12 Kenneth S. Latourette, 



stimulated in sailors and merchants." With the end of the war 

 these were forced to seek other outlets. 



Still another influence was the loss of the trade with the British 

 West Indies. Before the Revolution the colonies had, of course, 

 been included in the British colonial system. They had sent 

 their provisions and lumber to the AX'est Indies, had received in 

 payment credit on England, and with this credit had secured the 

 necessary old-world manufactures and supplies. Independence, 

 by placing them outside the colonial system, made it necessary 

 for them to look elsewhere for the investment of their commercial 

 capital, and for the means of paying the bills owed by them to 

 British merchants and manufacturers. As Phineas Bond wrote 

 at the time^'^: "In the restricted state of American trade it is 

 natural for men of enterprise to engage in such speculations as 

 are open to them, and which afford a prospect of profit." 



But independence and withdrawal from the colonial system, 

 while shutting the door of the West Indies, had opened that to 

 Asia and the East Indies. For nearly a century the East India 

 Company had held a monopoly on the British trade in the entire 

 hemisphere from the Cape of Good Hope eastward to the Straits 

 of Magellan." After the treaty of peace, this, of course, ceased 

 to be binding on the new nation, and it would have been strange 



* Trow, Old Shipmasters of Salem, pp. xx-xxiv. Charles S. Osgood 

 and H. M. Batchelder, Historical Sketch of Salem, 1626-1879, Salem, 

 1879, P- ^37- H. W. S. Cleveland, Voyages of a Merchant Navigator of 

 the Daj's that are past. Compiled from the Journals and Letters of the 

 Late Richard J. Cleveland, New York, 1886, p. 6. Horace S. Lyman, 

 History of Oregon : The Growth of an American State, 4v, New York, 

 1903, 2:87, says that Captain John Kendrick of the "Columbia" had 

 commanded a privateer. The log books of some of the privateers exist 

 in the Essex Institute in Salem. 



'"Letter to Lord Carmarthen, July 2, 1787. Letters of Phineas Bond, 

 British Consul at Philadelphia, to the Foreign Office of Great Britain, 

 1787, 1788, 1789. Edited by the Historical Manuscripts Committee of the 

 American Historical Association. In Annual Rep. of Am. Hist. Ass'n. 

 for 1896. Vol: I, pp. 513-659- P- 540. 



" Great Britain, The Statutes at Large, London. 1763 et seq. 3 738 ; 

 9 and ID Wil. Ill (1698) c. 44, sec. 81, give this grant, and place as a 

 penalty, forfeiture of ship and cargo. 



