Page:History of merchant shipping and ancient commerce (Volume 3).djvu/35

 their vessels on the most distant voyages. Indeed, so early as 1789, the merchants of Boston and Salem sent various ships direct to the East Indies and China, and, many years before the "Free Traders" of Great Britain could enter upon this trade, then monopolised by the ships of the East India Company, so far as regards Great Britain, the merchants of Massachusetts supplied, not merely their own people with the bulk of the teas, spices, silks, sugar and coffee from the East as well as with nankeens and other cotton clothes, but reshipped them from Boston to Hamburg and the Northern ports of Europe in their own vessels, thus deriving large profits from a trade with our possessions, from which the great bulk of our ships were long excluded by the stringent restrictions of a pernicious monopoly. *