IV 
SHIPPING BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND THE 
NETHERLANDS 
When it comes to the question of the quantity or the total 
annual value of the goods imported by the United States from 
the Netherlands the statistics are incomplete. Both the 
United Netherlands and the United States were such loose 
confederations, with such weak central governments, that 
there was no machinery for collecting and preserving infor- 
mation concerning the amount and value of the commerce of 
either nation. In both countries customs officers of certain 
ports kept records. These records, were, however, kept in 
different ways, and no attempt was made to bring the scat- 
tered and widely separated data together. The Pennsylvania 
Packet and Daily Advertiser, as the first part of its name 
indicates, was considerably concerned with commerce and 
shipping news. It received and published lists of vessels en- 
tered and cleared at all the principal ports in the United 
States. In these lists were indicated the name of each ship 
entered or cleared, the name of its captain, and the name of 
the port from which it had entered or for which it had cleared. 
Apparently the paper’s returns for the port of Philadelphia 
were more accurate and exhaustive than for some of the other 
ports. Its reports of entrances are fuller than of clearances. 
Evidently, its readers were more interested in the report of 
incoming vessels than of outgoing ones. Probably this was 
because merchants wanted to know something of the arrivals 
of vessels in order to be able to buy newly imported goods. 
Curiously enough, however, nothing is ever said of what 
goods the cargoes were composed or how much they carried. 
Only in the advertisements of the merchants does one ever 
get any hint as to this. And then there is nothing to indicate 
quantity. The arrivals from and departures for Rotterdam 
and Amsterdam at each of the American ports as reported 
in the Pennsylvania Packet have been tabulated, and the re- 
sults for each year have been collected in the form indicated 
below, which is the result for 1788: 
( 28 ) 
