History of Shipping

A return of 156o (not quite complete) shows that England possessed 76 ships of 10o tons and up, 2 1 of them owned in Lon don. In 1582 London had 62, and the whole country 177, and there is little doubt that this number had greatly increased by the end of the reign. Most of the larger ships belonged to the great chartered companies—the East India Company, the Levant Com pany, the Muscovy Company, the Guinea Company and others— by whom the bulk of the foreign trade was carried on, or to in dividual members of those companies ; but it is clear, from docu ments relating to the bounty system, that many ships were built by private speculators to be chartered to merchants.

The age of Elizabeth was, nevertheless, something of a false dawn, so far as English shipping was concerned. Under the first two Stuart kings an inefficient fleet allowed Dunkirk and Barbary corsairs to swarm in the Channel, and a weak and corrupt ad ministration hampered the development of the national energies.

The Dutch as Carriers.

Meanwhile the sturdy Dutchmen, assisted by cheap capital and business-like methods, were con stituting themselves the general carriers of the world's trade. The Dutch herring fishery in the North sea had become prominent in the 15th century. At the beginning of the 17th, it employed from 1,500 to 2,000 sea-going busses every year. The import of salt for curing, and the export of the cured fish to the Baltic, and to the Catholic countries of southern Europe, employed many larger vessels, supplied Holland itself with grain, wine and shipbuilding materials, and laid the foundations of the carrying and entrepot trade.

No nation, perhaps, has been so exclusively maritime and com mercial in its interests as i 7th century Holland. Its industries, apart from the fisheries, were relatively unimportant ; but it had succeeded to the position of the Hanseatic League as the entre* for the Baltic trade, and the products of central Europe came to its ports down the Rhine. Much of the Mediterranean trade had fallen into Dutch hands, and during the Spanish war, the Dutch had ousted the Portuguese from the East Indies, and effected settlements in the West Indies and Guiana. Contemporary Eng lish authors admit that English shipowners were everywhere losing ground to competitors with better financial backing and lower working costs.

Until the strong government of the Commonwealth provided England with an efficient navy, Dutch predominance was never effectively challenged; but the East India Company, founded in 1599, still preserved a fair show of prosperity, and the political troubles in England had given a stimulus to oversea expansion.

By the middle of the 17th century New England, Virginia, Mary land, the Carolinas, the Bermudas and several West Indian islands had been at least partially settled, and the demand for slave labour in the plantations foreshadowed a revival of the Guinea trade. A great new field for trade and shipping was being opened, and the one fear was that this too would fall into Dutch hands.

The British Navigation Acts.

Commercial rivalry, com bined with political animosity, found its expression in the Crom wellian and Stuart navigation laws of 1651 and 166o, which con fined the plantation trade exclusively to English vessels, and for bade the import of goods from European countries except in English ships, or ships belonging to the country of origin, "or to such port where the said goods can only be or most usually are first shipped for transportation." Three hard-fought wars left the British predominant at sea, and the restrictions of the naviga tion laws in full force. Their effect was an increase in the de mand for English shipping, reflected in higher building costs and higher freights, with the result of increasing the severity of Dutch competition outside the reserved trades. At the end of the century, Sir William Petty estimated that nearly half the mercantile ton nage of Europe was under the Dutch flag, and so late as 1775, Adam Smith declared that the Dutch carrying trade was much greater than that of any other nation.

On the other hand, the growing demands of the reserved colonial trade proved a powerful stimulus to English shipping. British tonnage is said to have doubled between the Restoration and the Revolution of 1688, and all through the i8th century it continued to grow. In 1700 the total clearances of British shipping at ports in Great Britain amounted to 270,000 tons; by 1770 they had risen to 700,000. In 1771 the slave trade alone employed 190 vessels. By this time Dutch shipping was beginning to decline, owing mainly to the exhaustion consequent on continental wars. French shipping, carefully fostered by Colbert and later Ministers, is said to have employed, in 173o, about 600 vessels in the West Indian trade, and goo in the traffic with Spain, Portugal and the Mediterranean, but it was always a somewhat artificial growth and suffered ruinous losses in the English wars. Spain, depending on treasure rather than on trade, had sunk into lethargy.