396 Tradesman and Merchant — Commercial Population 



The training for these functions was acquired in three ways: appren- 

 ticeship, business college, and travel. The earliest merchants trav- 

 elled with their goods and knew their markets first hand. In the 

 sixteenth century the supercargo arose and relieved the merchant;^ 

 thereafter the traveUing supercargo was a merchant at training. 

 The merchant of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries gained his 

 foreign experience as supercargo and factor for London principals. 

 The regular course of training consisted of (a) attending a grammar 

 and writing school, (b) ser\dng an apprenticeship to some London 

 merchant, (c) shipping as supercargo, (d) acting as resident factor 

 abroad, and (e) doing private business out of the factory abroad; 

 after which the trained merchant-elect returned to London and set 

 up as merchant to those parts of the world with which he had gained 

 acquaintance. 



Many illustrations from life might be cited. Sir Dudley North 

 attended a grammar school, and a writing school,- where he learned 

 "good hands and accounts;" he was then apprenticed to a Turkey 

 merchant in Threadneedle vStreet; shipped to Archangel as super- 

 cargo; was agent for several Turkey merchants of London; became 

 partner of one Hodges Hving at Constantinople; and finally returned 

 to London and set up as Turkey merchant.^ Edward Colston of 

 Bristol was educated in London, and served as factor in Spain. ^ Sir 

 John Barnard attended school and passed straightway to a respon- 

 sible position in the counting-house.'' William Patterson of Dum- 

 fries spent a few years of wandering life in the American Colonies and 

 West Indies, and engaged in a clandestine and piratical business in 

 West Indies, and engaged in trading voyages between the Bahamas 

 and Boston before returning to England and setting up as full-fledged 

 merchant.^ It was the practice throughout the seventeenth and 

 eighteenth centuries for the Newcastle Merchant Adventurers to 

 send their enfranchised apprentices abroad, sometimes "even during 



^ Schmoller, Grundriss, II, 31. 



2 There were elementar)^ business schools in London; e.g. Richard Hayes, 

 author of "The Negociator's ^Magazine," 1730, ran one. See Preface, N. 13. 



3 North, Lives, II. 



■* Bourne, Eng. Mer., 248. 



5 Ibid., 28,S. 



^ Ibid., 254-5. See the account of the great trading traveller Anthony Jenkin- 

 SOH; 1546-1572, in Hakluyt; also, of Humphrey Chetham, in Fuller, Worthies of 

 England. 



