Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/347

 The people of Virginia were, however, in a different position from the people of the English colonies in the tropics. Tobacco was the only profitable crop which at that time was adapted to the situation as well as to the agricultural conditions of the Virginian settlements. When the leaf declined in price to one penny a pound, a depression largely due to the amount exported from Barbadoes, Mevis, and St. Christopher to the English market, the planters of these islands directed their attention to cotton. It was also admitted that the character of the tobacco produced in their soil was not very good. In a few years, the cultivation of sugar and indigo, ginger and oranges, was added to that of cotton. In Barbadoes, the sugar-mills were turned by oxen which had been imported from Virginia. So great had the prosperity of that Colony become by 1649, that one hundred vessels were employed in its carrying trade; a very much larger number than were plying at this time between England and the Virginian plantations.

The plan of reducing the volume of the annual crop by restricting the number of plants to the head had, by the end of 1637, led to some important results which had not at the time of the establishment of the regulation been foreseen. The limitation caused many persons to forsake their estates in search of lands offering the virgin loam in which tobacco attained its largest growth.