The shipyards of Guayaquil
The yards that built the Pacific fleet of Spanish America, described in 1741 by the governor who had administered the province: 176 vessels since the city's foundation, keels of guachapelí that resisted the shipworm, oakum spun from coconut husk, and hulls whose masts, rigging and cargo all came out of the same territory — a circumstance, he wrote, reported of no other port of Europe or of the Indies.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of Spanish American shipbuilding rarely gets past the sentence "Guayaquil was an important colonial shipyard". This object gives the 1741 governor's own chapter from a digitised copy of the original: which of thirty timbers was chosen and why, the keel cut from the trunk and the knees from the branches of one tree, coconut-husk oakum against hemp, the gravity launch watched as a civic festival, the 176 hulls sorted into three keel-length bands from the shipwrights' filed contracts, the 24,000-peso annual timber trade to Lima and the viceroy who fixed the crown's price below what the cutters would have got — together with the author's own admission that after eight years he could not put a figure on what the yards were worth.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
Alsedo y Herrera devotes capítulo IV of his 1741 Compendio to the yards, which stood by the estero de la Atarazana between the old and new cities, and claims them "superiormente ventajosos à todos los demàs de ambas Americas, y à los mas cèlebres de la Europa" on three grounds — the lie of the beach, the nearness of the forests and sawmills, and the permanent quality of the timber. He then lists some thirty woods by name, among them roble, guachapelí, amarillo, cedro, bálsamo, laurel, guayacán, mangle, matapalo and espino.
The preferred timber was guachapelí, chosen for "su constantisima resistencia contra la corrupcion del agua, y de la broma" — rot and shipworm — and for its docility to axe, adze, chisel and auger. One tree yielded the whole frame in the shape it grew: the keel from the trunk, the piques from the roots, and the stem, sternpost, curved knees, barraganetes and lesser pieces from the branches. The best grade was the brown one the local shipwrights called guachapelí mulato, then roble de monte, amarillo and colorado.
The seams were caulked not with hemp but with estopa de coco, which Alsedo rates the better material because it stays incorruptible while the water bathes it and does not slacken unless sun and air dry it out, then payed with tar and pitch shipped from the ports of Guatemala. Launching was by gravity down a greased channel dug from the bow to the water's edge: the wedges were knocked out and, in the space of an Ave María, the hull ran into the river, held by anchors and cables against the current. Because this was the only shipyard of the South Sea, the whole town turned out to watch, and Alsedo counts the launch among the city's public festivals.
The ship was finished out of the same province. Masts were palo de María and, latterly, laurel — heavier than the pines of the north but so durable, he writes, that none had yet failed under sail; eighteen sticks of a hundred and eight geometric feet, fifty-four codos reales, had been taken from the fringe of the Bulubulú forest without anyone penetrating to its summit. The rigging was henequen from Chile or cabuya twisted by the Indians of Jipijapa, the sails thick-spun local cotton that he rates near enough to Europe's, and the outward cargo timber, cacao and the fruits of the province. Hull, masts, gear and freight from one territory was, he claims, "circunstancia tan notable, que no se refiere de otro ningun Puerto de Europa, ni de Indias".
For the output he cites the contracts of the maestros mayores de ribera filed in the city's Oficio de Registros: from the city's first foundation to 1736 the yards had built 176 vessels, not counting innumerable smaller craft — 47 of thirty-six to fifty-four codos of clean keel, 32 of twenty-seven to thirty-six, and 97 of eighteen to twenty-six. Many of the hulls, he adds, had lasted sixty and seventy years.
The timber trade is the one figure he will put a number on. Wood shipped yearly to Lima, Callao and the intermediate valleys came, one year with another, to 24,000 pesos; in 1735 it reached 32,800 because an extraordinary quantity went to careen the king's ships, of which the wood for repairing the Capitana, Almiranta and Patache of the Armada del Sur came to 8,800 pesos — a sum, he notes, "regulados por la voluntaria estimacion, que la quiso dàr el zelo de Don Joseph de Armendariz, Marquès de Castel-Fuerte", then viceroy of Peru, to the benefit of the Real Hacienda "con menos aprovechamiento de los interessados en el corte de la madera, y en los fletes de la conducion". The crown's price was set by viceregal fiat and the cutters and carriers absorbed the difference.
The labour appears in the book mainly as the author's complaint. Alsedo blames the frequent losses of Guayaquil-built ships on their crews, "que ordinariamente se compone de Indios, Negros, y Mulatos, gente torpe, descuidada, y perezosa", who leave the helm at night to a sailor or ship's boy of the same class until the wreck wakes everyone — while recording in the same sentence that the master, pilot and boatswain over them are salaried by the owner. Elsewhere the firewood left by the building is carried off "con un esclavo". The judgement is his, and is the standard contempt of a Spanish official for the men who actually built and sailed the ships; what it evidences is the composition of the workforce, not its competence.
What the source cannot show, and where it argues against itself. This is a memorial dedicated to the king by a former president of the Audiencia of Quito, written to establish the value of the province he had governed, so the comparisons with Europe are advocacy rather than measurement. Alsedo says as much himself: the utility to the city and port of the building and careening work proved impossible, "por espacio de ocho años", to reduce "no solo à numero cierto, sino aun à prudente computo estimativo", so he leaves the sum suspended. Nothing in the chapter establishes how many shipwrights and labourers the yards employed, what they were paid, or how much of that work was coerced; and the 176 hulls are his reading of registers he does not reproduce.