CHAPTER I

This town, although it has been the terror of seafaring men for the last three hundred years, has, for a like period of time, enjoyed an enviable commerce. Nearly three-fourths of all the silver that has been shipped to Europe from America during that long period has been sent from this port, besides the other productions of the country, such as cochineal, vanilla, wood of Tobasco, sarsaparilla, and jalap. To all this we must add that all the trade of Spain with Japan, China, and the Philipine Islands, was carried across Mexico from Acapulco, on the Pacific, to be shipped from Vera Cruz to Spain. During the long period we have named, this was the only port on the Atlantic side where foreign commerce was allowed; and this was restricted to Spain alone, and to a single fleet of merchant ships that came and went annually, until about fifty years before the Mexican independence, when free commerce was allowed with all the Spanish world. From a history of the commerce of Vera Cruz, just published at Mexico, I find that its annual average did not vary greatly from $12,000,000 importations against $18,000,000 exportations. The extra $6,000,000 being about the annual average of the royal revenue derived from New Spain, as this country was then called. Silver constituted the bulk of this $18,000,000, both in weight and in value. During the last fifty years of Spanish dominion, this commerce, extended, as we have said, to all Spanish possessions, was monopolized by a company of merchants styled the Consulado of Vera Cruz. Under the management of this company it averaged as high as $22,000,000.