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Old 18th March 2019, 02:20 PM   #11
midelburgo
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Join Date: Jun 2005
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Ariel, the page I linked is the Oficial Gazette of Nueva Granada, where a search for machete imports have been made. You can see on the left that 144 machetes entered in that week of 1846 as imports.

The pdfs just show that there was no industrial capability to make machetes at that time.
Or previously, as at the time of the colony they were imported from Cataluņa or Basqueland. The typical Collins machete is still known in South America as a "vizcaino". It seems they just copied what had been used previously. There are documents on the sale of machetes in America since 1541 at least.

That all three machetes are dated 1845 and ended in North Africa, possibly sustains that the batch never reached Colombia. I cannot imagine it was worthy to re-export them from Colombia where probably there was a chronic shortage of machetes.
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