chap, nr.] WEST INDIES. a 4 5 
ject will admit; there can be no possible induce¬ 
ment to exaggerate, where acknowledged facts are 
of so much weight. 
There yet remains to be added a brief state of 
the shipping and seamen to which the sugar colo¬ 
nies directly give employment; and it appears that 
the number of vessels which in the year 1787 
cleared from the several British West Indian islands 
for Great Britain and Ireland (including 14 from 
Honduras) were 689, containing 148,176 tons, and 
navigated by 13,936 men, being about nine sea¬ 
men to every 100 tons: an extent of shipping 
nearly equal (as I have elsewhere observed) to the 
whole commercial tonnage of England a century 
ago. At the same time it is not to be overlooked, 
that the seamen so employed, being in constant 
service, are always at command; and on this ac¬ 
count, they are a more valuable body of men than 
even the seamen employed in the Newfoundland 
fishery; of whom a great proportion remains in the 
country during the winter, and cannot therefore, 
on any sudden emergency, be added to the naval 
force of the kingdom.* 
On a retrospect of the whole it may be truly af¬ 
firmed, that the British sugar islands in the West 
* The French writers state the number of ships employed in theit 
West Indian trade at 600, and the average of their burthen at 300 
ftms one with another: their* seamen at 15,000. The following ac- 
