Page images
PDF
EPUB

The habilitadores have purchased for the last twelve years, the thousand of vanilla of the first class at an average price of 25 or 35 piastres; the thousand of zacate at ten, and of rezacate at four piastres. In 1803 the price of the grande fina was 50, and the zacate 15 piastres. The purchasers far from paying the Indians in ready money, supply them in barter, and at a very high price, with brandy, cocoa, wine and more especially with cotton cloth manufactured at Puebla. In this barter consists part of the profits of these monopolists.

The district of Papantla, formerly an Alcaldia mayor, is situated 18 leagues to the north of Misantla; it produces very little vanilla, and that little is besides badly dried, though very aromatic. The Indians of Papantla as well as those of Nautla, are accused of introducing themselves furtively into the forests of Quilate for the sake of collecting the fruit of the epidendrum planted by the natives of Misantla. In the intendancy of Oaxaca, the village of Teutila is celebrated for the superior quality of the vanilla produced in the neighbouring forests. It appears that this variety was the first which was introduced into Spain in the sixteenth century; for even at this day the baynilla de Teutila is considered at Cadiz as preferable to every other. It is indeed dried with much care, being pricked with pins and suspended by

threads of the Pite; but it weighs less by nearly a ninth than that of Misantla. I know not the quantity of vanilla produced in the province of Honduras and annually exported from the small port of Truxillo, but it appears to be very inconsiderable.

The forests of Quilate yield in very abundant years 800 millares of vanilla; a bad harvest in very rainy years amounts only to 200. The mean produce is estimated thus

[blocks in formation]

The value of these 910 millares is at Vera Cruz from 30 to 40,000 piastres. We must add the produce of the harvests of Santiago and San Andres Tuxtla, for which I am in want of sufficiently accurate data. It frequently happens that the harvest of one year does not pass all at once into Europe, but that a part of it is reserved to be added to that of the following year. In 1802, 1793 millares of vanilla left the port of Vera Cruz. It is astonishing that the total consumption of Europe is not greater.

The same eastern slope of the Cordillera on which the vanilla is produced, produces also the sarsaparilla (zarza) of which there was exported

from Vera Cruz in 1803 nearly 250,000* kilogrammest and the Jalap (Purga de Xalapa) which is the root, not of the mirabilis jalapa, of the M. longiflora, or of the M. dichotoma, but of the convolvolus jalapa. This convolvolus vegetates at an absolute height of from 13 to 14 hundred metres on the whole chain of mountains extending from the Volcan d'Orizaba to the Cofre de Perote. We did not meet with it in our herborizations around the town of Xalapa itself; but the Indians who inhabit the neighbouring villages brought us some excellent roots of it collected near Banderilla to the east of San Miguel el Soldado. This valuable remedy is procured in the Subdelegacion de Xalapa, around the villages of Santiago, Tlachi, Tihuacan de los Reyes, Tlacolula, Xicochimalco, Tatatila, Yxhuacan, and Ayahualulco; in the jurisdiccion de San Juan de los Llanos, near San Pedro Chilchotla and Quimixtlan; in the partidos of the towns of Cordoba, Orizaba and San Andres Tuxtla. The true Purga de Xalapa delights only in a temperate climate or rather an almost

* 551,750 lb. avoird. Trans.

The sarsaparilla employed in commerce proceeds from several species of smilax, very different from the S. Sarsaparilla. See the description of the ten new species, brought by us in the species of M. Willdenow. T. iv. P. i. p. 773.

From 4264 to 4592 feet. Trans.

cold climate, in shaded valleys and on the slope of mountains. I was so much the more surprized, therefore on learning after my return to Europe that an intelligent traveller who has displayed the greatest zeal for the good of his country, Thiery de Menonville* had asserted that he found the jalap in great abundance in the arid and sandy tracts in the neighbourhood of the port of Vera Cruz, and consequently under a climate excessively warm, and at the level of the ocean.

Raynal assertst that Europe consumes annually 7500 quintals of jalap. This estimate appears too much by one half; for from the most accurate information which I was able to procure at Vera Cruz, there was only exported from that port in 1802, 2921 and in 1803, 2281 quintals of jalap. The price at Xalapa is from 120 to 150 francs the quintal.

We did not see during our stay in New Spain, the plant which it is pretended, yields the root of Mechoacan, (the Tacuache of the Tarasck Indians, and the Tlalantlacuitlapilli of the Aztecs.) We never even during the course

*Thiery, p. 59. This jalap of Vera Cruz appears to be the same with that found by Mr. Michaux, in Florida. See the Memoir of Mr. Desfontaines, on the Convolvulus Jalapa, in the Annales du Museum d'Histoire Naturelle. T. ii. p. 120,

+ Hist. Philos. T. ii. p. 68.

of our travels in the antient kingdom of Michoacan, which is part of the intendancy of Valladolid, heard any mention made of it. The abbe Clavigero* relates that a physician of the late king of Tzintzontzan, communicated the knowledge of this remedy to the religious missionaries of the expedition of Cortez. Does there really exist a root, which under the name of Mechoacan, is exported from Vera Cruz, or does this remedy which is the same as the jeticucu of Marcgravet, come from the coast of Brazil? It appears even that antiently the true Jalap was called Mechoacan, and that by one of those mistakes so frequent in the history of medecines, the denomination has been afterwards transferred to the root of another plant.

The cultivation of Mexican Tobacco, might become a branch of agriculture of the very highest importance, if the trade in it were free; but since the introduction of the monopoly, or since the establishment of the royal farm, (el estanco real de Tabaco) by the Visitador Don Joseph de Galvez in 1764, not only a special permission is necessary to plant tobacco, and the cultivator obliged to sell it to the farm, at a price arbitrarily fixed according to the worth

* Storia antica di Messico, T. ii. p. 212.

+ Linn. Mat. Medica, 1749, p. 28. Murray Apparatus medicaminum, T. i. p. 62.

« ՆախորդըՇարունակել »