Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 1.djvu/381

 tobacco they afterwards sold for six and seven pence, leaving them a profit after meeting every expense. On the other hand, the removal, at least in part for a time, of the competition of the Hollanders, signified a heavy decline in the local value of the staple of the Colony, and there was also but a small margin of gain for the English trader, as his market had been narrowed by the amount of the same commodity which the Dutch had, by 1657, been led to produce in territory under their own dominion. Irritated by these evils, and quite probably anticipating worse, the Assembly, in 1660, passed an Act which must, for the time being, have suppressed the masters of English vessels who were attempting, under the supposed protection of the provisions of the English Navigation law, to shut out all foreign commanders who sought to share with them in the transportation of tobacco, and had even gone so far as to seize a number of these alien ships for violating the Act. A regulation was instituted compelling every master of a vessel, who arrived in the waters of Virginia for the purpose of securing a cargo, to enter into a bond that he would not molest any person employed in trading in conformity with the requirements of the colonial laws, under a penalty of two thousand pounds sterling, a sum of enormous proportions in that age. So numerous were the vessels, engaged in the transportation of tobacco, which were not the property of Englishmen, that in the same year the Assembly, ostensibly with a view to reducing the taxes levied on the people of the Colony, but more probably out of continued deference to the Act of Navigation, reimposed a duty of ten shillings on every hogshead exported in a ship not required by the terms of its charter party to