ilt until they began to double Cape Horn, and were sometimes
absent from a year and a half to three years. The labors of the cruise
were often richly rewarded with a thousand barrels of sperm oil and two
hundred and fifty barrels of whale oil.

BRITISH TRADERS' TACTICS.

By the middle of the seventeenth century the colonial merchants were in
a position to establish manufactures to compete with the British. A
seafaring race and a mercantile fleet had come into a militant
existence; and ambitious designs were meditated of conquering a part of
the import and export trade held by the British. The colonial shipowner,
sending tobacco, corn, timber or fish to Europe did not see why he
should not load his ship with commodities on the return trip and make a
double profit. It was now that the British trading class peremptorily
stepped in and used the power of government to suppress in its infancy a
competition that alarmed them.

Heavy export duties were now declared on every colonial article which
would interfere with the monopoly which the British trading class held,
and aimed to hold, while the most exacting duties were put on
non-British imports. Colonial factories were killed off by summary
legislation. In 1699 Parliament enacted that no wool yarn or woolen
manufactures of the American colonies should be exported to any place
whatever. This was a destructive bit of legislation, as nearly every
colonial rural family kept sheep and raised flax and were getting expert
at the making of coarse linen and woolen cloths. No sooner had the
colonists begun to make paper than that industry was likewise choked.
With hats it was the same. The colonists had scarcely begun to export
hats to Spain, Portugal and the West Indies before the British Company
of Hatters called upon the Government to put a stop to this colonial
interference with their trade. An act was thereupon passed by Parliament
forbidding the exportation of hats from any American colony, and the
selling in one colony of hats made in another. Colonial iron mills began
to blast; they were promptly declared a nuisance, and Parliament ordered
that no mill or engine for slitting or rolling iron be used, but
graciously allowed pig and bar iron to be imported from England into the
colonies. Distilleries were common; molasses was extensively used in the
making of rum and also by the fishermen; a heavy duty was put upon
molasses and sugar as also on tea, nails, glass and paints. S