Seasonality of the Catalan Triangular Trade

Seasonal variation in supply and demand for tasajo must affected the timing of the triangular Catalan trade with the Rio de la Plata and Cuba. Cuban demand for tasajo increased during the cane harvest from January through June, as plantation owners bought additional enslaved Africans for the grueling work, which killed many. Meanwhile, tasajo production took place during the nine months of October through June, the southern hemisphere’s spring, summer, and fall. During the winter, in contrast, the cattle weighed less and the air temperature was too cold to dry tasajo. To maximize the price differential between the purchase of the tasajo and its sale, then, voyages departed from the Río de la Plata during the season of tasajo production in time to arrive during the season of peak demand in Cuba.

The export statistics for the port of Buenos Aires confirm that seasonal rhythm (after fig. 6.12 in my book Black Ranching Frontiers, Yale,2012). Shipments of tasajo through the port of Buenos Aires began as soon as tasajo became available in the spring (October and, even, September) to arrive in Cuba in November and December in anticipation of the beginning of harvest season. That volume of shipments continued until about May, with those departing at that time still able to arrive in Cuba before the end of the cane harvest. July and August marked the nadir of tasajo shipments northward due to a lack of both supply and demand.

A temporal analysis run in ArcMap, shared using the video below, clearly shows the seasonal variation in the triangular trade, even with only fourteen voyages. I achieved the visualization by changing the year of each voyage to a single year, setting both the time interval and time window to one week, and creating a new point feature in the South Atlantic labeled with the month field. The daily-position symbols are triangles, with a week’s worth showing at a time. Their colors represent the direction of the voyage segment, based on their destination fields: green for northbound, orange for southbound, yellow for eastbound, and purple for the single westbound segment.

The visualization shows that in September, as cattle began to fatten, temperatures started to increase, and tasajo production kicked off, shipments began to leave the Rio de la Plata. They arrived in Cuba by November or December in anticipation of the cane harvest that would begin after Christmas. The shipments continued until tasajo production and the cane harvest both wrapped up in June. Focusing on the Caribbean during July and August reveals the lack of northbound (green) segments those two months.