ly
because of the different soil composition.

TRANSPORTATION TO MARKET

In the early days of the colony the small ocean-going merchant vessel
was the only method of transportation essential to marketing the
tobacco crop. Such a small ship was able to anchor at many of the
plantation wharves and load its cargo of tobacco. Next to fertility,
the proximity to navigable water was the most important factor in
influencing the planter in the selection of a tract of land. However,
later expansion of the tobacco industry into the interior and the
increase in the size of all ocean-going ships made some mode of
transportation within the colony a necessity. When the ships could not
get directly up to the wharf or enter shallow creeks on which many of
the plantations were located, small boats called flats or shallops were
used to transport the hogsheads to the anchored vessels. In 1633 the
General Assembly provided that all tobacco had to be brought to one of
the five warehouses--to be erected in specified localities--to be
stored until sold. The planters objected immediately and petitioned the
House of Burgesses to allow ships to come into every county, "where
they will find at every man's house a store convenient enough for
theire ladinge, we beinge all seated by the Riverside." The planters
also complained that they had "... noe other means to export but by
Boatinge."

Carrying the tobacco for long distances in the shallop involved a risk,
as well as an additional expense. By rolling the hogsheads directly on
board a ship anchored at his own wharf or only a few miles away the
planter eliminated the danger involved in transporting his tobacco in
an untrustworthy, heavily laden shallop, and he also saved the increase
in freight charges for delivery to the ships by the seamen. Freight
rates were the same from his wharf to England as they were from any
other point in the colony.

In 1697 Henry Hartwell remarked, "they [the merchants] are at the
charge of carting this tobacco ... [collected from the planter,] to
convenient Landinge; or if it lyes not far from these landings, they
must trust to the Seamen for their careful rolling it on board of their
sloops and shallops...." A second common mode of transportation,
according to Philip A. Bruce, was "not to draw the cask over the ground
by means of horses or oxen, like an enormous clod crusher, the custom
of a later period, but to propel it by the application of a steady
force