As the raw materials reached the manufacturers through Manchester merchants, so did the finished products reach their markets.[193] In the case of the Chethams at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as we have seen, one part of their establishment was in Manchester and the other in London, and the same system was in vogue with firms in the eighteenth century. The Chethams appear to have confined themselves to home trade, mainly to that with the London market, although they had dealings with Irish manufacturers and sent goods to the Irish markets.[194] In the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, however, Manchester goods were exported to foreign countries, and during the first part of the next century considerable progress appears to have been made particularly in trade to the British Plantations.[195] [Footnote 193: While there apparently was a distinction between merchants and manufacturers it should not be drawn too rigidly. _Cf._ Radcliffe, _ibid._, p. 131: “All those great merchants were manufacturers with scarcely an exception.”] [Footnote 194: Raines and Sutton, _Life of Humphrey Chetham_, pp. 13, 127.] [Footnote 195: _J.H.C._, xiv., p. 498; xvi., p. 311; xviii., p. 543; xxiii., pp. 76-78.] The statement of Aikin that in the first decades of the eighteenth century the trade was carried on through wholesale dealers at London, Bristol, and other ports, is probably correct, and there is also evidence of the accuracy of his later statement that, during the twenty or thirty years before he wrote (1795), “the increase of foreign trade has caused many of the Manchester manufacturers to travel abroad, and agents and partners to be fixed for a considerable time on the continent, as well as foreigners to reside in Manchester.”[196] The fact that, in 1770, a group of Manchester merchants were sufficiently interested in the effects of a destructive fire at Antigua Island to open a subscription for the relief of the sufferers, suggests important trading connections with the West Indies, and in considering how these connections were maintained, an announcement in the previous year of the death of a Manchester merchant at Jamaica is significant.[197] [Footnote 196: Aikin, _Manchester_, pp. 182-184. Radcliffe, _ibid._, p. 93.] [Footnote 197: _Manchester Mercury_, 29th November 1769; 6th February 1770.]