Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
products to Bolivia via Mendoza. The local farmers here added their
own wheat and wine to the cargos. Although produce of the vine such
as the grape brandy aptly called “fire-water,” or aguardiente, found a
low-end market even in Buenos Aires, the wines of the Andes foothills
merely supplemented what the market lacked in their overseas trade
with Europe.
Along the extensive trade routes between the great market and
production areas, travelers found auxiliary economic services—road-
houses, remounts, forage, and country stores. Farmers along the roads
provided teamsters with lambs, eggs, squash, and watermelons. People
even made a living from ferrying goods across large streams. They fur-
nished ox-hide tubs and swimming horses for baggage and passengers
alike. These services completed the regional trading complex of the
colonial era, but they did not earn their workers large fortunes, which
is why the Spanish merchants and landowners left them mainly in the
hands of mestizos and mulattoes.
Gatherers of
Yerba
in Paraguay
Another great production center in this far-reaching commercial net-
work was located up the Paraná River. Though they lived only 620
miles by land from Potosí, Paraguayans could not communicate with
Bolivia because of the hostility of the natives of the Gran Chaco, so
Paraguay existed on the very administrative and economic fringe of
the Spanish Americas. The silver of Potosí, however, attracted the
commercial interests of every settler group in the Río de la Plata. The
gentry of Asunción found their commercial salvation in the leaf of the
yerba
tree of Paraguay's rain forests.
Yerba
was found to make a distinc-
tive tea called
mate,
which soon gained favor among the residents of
Peru, Chile, and Argentina. (Many people in the Southern Cone still
drink
mate
daily.) One sipped the liquid either through a silver straw
from a sterling cup or through a wooden straw from a gourd, depend-
ing on social status. Most of the earliest
yerba
traffic flowed through
Asunción downriver to Santa Fe, then overland to markets either in
Chile or Peru.
Yerba
remained Paraguay's principal export throughout
the colonial period. It brought in six times the revenue of the second
most important export—tobacco.
The demand for
yerbamate
throughout the Southern Cone brought
about the transformation of its production in Paraguay. The first
exporters in the early 17th century merely organized their Guaraní
workers to go into the forest to pick and then toast the leaves from wild
