Folio broadside [25.4 x 17.0 cm], single-leaf letterpress text with typographic border. Bound in modern cardboard and marbled paper, mounted on tab. Binding well preserved. Broadside with narrow margins but otherwise pristine.

Very rare first and only edition of an apparently unrecorded official broadside listing American goods delivered to Cadiz from Havana in 1767 at the return of the Spanish flota from its annual voyage to the New World. The document, an important witness to 18^th-century transatlantic trade, served as a preliminary handlist for government and/or commercial officials in Cadiz to account for the wide range of valuable American imports arriving in the city, imports vital to the Spanish economy in the period. The list includes not only vast quantities of gold and silver (in bars, coin, and worked form), but also medicinal botanicals, foodstuff, raw materials, and finished products from New Spain and Tierra Firme, all of which left on ships from the ports of Vera Cruz, Cartagena, and Guayra (Venezuela), reconvening in Havana for the return voyage to Spain. Cuba, too, appears to have provided several important exports, as listed among the cargo here are many tons of Havana sugar (azucar de la Havana), large amounts of tobacco in both leaf and powder form, and even some 400 cases of cigars.

The 10 commercial ships of the 1767 flota sailed under the protection of captain Don Augustin Ydiaquez and returned to Cadiz on 13 March, having presumably set out the previous year. Individual ships are named here along with their captains, cargo, and ports of operation in the Americas. In addition to gold and silver, the ships carried tortoiseshells, jewelry, sacks of cacao from the Soconusco region of Chiapas, casks of vanilla, chocolate, sugar, indigo, sarsaparilla, cotton, clay pots (bucaros), the medicinal Peruvian fern calaguala, purgatives (purga de Jalapa), the aromatic/medicinal resin copal, cevadilla (used to kill ticks on cattle), tanned leather and hides, dyestuff (Campeche wood, achiote, and dividivi). Also mentioned are the 2 “paquetes de platina,” or platinum, a metal long used by native cultures but only recently ‘discovered’ in Colombia and made known to Europeans in 1745 through the efforts of the scientist/explorer Antonio de Ulloa (1716-95). In the report these goods are demarcated as belonging to the Spanish crown or various private commercial entities; the final ship listed, for example, belonged to the Real Compañia Guipuzcoana, a Basque trading company which operated out of Caracas between 1728 and 1785.

Only a handful of similar letterpress broadsides from other flota voyages of this period are known, and these too are very rare today, apparently having been printed in limited numbers as an ephemeral account of yearly imports. These lists, like the present item, are printed on only 1 or 2 leaves. See for example, the Nota de los caudales, y efectos, que han conducido de los puertos de Vera-Cruz, y la Havana… (Cadiz, 1770, 1 leaf, British Library) and the Nota de los caudales, que conducen, procedentes de Vera-Cruz y Havana, los Navios de S.M. nombrados San Raphael, y San Pedro de Alcantara... (Cadiz, 1772, 1 leaf, Bib. de Cataluyna).

OCLC and KVK locate no worldwide examples of the present Estado de la carga, que cuenta de S. M. comercio han conducido de los Puertos de Vera-Cruz, Cartagena, y Havana…, nor is the title listed in the standard bibliographical works (Palau, Medina, etc.).

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