as interrupted by the wars of
Charles XII in the Baltic region and the protracted struggle known as
the War of the Spanish Succession, he was reduced to the utmost
extremities.

Virginia and Maryland were learning that a prosperity founded upon one
crop which commanded a world market was in unsettled times subject to
serious setbacks. It was a long cry from the James and the Potomac to
the Baltic ports, yet the welfare of the Virginia and Maryland planters
was in no small degree dependent upon the maintenance of peaceful
conditions in Poland and Sweden and Russia. A war which seriously
curtailed the exportation of English leaf to the northern countries
would inevitably react on the price and so bring misfortune to the
colonial planters. When called before the Board of Trade to testify as
to the decay of the tobacco trade, the manufacturer John Linton declared
that the Baltic countries, which formerly had purchased thousands of
hogsheads a year, now took comparatively few. "The Russian trade is
ruined," he said.[8-28]

The war against France and Spain, coming at this unfortunate juncture,
still further restricted the market, sent prices down to new depths and
filled to overflowing the planters' cup of misfortune. "The war has
stopped the trade with Spain, France, Flanders and part of the Baltic,"
Colonel Quary reported in a memorial to the Board of Trade, "which took
off yearly 20,000 hogsheads of tobacco. Now our best foreign market is
Holland."[8-29] The pamphlet entitled _The Present State of the Tobacco
Plantations in America_ stated, in 1708, that France and Spain alone had
imported 20,000 hogsheads, but that both were now otherwise supplied.
"The troubles in Sweden, Poland, Russia, etc., have prevented the usual
exportation of great quantities to those ports. Virginia and Maryland
have severely felt the loss of such exportation, having so far reduced
the planters that for several years past the whole product of their
tobacco would hardly clothe the servants that made it."[8-30]

Their misfortunes were accentuated by the fact that the Dutch took
advantage of the European upheavals to gain control of a part of the
tobacco trade. Upon the outbreak of the war with Louis XIV, England
prohibited the exportation of tobacco either to France or to Spain, but
Holland, despite her participation in the struggle, apparently took no
such action. On the contrary she strained every nerve to entrench
herself in the markets of he