Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 2).djvu/251

 laws, so long as their shipowners and merchants reaped an immense advantage by their clandestine trade. Nor did the dread of perpetual imprisonment and slavery deter their mariners from engaging in this trade. Indeed, when these were wanting, Spanish-Americans supplied the deficiency by vessels of their own; while the governors of the islands connived at the illicit traffic. But a different spirit of morality was now to prevail. Directions were sent out from England to enforce the Navigation Acts in all their strictness: custom-house commissions were issued to the men-of-war, who were ordered to seize, without distinction, all foreign vessels found in any of the ports of the West India Islands; the British government becoming from one extreme of laxity the most strict and energetic repressors of Spanish as well as American smuggling. The result was that their own shipping suffered, and their exports to Jamaica declined 168,000l. in one year. In 1766 the ports of Jamaica and Dominica were opened to all foreign vessels whatsoever; but if credit can be given to one of the historians of the West Indies, the Spanish masters of vessels who resorted to Jamaica, having their names reported in the customs' lists, were thus betrayed to the Spanish authorities, who visited their offences with the most severe punishment.

On the continent of British North America the new duties and the rigorous measures adopted to restrict or put down the trade so long carried on with the French and Spanish settlements speedily produced consequences which the narrow-minded politicians at home did not anticipate. The extinction of the