Devonshire, Laurell, Blackstone, and Mary and Hannah, 

 all of Bideford, were anchored in Hampton Roads 

 off Kecoughtan. They comprised one-ninth of a 

 fleet of 63 ships from various English ports.'" 



Aside from such indications of a well-established 

 mercantile trade, the entrenchment of North Devon 

 interests in the colonies is repeatedly shown in other 

 ways. Before 1645, Thomas Fowle, a Boston mer- 

 chant, was doing business with his brother-in-law, 

 Vincent Potter, who lived in Barnstaple." In 1669, 

 John Selden, a Barnstaple merchant, died after con- 

 signing a shipment of goods to William Burke, a 

 merchant of Chuckatuck, Virginia. John's widow 

 and administratrix, Sisely Selden, brought suit to 

 recover these goods, which were "left to the sd. 

 W™ Burke, &c, for the use of my late husband." '- 



'" Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, 1901, vol. 9, pp. 

 257-258. 



" Bernard Bailyn, The J^'ew England Merchants in the Seventeenth 

 Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1955, p. 87. 



'2 Isle of Wight County (Virginia) records, quoted in Wil- 

 liam and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine, 1899, ser. 1, 

 vol. 7, p. 228. 



Figure 4. — Old pottery in Torrington Lane (for- 

 merly Potter's Lane), East-the-Water section of 

 Bideford. The photo was taken in 1920, just before 

 the buildings were razed. {Courtesy oj Miss M. E. 

 Jenkinson.) 



Burke was evidently an agent, or factor, who acted in 

 Virginia on Selden's behalf. In Northampton County, 

 alone, there resided six Bideford factors, remarkable 

 when one considers the isolated location of this Vir- 

 ginia Eastern Shore county and the sparseness of its 

 population in the 17th century." John Watkins, the 

 Bideford historian, adds further evidence of mercan- 

 tile involvement with the colonies, stating of Bideford 

 that "some of its chief merchants had very extensive 

 possessions in \'irginia and Maryland." '* Both in 

 New England and the southern colonies, local mer- 

 chants acted as resident agents for merchants based 

 in the mother countrv. Often tied to the latter by 



" P. .\. Bruce, Economic History oj Virginia in the Seventeenth 

 Century, New York, 1895, vol. 2, p. 334. 



n Watkins, op. cit. (footnote 4), p. 65. 



PAPER 13: NORTH DEVON POTTERY IN 17TH-CENTURY .AMERICA. 



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