But while the buccaneers at this period scoured the seas, there were knavish speculators on land who, under the pretence of fostering and developing the commercial and maritime resources of England, were really its greatest enemies. Among the numerous concerns then floated as joint stock companies, no one was more conspicuous or more disastrous than the “South Sea Bubble.” Having for its professed object the trade of the South Seas, yet with no basis for its operations beyond the dishonourable privilege of supplying Spanish America for thirty years with slaves torn from Africa, a very questionable favour granted to Great Britain by the Treaty of Utrecht, this company, in competition with the Bank of England, sought and obtained a monopoly of the South Sea trade on condition that the national floating debt, then about ten millions, should be paid out of its surplus profits!! Though perhaps no wilder scheme was ever propounded, it readily received the sanction of Parliament, and consequently a thousand and one other bubbles were speedily projected. The disastrous results are well known: thousands of families once well to do were irretrievably ruined, and the frenzy with which the people were seized, together with the impulse given to every form of gambling instead of to the steady pursuits of industry, materially aided the convulsion caused by the bursting of these bubbles, thus for many years paralysing commerce in all its branches, and laying prostrate the energies of the country. Seized for a time with the spirit of insane speculation, the people thought of nothing else, and though in our own day we have witnessed many wild schemes submitted for public support, none have really proved so thoroughly disastrous in their results as those which were then launched. South Sea stock of 100_l._ sold for 1000_l._; the Orkney Fishery stock rose from 25_l._ to 250_l._; the York Buildings stock, whose shares were 10_l._, reached 260_l._ The latter, a company erected to cut timber for ship-building and other purposes in Scotland, in spite of a protectionist bounty, proved a ruinous failure. There were besides eleven fishing projects; ten insurance companies; two companies for the remittance of money; four salt companies; two sugar companies; eleven companies for settlements in, or trading to, America; two building companies; thirteen land companies; six oil companies; four harbour and river companies; four companies for supplying London with coal, cattle, and hay, and for paving the streets; six hemp, flax, and linen companies; five companies for carrying on the manufacture of silks and cottons; one for planting mulberry-trees in Chelsea Park, and breeding silkworms;[203] fifteen mining companies; and some sixty more miscellaneous bubbles of the most preposterous character. One undertaking actually obtained subscriptions for an object “which in due time should be revealed!” [Sidenote: The bubble bursts, 1720.]