The price of china-ware fluctuated considerably during the seventeenth century. Sometimes a critic complained, as above, that values had greatly appreciated because of the demand, and then again others wailed that the enormous importations had driven prices down till the game was not worth the candle. In Mendelslo’s _Voyages_ (1639), we read:
“The Chinese bring to the island of Java porcelain which they sell there very cheaply: for when boats arrive from China they buy six porcelain dishes for a thousand _caxas_ (a string of two hundred _caxas_ are called _sata_ and are worth about nine _deniers_ of French money, and five _satas_ tied together make a _sapocon_).”
Again, from _Recueil des Voyages_ (Constant) we learn:
“The (Chinese) ships also bring (to Java) fine and coarse porcelain. When the Dutch first arrived, they bought five or six dishes of both kinds for 1,000 _caxas_, but afterwards they got no more than two or three, rarely more.
“For return freight, they take, besides pepper, all the lacca brought from the city of Tolonbaon, where there is great abundance. They also load with the anil[9] that comes from Anier in pots; sandal wood, musk and tortoiseshell, with which in China they make beautifully wrought _coffres_; elephant tusks, with which they make beautiful seats that are esteemed as much as if they were of silver, and that are used by Mandarins and Viceroys.”
The importations were indeed enormous, as the bills of lading of the Dutch vessels prove. For example, among the cargoes of eleven Dutch ships that arrived in Holland from the East Indies in July, 1664, were 44,943 pieces of very rare Japanese porcelain and 101 Japan cabinets. The eleven ships that left Batavia on December 24 of the same year, brought home 16,580 pieces of porcelain of divers kinds.
The Dutch brought to Europe such vast quantities of porcelain in the first quarter of the seventeenth century as practically to monopolize the trade and undersell the English. Thus, Methwold, writing from Masulipatam to the East India Company in 1619, says: “The great profit first obtained on porcelain has filled all men’s hands with plenty (by the Dutch), which makes theirs (the East India Company’s) not sought after.”