In a recent address on trade conditions in the Latin-American countries, Wm. Harley Porter, Deputy Captain of the Port of Cienfuegos, during the occupation of Cuba by the United States government, made some very pertinent suggestions on these questions, some of which are published by permission—as follows:
To secure South American trade, we must first train salesmen. They must make an exhaustive study of the different South American tariffs and at least know Spanish. They must be willing to accept instructions as to shipping, and be powerful enough to insist that they be carried out literally. And it would be a good thing for them to take a kindergarten course in carpentry and blacksmithing, so that they would not continue the stupid, expensive blunders of American houses in the packing of goods.
I don't know how to drive that last statement home hard enough. Our consuls plead with our exporters, and our Government distributes volumes freely on the subject, yet there is no apparent improvement.
I confess that until I had some first-hand experience, I supposed that the packing evil was a convenient sort of filler, with which Consuls padded their reports for want of better material.
In order to fit out the custom house of Cienfuegos, Cuba, with new office furniture, we placed an order amounting to nearly one thousand dollars with a Chicago house that brazenly advertised that it made a specialty of export business. Their booklet was encouraging, and the prices really low. So we ordered roll-top and flat-top desks, cashier's desks, office chairs, tables and card cabinets, and then worried, for fear that the goods would not arrive before the end of the fiscal year, then rapidly approaching, in which event, our furniture appropriation would revert to the island treasury.
Six weeks from the day the order reached Chicago, the goods left New York—time enough to have had them come from Hawaii. With the goods came a single invoice. The vouchers in triplicate, which must be filled properly before the account can be paid by a governmental department, had been thrown aside as of no use. To protect the exporter, a voucher was drawn, for the ship reached port on June 30, the last day of the fiscal year. Several dollars were wasted in cable messages to expedite the return of new invoices, and the goods were unpacked.
Not one piece of furniture, save a few chairs, was found whole. No American, in the States, would have accepted the goods. We had paid for them. A letter of remonstrance brought back a churlish answer, written in a cocky American spirit of superiority, to the effect that possibly some one outside could tell that house something about packing their own goods, but they would be greatly surprised to meet such a person.
The trouble lay in the thinness of the packing cases. Goods are loaded into a ship by casting a rope sling about their middle, by which they are hoisted up and let down, often with a run, into the hold. Our desks, without sufficient outer protection and not being built on the principle of a truss bridge, naturally collapsed. The cases were none too good for a railway journey, and were certain to be damaged at any Central or South American port because, in nearly every case, unloading is done from the ship to a lighter, and from the lighter, by main strength and awkwardness, to a wharf.
I cannot recall one instance in which American houses carried out instructions literally. I believe that there is a great future for an American exporter who will let the man on the ground do his own thinking, and take it for granted that he knows what he wants and how he wants it. The exasperation of a man who is weeks or months away from the markets, and who finds that substitution has been practiced, or his goods so packed that destruction was plainly invited, cannot be adequately described by a man on my income.