grandees demand choice flour from New York or Pennsylvania? American shipmasters soon had their prows pointed toward the nearest port of Spain with such cargoes to be exchanged for precious specie or for old wine to enliven good dinners in Boston, Charleston, or Philadelphia. There was no considerable port of the great Atlantic basin or the Mediterranean that did not regularly witness the coming and going of American ship captains seeking to turn an "honest penny" by trade, sometimes with only poetic respect for the local revenue laws.
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Less romantic than the lure of the sea, but no less potent in the upbuilding of economic strength, was the development of industries in the colonies. Having at hand all the materials and natural resources for manufacturing, the Americans through necessity and enterprise supplemented their labors at the bake-oven and the plow with the handicrafts of loom and forge. From the very beginning, the women of nearly every home spun and wove and sewed, supplying serges, linsey-woolseys, and other coarse woolen fabrics for rough wear. As time went on their skill increased until they were able to make broadcloth which gentlemen of fastidious taste could wear without shame at the church or in the counting house.
Seeing the germs of a lucrative business in this domestic craft, men also gave their attention to it, building little mills here and there along the tumbling streams and placing upon machinery some of the burdens of labor. Under this double stimulus, production for the use of the family widened into production for the community, and at length for a lively export trade to the plantations of the South and the West Indies. By the opening years of the eighteenth century the traffic had become so large that the royal governor in New York grew alarmed at the menace of the competition in textiles; with great foresight he warned the
