From that early Fourth of July, for more than two hundred years shipyards multiplied and prospered along the American coast.  The Yankees, with their racial adaptability, which long made them jacks of all trades and good at all, combined their shipbuilding with other industries, and to the hurt of neither.  Early in 1632, at Richmond Island, off the coast of Maine, was built what was probably the first regular packet between England and America.  She carried to the old country lumber, fish, furs, oil, and other colonial products, and brought back guns, ammunition, and liquor—­not a fortunate exchange.  Of course meanwhile English, Dutch, and Spanish ships were trading to the colonies, and every local essay in shipbuilding meant competition with old and established ship-yards and ship owners.  Yet the industry throve, not only in the considerable yards established at Boston and other large towns, but in a small way all along the coast.  Special privileges were extended to ship-builders.  They were exempt from military and other public duties.  In 1636 the “Desire,” a vessel of 120 tons, was built at Marblehead, the largest to that time.  By 1640 the port records of European ports begin to show the clearings of American-built vessels.

[Illustration:  THE KETCH]

In those days of wooden hulls and tapering masts the forests of New England were the envy of every European monarch ambitious to develop a navy.  It was a time, too, of greater naval activity than the world had ever seen—­though but trivial in comparison with the present expenditures of Christian nations for guns and floating steel fortresses.  England, Spain, Holland, and France were struggling for the control of the deep, and cared little for considerations of humanity, honor, or honesty in the contest.  The tall, straight pines of Maine and New Hampshire were a precious possession for England in the work of building that fleet whose sails were yet to whiten the ocean, and whose guns, under Drake and Rodney, were to destroy successfully the maritime prestige of the Dutch and the Spaniards.  Sometimes a colony, seeking royal favor, would send to the king a present of these pine timbers, 33 to 35 inches in diameter, and worth L95 to L115 each.  Later the royal mark, the “broad arrow,” was put on all white pines 24 inches in diameter 3 feet from the ground, that they might be saved for masts.  It is, by the way, only about fifteen years since our own United States Government has disposed of its groves of live oaks, that for nearly a century were preserved to furnish oaken knees for navy vessels.

[Illustration:  “THE BROAD ARROW WAS PUT ON ALL WHITE PINES 24 INCHES IN DIAMETER”]