five persons to establish a fishing station, and a severe winter followed, the colonists became disheartened and built the Virginia which carried them home in safety and which subsequently made several voyages across the Atlantic.
The Onrust, of sixteen tons, was built at Manhattan in 1613–14, by Adrian Block and his companions, to replace the Tiger, which had been damaged by are beyond repair. After exploring the coasts of New England and Delaware Bay, she sailed for Holland with a cargo of furs. The Blessing of the Bay, a barque of thirty tons, was built by order of Governor John Winthrop at Medford, near Boston, and was launched amid solemn rejoicings by the Puritans on July 4, 1631. This little vessel was intended to give the New England colonists a means of communication with their neighbors at New Amsterdam less difficult than that through the wilderness. So we see that shipbuilding was begun in America under the pressure of necessity, and it was fostered by the conditions of life in the new country.
In the year 1668, the ship-building in New England, small as it may now seem, had become sufficiently important to attract the attention of Sir Josiah Child, sometime Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company, who in his Discourse on Trade protests with patriotic alarm: "Of all the American plantations, His Majesty has none so apt for building of shipping as New England, nor any comparably so qualified for the breeding of seamen, not only by reason of the natural industry of that people, but principally by reason
