unfortunately, she was built of green timber, so her life was short. In building a ship of unprecedented burthen Pett had the support of a large public opinion. The advantages attaching to large size were by this time generally appreciated: in the case of fighting ships, in respect of strength, artillery force, and sea endurance, in the case of merchant ships, in respect of carrying capacity and economy of crew. The growth in the size of merchant shipping during the reign was indeed remarkable. Trade followed the flag, and the Jacobean merchant made haste to profit by the conquests of the Elizabethan adventurer. For a short while after the war with Spain our mercantile marine was stagnant; at the accession of James I only small vessels of less than a hundred tons were being built, and English merchants were having strange recourse to the hiring of foreigners. But this state of things did not last for long. The story of the success of the Earl of Cumberland and his 800-ton _Scourge of Malice_, and the sight of the great Portuguese carrack captured in 1592, are said to have stimulated the merchants of London to possess themselves of vessels fit for the Eastern trade. It is said, again, that the appearance of two large Dutch ships in the Thames supplied the sudden impulse to build big. Be that as it may, “the idea spread like wild-fire.” Larger ships were laid down, and by the end of the reign the country possessed a considerable fleet of ships of 500 tons and above. In one instance, at least, the pendulum swung too far, and experience soon exposed the disadvantages of excessive dimensions: the reduction in strength, the unhandiness in shallow waters, the almost impossibility of graving and breaming, the risking in a single bottom of too great a venture. The _Trades Increase_, built for the new East India Company in 1605 by William Burrell and launched by the king at Deptford, was of no less than 1,100 tons burthen. On her first voyage to Java she was lost by fire, and no more ships of her size were ordered by the Company.