certain bounties should be paid upon the importation from the said colonies of tar, pitch, rosin, turpentine, hemp, and masts.[1] The good consequence of this reasonable law, according to Anderson, was soon felt; so that at the time when he wrote both the New England provinces and also Carolina furnished us with great quantities of pitch and tar, "fit for most uses in the navy." "Of late, also," he adds, "good hemp and flax are raised in the said provinces, where there are such immense quantities of proper and excellent lands for the raising of those commodities," But this result was probably not produced to any considerable extent till a date a good deal later than that to which the details in the British Merchant refer. At the time when the act was passed it was computed that the quantity of pitch and tar, chiefly from Sweden, but in part also from Norway and from Archangel, imported by England, was about 1000 lasts; by Holland, for home-use and also for re-exportation to Spain, Portugal, and up the Mediterranean, 4000 lasts; by France 500; and by Hamburg, Lubeck, and the German ports, to the same amount.[2] By a subsequent act, passed in 1712, the same bounties were granted upon the importation of naval stores from Scotland; but this, as Anderson admits, was to little or no purpose, the lands and woods which might yield such naval stores being there, as the act itself states, "mostly in parts mountainous and remote from navigable rivers."[3] "This," he observes, "the York Buildings' Company experienced, to their cost, some years after this time: the timber they felled in some of those woods, at a great expense, being left to rot on the ground, the carriage of it to the nearest places of navigation being found impracticable, which will probably ever be the case with respect to Scotland, notwithstanding the bounties allowed by that act, or any larger bounties to be reasonably granted," 2. Another trade, which the writer in the British Merchant admits might also possibly be advan-
- ↑ Stat. 3 and 4 Anne, c. 9 (or 10 in the common editions).
- ↑ Anderson, Chron. of Com. iii. 17.
- ↑ Stat. 12 Anne, c. 9.
