that strangers should only be permitted to come and buy them of merchants and freemen of burghs with ready gold and silver, or merchandise; and an act of the fourth parliament of James VI enjoined all fishers of herring, or other white fish, to bring their fish to free ports, there to be sold, first in common to all subjects, and afterwards the remainder to freemen, that the king's own subjects might be first served, and that, if abundance remained, they might be salted and exported by free burgesses. Here we have the spirit of the mercantile and that of the corporation system in operation at the same time—the exclusion of the foreign in favour of the native producer or capitalist, and of the non-freeman in favour of the burgess. The interest of the general class of consumers was as little thought of as if no such class had existed.
The Danish historians record that in 1510, when Denmark was invaded by a squadron from Lubeck, King John provided a fleet for himself by purchasing ships, at a great expense, from his allies, the English, French, and Scots, all of which nations, it is stated, had then many vessels in the Baltic. But the most considerable Scottish fleet of the earlier part of the sixteenth century of which we have an account is that which is stated to have been fitted out by James V., in 1540, for an expedition to the islands on the north-west coast of his kingdom. It consisted of twelve stout ships, with which the king himself, attended by several of his chief nobility and a military force (Lord Herbert says that the vessels, which he makes fifteen in number, carried two thousand men), landed in all the principal islands, and, carrying away with him the chiefs as hostages for the obedience and orderly behaviour of their clans, in that way, for the first time, reduced those dependencies under real subjection to the Scottish crown. On this occasion James carried with him an excellent navigator and hydrographer, named Alexander Lindsay, who drew from his observations in this voyage the first known chart of Scotland and the adjacent islands—a work that has been repeatedly engraved, and is not only very accurate for
