Massachusetts had been known, while peace held and men breathed freely, between Queen Anne’s and King George’s wars, to complete one hundred and fifty ships in a single year, every town upon the coast and even little villages far within the rivers launching vessels from busy shipyards. Ship building became New England’s chief industry; and in 1724 the master builders of the Thames prayed Parliament for protection against the competition of the colonies. The annual catch of whale and cod by the New Englanders was worth two hundred and fifty thousand pounds sterling; and, besides fish and fish-oil, they shipped their fine timber, and not a little hay and grain even, across the sea or to the other colonies. Everywhere in America the forests yielded splendid timber, as his Majesty’s ministers well knew: for they sent into the northern forests of pine and had the tallest, straightest trees there marked with the royal arms, as a notice that they were reserved to be used as masts for his Majesty’s war-ships,—as if the King had a right to take what he would. [Illustration: VIEW OF THE BUILDINGS BELONGING TO HARVARD COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, NEW ENGLAND, 1726] “New England improved much faster than Virginia,” Colonel Byrd admitted; and yet Virginia had her own rich trade, of which tobacco was the chief staple; and all the colonies busied themselves as they could, and visibly grew richer year by year. The middle colonies were scarcely less industrious than those of the bleaker north, and prospered even more readily with their kindlier climate and their richer soil. Pennsylvania, with her two hundred and twenty thousand colonists, with her thrifty mixture of Germans, Quakers, Scots, and Scots-Irishmen, needed a fleet of four hundred sail to carry each season’s spare produce from the docks at Philadelphia; and New York had her separate fleet of close upon two hundred sail.