and merchant craft of every kind and thus keeping the shipwrights, calkers, rope makers, and other artisans of the seaport towns rushed with work.  They also increased trade with the mother country for, out of the cash collected in the fish markets of Europe and the West Indies, the colonists paid for English manufactures.  So an ever-widening circle of American enterprise centered around this single industry, the nursery of seamanship and the maritime spirit.

=Oceanic Commerce and American Merchants.=—­All through the eighteenth century, the commerce of the American colonies spread in every direction until it rivaled in the number of people employed, the capital engaged, and the profits gleaned, the commerce of European nations.  A modern historian has said:  “The enterprising merchants of New England developed a network of trade routes that covered well-nigh half the world.”  This commerce, destined to be of such significance in the conflict with the mother country, presented, broadly speaking, two aspects.

On the one side, it involved the export of raw materials and agricultural produce.  The Southern colonies produced for shipping, tobacco, rice, tar, pitch, and pine; the Middle colonies, grain, flour, furs, lumber, and salt pork; New England, fish, flour, rum, furs, shoes, and small articles of manufacture.  The variety of products was in fact astounding.  A sarcastic writer, while sneering at the idea of an American union, once remarked of colonial trade:  “What sort of dish will you make?  New England will throw in fish and onions.  The middle states, flax-seed and flour.  Maryland and Virginia will add tobacco.  North Carolina, pitch, tar, and turpentine.  South Carolina, rice and indigo, and Georgia will sprinkle the whole composition with sawdust.  Such an absurd jumble will you make if you attempt to form a union among such discordant materials as the thirteen British provinces.”

On the other side, American commerce involved the import trade, consisting principally of English and continental manufactures, tea, and “India goods.”  Sugar and molasses, brought from the West Indies, supplied the flourishing distilleries of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.  The carriage of slaves from Africa to the Southern colonies engaged hundreds of New England’s sailors and thousands of pounds of her capital.

The disposition of imported goods in the colonies, though in part controlled by English factors located in America, employed also a large and important body of American merchants like the Willings and Morrises of Philadelphia; the Amorys, Hancocks, and Faneuils of Boston; and the Livingstons and Lows of New York.  In their zeal and enterprise, they were worthy rivals of their English competitors, so celebrated for world-wide commercial operations.  Though fully aware of the advantages they enjoyed in British markets and under the protection of the British navy, the American merchants were high-spirited and mettlesome, ready to contend with royal officers in order to shield American interests against outside interference.