fishing ships, of leaving many men on the desert coast of
Newfoundland, when the season was over, whereby "these men were
obliged to sell themselves to the colonists, or piratically run off
with vessels, which they carry to the continent of America. By these
practices the Newfoundland fishery, supposed to be one of the most
valuable nurseries for seamen,[49] has long been an annual drain."[50]
In the two years, 1764-65, he estimates that 2,500 seamen thus went to
the colonies; in the next two years, 400. The difference was probably
due to the former period being immediately after a war, the effects of
which it reflected.

The general conditions of 1731 remained thirty years later, simply
having become magnified as the colonies grew in wealth and population.
In 1770 twenty-two thousand tons of shipping were annually built by
the continental colonists. They even built ships for Great Britain;
and this indulgence, for so it was considered, was viewed jealously by
a class of well-informed men, intelligent, but fully imbued with the
ideas of the Navigation Act, convinced that the carrying trade was the
corner-stone of the British Navy, and realizing that where ships were
cheaply built they could be cheaply sailed, even if they paid higher
wages. It is true, and should be sedulously remembered, especially now
in the United States, that the strength of a merchant shipping lies in
its men even more than in its ships; and therefore that the policy of
a country which wishes a merchant marine should be to allow its ships
to be purchased where they most cheaply can, in order that the owner
may be able to spend more on his crew, and the nation consequently to
keep more seamen under its flag. But in 1770 the relative conditions
placed Great Britain under serious disadvantages towards America in
the matter of ship-building; for the heavy drafts upon her native oak
had caused the price to rise materially, and even the forests of
continental Europe felt the strain, while the colonies had scarcely
begun to touch their resources. In 1775, more than one-third of the
foreign trade of Great Britain was carried in American-built ships;
the respective tonnage being, British-built, 605,545; American,
373,618.[51]

British merchants and ship-owners knew also that the colonial carriers
were not ardent adherents of the Navigation Act, but conducted their
operations in conformity with it only when compelled.[52] They traded
with the foreigner as