Scanning the thread ...
Every caravan is a waste of a cargo ship slot with Cargo Ships providing 2X as much as everything even when the destination is on the same land mass.
And in early game when no one has hooked up their resources, you are much better off with food cargo ships; you can reassign the route later to gold after the value goes up.
You're also supposed to build a couple of ships to clear the local pirates before building cargo ships.
But gold is supposed to be a problem in the early game in BNW; it was intentional to stop the tradition tactic of buying settlers with 500 gold each; and it succeeded. (Except in rare cases of having El Dorado near you or being Spain with any nearby natural wonder.)
They probably shot past the hole though; but this is fixable in a mod by removing the maintenance cost of Granaries, Water Mills, Stables, and the other ancient era buildings that require a local resource to build.