Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/356

 vessels to carry out respectively eighteen hundred pairs, making twenty-one thousand and six hundred pairs in all; five years later, the masters and owners of ten ships were authorized to export to Virginia twenty-four thousand pairs. During the forty years which elapsed between the Restoration and the close of the century, the increase in this one item of imports must have been extremely large in consequence of the growth in population. The same expansion, it is reasonable to infer, extended to the great variety of other goods brought in at the same time.

If the English merchant who had determined to export goods to Virginia did not possess a ship in which they might be conveyed, he entered into a contract with the owner of a vessel for their transfer, the goods themselves, however, remaining in charge of the person whom he had appointed to accompany them. Several traders who followed different branches of business often united in chartering a ship and employing a single factor to represent their several interests in the cargo. In many cases, the captain of the vessel acted for the English merchant whose property he had taken on board, such an agent receiving instructions which were generally placed on record as soon as he arrived in the Colony. The commodities