Various causes conspired to prevent Englishmen in these outlying plantations from joining their brethren of New England, the middle colonies, and the South, in the movement for independence. The West India planters were largely aided by English capital, and in England, where many of them had summer residences, they enjoyed a profitable and exclusive market for sugar, cotton, and other tropical products. It was considered good policy by English statesmen to favor the island colonies as against the continental, for the products of the former did not compete with those of Great Britain; so that while the Navigation Acts (page 104, § 44), restricting all colonial trade to British ports, at first bore heavily on the island planters, they were compensated in part by numerous discriminations in their favor. Many of these planters were the sons of Cavaliers who had fled to the islands of the Caribbean Sea to escape from the rule of the Commonwealth; or wealthy men who had, in times of popular disturbance, been made to feel uncomfortable in their old homes on the American mainland. In Nova Scotia and Newfoundland the ports were filled with English traders and officers; and a great belt of untraversed forest separated them from the New Englanders, with whom they had little in common. But perhaps above all was the fact that His Majesty's fleet easily commanded these outlying colonies, and revolt was not to be thought of within the reach of the guns of ships. It is worth our while briefly to review the history of these British American dependencies which for one reason or another did not enter the struggle that was soon to rend the empire in twain at the moment it had reached its greatest extent. 100. Windward and Leeward Islands (1605-1814). Sidenote: Settlement of Barbados. _Barbados_, the easternmost of the Windward Islands, was first visited by a party of English adventurers in 1605, since which time it has been an English possession. But it was not until 1625 that a colony was planted on the island. Its plan of government was much the same as that of the mainland colonies. Sidenote: Refuge for loyalists. During the Puritan uprising in England, Barbados was a place of refuge for loyalists, who were disposed, till the appearance of a parliamentary force (1651), to hold the island for the king. Under Cromwell's rule many prisoners of war were sent to the island, thus increasing the royalist population. The Restoration was promptly proclaimed. Sidenote: Warfare.