GLOUCESTEESHIEE. 115 



Bristol is one of the busiest cities of the United Kingdom. In the fourteenth 

 century it hardly yielded in importance to the capital, for when Edward III. 

 appealed to the maritime towns of his kingdom to furnish vessels for the invest- 

 ment of Calais, Bristol was called upon to fit out twenty- four, or only one less than 

 London. In the age of great discoveries it was from the Avon that most vessels 

 sailed in search of new countries and a north-west passage. It was Bristol which 

 sent forth the Mathias in 1497, under the command of John Cabot, a citizen 

 of Venice, but a Genoese by birth ; * and Bristol may thus claim the honour of 

 having sent out an explorer of a portion of North America, probably Labrador, 

 fourteen months before Columbus himself had touched the New "World. f In 

 our own century it was again Bristol which was first amongst the maritime towns 

 of Europe to send a steamer across the Atlantic to America, for in 1838 the Great 

 Western, commanded by Captain Hosken, started from the Avon, and reached New 

 York without an accident. Yet it is not Bristol which has reaped the advantages 

 which accrued from the spirit of enterprise animating its shipowners, for 

 Liverpool has become the great port of departure for trans- Atlantic steamers. The 

 relative decay of Bristol, however, had commenced more than a century before 

 that time, and if Liverpool rapidly overtook her rival, this was not done without 

 the citizens themselves being largely to blame. In the enjoyment of almost 

 unlimited privileges, they prevented strangers from settling in the town unless 

 they submitted to numerous disabilities which deprived them of every initiative. 

 It was thus that the advantages which Bristol enjoyed in consequence of its 

 geographical position and the relations established with foreign countries were 

 gradually lost to it.+ 



Bristol nevertheless continues to this day one of the busiest seaports of 

 England. The Avon, a narrow tidal river bounded by steep Clio's, enables the 

 largest vessels to reach the docks of the town, whose locks are closed as soon as 

 the tide begins to retire. These docks were excavated in the beginning of the 

 present century, and occupy the ancient bed of the Avon, as well as the lower part 

 of the Frome, which joins that river close by the cathedral. Although some 

 3 miles in length, this " harbour " hardly suffices for the accommodation of the 

 vessels which crowd it, and sea-docks bave consequently been constructed at the 

 mouth of the river, at Avonmoiith, and opened in 1876. The trade of the place 

 has always been connected with the West Indies and the North American colonies. 

 Whilst the West Indies were cultivated by slaves, and Virginia partly by trans- 

 ported criminals, the wealth generated in Bristol by intercourse between them 

 produced, on the one hand, an upper class peculiarly haughty and unsympathetic, and 

 on the other a mob exceptionally rough and violent. In the seventeenth century, 

 Mr. Bancroft tells us, the Bristol authorities used to make large profits by selling 

 criminals as slaves to Virginia, inducing them to consent by threatening them 

 with death. In our own days, the "Reform riots" of 1831, which laid much of the 



* D'Avezac, Bulletin de la Société de Géographie. 



t Peschel, "Zeitalter der Eatdeckungen." 



X Halley, "Atlas Maritimus et Commerciulis." 



