conveyance of all the commodities of the colonies to English bottoms. The instructions transmitted to both Wyatt and Berkeley,[1] whose terms of administration preceded the surrender to Parliament in 1651, directed them to take bonds of the masters of vessels leaving Virginia which would compel them to land their cargoes in England. It required special permission to make it legal for shipmasters to stop at any of the English colonies in the course of their outward voyage; this was sometimes asked when the planters or merchants did not have a sufficient number of vessels in which to transfer their tobacco to England, and in consequence were forced to transport it first to the North.[2] In spite of these precautions, a large quantity found its way to Holland, thus evading the customs to which it would have been subject had it been conveyed directly to London.[3]
In the years immediately following the publication of the first proclamations which prohibited the bringing of Spanish tobacco into England, a great quantity of this commodity was drawn from the Spanish West Indies and secretly carried into the port of London along with the cargoes from the Bermudas. Just as the importation of the Virginian leaf into Holland affected the royal revenues injuriously by diminishing the customs, so the importation of the Spanish leaf into England lowered the price of the Virginian product, not only by increasing the quantity of tobacco offered for sale in the English markets, but also by introducing a grade of better quality. The opinion was prevalent for a long time after the dissolution of the
