An Encouraging Development for the Mining and Shipping Interest
From our Special Correspondent · Huelva, 9th December, 1873.
Those who have followed with any attention the long and frequently vexatious history of mineral extraction in this province will learn with considerable satisfaction that an event of no small commercial consequence took place here upon the evening of Monday last. In the lower rooms of No. 10, Sixto Cámara Street—a thoroughfare known locally by the designation of the Medio Almud—there assembled, at the tireless instigation of the banker Manuel Vázquez López, a body of this city’s most substantial mercantile men, for the purpose of formally constituting the Junta Especial de Comercio y Puerto de Huelva, or, as it may be rendered for the benefit of our readers, the Special Board of Commerce and Port of Huelva.
The meeting was conducted with a seriousness altogether appropriate to the occasion. Sr. Vázquez López, whose industry in bringing this body into existence can scarcely be overstated, was accorded the title of Honorary President—a distinction well merited by one who has laboured so persistently on behalf of the commercial community of this port. The chair of Provisional President fell to his fellow banker, Francisco Jiménez Jiménez; the Vice-Presidency was assigned to Francisco de Paula García Ortiz; and the office of Secretary entrusted to Vicente Mantilla. The remaining vocales, or board members, are drawn from among the most respected names in the Huelvan interest: Rafael de la Corte y Bravo, Valentín Cabo, Eduardo Díaz Gómez de Cádiz, and Fernando de la Cueva.
Among those present, readers of this journal will note with particular interest the name of Guillermo Sundheim—a gentleman of German birth whose intimate acquaintance with both the requirements of the Spanish administration and the practical needs of the mining houses has rendered him an indispensable figure in the commercial affairs of this region. It is largely through such intermediaries that the great British concerns—Tharsis Sulphur and Copper, Limited, and the lately-constituted Rio Tinto consortium—have been able to pursue their operations in a country whose official machinery moves, it must be said, at its own deliberate pace.
The proceedings were given a sober and technical character by the reading of a memorial prepared by Justo Rodríguez, the Board’s principal engineering voice, whose document—drafted, we are informed, only the day preceding the session—laid before those assembled a diagnosis of the port’s deficiencies that will surprise no one acquainted with the difficulties under which the mineral trade of this district has long laboured. The substance of that memorial deserves the careful attention of every house with tonnage in these waters.
The port of Huelva, as it presently exists, is an obstacle rather than an aid to commerce. The absence of deep-water berths obliges all vessels engaged in the mineral trade to submit to the expensive and time-consuming practice known as double-handling—whereby cargo is conveyed first from ship to lighter, and thence by lighter to cart upon the open beach, a method as wasteful in labour and capital as it is injurious to the goods themselves. Vessels of any draught are frequently compelled to anchor in positions which the retreating tide leaves wholly dry; and it requires no expert eye to appreciate what repeated grounding upon a river bed does to the structural integrity of an iron hull. The entrance to the estuary, governed as it is by shifting sandbars and the capricious dictates of the tide, subjects masters and owners alike to a degree of uncertainty which is reflected, inevitably, in the freight rates that the mining companies must bear. The wooden pier constructed by the state some score of years since was described by Sr. Rodríguez in terms that, whilst measured, left his audience in no doubt of its condition: it is, in the precise language of the memorial, perfectly useless for its purpose.
The formation of the Junta does not, of itself, build a single quay or dredge a single fathom of channel. But those who have observed the course of port improvement in other quarters—at Bilbao, at Santander, at Cardiff and at Glasgow—will know that a properly constituted commercial board, armed with the authority to press its claims upon government and the resolution to do so, is the necessary first instrument of progress. The British mining houses engaged in this district have every reason to watch the proceedings of the new body with close and friendly attention. The trade of the Ría de Huelva is, at present, a fraction of what the wealth of the surrounding province would sustain, were the means of conveyance equal to the bounty of the ore.
