A few years after the Revolution measures were taken to revive the Greenland fishery; and in 1692 a company, incorporated for carrying it on with a capital of 40,000_l._, was granted by charter the exclusive possession of the trade for fourteen years. The preamble of their Act describes the previous trade to Greenland as “quite decayed and lost,” the merchants, who had been encouraged to enter into this business, in virtue of the previous Act of 1673, having only imported a small quantity of oil, blubber, and whale fins. They had found other nations enter into the trade with so large a number of ships, that the English fishermen were not enabled to compete with them on their separate interests; indeed the whole trade was then or soon after engrossed by foreigners. At length it was represented to the government that for several years no ships had been despatched from England to Greenland, and that the produce of those fisheries had been wholly bought from foreigners, the prices paid being six times the rates they formerly were; and the memorial added that there were few, if any, English harpooners or English seamen skilled and exercised in whale-catching, so that “the said trade could not be regained nor carried on without foreign harpinierers, or upon individual risks without a joint-stock fund.” As, however, the Greenland fishery did not rally under the protective charter conferred upon the parties subscribing, an additional capital of 42,000_l._ was raised in 1696, and a new Act obtained, exempting the Company from all duties upon oil, blubber, and whale fins imported during the term of their charter, but before it expired the entire capital was lost, and the Company relinquished the business. Under these circumstances the trade in 1702 was thrown open by Parliament, the Act pronouncing that it had been neglected by the Company, and thus lost to the nation. Twenty years afterwards, in 1721, the number of foreign ships engaged in the Greenland and Davis’s Straits fishery were three hundred and fifty-five, of which Holland sent two hundred and fifty-one ships, Hamburg fifty-five, Bremen twenty-four, Biscay twenty, and Bergen, in Norway, five. [Sidenote: Russian trade.] [Sidenote: Peter the Great.]