J26 
THE BRAZILS. 
considerable lias of late years been the value of their exports, 
and so niggardly are the European supplies furnished by the 
mother countr}-, that they draw an annual balance in hard 
specie of at least half a million sterling, by means of a clan- 
destine trade with English whalers, Americans, and the ships 
of other nations, which find it convenient to take off their 
hands their surplus produce. This money is mostly sunk in 
the purchase of slaves, twenty thousand of whom, as I have 
already stated, are annually imported, of which, at the mo- 
derate rate of twenty pounds a-head, the cost is 400,000/. 
Most of the woollen, linen, and cotton cloths, consumed 
in the Brazils, are of British manufacture ; and the greater 
part of coarse Indian goods used by them have also been sup- 
plied from London, through Lisbon, excepjt such as are 
thrown in direct from the former by clandestine means. For 
all these supplies, however, they have valuable products to 
give in return, if their government would only allow them the 
benefit of a free trade. In many of the Spanish dominions 
on the same continent this is not the case. On the western 
coast they have little produce to part with except specie, 
which they liberall}' exchange with our adventurers in return 
for the necessaries of life. In this manner a small portion of 
the silver dug out of the mines of Potosi finds its way direct to 
the Thames. And in addition to the balance which the Por- 
tugueze settlements in the Brazils draw in specie from Europe 
and North America, they receive perhaps an equal sum from 
supplying the Spanish settlements, through Rio de la Plata, not 
only with various articles of their own production, but a con- 
siderable quantity of European manufactures, all of which 
