Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/23

Rh that the Isle of Wight, which is opposite to the mouth of the Seine, may have been used as the mart of the British trade in this navigation, for which purpose it was also well adapted as lying about midway between Cornwall and Kent, and being therefore more conveniently situated than any other spot both for the supply of the whole line of coast with foreign commodities, and for the export of native produce. When the route we are now describing came to be adopted for the British trade generally, even a portion of the tin of Cornwall may have found its way to this central depot. But, even after land carriage came to be displaced by river navigation, a large portion of the British trade still continued to be carried on from the west coast of Gaul, through the medium both of the Loire and the Garonne. The Loire seems to have been taken advantage of chiefly to convey the exports from Narbonne and Marseilles down to the sea-coast after they had been brought by land across the country from Lyons, to which point they had been sent up by the Rhone. The Garonne was used for the conveyance to the south of France of British produce, which was sent up that river as far as it was navigable, and thence carried to its destination over land.

This is nearly all that is known respecting the commercial intercourse of Britain with other parts of the world before the country became a province of the Roman empire. The traffic both with Carthage and the Phœnician colonies in the south of Spain had of course ceased long before Cæsar's invasion; at that date the only direct trade of the island was with the western and north-western coasts of Gaul, from the Garonne as far probably as to the Rhine; for, in addition to the passage of commodities, as just explained, to and from Provence, the Belgic colonists, who now occupied so large a portion of the maritime districts in the south of Britain, appear also from their first settlement to have kept up an active intercourse with their original seats on the continent which stretched to the last-mentioned river. The British line of communication, on the other hand, may be presumed to have extended from the Land's End to