of English shipping. The second Act, and the measures supplementary to it, aimed not only at preserving and advancing the interests of English shipping, but also at creating for the benefit of the people of England a monopoly in the principal commodities of the Colony. Both the shipowner and the merchant were to be protected and fostered by the same legislation; the shipowner, by the provision that all products imported into or exported from the colonial settlements of England were to be conveyed in vessels possessed or built by Englishmen, and manned by English masters and crews composed of English subjects in a proportion of three to one; the merchant, not only by the requirement that all goods sent to the Colonies, whether of the production or manufacture of a foreign or the mother country, should be exported from England, but also by the clause which prescribed that certain products of the Colonies were to be imported only into England or the English dominions. The most important of these enumerated articles, as they were called, was, with the exception of sugar, tobacco, which was the principal commodity of Virginia. There was no restrictive condition as to the markets in which the grain, fish, and naval stores of the Colonies might be sold.
It is quite evident that for several years after the passage of the second Act of Navigation, its provisions with reference to tobacco were evaded, not only by transporting it to New England and there transshipping it to Holland, but also by forwarding it directly to the Low Countries.[1] There were two devices which at first were successfully used. Many ships, belonging to Dutchmen, claimed to have observed the regulations of the Act by employing a number of English mariners; other vessels,
- ↑ Documents Relating to the Colonial History of New York, vol. III, pp. 44, 45.
