Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/13

Rh Bremen, and Embden, to which the Dutch sent, of herrings and other fish, to the annual value of 100,000l.; nor any up the Rhine to Germany, the people of which bought, every year, 440,000l. worth of herrings and other fish from the Dutch; nor any up the Mouse to Maestricht, Liege, &c., to which places the Dutch sold herrings every year to the value of 140,000l.; nor any to Guelderland, Flanders, and up the Scheldt, all over the dominions of the Archduke of Austria, in which direction the Dutch sent annually 162,000l. worth; and not 2000l. worth to France, which took 100,000l. worth from the Dutch. In short, while, according to this account, the trade of the Dutch in fish brought them in annually not much under 2,000,000l., the English could hardly be said to have any trade in that article at all,—except only, Raleigh omits to notice, to the countries washed by the Mediterranean,—the great Catholic and fish-eating countries of Spain and Italy; but thither, also, the Dutch, he tells us, sent large quantities, although he does not specify to what exact amount.

In other important branches of trade the case was nearly the same. The Dutch sent nearly a thousand ships every year to the countries in the north-east of Europe with wine and salt, both chiefly obtained from France and Spain; England, with equal natural advantages, had not one ship employed in that trade. The timber trade of the Dutch, whose own country grew no wood, employed five or six hundred great ships; the English, with the same access as they had to the forests within the Baltic, neither exported nor imported a single cargo. Even the wool, cloth, lead, tin, and other native products of England were far from being turned to so much account as they might have been. As yet all the woollen cloth that went abroad was exported both undressed and undyed. About 80,000 pieces of woollen cloth were annually sent to foreign countries in that state, the dyeing and dressing of which, as Raleigh calculates, was a yearly gain to the foreigner of 400,000l.; besides about 150,000 northern and Devonshire kerseys and bayes (baize), the colouring of which would come to 100,000l. B 2