malities were
minutely observed. The unloaded goods were shut up in a storehouse, and
the doors sealed. But there was always found another door unsealed, and
by this they abstracted the goods during the night, and substituted coin
or bars of gold and silver. When the vessel was repaired to the
captain's satisfaction, it was reloaded and sailed away.

There was also, especially on the shores of the Caribbean Sea, a less
elaborate commerce called "sloop-trade," for it was usually managed by
sloops which hovered near some secluded spot on the coast, often at the
mouth of a river, and informed the inhabitants of their presence in the
neighbourhood by firing a shot from a cannon. Sometimes a large ship
filled with merchandise was stationed in a bay close at hand, and by
means of these smaller craft made its trade with the colonists. The
latter, generally in disguise, came off in canoes by night. The
interlopers, however, were always on guard against such dangerous
visitors, and never admitted more than a few at a time; for when the
Spaniards found themselves stronger than the crew, and a favourable
opportunity presented itself, they rarely failed to attempt the vessel.

Thus the Spaniards of the seventeenth century, by persisting, both at
home and in their colonies, in an economic policy which was fatally
inconsistent with their powers and resources, saw their commerce
gradually extinguished by the ships of the foreign interloper, and their
tropical possessions fall a prey to marauding bands of half-piratical
buccaneers. Although struggling under tremendous initial disabilities in
Europe, they had attempted, upon the slender pleas of prior discovery
and papal investiture, to reserve half the world to themselves. Without
a marine, without maritime traditions, they sought to hold a colonial
empire greater than any the world had yet seen, and comparable only with
the empire of Great Britain three centuries later. By discouraging
industry in Spain, and yet enforcing in the colonies an absolute
commercial dependence on the home-country, by combining in their rule of
distant America a solicitous paternalism with a restriction of
initiative altogether disastrous in its consequences, the Spaniards
succeeded in reducing their colonies to political impotence. And when,
to make their grip the more firm, they evolved, as a method of
outwitting the foreigner of his spoils, the system of great fleets and
single ports of call, they found