Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Buenos Aires at any one time, receiving full cooperation from local
Spanish officials. Even the Jesuits had few qualms about dealing with
the Protestant shippers of Amsterdam. The Castilian monarch certainly
knew of the illegal trade at Buenos Aires and chastised the
porteños
for
their corruption and consumers for their taste in European imports.
Despite the Crown's displeasure, smuggling at Buenos Aires continued
unabated into the 18th century, when the British arrived.
In 1713, the British South Sea Company gained the exclusive
monopoly from the Spanish Crown to import slaves into the Spanish
dominions. The company established a warehouse in Buenos Aires
and imported more than 18,000 Africans over the next 27 years. Its
monopoly contract stipulated that the British were to deal only in slaves
in exchange for local products, but no merchandise or silver. The South
Sea Company did not keep the bargain. By sharing its illicit profits with
local officials, British merchants gained sanction for illegal imports of
merchandise and exports of bullion.
All this illegal trade satisfied so many powerful persons in the Río
de la Plata that it could not be stifled. Spanish officials and merchants
became wealthy dealing with those very foreigners they pledged to keep
out of the empire. Likewise, local cattlemen gained outlets for their
dried cattle hides. The cartmen of Tucumán and muleteers of Mendoza
gained profits in transporting slaves and silver, while public officials in
Córdoba and Salta collected more taxes on the movement of goods over
the major trade routes of the Río de la Plata. Paraguayans found larger
markets for
yerba
and tobacco among those who made their living from
trade. Yet no place thrived on the illegal trade quite so much as the city
of Buenos Aires. Its population grew exponentially between 1615 and
1770 according to population estimates (see table on page 46).
By 1776, Buenos Aires had become the leading port in southern South
America. International trade had developed in the estuary because of
economic rather than political sanction. The Portuguese presence
across the estuary in southern Brazil and Uruguay posed a threat to the
established (though illegal) trade routes to the silver mines. Spain was
thus confronted with the necessity of reinforcing its presence in the
neglected fringe of its American empire.
Throughout the early colonial period, cattle raising was not a com-
mon occupation of settlers on the prairies south of Buenos Aires.
Cattle hides found their way into the holds of foreign vessels, but the
erratic demand for this commodity could be satisfied by the cattle
hunt, the
vaquería.
A leading citizen of Buenos Aires would organize
an expedition of gaucho horsemen and oxcarts, which proceeded
