=Shipbuilding.=—­Of all the specialized industries in the colonies, shipbuilding was the most important.  The abundance of fir for masts, oak for timbers and boards, pitch for tar and turpentine, and hemp for rope made the way of the shipbuilder easy.  Early in the seventeenth century a ship was built at New Amsterdam, and by the middle of that century shipyards were scattered along the New England coast at Newburyport, Salem, New Bedford, Newport, Providence, New London, and New Haven.  Yards at Albany and Poughkeepsie in New York built ships for the trade of that colony with England and the Indies.  Wilmington and Philadelphia soon entered the race and outdistanced New York, though unable to equal the pace set by New England.  While Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina also built ships, Southern interest was mainly confined to the lucrative business of producing ship materials:  fir, cedar, hemp, and tar.

=Fishing.=—­The greatest single economic resource of New England outside of agriculture was the fisheries.  This industry, started by hardy sailors from Europe, long before the landing of the Pilgrims, flourished under the indomitable seamanship of the Puritans, who labored with the net and the harpoon in almost every quarter of the Atlantic.  “Look,” exclaimed Edmund Burke, in the House of Commons, “at the manner in which the people of New England have of late carried on the whale fishery.  Whilst we follow them among the tumbling mountains of ice and behold them penetrating into the deepest frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and Davis’s Straits, while we are looking for them beneath the arctic circle, we hear that they have pierced into the opposite region of polar cold, that they are at the antipodes and engaged under the frozen serpent of the south....  Nor is the equinoctial heat more discouraging to them than the accumulated winter of both poles.  We know that, whilst some of them draw the line and strike the harpoon on the coast of Africa, others run the longitude and pursue their gigantic game along the coast of Brazil.  No sea but what is vexed by their fisheries.  No climate that is not witness to their toils.  Neither the perseverance of Holland nor the activity of France nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise ever carried this most perilous mode of hard industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people.”

The influence of the business was widespread.  A large and lucrative European trade was built upon it.  The better quality of the fish caught for food was sold in the markets of Spain, Portugal, and Italy, or exchanged for salt, lemons, and raisins for the American market.  The lower grades of fish were carried to the West Indies for slave consumption, and in part traded for sugar and molasses, which furnished the raw materials for the thriving rum industry of New England.  These activities, in turn, stimulated shipbuilding, steadily enlarging the demand for fishing