ment as to the absence of free schools, was not supported by fact.[1] For refutation, reference has only to be made to the vessel of Captain Whitty, the manner in which it was constructed having, as we have seen, excited admiration even in England. Berkeley attributed the indifference of the Virginians of his time to ship-building to the discouraging influences of the Navigation Acts. In the opinion of others, it was due to the absence of a school like the Newfoundland fisheries in which the colonists might have been trained in seamanship.[2] It is really to be ascribed to the circumstance that there was produced in Virginia a commodity which attracted to its rivers the vessels, first of England and Holland, the two great maritime nations of that age, and after the passage of the last Navigation Act, of England alone. No necessity was imposed on them, as on the people of New England, to build numerous ships by means of which the products of an unkindly soil and climate having no market in England and Holland, might be exchanged for tobacco, rum, and sugar, commodities which in their turn might elsewhere be exchanged for clothing and other articles of use. The buyers of the only staple of Virginia sought its plantations. The Virginian planter did not, like the New England farmer, have to seek the foreign purchaser. It followed most naturally that even when the population and wealth of the Colony had increased to a remarkable degree, ship-building did not become an important interest.
There was no lack of barges, shallops, and sloops, the only vessels which the planters required for the movement of their crops. Every facility was at hand for the construction of boats of this character at the time that
