shallows" continued to be the port at which all but a small part of the foreign commerce entered and from which the exports of chief value were shipped.[1]
One other branch of Mexican trade in the colonial era deserves mention—the commerce with Asia, which the mother country always looked upon with jealousy but which it felt it necessary to allow in spite of the fact that it drained off part of the highly valued silver production of Mexico and brought back from the East textiles that competed with her own manufactures. This was the trade through the galleons, which sailed usually from Acapulco for the assistance of the unprosperous colony in the Philippines. The Spanish merchants always looked upon this commerce as an unavoidable evil at best. In 1593 a royal decree confined the trade to two ships a year, in which not more than 500,000 duros of silver could be sent in return for the Chinese goods which they brought to Mexico. Except as to the number of ships, the government's regulations of this trade were always observed in the breach. The officials in Manila and in Mexico lent themselves to all sorts of evasions. Shipments of as much as 4,000,000 pesos in a single year are reported to have gone to the Philippines.
After the middle of the eighteenth century the restric-
- ↑ For discussions of the commerce of this period see: Alexandre de Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain, London, 1814, 2d ed., vol. 1, p. cxvii, and vol. 3, p. 492; Chappe D'Auteroch. Voyage to California, London, 1778, pp. 20-1; Henry Ker, Travels Through the Western Interior of the United States from the Year 1803 up to the Year 1816; with a particular description of a great part of Mexico, or New Spain, Elizabethtown, N. J., 1816, pp. 222-224; Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, op. cit., passim.
