1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [88]
Madrid was dismayed by the magnitude of the galleon trade—too much silver was going out, and too much silk and porcelain was coming in. Exact figures are not possible to calculate, but somewhere between a third and a half of the silver mined in the Americas went to China, either directly via the galleon trade or indirectly, via Europeans’ purchases of Chinese goods shipped overland by Central Asian traders or around Africa by the Dutch and the Portuguese. The monarchy was furious, because the king wanted the silver to buy supplies and pay troops in Spain’s innumerable wars. (“The Manila galleon’s most fearsome adversary was beyond doubt the Spanish administration itself,” the French historian Pierre Chaunu observed.) To prune back the galleon trade, officials cut the number of ships allowed to cross the Pacific to two per year. In response the galleons became enormous, ballooning to two thousand tons. Built by conscripted Malays out of tropical hardwoods, they were castles of the sea. On the Manila-bound lap they carried more than fifty tons of silver—equal, Flynn and Giráldez have calculated, to the combined annual exports of the Dutch East India Company, the English East India Company, and the Portuguese Estado da India.
Much or most of that silver was illegal. Worried Mexican officials informed the monarchy in 1602 that the galleons that year had exported almost four hundred tons of silver—eight times the declared amount. Furious imprecations from Madrid changed nothing; smuggling was too lucrative. “The king of China could build a palace with the silver bars which have been carried to his country … without their having been registered,” Admiral Bañuelos y Carrillo complained thirty-six years later. In 1654 the San Francisco Javier sank near Manila Bay. Its official manifest claimed that it carried 418,323 pesos. Centuries later, divers found 1,180,865 aboard. Even if one assumes, absurdly, that the divers found every last coin, the cargo was almost two-thirds contraband.
To restrict trade on the other side, the government issued import quotas. If the junks brought too much silk or porcelain to Manila, customs officials were supposed to send it back. To get around the quotas, Chinese traders arranged to have their agents meet the junks as they approached the Philippines. Much of the onboard merchandise had been ordered the year before, by Spaniards looking at samples. In a mirror image of the Spanish practice of loading illicit silk and porcelain onto galleons after they left Manila, the Chinese offloaded illicit silk and porcelain from their junks before they arrived. Only after these transactions did the ship officially enter the harbor and let the Spanish harbor patrol guide it to its berth.
Spain had its own silk weavers and dressmakers, as did its colony in Mexico. But the scale of Chinese textile production was so much bigger that Europeans couldn’t compete. Indeed, the silver-hungry Ming dynasty actually forced farmers to plant mulberry trees, the food for silkworms. Landowners with between five and ten mu (one mu is about one-sixth of an acre) had to plant, the official history of the dynasty says, “half a mu each of mulberry and cotton.” Those with more than ten mu had to plant “twice as much.” Farmers who didn’t plant mulberry had “to pay one bolt of silk.” Spurred by these decrees, farmers in eastern China covered the hills with mulberry trees. By the 1590s, the Fujianese writer Xie Zhaozhe was reporting areas with “mulberries planted on every foot or inch.” Rich farmers, he claimed, devoted “more than a million mu” (roughly 130,000 acres) to mulberry trees—entire landscapes of a single species. Working in a frenzy, farmers upriver from Yuegang harvested silk five times a year.
To their north, villages in the lower Yangtze became congested hives of small silk factories, attracting