140 TRADE AND MARKETS. 



and into employments which needed discretion. The least 

 mischief which they did was to trade on their own account, 

 but they constantly embroiled their employers with Native 

 powers, and with other Europeans. Such an affair was the 

 famous Amboyna massacre (1622), which generations did not 

 forget or forgive. The rapidity too with which the Dutch, 

 with their vastly superior capital and enterprise, occupied the 

 Spice islands, and the policy with which they secured 

 and maintained a monopoly of the trade, disastrous as it 

 proved in the end to themselves, was irritating and vexatious 

 in the last degree to their rivals. The English Company was 

 chartered for fifteen years only under Elizabeth's instrument, 

 but in 1610 James made the Company perpetual, and two 

 years afterwards they traded on a joint-stock principle. At 

 this time, according to Misselden, the exports and imports of 

 England were .4,628,586 in value, and the customs were 

 ; 148,075, of which nearly three-fourths were collected in 

 London. 



In 1615, English merchants traded to most of the Mediter- 

 ranean ports, to Portugal, Spain and France, to Hamburgh, 

 and the Baltic. The Newcastle collieries were also frequented 

 by vessels from Northern and Western Europe. Besides, the 

 English were active in the Newfoundland cod fishery, and the 

 Greenland whale fishery. During this first quarter of the 

 seventeenth century, colonies or plantations were founded 

 in America, and a treaty of commerce was renewed with 

 Russia. 



The settlements on the eastern coast of North America, 

 ultimately to become the United States, were practically com- 

 menced in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, as was 

 also the occupation of the islands in the Gulf of Mexico, the first 

 of which, Barbadoes, was settled in 1614. Hither the colonists 

 transported the sugar-cane, and began that industry which after 

 a time became so important. The largest had been occupied 

 by Spain, who laid claim, partly by the bull of Alexander VI, 

 which Protestant countries, as Spain grew weaker, repudiated, 



