depots and trading factories in the Spanish American possessions;[1] this being a part of the price at which France and Spain secured the withdrawal of Great Britain from the grand alliance.
His Catholic Majesty Felipe V. and her Britannic Majesty Queen Anne were to receive each one fourth share in the profits obtained from the sale of these human chattels, the former agreeing to advance one million pesos for carrying on the trade, or in case he could not raise such an amount to pay interest thereupon at the rate of eight per cent a year.[2] Before her decease, which occurred in the following year, the English sovereign, finding her share unprofitable, transferred it to the South Sea Company, though it does not appear that the latter reaped much benefit therefrom.[3]
"Commercial houses," as they were termed, were at once established at Vera Cruz and elsewhere on the coast of the North Sea; but their owners, not content with the enormous profits of the slave-trade, violated the terms of the treaty by introducing cargoes of foreign merchandise. England was now permitted, as we have seen, to send yearly to Portobello a five hundred ton vessel freighted with merchandise;[4] but each slaver that landed its living cargo on the shores of New Spain brought also a quantity of contraband goods. In vain the custom-house officers attempted to stay this traffic; and in vain the penalty of death and confiscation of property was threatened against
- ↑ An asiento for the sale of slaves, with power to regulate their price, was also granted to the French about the year 1702.
- ↑ Some of the clauses of this asiento are given in Moro, Informe (Mexico, 1724), 1-4, and all of them in an abridged form in Salmon's Modern Hist. (3d ed., London, 1746), iii. 220-2. The asiento had been previously granted (in 1702) to the French Guinea Company and was transferred to the crown of England at the treaty of Utrecht.
- ↑ In a speech delivered before the company in 1731, Sir John Eyles in giving an account of this branch of their business during the previous ten years, states that, though the report of their having lost £2,000,000 by the trade was untrue, they had incurred such losses through the seizure of their effects by the Spaniards during the wars with Spain that their gains were very small. They were not, however, out of pocket. Id., 222.
- ↑ Hist. Cent. Amer., ii. 586-7, this series.
