566 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION E. 
sold for their weight in silver.’' That is the point of view of a European in 
India, but a native of the East Indies in Europe at the same date would no 
doubt have spoken with astonishment of the amount of silver that could be got 
in Europe for a few grains of pepper. Our letter-writer says in his cheerful, 
hopeful, gossiping way, ‘The gains of these parts are other than those of 
Damascus, Aleppo, and Alexandria: for if one does not gain cent. per cent. 
from Portugal here, and from here back again, one thinks that one gains nothing. 
And three or four years would be quite enough.’? But, while he indicates how 
these immense gains are made, he also indicates clearly enough how they continue 
to be made—that is, how they are so counterbalanced by losses that if these 
great gains were not made on occasion commerce would cease. It was all very 
well to exchange your coral for spices, but the great matter was to get your coral 
out and your spices home in safety. The writer of this letter had entrusted to a 
friend who had left on a ship for Ormuz jewels of the value of 4,000 Venetian 
ducats, but the jewels were lost. He believed that his friend was murdered. 
‘ But such losses,’ he adds, ‘will occur.’ Another time he lost more than 6,000 
ducats gold in Portuguese vessels going to Ormuz, and on another occasion he 
suffered great loss when Pegu was sacked by the King of Burma. 
These notes may serve to illustrate the conditions of trade in the glorious 
days for Portugal when fine fortunes were heaped up in Lisbon through trade, 
but the great bulk of humanity got very little at least directly through that 
trade ; but we have not exhausted the interest connected with the nature of the 
outgoing commodities for India, and to that it will be well to return. Another 
of the stipulations of the treaty of 1513 above referred to was that while duties 
were to be paid in coin ‘the Portuguese were to pay for all the pepper and other 
merchandise they might purchase in kind,’ and, as the peace led among other 
things to a dearth of prizes, Albuquerque ‘was constrained to send an urgent 
request home for large quantities of merchandise to be sent out to make up for 
this deficiency.’* How long this stipulation remained in force I cannot say, but 
things were certainly different a hundred years later. In the report to the Grand 
Duke of Florence above cited we are told that what the Portuguese carry to 
India for exchange is above all ‘ silver in reals, and besides silver wine, oil, and 
some other sort of merchandise, such as coral, glass, and the like, of little import- 
ance’; and as to the silver he adds that ‘the reals bring a gain of more than 
50 per cent. as soon as they have reached India, for the real of eight, which in 
Lisbon is worth 820 reis, in India is sold and spent at the rate of 480 to 484 reis 
of that money, and with it one buys all sorts of spices and drugs which are sold 
there, except pepper, which is the monopoly of the King of Portugal and those 
to whom he gives a lease of that trade.’ The importance of silver among the 
outgoing commodities for India has continued from that time down to the 
present day, latterly, however, in diminishing proportion. For a long time after 
the date at which we have now arrived it was as predominant as a means of 
exchange with India as it was in the first century of the Christian era, when the 
drain of silver from the Roman Empire to the East was bewailed by the writers 
of that time. In the voyages of the English East India Company of the four 
years 1620-28 inclusive the value of the bullion (chiefly silver) sent out to 
India was 205,710/., as against only 58,8062. worth of merchandise.‘ 
Now, what is the meaning of the change in the position of silver in Indian 
trade which seems to have taken place between 1513 and the end of the sixteenth 
century ? No doubt we may see there the result of another change in geo- 
graphical relations brought about by a discovery nearly contemporaneous with 
that of the sea way to India—namely, that of the New World. The first result 
of that discovery of importance to commerce was the pouring into Europe of 
large quantities of the precious metals, and the quantity was enormously enhanced 
’ P. 34 of the letter referred to as published at Venice in 1824. 
2 Tbid., p. 29. 
® Danvers, vol. i. pp. 284, 286. 
* I take these figures from p. 6 of the appendix to P. Colquhoun’s Treatise on the 
Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire, 2nd ed., London, 1815. 
