These Manila merchants would then seek to load their cargo on galleons bound for Mexico. Merchants from mainland Asia would arrive in Manila in May, bringing with them these highly valued goods, which they exchanged with Manila-based merchants for silver. There was tremendous demand in Mexico and Spain for East Asian silks, textiles, porcelain, and lacquerware. These restrictions made space on each galleon extremely valuable. The Spanish Crown owned the ships and restricted the number of voyages to one per year between Mexico and Manila it also restricted the number of ships that could sail as part of each voyage. Importantly, the galleon trade was a government monopoly. The Manila Galleon trade was the longest, most profitable, and most celebrated colonial-era trade route. 2020), we examine the costs of corruption in the context of the Manila Galleon trade. But little empirical work has been done on colonial trading regimes. We also have rigorous empirical studies of the costs of corruption in modern settings ranging from Indonesia (Olken and Barron 2009) and India (Niehaus and Sukhtankar 2013) to sub-Saharan Africa (Reinikka and Svensson 2004). What does the sinking of the San José tell us about the costs of colonial trading regimes and the costs of corruption or rent-seeking more generally? This is a question that goes back to Adam Smith (1776).įrom Tullock (1967) and Krueger (1974), we understand that the overall welfare costs of corruption can exceed the gains to the beneficiaries from Shleifer and Vishny (1993), we know that the industrial structure of rent-seeking matters.
The San José was laden with a huge amount of silks and spices, over 197,000 works of Chinese and Japanese porcelain, 47 chests full of objects of worked gold, and hundreds of other chests containing precious stones and objects, the total value of which was recorded as 7,694,742 pesos or more than $500 million in today’s money. It was one of 788 galleons that sailed between Manila and Acapulco, Mexico, between 15 as part of the Manila Galleon trade.
The article contains a partial cargo list for the 1693 Santo Cristo de Burgos voyage and a special digital appendix with the full cargo manifest for the 1701 San Francisco Xavier.In 2011 underwater archaeologists discovered the remains of the San José, a galleon sunk near Lubang Island, Philippines, in July 1694.
According to La Follette and Deur, “in addition to trade goods, the Santo Cristo de Burgos carried a cargo of liquid mercury,” which was essential for refining silver ore from South American mines used to make coins that fueled the Spanish empire and the Manila trade itself. La Follette and Deur located probable matches for the shippers' identities of four shipper's marks found on Oregon beeswax chunks. In this article, Cameron La Follette and Douglas Deur describe research findings about cargo on the Santo Cristo de Burgos and similar Manila galleons, including the San Francisco Xavier of 1705, the previous favored candidate for the Oregon wreck. Both Native people and Euro-Americans have recovered large beeswax chunks, lending to the lore of the “Beeswax Wreck,” as well as Chinese blue-and-white porcelain fragments.
Much of the debris that has washed up on the shores of the northern Oregon coast for centuries were mainstays of Spanish trade carried as cargo across the world on Manila galleons.