Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/65

Rh other commodities, hath been found very serviceable to this state, by advancing navigation and transporting into foreign parts, for several years together, above 20,000 broad-cloths, besides other commodities, dyed and dressed in their fall manufacture." Among the productions of the East soon after this imported in considerable quantities by the Levant Company, vas coffee. It is said that coffee was first introduced into England in 1652 by a Turkey merchant of the name of Edwards, who had brought home with him a Greek servant accustomed to make it, and whom he set up in a coffee-house in St. Michael's Alley, Cornhill, on the spot where the Virginia Coffee-house now stands. The valuable privileges of the Russian Company were taken from them by the czar a short time before King Charles's death, on the pretence that certain members of the company had taken an active part on the side of what the czar considered a rebellion against their lawful sovereign; but it appears that whatever resentment may have been entertained against them on that account was at least very dexterously taken advantage of by the Dutch, who seized the opportunity of bargaining for a share of the Archangel trade on condition of paying a duty of fifteen per cent, on all exports and imports. For some years after this the English trade to Russia seems to have been almost suspended; nor did a sort of embassy, sent to the czar, or emperor as he styled him, by Cromwell in 1654, succeed in obtaining more than some very petty concessions.

Till the year 1641 the only produce of the island of Barbadoes consisted of very bad tobacco and a little cotton and ginger; but in that year some of the planters procured a few sugar-canes from Fernambuc in Brazil, which throve so well, that, after a season or two, a small ingenio, or mill for the manufacture of sugar, was set up in the island. Yet in 1647. when Ligon, the author of the "History of Barbadoes," who gives this account, arrived in the island, although there were then many sugar-works set up, the people were still ignorant of the true manner of planting, the time of cutting the