Catalan Tasajo Voyages, 1837-1900

This Web map shows the routes of fourteen voyages by twelve Catalan vessels from the mid to late nineteenth century. For the most part, they carried manufactured goods, wine, and other Catalan products from Barcelona to Buenos Aires or Montevideo. There they loaded tasajo, a type of salt beef used as food for enslaved Africans on sugar plantations in Cuba. Once in Cuba, they either loaded sugar or aguardiente, a type of cane alcohol, and returned to Barcelona; or they proceeded in ballast for ports in the US South, like Charleston, and loaded cotton for the textile mills of Barcelona. The GIS includes several variations on that basic trade pattern. See my 2010 article on The Hispanic Atlantic's Tasajo Trail in the Latin American Research Review for more details.

For method and data, see the first four posts of May 2013. The main difference with the previously posted Web map of Dutch slaving voyages is that I did not delete as many of the fields in the Catalan layers of the GIS before uploading them. That slowed the upload process a bit, even causing timeouts on a few occasions because I am working from my home office on a relatively slow connection at the moment) but it transferred more of the data in the GIS to the Web map. The fields I did delete were related to weather observations, included in the GIS because of all the weather data in the CLIWOC database but mainly empty fields regarding the Catalan voyages because when I transcribed those logbooks I had limited time, did not need the detailed weather observations for the research project I was working on, and so focused on the latitude, longitude, and cargo data.

I will use this Web map as the basis for others in the next several posts.

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The project GIS and website are © 2013 by Andrew Sluyter but open source and licensed through the Creative Commons as attribution-noncommercial 3.0, which allows others to use the data and programming to produce non-commercial derivative products. I collected the data in four archives in Spain while funded by a 2009-10 Louisiana Board of Regents ATLAS grant: Arxiu Històric Municipal del Masnou, Arxiu Històric Municipal de Sitges, Biblioteca de Catalunya, and Museu Marítim De Barcelona.I processed the data and built the GIS while a 2012-13 Digital Innovation Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. As with the other Web maps on this blog, anyone is free to use it as a basis for new, non-commercial, scholarly and creative products as long as each such GIS, website, and/or publication contains a statement that acknowledges Andrew Sluyter as this GIS's creator.