TRADE: WORLD STATISTICS. 1. The 16th, 17th and 18th Centuries.—The sea is the great highway of international commerce and it was the discovery of the Cape of Good Hope route to the East Indies and the discovery of America at the end of the 15th century which opened the world to commerce. Before that time the spices, sugar, silk and other luxuries of the East came into European hands only when they had filtered overland to the seaboards of the Mediterranean and Black seas. Thus the carrying trade of Europe was focussed in the Mediterranean, and in the fifteenth century Venice had es tablished herself as the great market and carrier of Europe. Statis tics relating to these early times are far between and generally unreliable, but it is said that Venice, at the height of her glory in the 15th century, could dispose of 3,30o ships, 36,00o mariners and 16,000 dock hands. The number of the crew was in propor tion to the burthen, one man for every Io,000 lb. of capacity; so that the carrying capacity of the fleet may well have approached 150,000 tons. Complementary to the eastern trade route was the western route extending by sea to the ports of England and Flanders; thus Venetians exchanged the luxuries of the East for the wool and woollen cloth of the North. Further north, the carrying trade was largely in the hands of the Hanseatic League.
With the discovery of the Cape route to the Indies, the centre of trade shifted from the Mediterranean to the western seaboard of Europe. The Portuguese were bending all their energies to the development of the Indian sea-route and, by the end of the 15th century, the Dutch had established their supremacy in the carry ing trade and Amsterdam had become the emporium of Europe.
As Sir Walter Raleigh showed in 1603 in his famous Ob servations concerning the trade and commerce of England with the Dutch and other foreign nations, it was largely owing to the development of their herring fishing industry, which trained both sailors and shipbuilders, that the Dutch were able to become the great carriers of Europe's trade. They maintained this position till the end of the I7th century when the wars in which they were involved, together with the economic development of England and France, destroyed their trade supremacy.
Sir William Petty in one of his essays on "Political Arithme tick," published in 1690 but written some years earlier, gives some interesting estimates of Europe's mercantile marine at that time. He wrote, "The value of the shipping of Europe, being about two Millions of Tons, I suppose the English have Five Hundred Thousand, the Dutch Nine Hundred Thousand, the French an Hundred Thousand, the Hamburgers, and the subjects of Den mark, Sweden, and the Town of Dantzick Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand, and Spain, Portugal, Italy, etc. Two Hundred and Fifty Thousand." Later in the same essay, he estimates the total value of the merchandise carried by Europe's shipping at £45, 000,000 a year. Petty appears to have based his estimates of
shipping on one seaman being required for every ten tons of shipping. He probably meant to include Scotland and Ireland with England but even so his figure of soo,000 tons appears to be on the high side. The first complete return of England's mercan tile marine was obtained by the commissioners of customs in 1701-2, when it appeared that there belonged to all the ports of England and Wales 3,281 vessels, measuring (or rather supposed to measure) 261,222 tons and carrying 27,196 men. By 1760, on the eve of the industrial revolution, the number of vessels had grown to 6,105 of the reputed burden of 433,922 tons, while in addition there belonged to Scotland 976 vessels of 52,818 tons.
There is one exception to the general absence of real statistics of shipping in the age before the industrial revolution. From about the year 1429 all vessels passing the Sound were liable to pay dues to Denmark and particulars of each ship passing, varying from time to time in their detail, were entered in the records. Some of the earlier records are missing but two volumes entitled Tables de la Navigation et du Transport des Marchandises pas sant par le Sund, 1497-1660, edited by Froken Nina Bang, con tain the available information. The figures naturally reflect the commercial progress of the countries bordering on the Baltic. The first two years for which the records are extant are and 1503 ; averaging these two years, the number of vessels passing the Sound (each vessel is counted both outwards and inwards) was 1,009 of which 712 were Dutch and most of the rest be longed to the Hanseatic towns. In the ten years 1538-47 the average number of ships a year was 1,442. The average annual number in each decade then rose steadily till the end of the 16th century, being 5,623 vessels per annum in the years 1590-99. Then the numbers fell off again and in the period 1650-57 averaged only 3,015 per annum. Throughout the period, with rare excep tions, over half the vessels were Dutch and usually about two thirds of them were Dutch. From 1536 to 1645 the Dutch ves sels are shown according to their capacity—over ioo lasts (a last is about 2 tons), 3o–ioo lasts, and under 3o lasts. About of the Dutch vessels were recorded as over ioo lasts in the early years but thereafter the proportion so recorded fell off. About the year 1618, however, the regulations appear to have been tightened up and in the following decade about half the Dutch vessels were recorded as over 'co lasts. Thereafter the proportion of vessels of over loo lasts increased and accounted for about 90% of all vessels in the period 1640-45. Throughout the period the number of English and Scottish vessels rarely exceeded loci, of the total.