=208. Supply of the market by smugglers.=—Spanish colonists increased but slowly, therefore, in numbers and riches, and furnished a poor market for Spanish exports. The Indians were even worse customers. Natives who went barefoot and had no beards were forced, it is said, to buy razors and silk stockings at exorbitant prices, but of course they had no natural desire for those or other European wares, and took only an inconsiderable amount. As the home manufactures declined in vigor, exports to the colonies came to consist almost entirely of the wares from other European countries, and even these were obtained mainly through smugglers. The government could maintain its regulations against Spaniards, but not against foreigners, who absorbed the most profitable parts of the trade, and spoiled the market for merchants who obeyed the restrictions. The English and Dutch islands became the stations for an illicit trade which flourished as the regular trade declined. After 1713 England had the right, by treaty, to the monopoly of the African slave trade with the Spanish possessions, and was privileged to send out nearly five thousand negroes a year. The English had moreover the right to send out one trading ship of 500 tons; they secretly enlarged the capacity of the ship and used accompanying transports to carry still more cargo. =209. Wares of the colonial trade.=—Of the products which Spanish America furnished to commerce silver continued the most important during the colonial period; the list of a ship’s cargo begins always with an enumeration of the “plate,” in bullion and coin, of which but a small part was gold. A fleet which left America in 1582 comprised 37 ships, “and in every one of them there was as good as thirty pipes of silver one with another, besides great store of gold, cochinilla, sugars, hides, and Cana Fistula (arrow-root?) with other apothecary drugs.” Descriptions of cargoes in the eighteenth century are substantially similar; among additional wares enumerated we find indigo, cocoa, vanilla, sarsaparilla, “Jesuit’s bark,” (quinine) “Paraguay tea” (_maté_), etc. The chief export from the La Plata region was hides, of which two ships brought nearly 40,000 in 1723. Most agricultural products were too bulky to pay for transportation. The Spanish exported to the colonies assorted cargoes; one of 1625 included “Wines, Figs, Raisins, Olives, Oyle, Cloth, Cursies (kerseys, light woolens named from an English town), Linnen, Iron and Quicksilver for the mines.”