Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 2.djvu/84

82 several useful drugs, to the value of bwtween 150,000l. and 180,000l. yearly, for home consumption, procured us calicoes, printed stuffs, and other merchandise for our trades to Turkey, France, Spain, Italy, and Guinea; most of which trades, according to this author, could not then be carried on with any considerable advantage but for those supplies; "and those goods exported," he adds, "do produce in foreign parts, to be returned to England, six times the treasure in specie which the Company exports from England to India." In other branches of trade he represents the Dutch as going far a-head of us. A great trade was carried on by them to China and Japan, in which the English had no share. In the Russia trade, he says, the Dutch, the year before he wrote, had twenty-two great ships employed, and the English but one. In the Greenland whale-fishery the Dutch and Hamburghers had annually four or five hundred sail employed, while the English had only one ship the preceding year, and the year before that not one. The white herring fishery upon our own coasts was almost wholly in the hands of the Dutch; and so was the export of salt from Portugal and France. To the Baltic, or Eastland countries, the English had not now half so much trade as formerly; while the Dutch had ten times more than they used to have. The Norway trade, again, was in great part in the hands of the Danes, Holsteiners, &c.; our exportations to France Had greatly fallen off; and the English ships employed in the Newfoundland fishery had decreased from two hundred and fifty, which was their number in 1605, to eighty when Child wrote. In many of these instances, however, the country had probably only disengaged itself from an old trade, that it might enter into and carry on some other, which it found more to its advantage. Child admits that the general commerce of the country was never before either so extensive or so profitable. The Turkey, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese trades, by means partly of our Indian commodities, partly of our native wool, were more active and prosperous than at any former period. The trade with our American plantations was a new branch of