II. Though The Portuguese And Spaniards Were Very Jealous Of The
Interference Of Any Nation With Their East India Commerce; Yet They Were
Comparatively Easy And Relaxed With Regard To Their American Possessions.
Accordingly, We Find That, In 1530, There Was Some Little Trade Between
England And Brazil:
This is the first notice we can trace of any commercial
intercourse between this country and the New World.
The first voyage was
from Plymouth: in 1540 and 1542 the merchants of Southampton and London
also traded to Brazil. We are not informed what were the goods imported;
but most probably they were Brazil wood, sugar, and cotton. The trade
continued till 1580, when Spain, getting possession of Portugal, put a stop
to it.
The next notice of any trading voyage to America occurs in 1593, when some
English ships sailed to the entrance of the St. Lawrence for morse and
whale fishing. This is the first mention of the latter fishery, or of whale
fins, or whale bones by the English. They could not find any whales; but on
an island they met with 800 whale fins, the remains of a cargo of a Biscay
ship which had been wrecked here.
In 1602, the English had suspended all intercourse with America for sixteen
years, in consequence of the unsuccessful attempts of Raleigh. But, at this
time, the intercourse was renewed: a ship sailed to Virginia, the name then
given to the greater part of the east coast of North America; and a traffic
was carried on with the Indians for peltry, sassafras, cedar wood, &c.
Captain Gosnol, who commanded this vessel, was a man of considerable skill
in his profession, and he is said to have been the first Englishman who
sailed directly to North America, and not, as before, by the circuitous
course of the West Indies and the Gulf of Florida. In the subsequent year
there was some traffic carried on with the Indians of the continent, and
some of the uncolonized West India islands.
Prior to the year 1606 several attempts had been made to colonize different
parts of the new world by the English, but they all proved abortive. In
this year, however, a permanent settlement was established near James
River, within the Chesapeake. It is not our plan to detail all the
particular settlements, or their progress to maturity; but merely to point
out the beginnings of them, as evidence of our extending commerce, and to
state such proofs as most strikingly display their improvement and the
advantages the mother country derived from them. In conformity with this
plan, we may mention that sugar plantations were first formed in Barbadoes
in 1641: this, as Mr. Anderson, in his History of Commerce, justly
observes, "greatly hastened the improvement of our other islands, which
soon afterwards followed it in planting sugar to very great advantage. And,
as it was impossible to manage the planting of that commodity by white
people in so hot a climate, so neither could sufficient numbers of such be
had at any rate.
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