Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/313

 In justifying their conduct afterwards, they declared that the owners of the Flying Hart were Englishmen and adventurers of the late Company, one of them, Arthur Swain, having been its principal factor in Holland. In the instructions drawn for the guidance of Yeardley, when he became Governor in 1626, the warmest disapprobation was expressed of the intercourse between Virginia and the Low Countries, but the uselessness of the disapproval is shown by the fact that a few years later the commerce with the Dutch had grown to such proportions that Captain Tucker, a leading merchant of the Colony, protested to the Privy Council against its being permitted to continue. He declared that the admission of supplies from Holland curtailed the Virginian market for English traders to an extent which diminished their profits very seriously, and that the discouragement of these traders signified that the planters would be deprived of the only agency upon which they could rely with absolute certainty for the acquisition of necessary foreign commodities; that the Dutch were already encroaching upon the boundaries of the Colony, and that a monopoly of its product would give them in the end the most complete possession of its soil. As an evidence that his statement as to the large volume of transactions by Dutch merchants in Virginia was not exaggerated, Captain Tucker called attention to the fact that two vessels from Zealand were then on the point of setting out for the Colony, the exchange of the cargoes of which for tobacco would impose a loss upon English merchants of four thousand pounds sterling.