There was, too, more and more money in the colonies as the years went by. New England, where, except in the rich valley of the Connecticut, the soil yielded little beyond the bare necessaries of life, led the rest of the colonies in the variety of her industries. Though parliamentary statutes forbade the making of woollen goods or hats or steel for export, the colonists were free to make anything they might need for use or sale within a single colony or in their own homes; and the thrifty New England farmers and villagers made most of their own furniture, tools, and household utensils, while their women or the village weavers wove the linen and woollen stuffs of which their clothes were made. They lived upon their own resources as no other colonists did. And their trade kept six hundred vessels busy plying to and fro to English and foreign ports. Almost every sea-coast hamlet was a port and maintained its little fleet. A thousand vessels, big and little, went every year to the fisheries, or up and down the coasts carrying the trade between colony and colony. A great many of these vessels the colonists had built themselves, out of the splendid timber which stood almost everywhere at hand in their forests; and every one knew who knew anything at all about New England that her seamen were as daring, shrewd, and hardy as those bred in past generations in the Devonshire ports of old England. Their boats flocked by the hundreds every year to the misty, perilous banks of Newfoundland, where the cod were to be caught. They beat up and down the long seas in search of the whale all the way from “the frozen recesses of Hudson’s Bay and Davis’s Straits” to the coasts of Africa and Brazil, far in the south. “Neither the perseverance of Holland, nor the activity of France, nor the dexterous and firm sagacity of English enterprise,” exclaimed Burke, “ever carried this most perilous mode of hardy industry to the extent to which it has been pushed by this recent people,—a people who are still, as it were, but in the gristle, and not yet hardened into the bone, of manhood.”