EXPOET OP CACAO. 
61 
It is only since the middle of the seventeenth century, 
■when the Dutch, tranquil possessors of the island of Cura^oa, 
awakened, by their smuggling, the agricultural industry of 
the inhabitants of the neighbouring coasts, that cacao 
has become ^an object of exportation in the province of 
Caracas. We are ignorant of everything that passed in 
those countries before the establishment of the Biscay 
Company ot Guipuzcoa, in 1728. No precise statistical 
data have reached us: we only know that the exportation 
oi cacao Irom Caracas scarcely amounted, at the beginning 
ot the eighteenth century, to thirty thousand fanegas a-year. 
1 rom 1730 to 1748, the company sent to Spain eight hun- 
dred and fifty-eight thousand nine hundred and seventy- 
eight fanegas, which make, on an average, forty-seven thou- 
sand seven hundred fanegas a-year ; the price of the fanega 
fell, m 1 / 32, to forty-five piastres, when it had before kept 
at eighty piastres. In 1763 the cultivation had so much 
augmented, that the exportation rose to eighty thousand 
six hundred and fifty-nine fanegas. 
In an official document, taken from the papers of the 
minister of finance, the annual produce (la cosecha) of the 
province of Caracas is estimated at a hundred and thirty- 
five thousand fanegas of cacao; thirty-three thousand of 
which are for home consumption, ten thousand for other 
Spanish colonies, seventy-seven thousand for the mother- 
country, fifteen thousand for the illicit commerce with the 
r r imo Dutch, and Danish colonies. From 1789 
to 1793, the importation of cacao from Caracas into Spain 
was, on an average, seventy-seven thousand seven hundred 
and nineteen fanegas a-year, of which sixty-five thousand 
seven hundred and sixty-six were consumed in the country, 
and eleven thousand nine hundred and fifty-three exported 
to rrance, Italy, and Germany. 
The late wars have had much more fatal effects on the 
cacao trade of Caracas than on that of Guayaquil. Oil 
account of the increase of price, less cacao of the first quality 
as been consumed in Europe. Instead of mixing, as was 
one formerly for common chocolate, one quarter of the 
cacao of Caracas, with three-quarters of that of Guayaquil, 
tne fatter has been.employed pure in Soain. We must here 
