y ill provided with some of the
necessaries of life, and most of the conveniences; so that prodigious
sums of the money brought from America have to be yearly exported for
the purchase of these.

Besides such drawbacks as the above, to which the Spaniards willingly
submit, there are many others which they are forced to endure: For
instance, all the negroes they employ in their plantations, in
which every kind of labour is performed by them, are purchased from
foreigners, particularly the English and Dutch, at a very large
annual expence; and, under pretence of furnishing them with negroes, a
clandestine trade is carried on every year, along the whole coasts
of their possessions on the Atlantic. In the South Sea, however,
they were tolerably free from every thing except the depredations
of pirates, till the general war on account of the succession to the
crown of Spain, which created a new kind of contraband trade, unknown
in former times, of which I now propose to give some account.

The _French interlopers_ carried vast quantities of goods directly
from Europe into the South Seas, which till then had hardly ever been
attempted by any European nation. This was always viewed with an evil
eye by the court of Spain, as repugnant to the interests of Spain, and
diametrically opposite to the maxims of her government; but there
were many circumstances at that time which rendered this a kind of
necessary evil, and obliged therefore the people of Old Spain to
submit to it. As for the Creoles, they had European goods and at a
cheaper rate, and it did not give them much concern who it was that
received their money. The town of St Malo has always been noted for
privateers, and greatly annoyed the trade of the English and Dutch
during the whole reign of King William, and part of that of Queen
Anne; and though some allege that money procured by privateering never
prospers, yet I may safely affirm that the people of St Malo are as
rich and flourishing as any in all France. Privateering has thriven
so well among them, that all their South Sea trade has arisen from
thence; and, during the last war, they were so rich and generous,
that they made several free gifts to Louis XIV.; and so dexterous were
they, that though our Admiralty always kept a stout squadron in
the Atlantic, we were never able to capture one of their South-Sea
traders. The reason of this was, that they always kept their ships
extremely clean, having ports to careen a