Chile sent Peru rigging for ships "en grande abundancia, la mas y la mexor que se gasta en el Perú", with cord, tow, wick, flax and hilo de acarreto, a fine twine.[16]: 391 The treasury valued the cordage for duty at 14 pesos a quintal, raw hemp at 9 pesos a quintal and hilo de acarreto at 2½ reales a pound.[5]: 223–224 Cordage was usually shipped untarred, as jarcia en blanco. Juan and Ulloa explained that tar hardly reached Chile and that buyers would not take tarred rope, fearing to pay for the weight of the tar and for adulterated tar; the cordage was tarred at Callao.[12]: 91–92 They judged the hemp excellent but the work poor: the fibre was badly cleaned, unevenly spun and badly laid, so that the rigging came out uneven, though the works of the marqués de la Pica, which took more care, made much stronger rope.[12]: 91
Cordage works were common on the estates of Melipilla and Quillota by the middle of the 17th century.[5]: 109 Most of the exporters named in the royal treasury's accounts were merchants, though estate owners also shipped on their own account.[5]: 223 In the 1650s the contracts that the merchant Gabriel Fernández de Armadel made before the notary of Quillota were generally payable in cordage, hilo de acarreto, tallow and cordovans,[5]: 91 and the historian Mario Góngora counts the export of these goods, tallow above all, as the mainstay of the economy of Santiago and its district at that time.[5]: 107
In the 18th century, by Vicuña Mackenna's account, the valleys of La Ligua and Quillota supplied cordage to ships arriving both from the north and round Cape Horn. He tells of an Aconcagua landowner who, as government notary, heard before others that the French had been granted direct navigation from Europe, planted hemp on his estate of Panquehue and in a single year made 80,000 pesos by selling 2,000 quintales of cordage at 40 pesos, mainly to the shipowners of Saint-Malo.[11]: 331 In 1774, by his account, a contractor offered to supply the arsenal of Callao with cordage at 25 pesos a quintal on condition that he be sold an equal weight of the king's tar at 11 pesos.[17]: 121
Scale
The figures for the trade come from harvest reports, customs accounts, travellers' estimates and trade tables, and they measure different things.
| Year | Figure | What it counts | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1614 | 1,270 quintales | hemp worked in the Quillota valley in the year of an official inspection | Vázquez de Espinosa, written 1628–1629[9]: 677 |
| 1622–1655 | 45 to 845 quintales a year | cordage entered in the export-duty accounts, in the years tabulated | Góngora (1970)[5]: 224 |
| 1627 | about 8,000 quintales | yearly harvest of the Quillota and La Ligua valleys | Governor Luis Fernández de Córdoba y Arce[3]: 12 |
| 1645 | 6,000 to 7,000 quintales | yearly harvest of Chile | Audiencia of Chile[3]: 14 |
| before 1748 | about 8,000 quintales | cordage sent each year from the countryside of Santiago to Callao | Juan and Ulloa (1748)[6] |
| 1788 | 21,652 pesos | value of the cordage and hemp in Chile's exports | statement of the Santiago merchants, printed by Vicuña Mackenna[17]: 210 |
| 1791 | 3,000 quintales at 10 pesos | jarcia en blanco sent from Valparaíso to Callao in a year | Mercurio Peruano[13]: table no. 4 |
| 1796 | 3,000 quintales at 8 pesos | jarcia en blanco exported to Lima and the ports of Peru | Manuel de Salas[18]: 162 |
The customs figures are far below the harvest reports. Díaz-Ordóñez points out that much Chilean cordage went to the Crown's ships free of duty, so that the accounts do not measure what was produced.[15]: 55 Díaz-Ordóñez and Rodríguez Hernández cite Antonio Arteta de Monteseguro (1783) for the statement that around 1780 Chile still supplied the Peruvian market with more than 8,000 quintales of cordage a year, besides what it sold to ships in its own ports and what reached Callao through Coquimbo and Papudo.[3]: 17 Vicuña Mackenna dated Ulloa's 8,000 quintales to 1743 and set against it the 749 quintales that the chronicler Vicente Carvallo gave for 1796, a figure he thought improbable and possibly a copying error.[17]: 162
Prices moved with supply. Rosales gave 14 pesos a quintal as the usual price of Chilean cordage in Peru, rising to 40 in times of scarcity.[16]: 391 The proposal of Martín de Espinosa y Santander in 1644, which assigned quantities of cordage to estate owners from La Ligua to Colchagua for export to Spain, was a plan and not an account of shipments: Díaz-Ordóñez and Rodríguez Hernández conclude that it was not carried out, because freight and insurance made Chilean hemp too dear in Spain, and that authors who took it as fact credited Chile with exporting almost 30,000 quintales a year.[5]: 214–216[3]: 14
Regulation
A cédula of 1594 freed Chile's farm and livestock exports to Peru from the almojarifazgo customs duty, but cordage and hilo de acarreto went on paying the old duty, to which the Union of Arms added a surcharge; from 1640, Góngora writes, cordage paid 3 per cent.[5]: 216, 223 In May 1643 the cabildo of Santiago received the viceroy of Peru's order that the 12,500 pesos of the Union of Arms assessed on the city be paid in tallow, cordovans and cordage,[19]: 262–263 and it fixed the end of August as the date by which the cordage and tallow were to be delivered at the port of Valparaíso.[19]: 268
The Crown also asked what Chile could supply. In 1638 the cabildo of Santiago wrote to the Audiencia asking that all exported fibre be manufactured and not sent raw.[3]: 13 In September 1644 the cabildo considered a royal cédula asking to be told what means the kingdom had for making cordage for the king's fleets.[19]: 382 The Audiencia reported in May 1645 that Chile harvested 6,000 to 7,000 quintales a year, enough in its informants' view for the shipping of the South Sea; up to 50,000 quintales could be grown between Coquimbo and the Maule, but the lack of labour limited the realistic figure to 20,000.[3]: 14
Cordage paid a tax by weight, the balanza, on goods shipped to Peru. In 1672 the cabildo of Santiago agreed that a scale was needed for the thickest cordage embarked at Valparaíso. In 1680 it bought one made to weigh 23 quintales, and in 1682 it appointed a weigher at Valparaíso and ordered the warehouse keepers to receive cordage weighed from the growers, not by the tags fixed to it at the works, whose false weights had done the owners much harm.[20]: 10–11 During a false alarm early in 1675 about an English fleet, Vicuña Mackenna wrote, the hemp of the Quillota and La Ligua valleys was embargoed for making cordage, along with the timber of Guayaquil and the copper of Coquimbo.[11]: 143
In the late 18th century the Crown encouraged the crop. Gay wrote that ordinances of 1777 urged the estate owners of Chile to take up hemp again and freed it from all export and import duties in Spain.[7]: 133 The naturalist Juan Ignacio Molina wrote in the Spanish translation of 1788 of his work that because the manufacture of flax and hemp was prohibited, farmers sowed only what they needed for cord and common thread.[21] As governor of Chile, Ambrosio O'Higgins encouraged the people of the Aconcagua valley to pool their scant capital to export hemp and cordage on a large scale, Vicuña Mackenna wrote.[17]: 254
Decline and later exports
By 1796 the trade had shrunk. Reporting to the finance minister on 10 January 1796, Manuel de Salas called the hemp growing and cordage making of the province of Quillota a remnant of what they had been: 3,000 quintales of cordage and a little hilo de acarreto were all that was made, from hemp he thought equal to northern Europe's, and the price had fallen to 5 pesos a quintal, or at most 10 once worked, from 20.[18]: 172–173
Gay wrote that the wars of independence halted almost all work in the fields and that afterwards only the trade with Peru could take the product.[7]: 134 A law of 15 October 1832 exempted hemp and flax and their seed from tithe for ten years and offered prizes of 2,000 and 1,000 pesos for machines to work them.[22]: 3–4 By Gay's account a decree of the same period freed hemp, the goods made from it and the oil of its seed from all export duty, and cordage made in Chile was reserved for the country's warships.[7]: 134 The factories built at Valparaíso after these measures, he reported in 1865, had stood idle.[7]: 134–135
A report of the United States Department of Agriculture in 1926 found that Chile had grown more hemp fibre than its own manufacturers could use, although production in the three previous years had been lower than in any year from 1917 to 1921. Argentina had usually taken the largest amount of the exports, but in 1924 Great Britain took more than half.[8]
See also
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Frezier, A.-F. (1902). Relacion del viaje por el Mar del Sur a las costas de Chile i el Peru durante los años de 1712, 1713 i 1714 (PDF) (in español). Translated by Peña M., N. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Mejía – via Memoria Chilena.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Díaz Ordóñez, M. (2019). "Las nuevas periferias americanas en la circulación de cáñamo y jarcia para la construcción naval militar española en el siglo XVIII". Magallánica: Revista de Historia Moderna (in español). 6 (11): 181–202.
- ↑ 3.00 3.01 3.02 3.03 3.04 3.05 3.06 3.07 3.08 3.09 3.10 Díaz-Ordóñez, M.; Rodríguez Hernández, A.J. (2017). "Cannabis sativa y Chile (1577–1700): un insumo al servicio del Imperio". TEMPUS Revista en Historia General (in español) (6): 1–21. doi:10.17533/udea.tempus.n6a01.
- ↑ Ovalle, A. de (1646). Historica relacion del Reyno de Chile y de las misiones y ministerios que exercita en el la Compañia de Iesus (in español). Rome: Francisco Cavallo. pp. 10–11 – via Memoria Chilena.
- ↑ 5.00 5.01 5.02 5.03 5.04 5.05 5.06 5.07 5.08 5.09 5.10 Góngora, M. (1970). Encomenderos y estancieros: estudios acerca de la constitución social aristocrática de Chile después de la conquista, 1580–1660 (in español). Santiago: Universidad de Chile, Sede Valparaíso – via Memoria Chilena.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Juan, J.; Ulloa, A. de (1748). Relacion historica del viage a la America meridional. Segunda parte, tomo tercero (in español). Madrid: Antonio Marin. p. 349 – via Memoria Chilena.
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 Gay, C. (1865). Historia física y política de Chile: Agricultura (in español). Vol. 2. Paris: En casa del autor – via Memoria Chilena.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Bureau of Agricultural Economics (2 April 1926). Hemp production in Chile (PDF) (Report). Foreign News on Hemp. Washington: United States Department of Agriculture. F.S. HE-11 – via Wikimedia Commons.
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 Vázquez de Espinosa, A. (1948). Compendio y descripción de las Indias Occidentales. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections (in español). Vol. 108. Transcribed by C.U. Clark. Washington: Smithsonian Institution. pp. 677, 680.
- ↑ León Sáenz, J. (2009). "Los astilleros y la industria marítima en el Pacífico americano: siglos XVI a XIX". Diálogos: Revista Electrónica de Historia (in español). 10 (1). doi:10.15517/dre.v10i1.6128.
- ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Vicuña Mackenna, B. (1869). Historia de Valparaíso: crónica política, comercial i pintoresca de su ciudad i de su puerto, desde su descubrimiento hasta nuestros días, 1536–1868 (in español). Vol. 1. Valparaíso: Imprenta Albion de Cox i Taylor – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 Juan, J.; Ulloa, A. de (1826). Barry, D. (ed.). Noticias secretas de America (PDF) (in español). Vol. Parte I. London: R. Taylor – via Memoria Chilena.
- ↑ 13.0 13.1 "Disertación histórica y política sobre el comercio del Perú". Mercurio Peruano de historia, literatura, y noticias públicas (in español). Vol. 1. Lima: Imprenta Real de los Niños Huérfanos. 1791 – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ Acarete du Biscay (1698). An Account of a Voyage up the River de la Plata, and thence over Land to Peru. London: Samuel Buckley. pp. 56–57 – via Gallica.
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 Díaz Ordóñez, M. (2005). "El cáñamo y la Corona española en Ultramar: América y Filipinas (siglos XVI–XVII)". Revista de Historia Naval (in español). 23 (90): 48–56 – via idUS, Universidad de Sevilla.
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 Rosales, D. de (1877). Vicuña Mackenna, B. (ed.). Historia general de el Reyno de Chile, Flandes Indiano (in español). Vol. 1. Imprenta del Mercurio. pp. 262, 391 – via Memoria Chilena.
- ↑ 17.0 17.1 17.2 17.3 Vicuña Mackenna, B. (1872). Historia de Valparaíso: crónica política, comercial i pintoresca de su ciudad i de su puerto, desde su descubrimiento hasta nuestros días, 1536–1868 (in español). Vol. 2. Valparaíso: Imprenta del Mercurio de Tornero y Letelier – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ 18.0 18.1 Salas, M. de (1910). "Representación hecha al Ministro de Hacienda don Diego de Gardoqui por el Síndico del Real Consulado de Santiago, sobre el estado de la agricultura, industria y comercio del reino de Chile". Escritos de don Manuel de Salas y documentos relativos a él y a su familia (in español). Vol. 1. Santiago: Universidad de Chile – via Memoria Chilena.
- ↑ 19.0 19.1 19.2 Medina, J.T., ed. (1906). Actas del Cabildo de Santiago, tomo XII. Colección de historiadores de Chile y documentos relativos a la historia nacional (in español). Vol. 32. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Elzeviriana – via Internet Archive.
- ↑ de Ramón, A.; Larraín, J.M. (1979). "Una metrología colonial para Santiago de Chile: de la medida castellana al sistema métrico decimal". Historia (in español). 14. Santiago: 5–69.
- ↑ Molina, J.I. (1788). Compendio de la historia geográfica, natural y civil del Reyno de Chile. Primera parte (in español). Translated by Arquellada Mendoza, D.J. de. Madrid: Antonio de Sancha. p. 205 – via Memoria Chilena.
- ↑ Solano Pérez, F. (1833). Memoria sobre el cultivo y beneficio del lino y el cáñamo (in español). Santiago: Imprenta Nacional – via Biblioteca Nacional Digital de Chile.