Berkeley sailed for England in May, 1661, where no doubt he talked with his brother Lord John Berkeley in an effort to have the Navigation Acts repealed. But he had no success. The fault is your own, he was told. Stop planting so much tobacco and produce the more useful commodities needed by England. Send us masts for our ships, flax for our linen, hemp for our ropewalks, potash for our woolens.[13] Berkeley made a sincere effort to turn the colony to the production of commodities other than tobacco, but all his experiments ended in failure. Ten years later, when the Lords of Trade asked him what impediments there existed to trade, he blurted out: "Mighty and destructive by that severe act of Parliament which excludes us from having any commerce with any nation in Europe but our own.... If this were for his Majesty's service or the good of his subjects we should not repine, whatever our sufferings are for it. But on my soul it is contrary to both."[14] Not only did the Navigation Acts impoverish Virginia, but they brought additional disaster to the people by provoking the Dutch to war. In 1667 a fleet of five Dutch warships entered the Chesapeake Bay. The crew of the English frigate _Elizabeth_, not suspecting danger, had careened her to clean her bottom. So they had to stand by helpless as the enemy moved up and captured her. The Dutch then turned on the tobacco fleet and took twenty vessels.[15] In a second Dutch war a desperate engagement was fought off Lynhaven Bay. Nine or ten of the tobacco ships, in their haste to get away, ran aground and were taken.[16] Had Edward Johnson been in Virginia in the year 1667, he would have been sure that the series of misfortunes which befell the colony came as a sign of God's anger. "This poor, poor country ... is now reduced to a very miserable condition," Thomas Ludwell wrote Lord John Berkeley. "In April ... we had a most prodigious storm of hail, many of them as big as turkey eggs, which destroyed most of our young mast and cattle.... But on the 27th of August followed the most dreadful hurricane that ever the colony groaned under.... The night of it was the most dismal time that ever I knew or heard of, for the wind and rain raised so confused a noise, mixed with the continual cracks of falling houses.... But when the morning came and the sun risen it would have comforted us after such a night, had it not lighted us to the ruins of our plantations, of which I think not one escaped. The nearest computation is at least 10,000 houses blown down, all the Indian grain laid flat on the ground, all the tobacco in the fields torn to pieces and most of that which was in the houses perished with them."[17] Even then the misfortunes of the planters were not ended, for in 1673 an epidemic occurred among their cattle, which carried off fifty thousand animals.[18]