Buenos Ayres and the Provinces of the Rio de La Plata: Their Present State, Trade, and DebtParish, Woodbine, Sir
History
Buenos Ayres and the Provinces of the Rio de La Plata: Their Present State, Trade, and Debt
Parish, Woodbine, Sir
Argentina -- Description and travel; Argentina -- History
Corn also was an article of export from Buenos Ayres during the general
war in Europe, and is again beginning to be exported to Brazil--as
is shown by the account of the exports in 1837. It is of an excellent
quality, and might be grown to any extent.
Mules, horses, and asses have at times been shipped in large numbers
for the West Indies and for the Isle of France, and have been sold
there at an enormous profit.
In the short notices given of the provinces of the interior, I have
given such accounts of any other of their native productions as I could
collect. The silver and gold mines of Cordova, La Rioja, Mendoza,
San Juan, and Salta, may eventually become productive; and, when an
intercourse is once more permitted with Bolivia through the interior,
it may be expected that some portion of the precious metals produced
there also will, as formerly, find their way to Buenos Ayres.
In old times, not only were the rich and populous provinces of Bolivia
exclusively supplied through the Rio de la Plata with all such articles
as they wanted from Europe, but they took from the lower provinces a
variety of useful productions of their own, for all which they paid in
gold and silver. Of mules alone upwards of 60,000 were annually sent to
Potosi from the provinces of Tucuman and Santa Fé.
This internal trade, once of so much importance to the people of
the intermediate provinces, was annihilated in the struggle for
establishing the independency of the Republic; for, Bolivia remaining
to the last in the hands of the Spaniards, of course all commercial
intercourse was prohibited with the provinces of La Plata, which had
thrown off the yoke of the mother-country. To this may be ascribed in
great measure the extreme poverty and backwardness of many of those
provinces at the present day. Salta, Tucuman, Cordova, Santa Fé, and
Paraguay, lost the best markets for their native produce; whilst the
people, dragged from their pastoral and agricultural pursuits in the
first instance to fight against their old masters, and afterwards to
destroy one another in support of the ephemeral authorities which
succeeded them, naturally contracted such unsettled and disorderly
habits as it will require many a year of domestic peace and better
government to wean them from. To time, and a continuance of those
blessings, as I have elsewhere said, we must, I believe, look for
the remedy of these evils, and for any material improvement in the
condition of the interior provinces of the republic.
HORSES AND CATTLE.
In connexion with what I have said upon the trade of Buenos Ayres, a
brief notice of the origin and extraordinary increase of the vast herds
of horses and cattle which at present constitute so large a portion of
the riches of Buenos Ayres, may perhaps be not uninteresting to some of
my readers.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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