THE EARLY COMMERCE OF PLYMOUTH. oun 
so hopefull and goodlye an action ”—and asking if any individuals 
were disposed to join with them in an expedition, which should 
put into Plymouth about the last day of March. Application was 
also made to the Earl of Pembroke, as Lord Warden of the 
Stannaries, for one hundred “ mynerall and labouring men.” 
Some years afterwards, with Captain Smith to help them, the 
Plymouth Company made other efforts, but with no better success ; 
although in November, 1620, James granted the great patent, 
which gave all rights of jurisdiction, traffic, and settlement in all 
lands which did not form the territory of any other Christian 
power, between the 40th and 48th parallels of N. latitude, to forty 
noblemen and merchants incorporated as the Council established at 
Plymouth, in the county of Devon, for the planting, ruling, and 
governing of New England in America. Here James granted so 
much that nothing came of it. The pretensions of the Plymouth 
Company, to whom that monarch had given so liberally what did 
not belong to him, were laughed at. The real foundation of the 
United States was laid neither by the Plymouth Company nor by 
the London, though the latter did establish Jamestown, but by the 
handful of feeble folk whom we now know as the Pilgrim Fathers, 
who were backed by neither king nor company, but by God and 
their own right hands and sturdy hearts. 
The most profitable source of commerce for the Western ports 
of the seventeenth century was unquestionably the fisheries of 
Newfoundland, in which Plymouth engaged at least as early as 
the middle of the reign of Elizabeth. 
I wish it were in my power to present the Institution with a 
full narrative of the condition of the internal trade of the town 
two centuries since. But although no materials exist for such a 
retrospect as one would desire to make, we are by no means with- 
out hints for a fair outline. Plymouth in the seventeenth century 
must have been in ordinary times a busy and a bustling town. Its 
streets were paved and regularly cleansed (the thrifty Corporation 
were even then in the habit of selling the “town scavenge”), and 
to the rural mind a stroll through Plymouth town must have 
seemed no faint realization of the glories of the far-distant metro- 
polis. The shops, I take it, were almost wholly of the old-fashioned 
type which has survived to the present day with some of the green- 
grocers—open and windowless, though even green-grocers now are 
advancing with the times, and aspiring to the dignity of plate-glass. 
