When Great Britain attempted to reduce to obedience the rebellious colonies which were to form the United States of America she was dealing with a people who in the North at least had long been conversant with the building and sailing of ships. A New England built ship entered the Thames in 1638, only eighteen years after the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth, Massachusetts. The New England men, with a sterile coast, with limitless fishing grounds and unsurpassed harbors, turned as naturally to the sea for livelihood as did the South, more kindly treated by nature, to agriculture. In 1670 it was estimated that two thirds of the British shipping was employed in the American trade. The Dutch, who had been great carriers on the sea, were excluded from this trade by the navigation laws of the period. Scotland was not admitted to the trade of the American plantations until her union with England in 1707, and Ireland not until 1780, while in 1670 nothing could be imported into the American colonies but what was laden in England in English-built ships. But while none of their products could be carried anywhere (except to other of the plantations) till they were first landed in England, the ships built in America were reckoned as English, and this fact gave great impetus to American shipbuilding. American shipping prospered amazingly. But while thus prospering, it was the attempted repression of our commerce afloat and ashore (which included such things as forbidding the exportation of hats, restricting the manufacture of iron, and forbidding commerce with the foreign-owned islands of the West Indies) which did much more to develop the idea of independence than did the Stamp Act. But the net result of conditions was to foster shipping, and our competition had so increased by 1725 that in that year “the shipwrights of the river Thames came up to Whitehall with a complaint that their business had declined and their workmen emigrated because the plantations furnished England with ships.” On the register of the underwriters at Lloyd’s for 1775, comprehending the shipping of the three preceding years, there were 3,908 British-built vessels of 605,545 tons, and 2,311 of American build with a tonnage of 373,618 tons. The average size of the ship of the time was about 400 tons displacement. One 100 feet in length and 26 to 28 feet broad was a good-sized ship. They were but cockle boats in comparison with the vast ships of to-day, many of which are full a hundred times 400 tons displacement. The foregoing will show that when there came a time to dispute the sea with Great Britain there was no difficulty in supplying the ships, and the many ironworks which had been established, particularly in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, despite Great Britain’s restrictions, could furnish guns in the manufacture of which our foundries were adepts before the war.